On reflection, I should have thought about this a lot more before posting. I felt strongly that the idea of complexity of value says something about thought experiments like torture versus specks, and I kind of went off the rails from there.
What I should have said is simply “There exists an optimal, correct way of understanding and reasoning about human values and we don’t know what it is. Our awareness of this lack of understanding should make us less confident about the validity of our consequentialist reasoning—we might be using fundamentally wrong assumptions.”
On reflection, I should have thought about this a lot more before posting. I felt strongly that the idea of complexity of value says something about thought experiments like torture versus specks, and I kind of went off the rails from there.
What I should have said is simply “There exists an optimal, correct way of understanding and reasoning about human values and we don’t know what it is. Our awareness of this lack of understanding should make us less confident about the validity of our consequentialist reasoning—we might be using fundamentally wrong assumptions.”
In what sense “optimal”? And what makes you certain that this is the case?