A more technical way of asking the basic question here is:
Assume that the “badness” of single harms and of aggregations of harms can be expressed in real numbers.
As the number of times a minor harm happens approaches infinity, does the limit of its “badness” also approach infinity? If it does, then there must be some number of paper cuts that is worse than 50 years of torture. If it doesn’t, then you have another bullet to bite: there’s some level of harm at which you have to draw an infinitely thin bright line between it and the “next worst” harm so that there’s a finite amount of the slightly worse harm you’d prefer to an infinite amount of the slightly less bad harm.
The bullet I prefer to bite is that harm can’t be expressed as a single real number. Treating utility as a real thing rather than a convenient simplification of an intractably complex phenomenon makes people go funny in the head.
Seriously, I’m starting to feel the same way about the word “utility” as I do about the word “sin”—that is to say, an observed regularity gets promoted to an ontologically fundamental object, and humans spend lifetimes trying to reason their way around the ensuing ontological crisis.
I’m not sure that the “real number” assumption is key here. Just imagine an arbitrarily finely graded sequence that looks like “dust speck, paper cut, bruise, broken arm, fifty years of torture”. If you claim that no number of dust specks is worse than the 50 years of torture, then one of the following also has to be true:
No number of dust specks is worse than a paper cut.
No number of paper cuts is worse than a bruise.
No number of bruises is worse than a broken arm.
No number of broken arms is worse than 50 years of torture.
So far, because the sequence is fairly short, several of these still look fairly plausible. But if you make the sequence longer, then in my opinion all your options begin to look ridiculous.
Given that nerve impulses are almost digital and that dust specks probably only activate the touch sense while paper cuts directly activate the pain sense, I’d say that practically humans do divide dust specks into a fundamentally different category than paper cuts. No matter how often I occasionally got a dust speck in my eye it would never feel as painful as a paper cut. On reflection, I might realize that I had spent a lot more time being annoyed by dust specks than paper cuts and make some sort of utilitarian deal regarding wasted time, but there is still some threshold at which the annoyance of a dust speck simply never registers in my brain the same way that a paper cut does. It physically can’t register the same way.
My brain basically makes this distinction for me automatically; I wear clothes, and that should register like a whole lot of dust-speck-equivalents touching my skin all the time and I should prefer some lottery where I win papercuts instead of feeling my clothes on my skin. Instead, my brain completely filters out the minor discomfort of wearing clothes. I can’t filter out paper cuts, broken arms, or torture.
I understand that “dust specks” is really meant as a stand-in for “the least amount of dis-utility that you can detect and care about”, so it may just be that “dust specks” was slightly too small an amount of dis-utility for a lot of people and it created the counter-intuitive feelings. I would never subject one person to a speck of dust if by doing so I could save 3^^^3 people from being hit twice as hard by a stray air molecule, for instance. I don’t know how I feel about saving 3^^^3 people from papercuts by torturing someone. It still feels intuitively wrong.
I think that being a finite creature, you have a finite amount of value to assign, and that finite value is assigned in concentric circles about you and your life. The value assigned to the outer circle gets split between the gazillions in the outer circle. For the most part, more people just means each one gets less.
A more technical way of asking the basic question here is:
Assume that the “badness” of single harms and of aggregations of harms can be expressed in real numbers.
As the number of times a minor harm happens approaches infinity, does the limit of its “badness” also approach infinity? If it does, then there must be some number of paper cuts that is worse than 50 years of torture. If it doesn’t, then you have another bullet to bite: there’s some level of harm at which you have to draw an infinitely thin bright line between it and the “next worst” harm so that there’s a finite amount of the slightly worse harm you’d prefer to an infinite amount of the slightly less bad harm.
The bullet I prefer to bite is that harm can’t be expressed as a single real number. Treating utility as a real thing rather than a convenient simplification of an intractably complex phenomenon makes people go funny in the head.
Seriously, I’m starting to feel the same way about the word “utility” as I do about the word “sin”—that is to say, an observed regularity gets promoted to an ontologically fundamental object, and humans spend lifetimes trying to reason their way around the ensuing ontological crisis.
I’m not sure that the “real number” assumption is key here. Just imagine an arbitrarily finely graded sequence that looks like “dust speck, paper cut, bruise, broken arm, fifty years of torture”. If you claim that no number of dust specks is worse than the 50 years of torture, then one of the following also has to be true:
No number of dust specks is worse than a paper cut.
No number of paper cuts is worse than a bruise.
No number of bruises is worse than a broken arm.
No number of broken arms is worse than 50 years of torture.
So far, because the sequence is fairly short, several of these still look fairly plausible. But if you make the sequence longer, then in my opinion all your options begin to look ridiculous.
Given that nerve impulses are almost digital and that dust specks probably only activate the touch sense while paper cuts directly activate the pain sense, I’d say that practically humans do divide dust specks into a fundamentally different category than paper cuts. No matter how often I occasionally got a dust speck in my eye it would never feel as painful as a paper cut. On reflection, I might realize that I had spent a lot more time being annoyed by dust specks than paper cuts and make some sort of utilitarian deal regarding wasted time, but there is still some threshold at which the annoyance of a dust speck simply never registers in my brain the same way that a paper cut does. It physically can’t register the same way.
My brain basically makes this distinction for me automatically; I wear clothes, and that should register like a whole lot of dust-speck-equivalents touching my skin all the time and I should prefer some lottery where I win papercuts instead of feeling my clothes on my skin. Instead, my brain completely filters out the minor discomfort of wearing clothes. I can’t filter out paper cuts, broken arms, or torture.
I understand that “dust specks” is really meant as a stand-in for “the least amount of dis-utility that you can detect and care about”, so it may just be that “dust specks” was slightly too small an amount of dis-utility for a lot of people and it created the counter-intuitive feelings. I would never subject one person to a speck of dust if by doing so I could save 3^^^3 people from being hit twice as hard by a stray air molecule, for instance. I don’t know how I feel about saving 3^^^3 people from papercuts by torturing someone. It still feels intuitively wrong.
I think that being a finite creature, you have a finite amount of value to assign, and that finite value is assigned in concentric circles about you and your life. The value assigned to the outer circle gets split between the gazillions in the outer circle. For the most part, more people just means each one gets less.