Since Robin is interested in data… I chose SPECKS, and was shocked by the people who chose TORTURE on grounds of aggregated utility. I had not considered the possibility that a speck in the eye might cause a car crash (etc) for some of those 3^^^3 people, and it is the only reason I see for revising my original choice. I have no accredited expertise in anything relevant, but I know what decision theory is.
I see a widespread assumption that everything has a finite utility, and so no matter how much worse X is than Y, there must be a situation in which it is better to have one person experiencing X, rather than a large number of people experiencing Y. And it looks to me as if this assumption derives from nothing more than a particular formalism. In fact, it is extremely easy to have a utility function in which X unconditionally trumps Y, while still being quantitatively commensurable with some other option X’. You could do it with delta functions, for example. You would use ordinary scalars to represent the least important things to have preferences about, scalar multiples of a delta function to represent the utilities of things which are unconditionally more important than those, scalar multiples of a delta function squared to represent things that are even more important, and so on.
The qualitative distinction I would appeal to here could be dubbed pain versus inconvenience. A speck of dust in your eye is not pain. Torture, especially fifty years of it, is.
Since Robin is interested in data… I chose SPECKS, and was shocked by the people who chose TORTURE on grounds of aggregated utility. I had not considered the possibility that a speck in the eye might cause a car crash (etc) for some of those 3^^^3 people, and it is the only reason I see for revising my original choice. I have no accredited expertise in anything relevant, but I know what decision theory is.
I see a widespread assumption that everything has a finite utility, and so no matter how much worse X is than Y, there must be a situation in which it is better to have one person experiencing X, rather than a large number of people experiencing Y. And it looks to me as if this assumption derives from nothing more than a particular formalism. In fact, it is extremely easy to have a utility function in which X unconditionally trumps Y, while still being quantitatively commensurable with some other option X’. You could do it with delta functions, for example. You would use ordinary scalars to represent the least important things to have preferences about, scalar multiples of a delta function to represent the utilities of things which are unconditionally more important than those, scalar multiples of a delta function squared to represent things that are even more important, and so on.
The qualitative distinction I would appeal to here could be dubbed pain versus inconvenience. A speck of dust in your eye is not pain. Torture, especially fifty years of it, is.