Mati_Roy answers What ethical thought experiments can be reversed?

[Mati_Roy]

Dust specs vs torture

I feel like this one was presented as a clash of 2 intuitions, so both the “reversed” is also in the original presentation.

Original:

1. We prefer X people experiencing Y pain than 1,000 people experiencing 2*Y pain AND this preference is true for all X, Y element of the real numbers

2. This can be chained together multiple times

3. We prefer 1 person experiencing 50 years of torture to a googolplex people having specs of dust in their eyes

Reversed:

1. We prefer a googolplex people having specs of dust in their eyes to 1 person experiencing 50 years of torture

2. There’s some threshold of pain for which we care lexically more about

3. We can more about 1 person experiencing slightly more pain than this threshold than a large number of people experiencing slightly less pain than this threshold

keyword to search: lexical threshold negative hedonistic utilitarianism

[Measure]

The original 1 seems pretty clearly false here if X >> 1000 for basically any value of Y.

[Mati_Roy]

Woops, I meant 1,000*X

[seed]

And Y/​2 pain, probably? (Or the conclusion doesn’t follow.)

[Mati_Roy]

Ahhh, yep, thanks

[Mati_Roy]

Oops, right!