How about each of those 3^^^3 is asked whether they would accept a dust speck in the eye to save someone from 1/3^^^3 of 50 years of torture, and everyone’s choice is granted? (i.e. the ones who say they’d accept a dust speck get a dust speck, and the person is tortured for an amount of time proportional to the number of people who refused.)
I’m not quite sure what I’d expect to have happen in that case. That’s harder than the moral question because we have to imagine a world that actually contains 3^^^3 different (i.e. not perfectly decision-theoretically correlated) people, and any kind of projection about that kind of world would pretty much be making stuff up. But as for the moral question of what a person in this situation should say, I’d say the reasoning is about the same — getting a dust speck in your eye is worse than 50/3^^^3 years of torture, so refuse the speck.
(That’s actually an interesting way of looking at it, because we could also put it in terms of each person choosing whether they get specked or they themselves get tortured for 50/3^^^3 years, in which case the choice is really obvious — but if you’re still working with 3^^^3 people, and they all go with the infinitesimal moment of torture, that still adds up to a total 50 years of torture.)
Edit: Actually, for that last scenario, forget 50/3^^^3 years, that’s way less than a Planck interval. So let’s instead multiply it by enough for it to be noticeable to a human mind, and reduce the intensity of the torture by the same factor.
How about each of those 3^^^3 is asked whether they would accept a dust speck in the eye to save someone from 1/3^^^3 of 50 years of torture, and everyone’s choice is granted? (i.e. the ones who say they’d accept a dust speck get a dust speck, and the person is tortured for an amount of time proportional to the number of people who refused.)
I’m not quite sure what I’d expect to have happen in that case. That’s harder than the moral question because we have to imagine a world that actually contains 3^^^3 different (i.e. not perfectly decision-theoretically correlated) people, and any kind of projection about that kind of world would pretty much be making stuff up. But as for the moral question of what a person in this situation should say, I’d say the reasoning is about the same — getting a dust speck in your eye is worse than 50/3^^^3 years of torture, so refuse the speck.
(That’s actually an interesting way of looking at it, because we could also put it in terms of each person choosing whether they get specked or they themselves get tortured for 50/3^^^3 years, in which case the choice is really obvious — but if you’re still working with 3^^^3 people, and they all go with the infinitesimal moment of torture, that still adds up to a total 50 years of torture.)
Edit: Actually, for that last scenario, forget 50/3^^^3 years, that’s way less than a Planck interval. So let’s instead multiply it by enough for it to be noticeable to a human mind, and reduce the intensity of the torture by the same factor.