Robin is absolutely wrong, because different instances of human suffering cannot be added together in any meaningful way.
The problem with this claim is that you can construct a series of overlapping comparisons involving experiences that differ but slightly in how painful they are. Then, provided that the series has sufficiently many elements, you’ll reach the conclusion that an experience of pain, no matter how intense, is preferable to arbitrarily many instances of the mildest pain imaginable.
(Strictly speaking, you could actually avoid this conclusion by assuming that painful experiences of a given intensity have diminishing marginal value and that this value converges to a finite quantity. Then if the limiting value of a very mild pain is less than the value of a single extremely painful experience, the continuity argument wouldn’t work. However, I see no independent motivation for embracing a theory of value of this sort. Moreover, such a theory would have incredible implications, e.g., that to determine how bad someone’s pain is one needs to consider whether sentient beings have already experienced pains of that intensity in remote regions of spacetime.)
you could actually avoid this conclusion by assuming that painful experiences of a given intensity have diminishing marginal value and that this value converges to a finite quantity.
Yeah, this is a common attempt to avoid this particular repugnant conclusion. This approach leads to conclusions like that a 3^^^3 mildly stabbed toes are better than a single moderately stabbed one. (Because if not, we can construct an unbroken chain of comparable pain experiences from specks to torture.)
However, I see no independent motivation for embracing a theory of value of this sort.
The motivation is there, to make dust specks and torture incomparable. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work, as it results in infinitely many arbitrarily defined discontinuities.
The problem with this claim is that you can construct a series of overlapping comparisons involving experiences that differ but slightly in how painful they are. Then, provided that the series has sufficiently many elements, you’ll reach the conclusion that an experience of pain, no matter how intense, is preferable to arbitrarily many instances of the mildest pain imaginable.
(Strictly speaking, you could actually avoid this conclusion by assuming that painful experiences of a given intensity have diminishing marginal value and that this value converges to a finite quantity. Then if the limiting value of a very mild pain is less than the value of a single extremely painful experience, the continuity argument wouldn’t work. However, I see no independent motivation for embracing a theory of value of this sort. Moreover, such a theory would have incredible implications, e.g., that to determine how bad someone’s pain is one needs to consider whether sentient beings have already experienced pains of that intensity in remote regions of spacetime.)
Yeah, this is a common attempt to avoid this particular repugnant conclusion. This approach leads to conclusions like that a 3^^^3 mildly stabbed toes are better than a single moderately stabbed one. (Because if not, we can construct an unbroken chain of comparable pain experiences from specks to torture.)
The motivation is there, to make dust specks and torture incomparable. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work, as it results in infinitely many arbitrarily defined discontinuities.