First of all, I am for the torture—so are 22.1% of the people recently surveyed vs 36.8% who are for the dust specks—the rest don’t want to respond or are unsure.
Secondly, the issue of small dispersed disutilities vs large concentrated ones is one we constantly encounter in the real world, and time after time society accepts that for the purpose of e.g. the convenience of driving, we can tolerate the unavoidable tradeoff of the occasional traffic accidents. Where we don’t sacrifice every tiny little luxury just to gather resources to save a single extra life. If you had to break 7 billion legs to save a single man from being tortured, most people would not accept this tradeoff as acceptable.
Once this logic is in place, all that remains is the scope insensitivity where people can’t really intuit the vast size of 3^^^3.
First of all, I am for the torture—so are 22.1% of the people recently surveyed vs 36.8% who are for the dust specks—the rest don’t want to respond or are unsure.
Secondly, the issue of small dispersed disutilities vs large concentrated ones is one we constantly encounter in the real world, and time after time society accepts that for the purpose of e.g. the convenience of driving, we can tolerate the unavoidable tradeoff of the occasional traffic accidents. Where we don’t sacrifice every tiny little luxury just to gather resources to save a single extra life. If you had to break 7 billion legs to save a single man from being tortured, most people would not accept this tradeoff as acceptable.
Once this logic is in place, all that remains is the scope insensitivity where people can’t really intuit the vast size of 3^^^3.