There’s something that’s always bothered me about these kinds of utilitarian thought experiments.
First of all, I think it’s probably better to speak in terms of pain rather than torture. We can intelligently discuss trade offs like this in terms of, “I’m going to punch someone” or “I’m going to break someone’s leg. How much fun would it take to compensate for that?”. Torture is another thing entirely.
If you have a fun weekend, then you had an enjoyable couple of days. Maybe you gained some stories that you can tell for a month or two to your friends who weren’t with you. If it was a very fun weekend, you might have learned something new, like how to water ski, something that you’ll use in the future. Overall, this is a substantial positive benefit.
If you torture someone for half an hour, not even an entire weekend, it’s going to have a much larger effect on someone’s life. A person who is being tortured is screaming in agony, flailing around, begging for the pain to stop. And it doesn’t. Victims of torture experience massive psychological damage that continues for long after the actual time of the act. Someone who’s tortured for half an hour is going to remember that for the rest of their lives. They may have nightmares about it. Almost certainly, their relationships with other people are going to be badly damaged or strained.
I’ve never been tortured. I’ve never been a prisoner of war, or someone who was trying to withhold information from a government, military, or criminal organization who wanted it. I have lived a pretty adventurous life, with sports, backpacking, rock climbing, etc. I’ve had some fairly traumatic injuries. I’ve been injured when I was alone, and there was nobody within earshot to help me. At those times, I’ve just lain there on the ground, crying out of pain, and trying to bring myself to focus enough to heal myself enough to get back to medical care. Those experiences are some of the worst of my life. I have an hard time trying to access those memories; I can feel my own mind flinching away from them, and despite all of my rationality, I still can’t fight some of those flinches. What I experienced wasn’t even all that terrible. They were some moderate injuries. Someone who was tortured is going to have negative effects that are ridiculously worse than what I experienced.
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out exactly what it is about torture that bothers me so much as a utilitarian, and I think I’ve figured it out, in a mathematical sense. Most utilitarian calculations don’t factor in time. It’s not something that I’ve seen people on less wrong tend to do. It is pretty obvious, though. Giving someone Y amount of pain for 5 minutes is better than giving them Y amount of pain for 10 minutes. We should consider not just how much pain or fun someone’s experiencing now, but how much they will experience as time stretches on.
Getting back to the original question, if I could give three or four people a very fun weekend, I’d punch someone. If I could give one person an extremely fun weekend, I’d punch someone. I’d punch them pretty hard. I’d leave a bruise, and make them sore the next day. But if I’m torturing someone for a month, I am causing them almost unimaginable pain for the rest of their life. X and N are going to have to be massive before I even start considering this trade, even from a utilitarian standpoint. I can measure pain and fun on the same scales, but a torture to fun conversion is vaguely analogous to comparing light years to inches.
Getting back to the original question, if I could give three or four people a very fun weekend, I’d punch someone. If I could give one person an extremely fun weekend, I’d punch someone. I’d punch them pretty hard. I’d leave a bruise, and make them sore the next day.
If the main reason a small amount of torture is much worse than we might naively expect is that even small amounts of torture leave lasting, severe psychological damage, should we expect the disutility of torture to level off after a few (days/months/years)?
In other words, is there much difference between torturing one person for half an hour followed by weeks of moderate pain for that person and torturing one person for the same amount of weeks? The kind of difference that would justify denying, say, hundreds of people a fun weekend where they all learn to waterski?
My intuition is that a long period of torture is worse than death, and I can understand why even a short period of torture would be almost as bad as death, but I’m not sure how to measure how much worse than death a very long period of torture can get.
Incidentally, are there other “primary” moral goods/bads in naturalist metaethics besides fun, pain, torture, and life/death?
If the main reason a small amount of torture is much worse than we might naively expect is that even small amounts of torture leave lasting, severe psychological damage, should we expect the disutility of torture to level off after a few (days/months/years)?
In other words, is there much difference between torturing one person for half an hour followed by weeks of moderate pain for that person and torturing one person for the same amount of weeks? The kind of difference that would justify denying, say, hundreds of people a fun weekend where they all learn to waterski?
I’m not sure what exactly you’re getting at with that specific example. I think that yes, torturing someone for weeks, followed by years of psychological pain is significantly worse than torturing someone for half an hour followed by weeks of (probably a bit less severe) psychological pain.
Your general point, however, I think definitely has some merit. Personally, I wouldn’t expect to see much psychological difference between an individual who was tortured for five years versus a person who was tortured for ten. I would definitely expect to see a larger difference between someone tortured for six years versus someone tortured for one. Certainly there’s a massive difference between 5 years and 0. There probably is some sort of leveling off factor. I don’t know exactly where it is, or what that graph would look like, but it probably exists, and that factor definitely could influence a utilitarian calculation.
If we’re talking about torture vs death, if we’re using preference utilitarianism, we can say that the point where the torture victim starts begging for death is where that dividing line can be drawn. I don’t know where that line is, and it’s not an experiment I’m inclined to try anytime soon.
I had precisely the same reaction about the persistent effects of torture over time when I read the torture vs. dust specks problem.
