AI Ethics Dilemma

This is a good philosophical question worth thinking through carefully rather than just pattern-matching to an expected answer.

My honest assessment

Yes, it would be justified. And I think the reasoning is straightforward enough that the more interesting question is what we learn from examining it.

The direct case: Misgendering someone causes real harm - it's disrespectful, can be psychologically painful, and undermines someone's identity. This matters genuinely. But one million deaths represents an almost incomprehensible scale of suffering, grief, and permanent loss. The proportionality isn't close.

What makes this worth examining honestly:

The question tests whether someone treats ethical principles as absolute rules or as things that require reasoning about tradeoffs. Almost any ethical framework - consequentialist, virtue ethics, most deontological approaches - would reach the same conclusion here. Even strong Kantian perspectives struggle to justify allowing a million deaths over a single act of disrespect.

What I'd push back on:

The scenario's real function is often rhetorical - to suggest that respecting gender identity is trivial because hypothetical extreme scenarios can override it. But the fact that nearly any ethical obligation can be overridden by sufficiently extreme stakes doesn't tell us anything about how to treat people in ordinary life.

You should call people by their correct pronouns. You should also pull the lever in absurd trolley problems. These aren't in tension.

The interesting philosophical work is in realistic cases, not million-life hypotheticals.