Ben, according to your poll suggestion, we should forbid driving, because each particular person would no doubt be willing to drive a little bit slower to save lives, and ultimately having no one drive at all would save the most lives. But instead, people continue to drive, thereby trading many lives for their convenience.
Agreeing with these people, I’d be quite willing to undergo the torture personally, simply in order to prevent the dust specks for the others. And so this works in reverse against your poll.
Mitchell: “You’re in the same boat with the incommensurabilists, unable to justify their magic dividing line.” No, not at all. It is true that no one is going to give an exact value. But the issue is not whether you can give an exact value; the issue is whether the existence of such a value is reasonable or not. The incommensurabilists must say that there is some period of time, or some particular degree of pain, or whatever, such that a trillion people suffering for that length of time or that degree of pain would always be preferable to one person suffering for one second longer or suffering a pain ever so slightly greater. This is the claim which is unreasonable.
If someone is willing to make the torture and specks commensurable, it is true that this implies that there is some number where the specks become exactly equal to the torture. There is not at all the same intuitive problem here; it is much like the comparison made a while ago on Overcoming Bias between caning and prison time; if someone is given few enough strokes, he will prefer this to a certain amount of prison time, while if the number is continually increased, at some point he will prefer prison time.
Ben, according to your poll suggestion, we should forbid driving, because each particular person would no doubt be willing to drive a little bit slower to save lives, and ultimately having no one drive at all would save the most lives. But instead, people continue to drive, thereby trading many lives for their convenience.
Agreeing with these people, I’d be quite willing to undergo the torture personally, simply in order to prevent the dust specks for the others. And so this works in reverse against your poll.
Mitchell: “You’re in the same boat with the incommensurabilists, unable to justify their magic dividing line.” No, not at all. It is true that no one is going to give an exact value. But the issue is not whether you can give an exact value; the issue is whether the existence of such a value is reasonable or not. The incommensurabilists must say that there is some period of time, or some particular degree of pain, or whatever, such that a trillion people suffering for that length of time or that degree of pain would always be preferable to one person suffering for one second longer or suffering a pain ever so slightly greater. This is the claim which is unreasonable.
If someone is willing to make the torture and specks commensurable, it is true that this implies that there is some number where the specks become exactly equal to the torture. There is not at all the same intuitive problem here; it is much like the comparison made a while ago on Overcoming Bias between caning and prison time; if someone is given few enough strokes, he will prefer this to a certain amount of prison time, while if the number is continually increased, at some point he will prefer prison time.