I think your reply to the original question highlights a difficulty with actual application of utilitarian thought experiments in concrete situations. The question as originally posed involved inflicting disutility on a random target by pushing a button, presumably with the actor and the target being mutually unaware of each other’s identities. When you substitute punching someone, even if the target is randomly chosen, the thought experiment breaks down, both because it becomes difficult to predict the actual amount of suffering that is going to result (e.g. the target has a black belt and/or concealed weapon and no sense of humor = more pain than you were expecting), and because of second order effects: a world in which inflicting random pain is considered justified if it produces a greater amount of fun for other individuals is going to be a world with a lot less social trust, reducing utility for everybody.
But, hang on. Grant that there’s some amount of disutility from permanent damage caused by torture. Nevertheless, as you add more specks, at some point you’re going to have added more disutility, right? Suppose the torture victim lives for fifty years after you’re done with him, and he’s an emotional and physical wreck for every day of those fifty years; nevertheless, this is a finite amount of disutility and can be compensated for by inserting a sufficient number of Knuth up-arrows between the numerals. Right?
and can be compensated for by inserting a sufficient number of Knuth up-arrows between the numerals
I think for us “concrete situations”, as meant here, does have a way lower border than just “for some natural number N”. I think no parent of your comment disputed that we are still dealing with finite amounts of (dis)utility.
Jeremy Bentham actually mentioned this in the initial form of utilitarianism. He said that the “felicific calculus” required one to take into account fecundity, which was a measure of how likely a pleasurable/painful experience would cause more pleasure/pain in the future, and purity, which measured how likely a pleasurable experience was to not be followed by a painful one, or vice versa.
Getting back to the original question, if I could give three or four people a very fun weekend, I’d punch someone. If I could give one person an extremely fun weekend, I’d punch someone. I’d punch them pretty hard. I’d leave a bruise, and make them sore the next day.
I don’t know about you, but if I didn’t have at least one bruise and feel sore after a weekend of extreme fun then I’d start to think I was doing it wrong. ;)
Lol. I’m inclined to agree with you there. However, considering that I’m writing this while I lay in bed with my foot propped up, having shattered a few bones during my last “weekend of extreme fun”, I’m beginning to reevaluate my priorities. ;)
Ouch! I suppose my intuitions are influenced a little by the fact that I have never broken a bone or had any sort of serious injury. I suspect my priorities may be changing too in your shoes. (Well, possibly shoe, probably not the plural. Too soon? :P)
Okay, now what if you give them a drug that makes them forget the torture? And maybe also keep them drugged-up until they heal. How would that compare?
That is a good point. If you could wipe their memories in such a way that they didn’t have any lasting psychological damage, that would make it significantly better. It’s still pretty extreme; a month is a long time, and if we’re talking about a serious attempt to maximize their pain during that time, there’s a lot of pain that we’d have to cancel out. X and N will still need to be very large, but not as large as without the drugs.
There’s something that’s always bothered me about these kinds of utilitarian thought experiments.
First of all, I think it’s probably better to speak in terms of pain rather than torture. We can intelligently discuss trade offs like this in terms of, “I’m going to punch someone” or “I’m going to break someone’s leg. How much fun would it take to compensate for that?”. Torture is another thing entirely.
If you have a fun weekend, then you had an enjoyable couple of days. Maybe you gained some stories that you can tell for a month or two to your friends who weren’t with you. If it was a very fun weekend, you might have learned something new, like how to water ski, something that you’ll use in the future. Overall, this is a substantial positive benefit.
If you torture someone for half an hour, not even an entire weekend, it’s going to have a much larger effect on someone’s life. A person who is being tortured is screaming in agony, flailing around, begging for the pain to stop. And it doesn’t. Victims of torture experience massive psychological damage that continues for long after the actual time of the act. Someone who’s tortured for half an hour is going to remember that for the rest of their lives. They may have nightmares about it. Almost certainly, their relationships with other people are going to be badly damaged or strained.
I’ve never been tortured. I’ve never been a prisoner of war, or someone who was trying to withhold information from a government, military, or criminal organization who wanted it. I have lived a pretty adventurous life, with sports, backpacking, rock climbing, etc. I’ve had some fairly traumatic injuries. I’ve been injured when I was alone, and there was nobody within earshot to help me. At those times, I’ve just lain there on the ground, crying out of pain, and trying to bring myself to focus enough to heal myself enough to get back to medical care. Those experiences are some of the worst of my life. I have an hard time trying to access those memories; I can feel my own mind flinching away from them, and despite all of my rationality, I still can’t fight some of those flinches. What I experienced wasn’t even all that terrible. They were some moderate injuries. Someone who was tortured is going to have negative effects that are ridiculously worse than what I experienced.
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out exactly what it is about torture that bothers me so much as a utilitarian, and I think I’ve figured it out, in a mathematical sense. Most utilitarian calculations don’t factor in time. It’s not something that I’ve seen people on less wrong tend to do. It is pretty obvious, though. Giving someone Y amount of pain for 5 minutes is better than giving them Y amount of pain for 10 minutes. We should consider not just how much pain or fun someone’s experiencing now, but how much they will experience as time stretches on.
