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Well, what you should do, is to recognize that such arguments themselves are built entirely out of intuitions, and their validity rest on conjunction of a significant number of often unstated intuitive assumptions. One should not fall for cargo cult imitation of logic.
There's no fundamental reason why value should be linear in number of dust specks; it's nothing but an assumption which may be your personal intuition, but it is still intuition that lacks any justification what so ever, and in so much as it is an uncommon intuition, it even lacks the "if it was wrong it would be debunked" sort of justification. There's always the Dunning Kruger effect. People least capable of moral (or any) reasoning should be expected to think themselves most capable.
Yeah, that has always been my main problem with that scenario.
There are different ways to sum multiple sources of something. Consider linear vs paralel electrical circuits; the total output depends greatly on how you count the individual voltage sources (or resistors or whatever).
When it comes to suffering, well suffering only exists in consciousness, and each point of consciousness - each mind involved - experiences their own dust speck individually. There is no conscious mind in that scenario who is directly experiencing the totality of the dust specks and suffers accordingly. It is in no way obvious to me that the "right" way to consider the totality of that suffering is to just add it up. Perhaps it is. But unless I missed something, no one arguing for torture so far has actually shown it (as opposed to just assuming it).
Suppose we make this about (what starts as) a single person. Suppose that you, yourself, are going to be copied into all that humongous number of copies. And you are given a choice: before that happens, you will be tortured for 50 years. Or you will be unconscious for 50 years, but after copying each of your copies will get a dust speck in the eye. Either way you get copied, that's not part of the choice. After that, whatever your choice, you will be able to continue with your lives.
In that case, I don't care about doing the "right" math that will make people call me rational, I care about being the agent who is happily NOT writhing in pain with 50 years more of it ahead of him.
EDIT: come to think of it, assume the copying template is taken from you before the 50 years start, so we don't have to consider memories and lasting psychological effects of torture. My answer remains the same, even if in future I won't remember the torture, I don't want to go through it.
As far as I know, TvDS doesn't assume that value is linear in dust specks. As you say, there are different ways to sum multiple sources of something. In particular, there are many ways to sum the experiences of multiple individuals.
For example, the whole problem evaporates if I decide that people's suffering only matters to the extent that I personally know those people. In fact, much less ridiculous problems also evaporate... e.g., in that case I also prefer that thousands of people suffer so that I and my friends can live lives of ease, as long as the suffering hordes are sufficiently far away.
It is not obvious to me that I prefer that second way of thinking, though.
It is arguable (in terms of revealed preferences) that first-worlders typically do prefer that. This requires a slightly non-normative meaning of "prefer", but a very useful one.
Oh, absolutely. I chose the example with that in mind.
I merely assert that "but that leads to thousands of people suffering!" is not a ridiculous moral problem for people (like me) who reveal such preferences to consider, and it's not obvious that a model that causes the problem to evaporate is one that I endorse.
Well, it sure uses linear intuition. 3^^^3 is bigger than number of distinct states, its far past point where you are only increasing exactly-duplicated dust speck experience, so you could reasonably expect it to flat out.
One can go perverse and proclaims that one treats duplicates the same, but then if there's a button which you press to replace everyone's mind with mind of happiest person, you should press it.
I think the stupidity of utilitarianism is the belief that the morality is about the state, rather than about dynamic process and state transition. Simulation of pinprick slowed down 1000000 times is not ultra long torture. The 'murder' is a form of irreversible state transition. The morality as it exist is about state transitions not about states.
"State" doesn't have to mean "frozen state" or something similar, it could mean "state of the world/universe". E.g. "a state of the universe" in which many people are being tortured includes the torture process in it's description. I think this is how it's normally used.
Well, if you are to coherently take it that the transitions have value, rather than states, then you arrive at morality that regulates the transitions that the agent should try to make happen, ending up with morality that is more about means than about ends.
I think it's simply that the pain feels like a state rather than dynamic process, and so utilitarianism treats it as state, while doing something feels like a dynamic process, so utilitarianism doesn't treat it as state and is only concerned with difference in utilities.
