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Paul_Gowder comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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Robin: dare I suggest that one area of relevant expertise is normative philosophy for-@#%(*^*^$-sake?!
It's just painful -- really, really, painful -- to see dozens of comments filled with blinkered nonsense like "the contradiction between intuition and philosophical conclusion" when the alleged "philosophical conclusion" hinges on some ridiculous simplistic Benthamite utilitarianism that nobody outside of certain economics departments and insular technocratic computer-geek blog communities actually accepts! My model for the torture case is swiftly becoming fifty years of reading the comments to this post.
The "obviousness" of the dust mote answer to people like Robin, Eliezer, and many commenters depends on the following three claims:
a) you can unproblematically aggregate pleasure and pain across time, space, and individuality,
b) all types of pleasures and pains are commensurable such that for all i, j, given a quantity of pleasure/pain experience i, you can find a quantity of pleasure/pain experience j that is equal to (or greater or less than) it. (i.e. that pleasures and pains exist on one dimension)
c) it is a moral fact that we ought to select the world with more pleasure and less pain.
But each of those three claims is hotly, hotly contested. And almost nobody who has ever thought about the questions seriously believes all three. I expect there are a few (has anyone posed the three beliefs in that form to Peter Singer?), but, man, if you're a Bayesian and you update your beliefs about those three claims based on the general opinions of people with expertise in the relevant area, well, you ain't accepting all three. No way, no how.
As someone who has studied moral philosophy for many years, I would like to point out that I agree with Robin and Eliezer, and that I know many professional moral philosophers who would agree with them, too, if presented with this moral dilemma. It is also worth noting that, many comments above, Gaverick Matheny provided a link to a paper by a professional moral philosopher, published in one of the two most prestigious moral philosophy journals in the English-speaking world, which defends essentially the same conclusion. And as the argument presented in that paper makes clear, the conclusion that one should torture need not be motivated by a theoretical commitment to some substantive thesis about the nature of pain or aggregation (as Godwer claims), but follows instead by transitivity from a series of comparisons that everyone--including those who deny that conclusion--finds intuitively plausible.
If anyone still has a hard time believing that this is not an unorthodox position among Philosophers, I'd like to recommend Shelly Kagan's excellent The Limits of Morality, which discusses 'radical consequentialism' and defends a similar conclusion.