Getting back to the original question, if I could give three or four people a very fun weekend, I’d punch someone. If I could give one person an extremely fun weekend, I’d punch someone. I’d punch them pretty hard. I’d leave a bruise, and make them sore the next day. But if I’m torturing someone for a month, I am causing them almost unimaginable pain for the rest of their life. X and N are going to have to be massive before I even start considering this trade, even from a utilitarian standpoint. I can measure pain and fun on the same scales, but a torture to fun conversion is vaguely analogous to comparing light years to inches.
Thanks, this counts as an answer for my purposes.
This is brilliant; I have one nitpicky question:
If the main reason a small amount of torture is much worse than we might naively expect is that even small amounts of torture leave lasting, severe psychological damage, should we expect the disutility of torture to level off after a few (days/months/years)?
In other words, is there much difference between torturing one person for half an hour followed by weeks of moderate pain for that person and torturing one person for the same amount of weeks? The kind of difference that would justify denying, say, hundreds of people a fun weekend where they all learn to waterski?
My intuition is that a long period of torture is worse than death, and I can understand why even a short period of torture would be almost as bad as death, but I’m not sure how to measure how much worse than death a very long period of torture can get.
Incidentally, are there other “primary” moral goods/bads in naturalist metaethics besides fun, pain, torture, and life/death?
I’m not sure what exactly you’re getting at with that specific example. I think that yes, torturing someone for weeks, followed by years of psychological pain is significantly worse than torturing someone for half an hour followed by weeks of (probably a bit less severe) psychological pain.
Your general point, however, I think definitely has some merit. Personally, I wouldn’t expect to see much psychological difference between an individual who was tortured for five years versus a person who was tortured for ten. I would definitely expect to see a larger difference between someone tortured for six years versus someone tortured for one. Certainly there’s a massive difference between 5 years and 0. There probably is some sort of leveling off factor. I don’t know exactly where it is, or what that graph would look like, but it probably exists, and that factor definitely could influence a utilitarian calculation.
If we’re talking about torture vs death, if we’re using preference utilitarianism, we can say that the point where the torture victim starts begging for death is where that dividing line can be drawn. I don’t know where that line is, and it’s not an experiment I’m inclined to try anytime soon.
I had precisely the same reaction about the persistent effects of torture over time when I read the torture vs. dust specks problem.
I think your reply to the original question highlights a difficulty with actual application of utilitarian thought experiments in concrete situations. The question as originally posed involved inflicting disutility on a random target by pushing a button, presumably with the actor and the target being mutually unaware of each other’s identities. When you substitute punching someone, even if the target is randomly chosen, the thought experiment breaks down, both because it becomes difficult to predict the actual amount of suffering that is going to result (e.g. the target has a black belt and/or concealed weapon and no sense of humor = more pain than you were expecting), and because of second order effects: a world in which inflicting random pain is considered justified if it produces a greater amount of fun for other individuals is going to be a world with a lot less social trust, reducing utility for everybody.
But, hang on. Grant that there’s some amount of disutility from permanent damage caused by torture. Nevertheless, as you add more specks, at some point you’re going to have added more disutility, right? Suppose the torture victim lives for fifty years after you’re done with him, and he’s an emotional and physical wreck for every day of those fifty years; nevertheless, this is a finite amount of disutility and can be compensated for by inserting a sufficient number of Knuth up-arrows between the numerals. Right?
Prismattic:
Rolf:
I think for us “concrete situations”, as meant here, does have a way lower border than just “for some natural number N”. I think no parent of your comment disputed that we are still dealing with finite amounts of (dis)utility.
Jeremy Bentham actually mentioned this in the initial form of utilitarianism. He said that the “felicific calculus” required one to take into account fecundity, which was a measure of how likely a pleasurable/painful experience would cause more pleasure/pain in the future, and purity, which measured how likely a pleasurable experience was to not be followed by a painful one, or vice versa.
I don’t know about you, but if I didn’t have at least one bruise and feel sore after a weekend of extreme fun then I’d start to think I was doing it wrong. ;)
Lol. I’m inclined to agree with you there. However, considering that I’m writing this while I lay in bed with my foot propped up, having shattered a few bones during my last “weekend of extreme fun”, I’m beginning to reevaluate my priorities. ;)
Ouch! I suppose my intuitions are influenced a little by the fact that I have never broken a bone or had any sort of serious injury. I suspect my priorities may be changing too in your shoes. (Well, possibly shoe, probably not the plural. Too soon? :P)
Okay, now what if you give them a drug that makes them forget the torture? And maybe also keep them drugged-up until they heal. How would that compare?
That is a good point. If you could wipe their memories in such a way that they didn’t have any lasting psychological damage, that would make it significantly better. It’s still pretty extreme; a month is a long time, and if we’re talking about a serious attempt to maximize their pain during that time, there’s a lot of pain that we’d have to cancel out. X and N will still need to be very large, but not as large as without the drugs.