I’ve no strong background in philosophy, but I am not convinced by your rebuttal of naïve objective list theory. As long as we concede that the same thing can be more or less good depending on context, I still think that the naïve vision has a point. Simple example: a billion dollars in cash usually translates to a lot of positive value, but not if you are stranded on a desert island with no way to spend the money.
Arguments of the form “super-torture trumps every positive thing” work only because we intuitively associate “extremly pain torture” with images of sadistic jailers preventing you from doing pretty much anything. Of course friendship is of no value if your jailer doesn’t let you see your friends in the first place, and of course knowledge is of no value if you suffer so much that you can’t think about anything else but your pain. I don’t intuitively consider this as a flaw in the naïve theory, it kinda feels like putting the cart before the horse. A more accurate example than literal torture would be suffering from some terrible illness while still being able to enjoy things. Suppose that the Devil offers to make you the next Stephen Hawking, inflicting some horrible permanent disease upon you in exchange from wondrous scientific achievements and planetary fame. I predict that a nonzero number of people would gladly accept such a deal. By contrast, a deal such as “you’ll get infinite knowledge but you won’t ever be able to use it because of the constant pain” sounds very stupid from the start.
We’re asking what’s good for the person, not what deal they’d accept. If we ask whether the person who is constantly tortured is well off, the answer is obviously no! If naive OLT is true, then they would be well off. It doesn’t matter if they can ever use the knowledge.
Is the naïve OLT so naïve that it always assign the same fixed amount of Value to the same bit of knowledge no matter what?
Anyway, I’m still not convinced that a person in constant pain should automatically be not well off. Who is better off, a world-famous scientist billionaire with a terrible illness causing constant pain, or a beggar without terrible illnesses living a miserable life in some third-world slum?
I’ve some trouble figuring out a similar scenario of well-off people involving literal torture, but that’s because, as I said earlier, the very concept of “torture” involves jailers deliberately inflicting harm to segregated people. You say that OTL fails just because you can’t imagine any realistic counterbalance to the torture itself. But since we are already in the realm of hypotheses, consider a fantasy setting where the demon-king routinely torture his generals, each of whom rules a whole realm anyway.
I’ve no strong background in philosophy, but I am not convinced by your rebuttal of naïve objective list theory. As long as we concede that the same thing can be more or less good depending on context, I still think that the naïve vision has a point. Simple example: a billion dollars in cash usually translates to a lot of positive value, but not if you are stranded on a desert island with no way to spend the money.
Arguments of the form “super-torture trumps every positive thing” work only because we intuitively associate “extremly pain torture” with images of sadistic jailers preventing you from doing pretty much anything. Of course friendship is of no value if your jailer doesn’t let you see your friends in the first place, and of course knowledge is of no value if you suffer so much that you can’t think about anything else but your pain. I don’t intuitively consider this as a flaw in the naïve theory, it kinda feels like putting the cart before the horse. A more accurate example than literal torture would be suffering from some terrible illness while still being able to enjoy things. Suppose that the Devil offers to make you the next Stephen Hawking, inflicting some horrible permanent disease upon you in exchange from wondrous scientific achievements and planetary fame. I predict that a nonzero number of people would gladly accept such a deal. By contrast, a deal such as “you’ll get infinite knowledge but you won’t ever be able to use it because of the constant pain” sounds very stupid from the start.
We’re asking what’s good for the person, not what deal they’d accept. If we ask whether the person who is constantly tortured is well off, the answer is obviously no! If naive OLT is true, then they would be well off. It doesn’t matter if they can ever use the knowledge.
Is the naïve OLT so naïve that it always assign the same fixed amount of Value to the same bit of knowledge no matter what?
Anyway, I’m still not convinced that a person in constant pain should automatically be not well off. Who is better off, a world-famous scientist billionaire with a terrible illness causing constant pain, or a beggar without terrible illnesses living a miserable life in some third-world slum?
I’ve some trouble figuring out a similar scenario of well-off people involving literal torture, but that’s because, as I said earlier, the very concept of “torture” involves jailers deliberately inflicting harm to segregated people. You say that OTL fails just because you can’t imagine any realistic counterbalance to the torture itself. But since we are already in the realm of hypotheses, consider a fantasy setting where the demon-king routinely torture his generals, each of whom rules a whole realm anyway.