I don’t think even everyone going blind is a good excuse for torturing a man for fifty years. How are they going to look him in the eye when he gets out?
That’s cold brother. Real cold....
The idea of an ethical discontinuity between something that can destroy a life (50 years of torture, or 1 year) and something that can’t (1 minute of torture, a dust speck) has some intuitive plausibility, but...
Sorry, no. ‘Torture’ and ‘dust speck’ are not two different quantities of the same currency. I wouldn’t even be confident trying to add up individual minutes of torture to equal one year. Humans do not experience the world like disinterested machines. They don’t even experience a logarithmic progression of ‘amount of discomfort.’ 50 years of torture does things to the mind and body that one year (for 50 people) can never do. One year of torture does things one minute can never do. One minute of torture does things x dust specks in x people’s eyes could never do. None of these things registers on each others’ scales.
Cash, possessions, whatever, I’m with you and Eliezer. Pure human perception is different, even when you count neurons. And no, this isn’t a blind irrational reaction to the key word ‘torture’. This is how human beings work.
Something occurred to me reading through all this earlier. Do we put no weight on the fact that if you polled the 3^^^3 people and asked them whether they would all undergo one dust speck to save one person from 50 years of torture, they’d almost certainly all say yes? Who would say “no, look how many of us there are! Torture him!” I find this goes a long way to exploding the idea of ‘cumulative discomfort’.
The issue with polling 3^^^3 people is that once they are all aware of the situation, it’s no longer purely (3^^^3 dust specks) vs (50yrs torture). It becomes (3^^^3 dust specks plus 3^^^3 feelings of altruistically having saved a life) vs (50yrs torture). The reason most of the people polled would accept the dust speck is not because their utility of a speck is more than 1/3^^^3 their utility of torture. It’s because their utility of (a speck plus feeling like a lifesaver) is more than their utility of (no speck plus feeling like a murderer).
I don’t think even everyone going blind is a good excuse for torturing a man for fifty years. How are they going to look him in the eye when he gets out?
That’s cold brother. Real cold....
The idea of an ethical discontinuity between something that can destroy a life (50 years of torture, or 1 year) and something that can’t (1 minute of torture, a dust speck) has some intuitive plausibility, but...
Sorry, no. ‘Torture’ and ‘dust speck’ are not two different quantities of the same currency. I wouldn’t even be confident trying to add up individual minutes of torture to equal one year. Humans do not experience the world like disinterested machines. They don’t even experience a logarithmic progression of ‘amount of discomfort.’ 50 years of torture does things to the mind and body that one year (for 50 people) can never do. One year of torture does things one minute can never do. One minute of torture does things x dust specks in x people’s eyes could never do. None of these things registers on each others’ scales.
Cash, possessions, whatever, I’m with you and Eliezer. Pure human perception is different, even when you count neurons. And no, this isn’t a blind irrational reaction to the key word ‘torture’. This is how human beings work.
Something occurred to me reading through all this earlier. Do we put no weight on the fact that if you polled the 3^^^3 people and asked them whether they would all undergo one dust speck to save one person from 50 years of torture, they’d almost certainly all say yes? Who would say “no, look how many of us there are! Torture him!” I find this goes a long way to exploding the idea of ‘cumulative discomfort’.
The issue with polling 3^^^3 people is that once they are all aware of the situation, it’s no longer purely (3^^^3 dust specks) vs (50yrs torture). It becomes (3^^^3 dust specks plus 3^^^3 feelings of altruistically having saved a life) vs (50yrs torture). The reason most of the people polled would accept the dust speck is not because their utility of a speck is more than 1/3^^^3 their utility of torture. It’s because their utility of (a speck plus feeling like a lifesaver) is more than their utility of (no speck plus feeling like a murderer).