A better metaphor: What if we replaced “getting a dust speck in your eye” with “being horribly tortured for one second”? Ignore the practical problems of the latter, just say the person experiences the exact same (average) pain as being horribly tortured, but for one second.
That allows us to directly compare the two experiences much better, and it seems to me it eliminates the “you can’t compare the two experiences”- except of course with long term effects of torture, I suppose; to get a perfect comparison we’d need a torture machine that not only does no physical damage, but no psychological damage either.
On the other hand, it does leave in OnTheOtherHandle’s argument about “fairness” (specifically in the “sharing of burdens” definition, since otherwise we could just say the person tortured is selected at random). Which to me as a utilitarian makes perfect sense; I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with him on that.
A better metaphor: What if we replaced “getting a dust speck in your eye” with “being horribly tortured for one second”? Ignore the practical problems of the latter, just say the person experiences the exact same (average) pain as being horribly tortured, but for one second.
That allows us to directly compare the two experiences much better, and it seems to me it eliminates the “you can’t compare the two experiences”- except of course with long term effects of torture, I suppose; to get a perfect comparison we’d need a torture machine that not only does no physical damage, but no psychological damage either.
On the other hand, it does leave in OnTheOtherHandle’s argument about “fairness” (specifically in the “sharing of burdens” definition, since otherwise we could just say the person tortured is selected at random). Which to me as a utilitarian makes perfect sense; I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with him on that.