As a side note, I think belief in belief may relate. I'm willing to accept a world which is inconvenient, to a point. But the person who you are arguing with is acting extremely similarly to someone who has an invisible dragon in his garage.
No. Just no. A factual claim and a hypothetical thought-experiment are not the same thing. When you object to the details of the hypothetical thought experiment, and you nonetheless aren't convinced by any modifications correcting it either, then you're simply showing that this isn't your true objection.
So many people seem to be trying to find ways to dance around the simple plain issue of whether we should consider the multiplication of small disutilities to possibly be morally equivalent (or worse) to a single humongous disutility.
On my part I say simply: YES. Torturing a person for 50 years is morally better than inflicting the momentary annoyance of a single dust speck to each of 3^^^3 people. I don't see much sense in any arguments more complicated than a multiplication.
As simple and plain as that. People who've already written their bottom line differently, I am sure they can find whatever random excuses they want to explain it. But I just urge them to introspect for a sec and actually see whether that bottom line was actually affected any by the argument they placed above it.
So many people seem to be trying to find ways to dance around the simple plain issue of whether we should consider the multiplication of small disutilities to possibly be morally equivalent (or worse) to a single humongous disutility.
On my part I say simply: YES. Torturing a person for 50 years is morally better than inflicting the momentary annoyance of a single dust speck to each of 3^^^3 people. I don't see much sense in any arguments more complicated than a multiplication.
I agree that this is the critical point, but you present this disagreement as ...
Today's post, Torture vs. Dust Specks was originally published on 30 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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