If I recall correctly Alicorn made a reference to reversing the utilities in this argument… would you think it better for someone to give up a life of the purest and truest happiness, if in exchange they created all of the 10 second or less cat videos that will ever be on youtube throughout all of history and the future?
My intuitions here say yes; it can be worth sacrificing your life (i.e. torturing yourself working at a startup) to create a public good which will do a small amount for a lot of people (i.e. making standard immunization injections also give people immunity to dust specks in their eyes)
Manipulative phrasing. Of course, it will always seem worth torturing yourself, yadda yadda, when framed as a volitional sacrifice. Does your intuition equally answer yes when asked if it is worth killing somebody to do etc etc? Doubt it (and not a deontological phrasing issue)
Certainly there’s a difference between what I said and the traditional phrasing of the dilemma; certainly the idea of sacrificing oneself versus another is a big one.
But the OP was asking for an instrumentalist reason to choose torture over dust specks. It is pretty far-fetched to imagine that literally torturing someone will actually accomplish… well, almost anything, unless they’re a supervillain creating a contrived scenario in which you have to torture them.
When you will actually be trading quality of life for barely-tangible benefit on a large scale is torturing yourself working at a startup. This is an actual decision that people make to make lives miserable in exchange for minor but widespread public goods. And I fully support the actual trades of this sort that people actually make.
That’s my instrumentalist argument for, as a human being, accepting the metaphor of dust specks versus torture, not my philosophical argument for a decision theory that selects it.
Was there any reason to think I didn’t understand exactly what you said the first time? You agree with me and then restate. Fine, but pointless. Additionally, unimaginative re: potential value of torture. Defending lack of imagination in that statement by claiming torture defined in part by primary intent would be inconsistent.
The reason I thought you didn’t understand what I was talking about was that I was calling on examples from day to day life, this is what I took “instrumentalist” to mean, and you starting talking about killing people, which is not an event from day to day life.
If you are interested in continuing this discussion (which if not I won’t object) let’s take this one step at a time; does that difference seem reasonable to you?
The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. “torturing yourself working at a startup” becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.
The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat “real” examples in day to day life. It is entirely because “we” (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!
Point number one is: I don’t understand how you can say, when I am making an argument explicitly restricted to instrumental decision theory, how day to day life is irrelevant. Instrumentalism should ONLY care about day to day life.
With respect to forced sacrifice, my intuitions say I should just do the math, and that the reason volition is so important is that the reasonable expectation that one won’t be forced to make sacrifices is a big-ticket public good, meaning the math almost always comes out on its side. I think that you’re saying these choices have been screened off, but I think non-volitional choices have been screened off because they are in general bad trades rather than because “volition” is a magic word that lets you get whatever you want.
Point three, let’s turn this around… say someone is about to spend their entire life being tortured. Would you rescue them, if you knew it meant throwing a harmless dust speck into the eye of everyone ever to exist or be emulated? This should be equivalent, but both of the sacrifices here are forced since, at a minimum, some human beings are sociopaths and wouldn’t agree to take the dust speck.
If you want me to consider volition more closely, can you come up with some forced sacrifice choices that are reasonable exchanges that I might come across if I lived in a different world?
One possible idea: if I was the son of an African warlord, and I had the ability to make my parents’ political decrees more compassionate if I talked to them after they blew off steam torturing people, but I could instead make them torture fewer people by talking to them beforehand.
Here my intuitions say I should let the individuals be tortured in exchange for effecting large scale policy decisions.
If I recall correctly Alicorn made a reference to reversing the utilities in this argument… would you think it better for someone to give up a life of the purest and truest happiness, if in exchange they created all of the 10 second or less cat videos that will ever be on youtube throughout all of history and the future?
My intuitions here say yes; it can be worth sacrificing your life (i.e. torturing yourself working at a startup) to create a public good which will do a small amount for a lot of people (i.e. making standard immunization injections also give people immunity to dust specks in their eyes)
Manipulative phrasing. Of course, it will always seem worth torturing yourself, yadda yadda, when framed as a volitional sacrifice. Does your intuition equally answer yes when asked if it is worth killing somebody to do etc etc? Doubt it (and not a deontological phrasing issue)
Certainly there’s a difference between what I said and the traditional phrasing of the dilemma; certainly the idea of sacrificing oneself versus another is a big one.
But the OP was asking for an instrumentalist reason to choose torture over dust specks. It is pretty far-fetched to imagine that literally torturing someone will actually accomplish… well, almost anything, unless they’re a supervillain creating a contrived scenario in which you have to torture them.
When you will actually be trading quality of life for barely-tangible benefit on a large scale is torturing yourself working at a startup. This is an actual decision that people make to make lives miserable in exchange for minor but widespread public goods. And I fully support the actual trades of this sort that people actually make.
That’s my instrumentalist argument for, as a human being, accepting the metaphor of dust specks versus torture, not my philosophical argument for a decision theory that selects it.
Was there any reason to think I didn’t understand exactly what you said the first time? You agree with me and then restate. Fine, but pointless. Additionally, unimaginative re: potential value of torture. Defending lack of imagination in that statement by claiming torture defined in part by primary intent would be inconsistent.
The reason I thought you didn’t understand what I was talking about was that I was calling on examples from day to day life, this is what I took “instrumentalist” to mean, and you starting talking about killing people, which is not an event from day to day life.
If you are interested in continuing this discussion (which if not I won’t object) let’s take this one step at a time; does that difference seem reasonable to you?
The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. “torturing yourself working at a startup” becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.
The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat “real” examples in day to day life. It is entirely because “we” (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!
Point number one is: I don’t understand how you can say, when I am making an argument explicitly restricted to instrumental decision theory, how day to day life is irrelevant. Instrumentalism should ONLY care about day to day life.
With respect to forced sacrifice, my intuitions say I should just do the math, and that the reason volition is so important is that the reasonable expectation that one won’t be forced to make sacrifices is a big-ticket public good, meaning the math almost always comes out on its side. I think that you’re saying these choices have been screened off, but I think non-volitional choices have been screened off because they are in general bad trades rather than because “volition” is a magic word that lets you get whatever you want.
Point three, let’s turn this around… say someone is about to spend their entire life being tortured. Would you rescue them, if you knew it meant throwing a harmless dust speck into the eye of everyone ever to exist or be emulated? This should be equivalent, but both of the sacrifices here are forced since, at a minimum, some human beings are sociopaths and wouldn’t agree to take the dust speck.
If you want me to consider volition more closely, can you come up with some forced sacrifice choices that are reasonable exchanges that I might come across if I lived in a different world?
One possible idea: if I was the son of an African warlord, and I had the ability to make my parents’ political decrees more compassionate if I talked to them after they blew off steam torturing people, but I could instead make them torture fewer people by talking to them beforehand.
Here my intuitions say I should let the individuals be tortured in exchange for effecting large scale policy decisions.