I think Torture vs Dust Specks makes a hidden assumption that the two things are comparable. It appears that people don’t actually think like that; even an infinite amount of dust specks are worse than a single person being tortured or dying. People arbitrarily place some bad things into a category that’s infinitely worse than another category.
The thing is, if you think that A and B aren’t comparable, with A>B, and if you don’t make some simplifying assumption like “any event with P < 0.01 is unworthy of consideration, no matter how great or awful” or something, then you don’t get to ever care about B for a moment. There’s always some tiny chance of A that has to completely dominate your decision-making.
After reading this several times, I have to conclude that I don’t understand what “comparable” means in this comment. Otherwise, I have no idea how one could thinking both that A and B aren’t comparable and that A > B.
even an infinite amount of dust specks are worse than a single person being tortured or dying. People arbitrarily place some bad things into a category that’s infinitely worse than another category.
I mean “comparable” as the negation of this line of thought.
So, you meant something like: if I think A is worse than B, but not infinitely worse than B, and I don’t have some kind of threshold (e.g., a threshold of probability) below which I no longer evaluate expected utility of events at all, then my beliefs about B are irrelevant to my decisions because my decisions are entirely driven by my beliefs about A?
I mean, that’s trivially true, in the sense that a false premise justifies any conclusion, and any finite system will have some threshold for which events not to evaluate.
This is a good point, and I’ve pondered on this for a while.
Following your logic: we can observe that I’m not spending all my waking time caring about A (people dying somewhere for some reason). Therefore we can conclude that the death of those people is comparable to mundane things I choose to do instead—i.e. the mundane things are not infinitely less important than someone’s death.
But this only holds if my decision to do the mundane things in preference to saving someone’s life is rational.
I’m still wondering whether I do the mundane things by rationally deciding that they are more important than my contribution to saving someone’s life could be, or by simply being irrational.
I am leaning towards the latter—which means that someone’s death could still be infinitely worse to me than something mundane, except that this fact is not accounted for in my decision making because I am not fully rational no matter how hard I try.
The thing is, if you think that A and B aren’t comparable, with A>B, and if you don’t make some simplifying assumption like “any event with P < 0.01 is unworthy of consideration, no matter how great or awful” or something, then you don’t get to ever care about B for a moment. There’s always some tiny chance of A that has to completely dominate your decision-making.
After reading this several times, I have to conclude that I don’t understand what “comparable” means in this comment. Otherwise, I have no idea how one could thinking both that A and B aren’t comparable and that A > B.
I mean “comparable” as the negation of this line of thought.
Ah.
So, you meant something like: if I think A is worse than B, but not infinitely worse than B, and I don’t have some kind of threshold (e.g., a threshold of probability) below which I no longer evaluate expected utility of events at all, then my beliefs about B are irrelevant to my decisions because my decisions are entirely driven by my beliefs about A?
I mean, that’s trivially true, in the sense that a false premise justifies any conclusion, and any finite system will have some threshold for which events not to evaluate.
But in a less trivial sense… hm.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
This is a good point, and I’ve pondered on this for a while.
Following your logic: we can observe that I’m not spending all my waking time caring about A (people dying somewhere for some reason). Therefore we can conclude that the death of those people is comparable to mundane things I choose to do instead—i.e. the mundane things are not infinitely less important than someone’s death.
But this only holds if my decision to do the mundane things in preference to saving someone’s life is rational.
I’m still wondering whether I do the mundane things by rationally deciding that they are more important than my contribution to saving someone’s life could be, or by simply being irrational.
I am leaning towards the latter—which means that someone’s death could still be infinitely worse to me than something mundane, except that this fact is not accounted for in my decision making because I am not fully rational no matter how hard I try.