My initial reaction (before I started to think...) was to pick the dust specks, given that my biases made the suffering caused by the dust specks morally equivalent to zero, and 0^^^3 is still 0.
However, given that the problem stated an actual physical phenomenon (dust specks), and not a hypothetical minimal annoyance, then you kind of have to take the other consequences of the sudden appearance of the dust specks under consideration, don’t you?
If I was omnipotent, and I could make everyone on Earth get a dust speck in their eye right now, how many car accidents would occur? Heavy machinery accidents? Workplace accidents? Even if the chance is vanishingly small—let’s say 6 accidents occur on Earth because everyone got a dust speck in their eye. That’s one in a billion.
That’s one accident for every 10e9 people. Now, what percentage of those are fatal? Transport Canada currently lists the 23.7 of car accidents in 2003 as resulting in a fatality, which is 1 in 4. Let’s be nice, and assume that everywhere else on earth safer, and take that down to 1 in 100 accidents being fatal.
Now, if everyone in existence gets a dust speck in their eye because of my decision, assuming the hypothetical 3^^^3 people live in something approximating the lifestyles on Earth, I’ve conceivably doomed 1 in 10e11 people to death.
That is, my cloud of dust specks have killed 3^^^3 / 10e11 people.
The more I think about the question, the more I’m convinced that it attempts to demonstrate the commensurability of disutility by invoking the commensurability of disutility.
I don’t see how it’s attempting to demonstrate the commensurability of disutility at all; it seems to be using the assumed commensurability of disutility to challenge intuitions about disutility. Can you say more about what is convincing you?
If the OP’s challenging a moral intuition that doesn’t at some point reduce to commensurability, then I don’t know what it is. It asks us to imagine the worst thing that could happen to a random person, and then the least perceptibly bad thing that could happen, and seems to be making the argument that an unimaginably huge number of the latter would trump a single instance of the former. What’s that a reductio for, if not the assumption that torture (or anything comparably bad) carries a special kind of disutility?
On the other hand I’m not sure what the post was written in response to, if anything, so there might be some contextual information there that I’m missing.
But, yes, agreed that a lot of objections to this post implicitly assert that torture is incommensurable with dust-specks, and EY is challenging that intuition.
My initial reaction (before I started to think...) was to pick the dust specks, given that my biases made the suffering caused by the dust specks morally equivalent to zero, and 0^^^3 is still 0.
However, given that the problem stated an actual physical phenomenon (dust specks), and not a hypothetical minimal annoyance, then you kind of have to take the other consequences of the sudden appearance of the dust specks under consideration, don’t you?
If I was omnipotent, and I could make everyone on Earth get a dust speck in their eye right now, how many car accidents would occur? Heavy machinery accidents? Workplace accidents? Even if the chance is vanishingly small—let’s say 6 accidents occur on Earth because everyone got a dust speck in their eye. That’s one in a billion.
That’s one accident for every 10e9 people. Now, what percentage of those are fatal? Transport Canada currently lists the 23.7 of car accidents in 2003 as resulting in a fatality, which is 1 in 4. Let’s be nice, and assume that everywhere else on earth safer, and take that down to 1 in 100 accidents being fatal.
Now, if everyone in existence gets a dust speck in their eye because of my decision, assuming the hypothetical 3^^^3 people live in something approximating the lifestyles on Earth, I’ve conceivably doomed 1 in 10e11 people to death.
That is, my cloud of dust specks have killed 3^^^3 / 10e11 people.
It is cheating to answer this by using worse individual consequences than the dust specks themselves.
The very point of the question is the infinitesimality of each individual disutility.
The more I think about the question, the more I’m convinced that it attempts to demonstrate the commensurability of disutility by invoking the commensurability of disutility.
I don’t see how it’s attempting to demonstrate the commensurability of disutility at all; it seems to be using the assumed commensurability of disutility to challenge intuitions about disutility. Can you say more about what is convincing you?
If the OP’s challenging a moral intuition that doesn’t at some point reduce to commensurability, then I don’t know what it is. It asks us to imagine the worst thing that could happen to a random person, and then the least perceptibly bad thing that could happen, and seems to be making the argument that an unimaginably huge number of the latter would trump a single instance of the former. What’s that a reductio for, if not the assumption that torture (or anything comparably bad) carries a special kind of disutility?
On the other hand I’m not sure what the post was written in response to, if anything, so there might be some contextual information there that I’m missing.
I’m… puzzled by this exchange.
But, yes, agreed that a lot of objections to this post implicitly assert that torture is incommensurable with dust-specks, and EY is challenging that intuition.