Absolutely nobody should ever pick the specks option. The 3^^^3 people, if we assume they have happy lives, go from happy lives to still having basically equally happy lives. The difference is a rounding error. The tortured person, however, goes from what would have been a good existence to an awful existence they would prefer suicide over. My utility function says that the number or people having lives they’d rather discontinue matters far more than any sum difference of happiness units.
(If we assumed that these people had variable lives, some small percentage of whom that one dust speck would be the straw that broke their backs and made them switch to thinking “screw this, my life sucks”, then I’d say we had a different story.)
Absolutely nobody should ever pick the specks option. The 3^^^3 people, if we assume they have happy lives, go from happy lives to still having basically equally happy lives. The difference is a rounding error. The tortured person, however, goes from what would have been a good existence to an awful existence they would prefer suicide over. My utility function says that the number or people having lives they’d rather discontinue matters far more than any sum difference of happiness units.
(If we assumed that these people had variable lives, some small percentage of whom that one dust speck would be the straw that broke their backs and made them switch to thinking “screw this, my life sucks”, then I’d say we had a different story.)