Comment on Torture vs. Dust Specks

Sat, 11 Apr 2015 05:46:10 GMT

Yes, this is a failure mode of (some forms of?) utilitarianism, but not the specific weirdness I was trying to get at, which was that if you aggregate by min(), then it's completely morally OK to do very bad things to huge numbers of people - in fact, it's no worse than radically improving huge numbers of lives - as long as you avoid affecting the one person who is worst-off. This is a very silly property for a moral system to have.

You can attempt to mitigate this property with too-clever objections, like "aha, but if you kill a happy person, then in the moment of their death they are temporarily the most unhappy person, so you have affected the metric after all". I don't think that actually works, but didn't want it to obscure the point, so I picked "kill their dog" as an example, because it's a clearly bad thing which definitely doesn't bump anyone to the bottom.

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