“Following your heart and not your head—refusing to multiply—has also wrought plenty of havoc on the world, historically speaking. It’s a questionable assertion (to say the least) that condoning irrationality has less damaging side effects than condoning torture.”
I’m not really convinced that multiplication of the dust-speck effect is relevant. Subjective experience is restricted to individuals, not collectives. To me, this specific exercise reduces to a simpler question: Would it be better (more ethical) to torture individual A for 50 years, or inflict a dust speck on individual B?
If the goal is to be a utilitarian ethicist with the well-being of humanity as your highest priority; then something may be wrong with your model when the vast majority of humans would choose the option that you wouldn’t. (As I suspect they would). Utility isn’t all that matters to most people. Is utilitarianism the only “real” ethics?
My criticisms can sometimes come across the wrong way. (And I know that you actually do care about humanity, Eli.) I don’t mean to judge here, just strongly disagree. Not that I retract what I wrote; I don’t.
I know that this is only a hypothetical example, but I must admit that I’m fairly shocked at the number of people indicating that they would select the torture option (as long as it wasn’t them being tortured). We should be wary of the temptation to support something unorthodox for the effect of: “Hey, look at what a hardcore rationalist I can be.” Real decisions have real effects on real people.