It isn't clear to me what the phrase "exactly-duplicated" is doing there. Is there a reason to believe that each individual dust-speck-in-eye event is exactly like every other? And if so, what difference does that make? (Relatedly, is there a reason to believe that each individual moment of torture is different from all the others? If it turns out that it's not, does that imply something relevant?)
In any case, I certainly agree that one could reasonably expect the negvalue of suffering to flatten out no matter how much of it there is. It seems unlikely to me that fifty years of torture is anywhere near the asymptote of that curve, though... for example, I would rather be tortured for fifty years than be tortured for seventy years.
But even if it somehow is at the asymptotic limit, we could recast the problem with ten years of torture instead, or five years, or five months, or some other value that is no longer at that limit, and the same questions would arise.
So, no, I don't think the TvDS problem depends on intuitions about the linear-additive nature of suffering. (Indeed, the more i think about it the less convinced i am that I have such intuitions, as opposed to approaches-a-limit intuitions. This is perhaps because thinking about it has changed my intuitions.)
Agreed that all of these sorts of arguments ultimately rest on different intuitions about morality, which sometimes conflict, or seem to conflict.
Agreed that value needn't add linearly, and indeed my intuition is that it probably doesn't.
It seems clear to me that if I negatively value something happening, I also negatively value it happening more more. That is, for any X I don't want to have happen, it seems I would rather have X happen than have X happen twice. I can't imagine an X where I don't want X to happen and would prefer to have X happen twice than once. (Barring silly examples like "the power switch for the torture device gets flipped".)
Can anyone explain what goes wrong if you say something like, "The marginal utility of my terminal values increases asymtotically, and u(Torture) approaches a much higher asymptote than u(Dust speck)" (or indeed whether it goes wrong at all)?
Nothing, iif that happens to be be what your actual preferences are. If your preferences did not happen to be as you describe but instead you are confused by an inconsistency in your intuitions then you will make incorrect decisions.
The challenge is not to construct a utility function such that you can justify it to others in the face of opposition. The challenge is to work out what your actual preferences are and implement them.
Ayup. Also, it may be worth saying explicitly that a lot of the difficulty comes in working out a model of my actual preferences that is internally consistent and can be extended to apply to novel situations. If I give up those constraints, it's easier to come up with propositions that seem to model my preferences, because they approximate particular aspects of my preferences well enough that in certain situations I can't tell the difference. And if I don't ever try to make decisions outside of that narrow band of situations, that can be enough to satisfy me.
[Edited to separate from quote] But doesn't that beg the question? Don't you have to ask a the meta question "what kinds of preferences are reasonable to have?" Why should we shape ethics the way evolution happened to set up our values? That's why I favor hedonistic utiltiarianism that is about actual states of the world that can in itself be bad (--> suffering).
Note that markup requires a blank line between your quote and the rest of the topic.
It does beg a question: specifically, the question of whether I ought to implement my preferences (or some approximation of them) in the first place. If, for example, my preferences are instead irrelevant to what I ought to do, then time spent working out my preferences is time that could better have been spent doing something else.
All of that said, it sounds like you're suggesting that suffering is somehow unrelated to the way evolution set up our values. If that is what you're suggesting, then I'm completely at a loss to understand either your model of what suffering is, or how evolution works.
The fact that suffering feels awful is about the very thing, and nothing else. There's no valuing required, no being ask itself "should I dislike this experience" when it is in suffering. It wouldn't be suffering otherwise.
My position implies that in a world without suffering (or happiness, if I were not a negative utiltiarian), nothing would matter.
Depends on what I'm trying to do.
If I make that assumption, then it follows that given enough Torture to approach its limit, I choose any number of Dust Specks rather than that amount of Torture.
If my goal is to come up with an algorithm that leads to that choice, then I've succeeded.
(I think talking about Torture and Dust Specks as terminal values is silly, but it isn't necessary for what I think you're trying to get at.)
That's been done in this paper, secion VI "The Asymptotic Gambit".
Thank you. I had expected the bottom to drop out of it somehow.
EDIT: Although come to think of it I'm not sure the objections presented in that paper are so deadly after all if you takes TDT-like considerations into account (i.e. there would not be a difference between "kill 1 person, prevent 1000 mutilations" + "kill 1 person, prevent 1000 mutilations" and "kill 2 people, prevent 2000 mutilations".) Will have to think on it some more.