FWIW, it seems a bit too buried in text. I think this would be something to say upfront, e.g. in the summary, if you're critiquing an org, because readers will often just skim, like I did.

I would probably think of donating to FWI as supporting them to develop a more cost-effective program. Most of their budget is spent on R&D, IIRC.

Thanks, fixed!

Assume your utility function $u$ is unbounded from above. Pick outcomes $x_1,x_2,...$ such that $u\left(x_n\right)\ge 2^n$. Let your lottery $X$ be $x_n$ with probability $1/2^n$. Note that ${\sum }_{n=1}^{\infty }1/2^n=1$, so the probabilities sum to 1.

Then this lottery has infinite expected utility:

Now, consider any two other lotteries $A$ and $B$ with finite expected utility, such that $A\prec B\prec X$.  There's no way to mix $A$ and $X$ probabilistically to be equivalent to $B$, because

whenever $p<1$. For $p=1$,  $E[pA+(1-p\left)X\right]=E\left[u\right(A\left)\right]<E\left[u\right(B\left)\right]$.

So Continuity is violated.

In practice, I think the effects of one's actions decay to practically 0 after 100 years or so. In principle, I am open one's actions having effects which are arbitrarily large, but not infinite, and continuity does not rule out arbitrarily large effects.

If you allow arbitrarily large values and prospects with infinitely many different possible outcomes, then you can construct St Petersburg-like prospects, which have infinite expected value but only take finite value in every outcome. These violate Continuity (if it's meant to apply to all prospects, including ones with infinitely many possible outcomes). So from arbitrary large values, we violate Continuity.

We've also discussed this a bit before, and I don't expect to change your mind now, but I think actually infinite effects are quite plausible (mostly through acausal influence in a possibly spatially infinite universe), and I think it's unwarranted to assign them probability 0.

Reality forces us to compare outcomes, at least implicitly.

There are decision rules that are consistent with violations of Completeness. I'm guessing you want to treat incomparable prospects/lotteries as equivalent or that whenever you pick one prospect over another, the one you pick is at least as good as the latter, but this would force other constraints on how you compare prospects/lotteries that these decision rules for incomplete preferences don't.

I just do not see how adding the same possibility to each of 2 lotteries can change my assessment of these.

You could read more about the relevant accounts of risk aversion and difference-making risk aversion, e.g. discussed here and here. Their motivations would explain why and how Independence is violated. To be clear, I'm not personally sold on them. 

If your utility function can take arbitrarily large but finite values, then you can design a prospect/lottery with infinitely many possible outcomes and infinite expected value, like the St Petersburg paradox. Then you can treat such a prospect/lottery as if it has infinite actual value, and demonstrate violations of Continuity the same way you would with an outcome with infinite value. This is assuming Continuity applies to arbitrary prospects/lotteries, including with infinitely many possible outcomes, not just finitely many possible outcomes per prospect/lottery.

(Infinitary versions of Independence and the Sure-Thing Principle also rule out "unbounded" utility functions. See Russell & Isaacs, 2020.)

When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.

I'm sympathetic to illusionism about phenomenal properties (illusionism about phenomenal consciousness), i.e. I don't believe consciousness is phenomenal, ineffable, intrinsic, qualitative, etc.. People often mean phenomenal properties or qualia when they talk about things just looking a certain way. This might cut against your claims here.

However, I suspect there are ways to interpret your statements that are compatible with illusionism. Maybe something like your brain is undergoing specific patterns of reactions and discriminations to inputs, and these are distinctive for distinctive colours. What it means to "look" or "feel" a certain way is to just undergo particular patterns of reactions. And it's wired in or cognitively impenetrable: you don't have direct introspective access to the processes responsible for these patterns of reactions, only their effects on you.

Furthermore, everything we respond to and are aware of is filtered through these processes, so "we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting".

there can be no doubt about its existence

I'm not sure about this. I'd probably want to see a deductive argument for this.

If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about.

I'm not saying values don't exist, I just think they are projected, rather than intrinsic. It can still matter to whatever's doing the projection.

The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.

This seems to me to be separating the apparent disvalue from one of the crucial mechanisms responsible for (a large share of) the apparent disvalue. Motivational salience is what gives suffering its apparent urgency, and (I think) a big part of what makes suffering feel the way it does. If you got rid of its motivational salience, it would feel very different.

I don't think any of the axioms are self-evident. FWIW, I don't really think anything is self-evident, maybe other than direct logical deductions and applications of definitions.

I have some sympathy for rejecting each of them, except maybe transitivity, which I'm pretty strongly inclined not to give up. (EDIT: On the other hand, I'm quite willing to give up the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, which is similar to transitivity.) I give weight to views that violate the axioms, under normative uncertainty.

Some ways you might reject them:

1. Continuity: Continuity rules out infinities and prospects with finite value but infinite expected value, like St Petersburg lotteries. If Continuity is meant to apply to all logically coherent prospects (including prospects with infinitely many possible outcomes), then this implies your utility function must be bounded. This rules out expectational total utilitarianism as a general view.
2. Continuity: You might think some harms are infinitely worse than others, e.g. when suffering reaches the threshold of unbearability. It could also be that this threshold is imprecise/vague/fuzzy, and we would also reject Completeness to accommodate that.
3. Completeness: Some types of values/goods/bads may be incomparable. Or, you might think interpersonal welfare comparisons, e.g. across very different kinds of minds, are not always possible. Tradeoffs between incomparable values would often be indeterminate. Or, you might think they are comparable in principle, but only vaguely so, leaving gaps of incomparability when the tradeoffs seem too close.
4. Independence: Different accounts of risk aversion or difference-making risk aversion (not just decreasing marginal utility, which is consistent with Independence).

Thanks Erich!

Yes, it is pretty close to Korsgaard! I think I actually had Korsgaard in mind and might have checked some of her shorter pieces while working on this, although "object views" ended up being what I actually wanted here. Also, there's this piece by Jeff Sebo explaining Korsgaard's constructivism.

Fyi, the latter two of these links are broken.

Fixed! Thanks.