and with the numbers involved, it has to be a curve specifically tailored to the example.
A pure utilitarian who could grasp a number as large as 3^^^3 might choose the one person being tortured. My point was that intuitively, the unfairness of torture jumps out more than the huge, huge number of people being minorly annoyed.
Maybe fairness as an intuition is more a flaw than a value. That’s actually an interesting thought. I’m going to ponder that now for a while.
My own feeling is that fairness as an intuition is very useful in small groups but starts to break down as the group gets larger. Which is what I would expect for an intuition that evolved in the context of small groups.
A pure utilitarian who could grasp a number as large as 3^^^3 might choose the one person being tortured. My point was that intuitively, the unfairness of torture jumps out more than the huge, huge number of people being minorly annoyed.
Maybe fairness as an intuition is more a flaw than a value. That’s actually an interesting thought. I’m going to ponder that now for a while.
My own feeling is that fairness as an intuition is very useful in small groups but starts to break down as the group gets larger. Which is what I would expect for an intuition that evolved in the context of small groups.