Er, sorry, I was unclear. (I wrote unclearly because I wasn’t thinking clearly enough. It’s annoying how that happens.) So, the point I was trying to make but didn’t actually get around to writing down because I forgot about it while writing down what I did :-) is that those people for whom dust specks and torture are incommensurable—which I think they have to be, to prefer 3^^^3.SPECK to 1.TORTURE—don’t, so far as I can tell, generally spend their entire lives estimating how many people are going to get tortured-or-worse on account of their actions, neither do they entirely ignore minor inconveniences; so it doesn’t seem to be the case that having that sort of utility function implies ignoring everything but the highest order.
[EDITED above, about a day after posting, to fix a formatting glitch that I hadn’t noticed before.]
Arguably it would do if those people were perfectly consistent—one of the more convincing arguments for preferring TORTURE to SPECKS consists of exhibiting a series of steps between SPECK and TORTURE of length, say, at most 100 in which no step appears to involve a worse than, say, 100:1 difference in badness, so maybe preferring TORTURE to SPECKS almost always involves intransitivity or something like that. And maybe some similar charge could be brought against anyone who has separate “orders” but still gives any consideration to the lower ones. Hence my remark that the one doesn’t seem more irrational than the other.
Er, sorry, I was unclear. (I wrote unclearly because I wasn’t thinking clearly enough. It’s annoying how that happens.) So, the point I was trying to make but didn’t actually get around to writing down because I forgot about it while writing down what I did :-) is that those people for whom dust specks and torture are incommensurable—which I think they have to be, to prefer 3^^^3.SPECK to 1.TORTURE—don’t, so far as I can tell, generally spend their entire lives estimating how many people are going to get tortured-or-worse on account of their actions, neither do they entirely ignore minor inconveniences; so it doesn’t seem to be the case that having that sort of utility function implies ignoring everything but the highest order.
[EDITED above, about a day after posting, to fix a formatting glitch that I hadn’t noticed before.]
Arguably it would do if those people were perfectly consistent—one of the more convincing arguments for preferring TORTURE to SPECKS consists of exhibiting a series of steps between SPECK and TORTURE of length, say, at most 100 in which no step appears to involve a worse than, say, 100:1 difference in badness, so maybe preferring TORTURE to SPECKS almost always involves intransitivity or something like that. And maybe some similar charge could be brought against anyone who has separate “orders” but still gives any consideration to the lower ones. Hence my remark that the one doesn’t seem more irrational than the other.