I’ve heard this rephrasing before but it means less than you might think. Human instinct tells us to postpone the bad as much as possible. Put aside the dustspeck issue for the moment: let’s compare torture to torture. I’d be tempted to choose a 1000 years of torture over a single year of torture, if the 1000 years are a few millions of years in the future, but the single year had to start now.
Does this fact mean I need concede 1000 years of torture are less bad than a single year? Surely not. It just illustrates human hyperbolic discounting.
I’ve heard this rephrasing before but it means less than you might think. Human instinct tells us to postpone the bad as much as possible. Put aside the dustspeck issue for the moment: let’s compare torture to torture. I’d be tempted to choose a 1000 years of torture over a single year of torture, if the 1000 years are a few millions of years in the future, but the single year had to start now.
Does this fact mean I need concede 1000 years of torture are less bad than a single year? Surely not. It just illustrates human hyperbolic discounting.