But there are other matters that you would regard as quantitatively comparable, yes? In which you are willing to say that one A is worse than one B, but enough Bs can add up to something worse than an A?
There are three counterarguments to “torture over specks” that I take seriously.
1) The harm coming from a speck in the eye is on a different plane to that coming from torture, so simply no amount of specks ever adds up to something as bad as torture.
2) The utilitarian calculation is overridden by the fact that the 3^^^3 people (if they were being moral about it) would not want some other person to undergo the torture, in order to avoid the specks.
3) Altruism is a mistake; you shouldn’t choose 50 years of torture for yourself, for any reason.
ETA btw I’m not asserting that any of these counterarguments is correct; just that they might be.
A varient on 1: fifty one years after getting the dust speck, the victims will be as they would have been without it. It gets flat-out forgotten. Probably never even makes it into long-term memory. The physical damage is completely repaired. But the torture victim will likely be mentally broken. If you think of consequences when it’s over, specs are preferable. So there is a specific qualitative difference between specs and torture, which supports our intuition to round small things to zero.
Okay, let’s account for that and, uhm, double the amount of dust specks. Or just rule out indirect effects by having an untortured “back-up” upload of the victim that you use to repair whatever damage happened, including traumatic memories. The whole point of thought experiments like this is to get you thinking about just the variables that are mentioned to figure out what principles you consider to be relevant. If we find further arguments to support a conclusion, we are not playing properly.
In that case, it depends on if the torture victim would live until the singularity/cryonics, or if they would die of old age and then that trauma would be gone as well.
But there are other matters that you would regard as quantitatively comparable, yes? In which you are willing to say that one A is worse than one B, but enough Bs can add up to something worse than an A?
There are three counterarguments to “torture over specks” that I take seriously.
1) The harm coming from a speck in the eye is on a different plane to that coming from torture, so simply no amount of specks ever adds up to something as bad as torture.
2) The utilitarian calculation is overridden by the fact that the 3^^^3 people (if they were being moral about it) would not want some other person to undergo the torture, in order to avoid the specks.
3) Altruism is a mistake; you shouldn’t choose 50 years of torture for yourself, for any reason.
ETA btw I’m not asserting that any of these counterarguments is correct; just that they might be.
A varient on 1: fifty one years after getting the dust speck, the victims will be as they would have been without it. It gets flat-out forgotten. Probably never even makes it into long-term memory. The physical damage is completely repaired. But the torture victim will likely be mentally broken. If you think of consequences when it’s over, specs are preferable. So there is a specific qualitative difference between specs and torture, which supports our intuition to round small things to zero.
Okay, let’s account for that and, uhm, double the amount of dust specks. Or just rule out indirect effects by having an untortured “back-up” upload of the victim that you use to repair whatever damage happened, including traumatic memories. The whole point of thought experiments like this is to get you thinking about just the variables that are mentioned to figure out what principles you consider to be relevant. If we find further arguments to support a conclusion, we are not playing properly.
In that case, it depends on if the torture victim would live until the singularity/cryonics, or if they would die of old age and then that trauma would be gone as well.