(If a dust speck is zero, you could substitute “stubbed toe”.)
Incidentally, my own answer to the torture vs. dust specks question was to bite the other bullet and say that, given any two different intensities of suffering, there is a sufficiently long finite duration of the greater intensity such that I’d pick a Nearly Infinite duration of the lesser degree over it. In other words, yeah, I’d condemn a Nearly Infinite number of people to 50 years of slightly less bad torture to spare a large enough finite group from 50 years of slightly worse torture.
In real life, I consider myself lucky that questions like that one are only hypothetical.
MartinH:
See the follow-up here.
(If a dust speck is zero, you could substitute “stubbed toe”.)
Incidentally, my own answer to the torture vs. dust specks question was to bite the other bullet and say that, given any two different intensities of suffering, there is a sufficiently long finite duration of the greater intensity such that I’d pick a Nearly Infinite duration of the lesser degree over it. In other words, yeah, I’d condemn a Nearly Infinite number of people to 50 years of slightly less bad torture to spare a large enough finite group from 50 years of slightly worse torture.
In real life, I consider myself lucky that questions like that one are only hypothetical.