I’m pretty sure that right now more than 1 in 1,000,000 people around the world (that is, around 7000 people total) are experiencing suffering at least as bad as the hypothetical torture. Taking that into account, a ratio of 1:1,000,000 would be a strict improvement. Faced with a choice like that, I might selfishly refuse due to the chance that I would be one of the unlucky few, whereas right now I am doing pretty well compared to most people. But I would like to be the sort of person that wouldn’t refuse.
(I’m also not convinced that a life completely free of discomfort, pain, and suffering is possible or desirable; however, this objection doesn’t reach the heart of the matter, so I’m willing to ignore it for the sake of argument.)
The decision would be more difficult once we get to a ratio which does not strictly dominate our current situation. The terrible unfairness of a world where you’re either free of all discomfort or being horribly tortured bothers me; for this reason, I think I wouldn’t make the trade for any ratio where the total amount of suffering is roughly comparable to the status quo. I would have to do some research to give you a precise number.
But now we are very far off from the original problem of dust specks vs. torture, in which the number 3^^^3 is specifically chosen to be sufficiently large that if you have an acceptable exchange rate at all, 1 : 3^^^3 will be acceptable to you.
Don’t be bamboozled by big numbers, it is exactly the same problem: How far would you go to maximize pain in the minority in order to minimize it in the majority. As Eliezer argued so forcefully in the comments above, this problem exists on a continuum and if you want to break the chain at any point you have to justify why that point and not another.
Your argument for 1:1,000,000 does not go far enough in minimising pain for the majority. One person cannot take the pain of 1,000,000 people without dying or at least becoming unconscious. I suspect the maximum “other people’s pain” a person could endure without losing conscious is broadly between 5 and 50, let’s say 25.
So if you are willing to send one human being out of 3^^^3 people to be tortured for 50 years to remove a vanishingly small momentary discomfort for the majority, then you must also be willing to continually torture 1 in 25 people to eradicate all pain in the majority of the other 24. They are two ends of the same continuum, you cannot break the chain.
Both instances are brutally unfair on the people tortured, but at least in the second instance the majority will lead better lives while in the first instance not a single person is aware they had one less blink of discomfort in their entire lifetime. So my question remains to the torturers, are you a monster for sending 1 in 25 people to be tortured?
When did we start talking about someone “taking the pain of other people”? This is news to me; it wasn’t part of the argument before.
This, I understand is the reason you’re suggesting that I would torture 1 in 25 people. Well, I wouldn’t torture 1 in 25 people. I have already stated that if the total amount of pain is conserved (there may be difficulties with measuring “total pain”, but bear with me here) then I prefer it to be spread out evenly rather than piled onto one person.
In the dust speck formulation, the 3^^^3 being dustspecked are, in aggregate, suffering much more than the one person being tortured. 3^^^3 is very large. For any continuum you could actually describe that ends in “torture 1 in X people so that the remainder live perfect lives”, X will still be approximately 3^^^3. Possibly divided by some insignificant number like googolplex that can be writtten down in mere scientific notation.
I’m pretty sure that right now more than 1 in 1,000,000 people around the world (that is, around 7000 people total) are experiencing suffering at least as bad as the hypothetical torture. Taking that into account, a ratio of 1:1,000,000 would be a strict improvement. Faced with a choice like that, I might selfishly refuse due to the chance that I would be one of the unlucky few, whereas right now I am doing pretty well compared to most people. But I would like to be the sort of person that wouldn’t refuse.
(I’m also not convinced that a life completely free of discomfort, pain, and suffering is possible or desirable; however, this objection doesn’t reach the heart of the matter, so I’m willing to ignore it for the sake of argument.)
The decision would be more difficult once we get to a ratio which does not strictly dominate our current situation. The terrible unfairness of a world where you’re either free of all discomfort or being horribly tortured bothers me; for this reason, I think I wouldn’t make the trade for any ratio where the total amount of suffering is roughly comparable to the status quo. I would have to do some research to give you a precise number.
But now we are very far off from the original problem of dust specks vs. torture, in which the number 3^^^3 is specifically chosen to be sufficiently large that if you have an acceptable exchange rate at all, 1 : 3^^^3 will be acceptable to you.
Don’t be bamboozled by big numbers, it is exactly the same problem: How far would you go to maximize pain in the minority in order to minimize it in the majority. As Eliezer argued so forcefully in the comments above, this problem exists on a continuum and if you want to break the chain at any point you have to justify why that point and not another.
Your argument for 1:1,000,000 does not go far enough in minimising pain for the majority. One person cannot take the pain of 1,000,000 people without dying or at least becoming unconscious. I suspect the maximum “other people’s pain” a person could endure without losing conscious is broadly between 5 and 50, let’s say 25.
So if you are willing to send one human being out of 3^^^3 people to be tortured for 50 years to remove a vanishingly small momentary discomfort for the majority, then you must also be willing to continually torture 1 in 25 people to eradicate all pain in the majority of the other 24. They are two ends of the same continuum, you cannot break the chain.
Both instances are brutally unfair on the people tortured, but at least in the second instance the majority will lead better lives while in the first instance not a single person is aware they had one less blink of discomfort in their entire lifetime. So my question remains to the torturers, are you a monster for sending 1 in 25 people to be tortured?
When did we start talking about someone “taking the pain of other people”? This is news to me; it wasn’t part of the argument before.
This, I understand is the reason you’re suggesting that I would torture 1 in 25 people. Well, I wouldn’t torture 1 in 25 people. I have already stated that if the total amount of pain is conserved (there may be difficulties with measuring “total pain”, but bear with me here) then I prefer it to be spread out evenly rather than piled onto one person.
In the dust speck formulation, the 3^^^3 being dustspecked are, in aggregate, suffering much more than the one person being tortured. 3^^^3 is very large. For any continuum you could actually describe that ends in “torture 1 in X people so that the remainder live perfect lives”, X will still be approximately 3^^^3. Possibly divided by some insignificant number like googolplex that can be writtten down in mere scientific notation.
At no point did anyone accept your 1:25 proposal.