This “moral dilemma” only has force if you accept strict Bentham-style utilitarianism, which treats all benefits and harms as vectors on a one-dimensional line, and cares about nothing except the net total of benefits and harms. That was the state of the art of moral philosophy in the year 1800, but it’s 2012 now.
There are published moral philosophies which handle the speck/torture scenario without undue problems. For example if you accepted Rawls-style, risk-averse choice from a position where you are unaware whether you will be one of the speck-victims or the torture victim, you would immediately choose the specks. Choosing the specks maximises the welfare of the least well off (they are subject to a speck, not torture) and, if you don’t know which role you will play, eliminates the risk you might be the torture victim.
(Bentham-style utility calculations are completely risk-neutral and care only about expected return on investment. However nothing about the universe I’m aware of requires you to be this way, as opposed to being risk-averse).
Or for that matter if you held a modified version of utilitarianism that subscribed to some notion of “justice” or “what people deserve”, and cared about how utility was distributed between persons instead of being solely concerned with the strict mathematical sum of all utility and disutility, you could just say that you don’t care how many dust specks you pile up, the degree of unfairness in a distribution where 3^^^3 people get out of a dust speck and one person gets tortured makes the torture scenario a less preferable distribution.
I know Eliezer’s on record as advising people not to read philosophy, but I think this is a case where that advice is misguided.
Rawls’s Wager: the least well-off person lives in a different part of the multiverse than we do, so we should spend all our resources researching trans-multiverse travel in a hopeless attempt to rescue that person. Nobody else matters anyway.
If this is a problem for Rawls, then Bentham has exactly the same problem given that you can hypothesise the existence of a gizmo that creates 3^^^3 units of positive utility which is hidden in a different part of the multiverse. Or for that matter a gizmo which will inflict 3^^^3 dust specks on the eyes of the multiverse if we don’t find it and stop it. Tell me that you think that’s an unlikely hypothesis and I’ll just raise the relevant utility or disutility to the power of 3^^^3 again as often as it takes to overcome the degree of improbability you place on the hypothesis.
However I think it takes a mischievous reading of Rawls to make this a problem. Given that the risk of the trans-multiverse travel project being hopeless (as you stipulate) is substantial and these hypothetical choosers are meant to be risk-averse, not altruistic, I think you could consistently argue that the genuinely risk-averse choice is not to pursue the project since they don’t know this worse-off person exists nor that they could do anything about it if that person did exist.
That said, diachronous (cross-time) moral obligations are a very deep philosophical problem. Given that the number of potential future people is unboundedly large, and those people are at least potentially very badly off, if you try to use moral philosophies developed to handle current-time problems and apply them to far-future diachronous problems it’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that we should dedicate 100% of the world’s surplus resources and all our free time to doing all sorts of strange and potentially contradictory things to benefit far-future people or protect them from possible harms.
This isn’t a problem that Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism, nor Eliezer’s gloss on it, handles any more satisfactorily than any other theory as far as I can tell.
This “moral dilemma” only has force if you accept strict Bentham-style utilitarianism, which treats all benefits and harms as vectors on a one-dimensional line, and cares about nothing except the net total of benefits and harms. That was the state of the art of moral philosophy in the year 1800, but it’s 2012 now.
There are published moral philosophies which handle the speck/torture scenario without undue problems. For example if you accepted Rawls-style, risk-averse choice from a position where you are unaware whether you will be one of the speck-victims or the torture victim, you would immediately choose the specks. Choosing the specks maximises the welfare of the least well off (they are subject to a speck, not torture) and, if you don’t know which role you will play, eliminates the risk you might be the torture victim.
(Bentham-style utility calculations are completely risk-neutral and care only about expected return on investment. However nothing about the universe I’m aware of requires you to be this way, as opposed to being risk-averse).
Or for that matter if you held a modified version of utilitarianism that subscribed to some notion of “justice” or “what people deserve”, and cared about how utility was distributed between persons instead of being solely concerned with the strict mathematical sum of all utility and disutility, you could just say that you don’t care how many dust specks you pile up, the degree of unfairness in a distribution where 3^^^3 people get out of a dust speck and one person gets tortured makes the torture scenario a less preferable distribution.
I know Eliezer’s on record as advising people not to read philosophy, but I think this is a case where that advice is misguided.
Rawls’s Wager: the least well-off person lives in a different part of the multiverse than we do, so we should spend all our resources researching trans-multiverse travel in a hopeless attempt to rescue that person. Nobody else matters anyway.
If this is a problem for Rawls, then Bentham has exactly the same problem given that you can hypothesise the existence of a gizmo that creates 3^^^3 units of positive utility which is hidden in a different part of the multiverse. Or for that matter a gizmo which will inflict 3^^^3 dust specks on the eyes of the multiverse if we don’t find it and stop it. Tell me that you think that’s an unlikely hypothesis and I’ll just raise the relevant utility or disutility to the power of 3^^^3 again as often as it takes to overcome the degree of improbability you place on the hypothesis.
However I think it takes a mischievous reading of Rawls to make this a problem. Given that the risk of the trans-multiverse travel project being hopeless (as you stipulate) is substantial and these hypothetical choosers are meant to be risk-averse, not altruistic, I think you could consistently argue that the genuinely risk-averse choice is not to pursue the project since they don’t know this worse-off person exists nor that they could do anything about it if that person did exist.
That said, diachronous (cross-time) moral obligations are a very deep philosophical problem. Given that the number of potential future people is unboundedly large, and those people are at least potentially very badly off, if you try to use moral philosophies developed to handle current-time problems and apply them to far-future diachronous problems it’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that we should dedicate 100% of the world’s surplus resources and all our free time to doing all sorts of strange and potentially contradictory things to benefit far-future people or protect them from possible harms.
This isn’t a problem that Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism, nor Eliezer’s gloss on it, handles any more satisfactorily than any other theory as far as I can tell.