Jeffrey wrote: To me, this specific exercise reduces to a simpler question: Would it be better (more ethical) to torture individual A for 50 years, or inflict a dust speck on individual B? Gosh. The only justification I can see for that equivalence would be some general belief that badness is simply independent of numbers. Suppose the question were: Which is better, for one person to be tortured for 50 years or for everyone on earth to be tortured for 49 years? Would you really choose the latter? Would you not, in fact, jump at the chance to be the single person for 50 years if that were the only way to get that outcome rather than the other one?
In any case: since you now appear to be conceding that it’s possible for someone to prefer TORTURE to SPECKS for reasons other than a childish desire to shock, are you retracting your original accusation and analysis of motives? … Oh, wait, I see you’ve explicitly said you aren’t. So, you know that one leading proponent of the TORTURE option actually does care about humanity; you agree (if I’ve understood you right) that utilitarian analysis can lead to the conclusion that TORTURE is the less-bad option; I assume you agree that reasonable people can be utilitarians; you’ve seen that one person explicitly said s/he’d be willing to be the one tortured; but in spite of all this, you don’t retract your characterization of that view as shocking; you don’t retract your implication that people who expressed a preference for TORTURE did so because they want to show how uncompromisingly rationalist they are; you don’t retract your implication that those people don’t appreciate that real decisions have real effects on real people. I find that … well, “fairly shocking”, actually.
(It shouldn’t matter, but: I was not one of those advocating TORTURE, nor one of those opposing it. If you care, you can find my opinions above.)
Jeffrey wrote: To me, this specific exercise reduces to a simpler question: Would it be better (more ethical) to torture individual A for 50 years, or inflict a dust speck on individual B? Gosh. The only justification I can see for that equivalence would be some general belief that badness is simply independent of numbers. Suppose the question were: Which is better, for one person to be tortured for 50 years or for everyone on earth to be tortured for 49 years? Would you really choose the latter? Would you not, in fact, jump at the chance to be the single person for 50 years if that were the only way to get that outcome rather than the other one?
In any case: since you now appear to be conceding that it’s possible for someone to prefer TORTURE to SPECKS for reasons other than a childish desire to shock, are you retracting your original accusation and analysis of motives? … Oh, wait, I see you’ve explicitly said you aren’t. So, you know that one leading proponent of the TORTURE option actually does care about humanity; you agree (if I’ve understood you right) that utilitarian analysis can lead to the conclusion that TORTURE is the less-bad option; I assume you agree that reasonable people can be utilitarians; you’ve seen that one person explicitly said s/he’d be willing to be the one tortured; but in spite of all this, you don’t retract your characterization of that view as shocking; you don’t retract your implication that people who expressed a preference for TORTURE did so because they want to show how uncompromisingly rationalist they are; you don’t retract your implication that those people don’t appreciate that real decisions have real effects on real people. I find that … well, “fairly shocking”, actually.
(It shouldn’t matter, but: I was not one of those advocating TORTURE, nor one of those opposing it. If you care, you can find my opinions above.)