The point of "torture vs specks" is whether enough tiny disutilities can add up to something bigger than a single huge disutility. To argue that specks may on average have positive utility kinda misses the point, because the point we're debating isn't the value of a dust speck, or a sneeze, or a stubbed toe, or an itchy butt, or whatever -- we're just using dust speck as an example of the tiniest bit of disutility you can imagine, but which nonetheless we can agree is disutility.
If dust specks don't suit you for this purpose, find another bit of tiny disutility, as tiny as you can make it.
(As a sidenote the point is missed on the opposite direction by those who say "well, say there's a one billionth chance of a dust speck causing a fatal accident, you would then be killing untold numbers of people if you inflicted 3^^^^3 specks." -- these people don't add up tiny disutilities, they add up tiny probabilities. They make the right decision in rejecting the specks, but it's not the actual point of the question)
I reject unproven assumptions as torture justifications.
Well, I can reject your unproven assumptions as justifications for inflicting disutility on 3^^^3 people, same way that I suppose spammers can excuse billions of spam by saying to themselves "it just takes a second to delete it, so it doesn't hurt anyone much", while not considering that these multiplied means they've wasted billions of seconds from the lives of people...
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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