Or, you know, they could weight suffering in a continuous, derivable way that doesn’t make a fundamental distinction in theory, but achieves that result in practice; amputating a finger is worth more than a billion blood-pricks, one broken arm is worth more than a billion billion nudges, and so on.
That’s not (at all realistically) possible with a number as large as 3^^^3. If there is a number large enough to make a difference 3^^^3 is larger than that number. You say “and so on”, but you could list a billion things each second, each a billion times worse than the preceding, continue doing so until the heat death of the universe and you still wouldn’t get anywhere close to a difference even worth mentioning when there’s a factor of 3^^^3 involved.
Then how about we take the human brain’s inability to multiply into account? Above a certain number of people, the brain goes numb to any increments, in suffering or otherwise. Then it wouldn’t matter if you’re 3^^^3, 3 million, or even 3 thousand; anything past a certain limit is just background noise, statistics.
Which I suppose would have an interesting effect on the value of genocides and other mass-scales inflictions of suffering, and donation management and other mass-scales alleviations of such. I guess what really matters is the tangible result to you, those close to you whom you care about, and the more immediate social environment you move in.
You’d care about the state of a neighborhood, not because you care about any of them individually; you don’t even know them. No, you just want to walk around happy people so you can feel happy yourself. Depressed people are depressing. A utilitarian, linear calculation of wealth increase (or even one that’d include a law of diminishing returns) is simply a very rough approximation towards this goal of seeing smiling faces.
And then there’s of course the matter of satisfying your values, which has much more to do with the state of your mind than with that of others’.
And this is the limit of my working memory for today. I’ll go mull this over… Of course, I suppose I’m hardly being original here; could you point me to sources that have already thought over all this? I’d hate to find out I’m wasting brain-time reinventing the wheel.
That’s not (at all realistically) possible with a number as large as 3^^^3. If there is a number large enough to make a difference 3^^^3 is larger than that number. You say “and so on”, but you could list a billion things each second, each a billion times worse than the preceding, continue doing so until the heat death of the universe and you still wouldn’t get anywhere close to a difference even worth mentioning when there’s a factor of 3^^^3 involved.
Then how about we take the human brain’s inability to multiply into account? Above a certain number of people, the brain goes numb to any increments, in suffering or otherwise. Then it wouldn’t matter if you’re 3^^^3, 3 million, or even 3 thousand; anything past a certain limit is just background noise, statistics.
Which I suppose would have an interesting effect on the value of genocides and other mass-scales inflictions of suffering, and donation management and other mass-scales alleviations of such. I guess what really matters is the tangible result to you, those close to you whom you care about, and the more immediate social environment you move in.
You’d care about the state of a neighborhood, not because you care about any of them individually; you don’t even know them. No, you just want to walk around happy people so you can feel happy yourself. Depressed people are depressing. A utilitarian, linear calculation of wealth increase (or even one that’d include a law of diminishing returns) is simply a very rough approximation towards this goal of seeing smiling faces.
And then there’s of course the matter of satisfying your values, which has much more to do with the state of your mind than with that of others’.
And this is the limit of my working memory for today. I’ll go mull this over… Of course, I suppose I’m hardly being original here; could you point me to sources that have already thought over all this? I’d hate to find out I’m wasting brain-time reinventing the wheel.