Agreeing with shminux above, elaborating a little… there’s a general agreement that marginal utility changes aren’t linear with changes in the thing being measured. How much I value a hundred dollars depends on how much money I have; how much I antivalue a minute of torture depends on how long I’ve already been tortured.
So I expect that very few people here will claim that 1 person getting a million dollars has the same aggregate utility as a million people getting a dollar each, or that 1 person tortured for a year has the same aggregate antiutility as half a million people tortured for a minute.
One reason the Torture vs Dust Specks story uses such huge numbers is to avoid having to worry about that.
It’s not the exact numbers that matter, it’as the (transitivity) assumption that they exist. Whether 1 Person tortured for 1 year = 525600 people tortured for 1 minute or 10000000000 people tortured for 1 minute is immaterial to the conclusion.
This may be an unrelated question, but I’ve seen a lot of similar exercises here—is the general implication that:
1 Person tortured for 1 year = 365 people tortured for 1 day = 8760 people tortured for 1 hour = 525600 people tortured for 1 minute?
Agreeing with shminux above, elaborating a little… there’s a general agreement that marginal utility changes aren’t linear with changes in the thing being measured. How much I value a hundred dollars depends on how much money I have; how much I antivalue a minute of torture depends on how long I’ve already been tortured.
So I expect that very few people here will claim that 1 person getting a million dollars has the same aggregate utility as a million people getting a dollar each, or that 1 person tortured for a year has the same aggregate antiutility as half a million people tortured for a minute.
One reason the Torture vs Dust Specks story uses such huge numbers is to avoid having to worry about that.
It’s not the exact numbers that matter, it’as the (transitivity) assumption that they exist. Whether 1 Person tortured for 1 year = 525600 people tortured for 1 minute or 10000000000 people tortured for 1 minute is immaterial to the conclusion.