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TimS comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
The problem with that one is it comes across as an attempt to define the objection out of existence - it basically demands that you assume that X negative utility spread out across a large number of people really is just as bad as X negative utility concentrated on one person. "Shut up and multiply" only works if you assume that the numbers can be multiplied in that way.
That's also the only way an interesting discussion can be held about it - if that premise is granted, all you have to do is make the number of specks higher and higher until the numbers balance out.
(And it's in no way equivalent to the trolley problem because the trolley problem is comparing deaths with deaths)
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.