The fact that he is not willing to kill his grandmother to save the chickens doesn’t imply that chickens have 0 value or that his grandmother has infinite value.
Consider the problem from an egocentric point of view: to be responsible for one’s grandmother’s death feels awful, but also dedicating your life to a very unlikely possibility to save someone who has been declared dead, seems awful.
I think that he set the mind experiment in the Least convenient possible world. So your last hypothesis is right.
To be more precise: let’s assume that the time will be quite short (5 second for example), in this case I think it is really better to let billions of people suffer 5 second of bearable pain than to let one person suffer 5 second of unbearable pain. After all, people can stand a bearable pain by definition.
However, pain tolerance is subjective and in real life we don’t know exactly where the threshold is in every person, so we can prefer, as heuristic rule, the option with less people involved when the pains are similar to each other (maybe we have evolved some system to make such approximations, a sort of threshold insensitivity).
I think it’s worst for 3^999999999 people to feel two dust specks than for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck. After all the next step is that it is worst for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck than for 3^1000000001 people to feel less than one dust speck, which seem right.
I think that we “speckists” see injuries as poisons: they can destroy people lives only if they reach a certain concentration. So a greater but far more diluted pain can be less dangerous than a smaller but more concentrated one. 50 and 49 years of torture are still far over the threshold. One or two dust specks, on the other hand, are far below.
But consider this: the last exemplars of each species of hominids could reproduce with the firs exemplars of the following.
However, we probably wouldn’t be able to reproduce with Homo habilis.
This shows that small differences sum as the distance between the examined subjects increases, until we can clearly see that the two subjects are not part of the same category anymore.
The pains that are similar in intensity are still comparable. But there is too much difference between dust specks in the eye/stubbed toe and torture to consider them as part of the same category
Suppose that the qualitative difference is between bearable and unbearable, in other words things that are over o below the pain tolerance. A pain just below pain tolerance when experienced for a small quantity of time will remain bearable; however, if it is prolonged for lots of time it will become unbearable because human patience is limited. So, even if we give importance to qualitative differences, we can still choose to avoid torture and your second scenario, without going against our intuitions, or be incoherent.
Moreover, we can describe qualitative differences as the colors on the spectrum of visible light: their edges are nebulous but we can still agree that the grass is green and the sea is blue. This means that two very close points on the spectrum appear as part of the same color, but when their distance increases they became part of two different colors.
1,525,122 and 1,525,123 are so close that we can see them as shades of the same qualitative category. On the other hand, dust speck and torture are very distant from each other and we can consider them as part of two different qualitative categories.
Thanks for the informations.
I am rather new here and I would like to ask: what are the criterions that a post must respect to be put in the front page? How can I improve to reach such criterions?
Thanks for the article.
To better express my argument I could use this analogy.
Pain can be seen as a poison: people would prefer to avoid it altogether. However it is really dangerous only when it reaches a certain concentration and causes long term damages that really impairs people ability to experience a worthy, or at least bearable, life (which is probably the first goal of most people).
I too have reached the conclusion that people goals are too numerous, mutable, and nebulous to be expressed by a function; and even if I am wrong, probably the resulting function will be too complex to be applied by humans, at least in their everyday choices.
On the other hand, utility functions surely are useful to maximize our resources and efficiency. So they can be used as tools to reach our goals.
Good points, I should have been more explicit.
It is true that no one will ever discover what has happened, but “good willed” people can make a social contract to ensure mutual protection.
Maybe it is just the opposite of Roko’s basilisk: rather than threatens people, the social contract protects them, and enhances solidariety.
Of coure the contract could work as motivator only if people trust each other: spontaneously choosing B) people signal that their “moral compass” recognize merit as a value in itself, and that they will punish or reward people because they want to do so.
It depends if someone can trust our promises.
You answered A so I can think that you care equally about people, and you don’t see merit’s reward as an intrinsic good.
In this case I will be less motivated to collaborate with you.
I answered B (at least in the first case), so people can think that I care more about those who do good actions, and that I see merit’s reward as an intrinsic good.
Thanks for the answers.
Yes, a possible application of B.4 is dust specks.
You answered A, to question B.1, why?
Anyway, thanks.
I edited the post as you advised to be more comprehensible.
Sorry, my fault.
The point is that the probability to really found yourself in such situation is very remote.
On the other hand, I think that many people dislike the lack of recognition of merit (me included), and a society that doesn’t motivate others to behave right, will be more instable and will cause more pain in the long run.
Choosing A here, in this moment, you signal that you care about merit, or rather you signal that you have certain emotions in response of certain behavior and that these emotions guide your actions. Which can motivate other to behave in a certain way.
I am curious, what are the arguments that you find wrong? And what are your counterargument?
Then I agree with you, certain phenomena present characteristics that emerge only from the interactions of their parts.
I tried to express a similar concept when I wrote: “All this things are valuable but only together they make something qualitatively more important, which is often called human flourishing or Eudaimonia.
Similarly only if pain is combined with frustration, fear, desperation, panic, etc. it becomes something qualitatively worst such as agony.”
I would like to ask you a question (because I became curious about people’s opinion on the subject after I read these posts): do you think that humans are, or at least should be utility maximizer when pursuing their goals? (I think that we should be utility maximizer when pursuing the resources to reach our goals, but I wonder if people decision process is too incoherent to be expressed as a function)
Thanks for the encouragement.
I cannot agree with 2) because I think that a dust speck, or a stubbed toe have a disutility which is not ignorable. After all I still would prefer to avoid them.
The solution number 1) is more interesting, but I prefer to say that dust specks are irrelevant compared to torture because they are a different kind of pain (bearable rather than unbearable). The biggest advantage is that rather than use a different formula I just include a physiological limit (pain tolerance).
The bigger problem is: where does this limit exactly lays?
The post’s aim is to bring some examples of limits which are nebulous but still evident.
It is threatening people just to test you. We can assume that Its behavior is completely different from ours. So Tom’s argument still works.