Neel, I think you and I are looking at this as two different questions. I’m fine with bounded utility at the individual level, not so good with bounds on some aggregate utility measure across an unbounded population (but certainly willing to listen to a counter position), which is what we’re talking about here. Now, what form an aggregate utility function should take is a legitimate question (although, as Salutator points out, unlikely to be a productive discussion), but I doubt that you would argue it should be bounded.
I have really enjoyed following this discussion. My intuition to the initial post was “specks” but upon reflection I couldn’t see how that could be. My intuition couldn’t scale the problem correctly—I had to “do the math.” Magically diminishing unit harm from the same action across an increasing number of individuals was not convincing. The notion that specks are not harm in the same sense that torture is harm is appealling in practice but was ruled out in the thought experiment, IMHO. Bottom line, if both specks and torture are finite harm (a reasonable premise, although the choice of “specks” was unfortunate because it opens the “zero harm” door), I can’t see how there is not some sufficiently large number of specks that have to outweigh the torture. This is very uncomfortable because it implies that there is also (in theory) a sufficiently large number of specks that would outweigh 10^100 people being tortured. Ouch, my brain is trying to reject that conclusion. More evidence that I need to do the math. Luckily, this is all hypothetical. But scaling questions are not always hypothetical and nothing in this discussion has convinced me that intuition will give you the right answer. To the contrary...
Neel, I think you and I are looking at this as two different questions. I’m fine with bounded utility at the individual level, not so good with bounds on some aggregate utility measure across an unbounded population (but certainly willing to listen to a counter position), which is what we’re talking about here. Now, what form an aggregate utility function should take is a legitimate question (although, as Salutator points out, unlikely to be a productive discussion), but I doubt that you would argue it should be bounded.
I have really enjoyed following this discussion. My intuition to the initial post was “specks” but upon reflection I couldn’t see how that could be. My intuition couldn’t scale the problem correctly—I had to “do the math.” Magically diminishing unit harm from the same action across an increasing number of individuals was not convincing. The notion that specks are not harm in the same sense that torture is harm is appealling in practice but was ruled out in the thought experiment, IMHO. Bottom line, if both specks and torture are finite harm (a reasonable premise, although the choice of “specks” was unfortunate because it opens the “zero harm” door), I can’t see how there is not some sufficiently large number of specks that have to outweigh the torture. This is very uncomfortable because it implies that there is also (in theory) a sufficiently large number of specks that would outweigh 10^100 people being tortured. Ouch, my brain is trying to reject that conclusion. More evidence that I need to do the math. Luckily, this is all hypothetical. But scaling questions are not always hypothetical and nothing in this discussion has convinced me that intuition will give you the right answer. To the contrary...