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.
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 accept any amount of fifty thousand dollars in exchange for any amount of dollars? I hope not, because that's clearly false.
I conclude that your reasoning is not quite right.
All of that said, I agree that a simple utilitarian moral system doesn't properly describe our actual value system in all cases.
The difference is that "dollars" and "fifty thousand dollars" are obviously equivalent and interchangeable units. 50,000 dollars equals one "fifty thousand dollars", obviously.
I don't think that any amount of "occasional minor annoyances" are equivalent or interchangeable with "a long period of horrific torture". They aren't even in the same catorgy, IMHO.
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