You were the one who claimed that the mental discomfort from hearing about torture would swamp the disutility from the dust specks—I assumed from that, that you thought they were commensurable. I thought it was odd that you thought they were commensurable but thought the math worked out in the opposite direction.
I believe Eliezer’s post was not so much directed at folks who disagree with utilitarianism—rather, it’s supposed to be about taking the math seriously, for those who are. If you’re not a utilitarian, you can freely regard it as another reductio.
You don’t have to be any sort of simple or naive utilitarian to encounter this problem. As long as goods are in any way commensurable, you need to actually do the math. And it’s hard to make a case for a utilitarianism in which goods are not commensurable—in practice, we can spend money towards any sort of good, and we don’t favor only spending money on the highest-order ones, so that strongly suggests commensurability.
You were the one who claimed that the mental discomfort from hearing about torture would swamp the disutility from the dust specks—I assumed from that, that you thought they were commensurable. I thought it was odd that you thought they were commensurable but thought the math worked out in the opposite direction.
I believe Eliezer’s post was not so much directed at folks who disagree with utilitarianism—rather, it’s supposed to be about taking the math seriously, for those who are. If you’re not a utilitarian, you can freely regard it as another reductio.
You don’t have to be any sort of simple or naive utilitarian to encounter this problem. As long as goods are in any way commensurable, you need to actually do the math. And it’s hard to make a case for a utilitarianism in which goods are not commensurable—in practice, we can spend money towards any sort of good, and we don’t favor only spending money on the highest-order ones, so that strongly suggests commensurability.