If the OP’s challenging a moral intuition that doesn’t at some point reduce to commensurability, then I don’t know what it is. It asks us to imagine the worst thing that could happen to a random person, and then the least perceptibly bad thing that could happen, and seems to be making the argument that an unimaginably huge number of the latter would trump a single instance of the former. What’s that a reductio for, if not the assumption that torture (or anything comparably bad) carries a special kind of disutility?
On the other hand I’m not sure what the post was written in response to, if anything, so there might be some contextual information there that I’m missing.
But, yes, agreed that a lot of objections to this post implicitly assert that torture is incommensurable with dust-specks, and EY is challenging that intuition.
If the OP’s challenging a moral intuition that doesn’t at some point reduce to commensurability, then I don’t know what it is. It asks us to imagine the worst thing that could happen to a random person, and then the least perceptibly bad thing that could happen, and seems to be making the argument that an unimaginably huge number of the latter would trump a single instance of the former. What’s that a reductio for, if not the assumption that torture (or anything comparably bad) carries a special kind of disutility?
On the other hand I’m not sure what the post was written in response to, if anything, so there might be some contextual information there that I’m missing.
I’m… puzzled by this exchange.
But, yes, agreed that a lot of objections to this post implicitly assert that torture is incommensurable with dust-specks, and EY is challenging that intuition.