The potential harm it may cause should at least POSSIBLY be outweighted by the benefits, e.g. someone not being run over by a car because he stopped and scratched his eye.
That’s fighting the hypothetical. Assume that the speck is such that the harm caused by the spec slightly outweighs the benefits.
You have to treat this option as a net win of 0 then, because you have no more info to go on so the probs. are 50⁄50.
Option A: Torture. Net win is negativ. Option B: Spec dust. Net win is zero. Make you choice.
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, every dust speck causes a constant small amount of harm with no knock-on effects(no avoiding buses, no crashing cars...)
I thought the original point was to focus just on the inconvenience of the dust, rather than simply propositioning that out of 3^^^3 people who were dustspecked, one person would’ve gotten something worse than 50 years of torture as a consequence of the dust speck. The latter is not even an ethical dilemma, it’s merely an (entirely baseless but somewhat plausible) assertion about the consequences of dust specks in the eyes.
That’s fighting the hypothetical. Assume that the speck is such that the harm caused by the spec slightly outweighs the benefits.
Or the benefits could slightly outweigh the harm.
You have to treat this option as a net win of 0 then, because you have no more info to go on so the probs. are 50⁄50. Option A: Torture. Net win is negativ. Option B: Spec dust. Net win is zero. Make you choice.
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, every dust speck causes a constant small amount of harm with no knock-on effects(no avoiding buses, no crashing cars...)
I thought the original point was to focus just on the inconvenience of the dust, rather than simply propositioning that out of 3^^^3 people who were dustspecked, one person would’ve gotten something worse than 50 years of torture as a consequence of the dust speck. The latter is not even an ethical dilemma, it’s merely an (entirely baseless but somewhat plausible) assertion about the consequences of dust specks in the eyes.
exactly! No knock-on effects. Perhaps you meant to comment on the grandparent(great-grandparent? do I measure from this post or your post?) instead?
yeah, clicked wrong button.