I was reading the original comment thread on Torture vs. Dust Specks, and notice Eliezer saying he wouldn't pay a penny to avoid a single dust speck - which confused me, until I noticed that the original specification of the problem says the dust speck "floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck." I guess I blanked that out when I first read the post. My default visualization when I imagine "dust speck in my eye" is something substantially more annoying than that.
This leads me to wonder if people would have responded differently if instead of going out of his way to make the alternative to torture involve something as trivial-sounding as possible, Eliezer had gone for some merely minor mishap - say, getting shampoo in your eye. After all, lots of us have gotten shampoo in our eyes at least once (maybe when we were kids), and it's easy to imagine paying $2.99 for a bottle of won't-irritate-your-eyes shampoo over an otherwise identical $2.98 bottle that will hurt if you get it in your eyes (or your kid's eyes, if you're totally confident that, as an adult, you'll be able to keep shampoo out of your eyes).
From there, it's easy to argue that if you're honest with yourself you wouldn't pay $(3^^^3/100) to save one person from being tortured for 50 years, so you should choose one person getting tortured for 50 years over 3^^^3 people getting shampoo (the stingy kind) in their eyes. I suppose, however, that might not change your answer to torture vs. specks if you think there's a qualitative difference between the speck (as originally specified by Eliezer) and getting shampoo in your eye.
(nods) Right. I think most people would.
What that says to me is that most of us would not trade any amount of "occasional minor annoyances" for any amount of "horrific torture". The two things might both be "bad", but that doesn't mean that X annoyances=Y torture, any more then (for positive values) X pleasure=Y freedom. (The initial problem helped disguise that by implying that the torture was going to happen to someone else, but in utilitarian terms that shouldn't matter.)
When you can point to situations where "shutting up and multiplying" doesn't seem to fit our actual values, then perhaps the simplistic kind of utilitarian moral system that allows you to do that kind of math is simply not a good description of our actual value system, at least not in all cases.
So, consider the general case of an ordered pair (X,Y) such that given a choice between X right now, and Y once a year for the next (insert arbitrarily large number here) years, most people would probably choose Y.
Where (X="50 years of horrific torture", Y= "a minor annoyance"), your reasoning leads you to conclude that most of us would not accept any amount of X in exchange for any amount of Y.
Where (X="spending fifty thousand dollars", Y="spending a dollar"), would you similarly conclude that most of us would not a... (read more)