One of your original criticisms of torture instead of specks was that it assumed very particular consequences of actions - that torturing wouldn't ever affect future choices to torture.
... My original criticism depended on the idea that torturing would affect future choices to torture. That continues to be my criticism. From where do you derive this idea that I assert it does not?
However, you illegitimately assume that it will always affect future choices to torture by making it more likely.
Please explain why you find this to be an "illegitimate assumption". Especially in the face of the explanations I have thus far given as to why it would in fact occur.
At a certain number of future cases, at a certain quantity of specks, more people would be tortured for 50 years if one always chose specks than if one always chose torture!
I disagree. Strongly. Very strongly, in fact. For the same reason I've already made: by the time 3^^^3 people are tortured for fifty years as a result of dustspecks, for the equivalent number of choices to be made for torture instead would require -- even if we assume that the torture scenario has only a quarter the total suffering of the 3^^^3 speckings -- the sheer volume of such tortures would definitely invoke the Broken Window Theory. At a certain point human beings will -- from sheer necessity for psychological stability -- engage in the suspension of moral belief. "One person dying is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic; a million is a number." Such immunization to the suffering of others as would be resultant from the sheer volume of such suffering would result, unless some major alterations are made to human psychology, in the institutionalization of such suffering. As a result of that, then, there would be -- again, all other things being equal -- far more torture, rape, and sheer absence of compassion and aid resultant. We still have societies of this nature today.
If nothing else, the expansion from a single instance to multiple makes this principle far more overtly obvious -- it allowed me to make what I personally feel an absurd declaration (that 'terrific' torture for fifty years is equivalent to 1/4th of 3^^^3 almost-unnoticeable near-instant nuisance events in terms of direct suffering -- when as I said before I feel that dustspecking is infinitessimal in comparison to said torture.)
And that's only considering the immediate suffering, as opposed to other consequences -- such as the impact on the psychological well-being of those involved, their ability to contribute to society and the positive utility such individuals might then create, or the negative social utility of caring for those who have been exposed to such effects, etc., etc.. (For example; if we state that torture and dustspecks have exactly equal amounts of direct suffering, we should still obviously choose the specks. There is exactly zero social integration cost for recovery from a dust-speck -- even 3^^^3 of them; the same is not true of the torture victim.
One of your original criticisms of the choice of torture instead of specks was that that choice assumed very particular consequences of actions - that torturing wouldn't ever affect future choices to torture. However, you assume that it would always affect future choices to torture by making it more likely. Both of these assumptions are too extreme for the real world, though fine for hypotheticals in which other questions - such as aggregation of utility - are the subject.
Arguing that something would usually or often happen doesn't undermine the original t...
For those not familiar with the topic, Torture vs. Dustspecks asks the question: "Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?"
Most of the discussion that I have noted on the topic takes one of two assumptions in deriving their answer to that question: I think of one as the 'linear additive' answer, which says that torture is the proper choice for the utilitarian consequentialist, because a single person can only suffer so much over a fifty year window, as compared to the incomprehensible number of individuals who suffer only minutely; the other I think of as the 'logarithmically additive' answer, which inverts the answer on the grounds that forms of suffering are not equal, and cannot be added as simple 'units'.
What I have never yet seen is something akin to the notion expressed in Ursula K LeGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it for you.
I believe that any metric of consequence which takes into account only suffering when making the choice of "torture" vs. "dust specks" misses the point. There are consequences to such a choice that extend beyond the suffering inflicted; moral responsibility, standards of behavior that either choice makes acceptable, and so on. Any solution to the question which ignores these elements in making its decision might be useful in revealing one's views about the nature of cumulative suffering, but beyond that are of no value in making practical decisions -- they cannot be, as 'consequence' extends beyond the mere instantiation of a given choice -- the exact pain inflicted by either scenario -- into the kind of society that such a choice would result in.
While I myself tend towards the 'logarithmic' than the 'linear' additive view of suffering, even if I stipulate the linear additive view, I still cannot agree with the conclusion of torture over the dust speck, for the same reason why I do not condone torture even in the "ticking time bomb" scenario: I cannot accept the culture/society that would permit such a torture to exist. To arbitrarily select out one individual for maximal suffering in order to spare others a negligible amount would require a legal or moral framework that accepted such choices, and this violates the principle of individual self-determination -- a principle I have seen Less Wrong's community spend a great deal of time trying to consider how to incorporate into Friendliness solutions for AGI. We as a society already implement something similar to this, economically: we accept taxing everyone, even according to a graduated scheme. What we do not accept is enslaving 20% of the population to provide for the needs of the State.
If there is a flaw in my reasoning here, please enlighten me.