The problem here is that your math doesn’t seem to take into account that humans are deeply scope insensitive and our emotional involvement is largely a function of ‘distance’ (space, time, appearance, etc).
(Note: I am not a utilitarian and do not condone any illegal actions. This is a hypothetical to better express my point.)
A public execution on national TV of a hated individual, or even just a member of a hated group, could potentially give tens or hundreds of millions of observers a half hour of high-quality entertainment. Even discounting the value of the positive memories and added social cohesion from the shared experience, the kind of money advertisers will pay for even a poorly rated cable show should prove that the execution is a net benefit.
A newspaper article or TV news report, even with grizzly pictures and video, describing the deaths of hundreds of members of a hated group is less personal and thus less intense an experience. The same viewers might feel better in an abstract sense, maybe even enough to break even, but it’s probably not a particularly useful expenditure. Even if the number of viewers increased by a hundred-fold to match the victims it’s still going to be a worse deal in $$$ per utilons.
Killing millions in a short time-frame for entertainment value is just realistically not going to be an efficient use of time and energy, even if trillions or quadrillions of human viewers were watching. A million really is a statistic, and it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to care more about a million deaths than a half dozen.
The problem here is that your math doesn’t seem to take into account that humans are deeply scope insensitive and our emotional involvement is largely a function of ‘distance’ (space, time, appearance, etc).
(Note: I am not a utilitarian and do not condone any illegal actions. This is a hypothetical to better express my point.)
A public execution on national TV of a hated individual, or even just a member of a hated group, could potentially give tens or hundreds of millions of observers a half hour of high-quality entertainment. Even discounting the value of the positive memories and added social cohesion from the shared experience, the kind of money advertisers will pay for even a poorly rated cable show should prove that the execution is a net benefit.
A newspaper article or TV news report, even with grizzly pictures and video, describing the deaths of hundreds of members of a hated group is less personal and thus less intense an experience. The same viewers might feel better in an abstract sense, maybe even enough to break even, but it’s probably not a particularly useful expenditure. Even if the number of viewers increased by a hundred-fold to match the victims it’s still going to be a worse deal in $$$ per utilons.
Killing millions in a short time-frame for entertainment value is just realistically not going to be an efficient use of time and energy, even if trillions or quadrillions of human viewers were watching. A million really is a statistic, and it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to care more about a million deaths than a half dozen.