Broken arms vs toes: I agree that any number of broken toes wouldn’t be better than a broken arm. But that’s the point, these are _comparable_.
Incomparable breaks occur where you put the ellipses in your list. Torture for 40-50 years vs torture for 1 day is qualitatively distinct. I imagine a human being can bounce back from torture for 1 day, have scars but manage to prosper. That would be hellishly more difficult with torture for 40 years. We could count torture by day, 1-(365*40) and there would be a point of no return there. A duration of torture a person can’t bounce back. It would depend on the person, what happens during and after etc, which is why it’s not possible to compute that day. That doesn’t mean we should ignore how humans work.
Here’s the main beef I have with Dust Specks vs Torture: Statements like “1 million broken toes” or “3^^^3 dust specks” disregard human experience. That many dust specks on one person is torture. One on each is _practically nothing_. I’m simulating people experiencing these, and the result I arrive at is this; choose best outcome from (0 utils * 3^^^3) vs (-3^^^3 utils). This is easy to answer.
You may say “but 1 dust speck on a person isn’t 0 utils, it’s a very small negative utility” and yes, technically you’re correct. But before doing the sum over people, take a look at the people. *Distribution matters.*
Humans don’t work like linear sensory devices. Utility can’t work linearly as well.
To me all the talk about utilities seem broken at a fundamental level. An implication of Timeless Decision Theory should be that an agent running TDT calculates utilities as an integral over time, so final values don’t have any explicit time dependence.
This fixes a lot of things, especially when combined with the texture of human experience. Utility should be a function of the states of the world it affects integrated over time. Since we don’t get to make that calculation in detail, we can approximate by choosing the kinds of actions that minimize the future bad impacts and maximize good ones.
This is the only view of utility that I can think of that preserves the “wisdom of the elders” point of view. It’s strange how often they turn out to be right as one ages, in saying “only care for the ones caring for you”, “focus on bettering yourself and not wallowing in bad circumstances” etc. These are the kind of actions that incorporate the notion that life is ongoing. One person only realizes these in an experiential way after having access to dozens of years of memories to reflect on.
Consequentialism (and utilitarianism as well IMO) is broad enough to incorporate both the necessity of universality and the view of virtue ethics if one thinks in the timeless utility perspective.