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TimS comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
I choose specks, but I found the discussion very helpful nonetheless.
Specifically, I learned that if you believe suffering is additive in any way, choosing torture is the only answer that makes sense. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then your references to "negative utility" are not as well defined as you think.
Edit: In other words, I think Torture v. Specks is just a restatement of the Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion can be rejected by average-utilitarianism, whereas in Torture vs. Dustspecks average-utilitarianism still tells you to torture, because the disutility of 50 years of torture divided among 3^^^3 people is less than the disutility of 3^^^3 dustspecks divided among 3^^^3 people. That's an important structural difference to the thought experiment.
Right. The problem was the people on that side seemed to have a tendency to ridicule the belief that it is not.
Yes, the ridicule was annoying, although I think many have learned their lesson.
The problem with our position is that it leaves us vulnerable to being Dutch-booked by opponents who are willing to be sufficiently cruel. (How much would you pay not to be tortured? Why not that amount plus $10?)
Hmm ... what examples of learning their lesson are you thinking of?
This is a much more mature response to the debate.
Let's be clear: I do subscribe to utilitarianism, just not a naive one. (Long-range consequences and advanced decision theories make a big difference.) If I had magical levels of certainty of the problem statement, then I'd bite the bullet and pick torture. But in real life, that's an impossible state for a human being to occupy on object-level problems.
Truly meta-level problems are perhaps different; given a genie that magically understands human moral intuitions and is truly motivated to help humanity, I would ask it to reconcile our contradictory intuitions in a utilitarian way rather than in a deontological way. (It would take a fair bit of work to turn this hypothetical into something that makes real sense to ask, but one example is how to structure CEV.)
Does that make sense as a statement of where I stand?
It's similar, but it's not quite a restatement. Average utilitarianism seems to suggest "torture" when presented with TvDS, for example, while it doesn't support the Repugnant Conclusion as it's usually formulated.