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gwern comments on The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" - Less Wrong
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What about the consequences of the precedent set by the person making the decision that it is ok to torture an innocent person, in such circumstances? If such actions get officially endorsed as being moral, isn't that going to have consequences which mean the torture won't be a one-off event?
There's a rather good short story about this, by Ursula K LeGuin:
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Why would it?
And I don't think LeGuin's story is good - it's classic LeGuin, by which I mean enthymematic, question-begging, emotive substitution for thought, which annoyed me so much that I wrote my own reply.
I've read your story three times now and still don't know what's going on in it. Can I have it in the form of an explanation instead of a story?
Sure, but you'll first have to provide an explanation of LeGuin's.
There is this habitation called Omelas in which things are pretty swell for everybody except one kid who is kept in lousy conditions; by unspecified mechanism this is necessary for things to be pretty swell for everybody else in Omelas. Residents are told about the kid when they are old enough. Some of them do not approve of the arrangement and emigrate.
Something of this form about your story will do.
There is this city called Acre where things are pretty swell except for this one guy who has a lousy job; by a well-specified mechanism, his job makes him an accessary to murders which preserve the swell conditions. He understands all this and accepts the overwhelmingly valid moral considerations, but still feels guilty - in any human paradise, there will be a flaw.
Since the mechanism is well-specified, can you specify it?
I thought it was pretty clear in the story. It's not easy coming up with analogues to crypto, and there's probably holes in my lock scheme, but good enough for a story.
Please explain it anyway.
(It never goes well for me when I reply to this sort of thing with snark. So I edited away a couple of drafts of snark.)
It's a prediction market where the predictions (that we care about, anyway) are all of the form "I bet X that Y will die on date Z."
"Omelas" contrasts the happiness of the citizens with the misery of the child. I couldn't tell from your story that the tradesman felt unusually miserable, nor that the other people of his city felt unusually happy. Nor do I know how this affects your reply to LeGuin, since I can't detect the reply.
For what it's worth, some people read "Omelas" as being about a superstition that torturing a child is necessary (see the bit about good weather) rather than a situation where torturing a child is actually contributing to public welfare.
And the 'wisdom of their scholars' depends on the torture as well? 'terms' implies this is a magical contract of some sort. No mechanism, of course, like most magic and all of LeGuin's magic that I've read (Earthsea especially).