Adam_Safron comments on The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2008 04:29PM

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Comment author: Adam_Safron 28 January 2008 09:03:25PM 1 point [-]

Correction: What I said: "one-second of irritation is less than 3^^^3-times as bad as the 50 years of torture." What I meant: "50 years of torture is more than 3^^^3-times as bad as 1-second of eye-irritation." Apologies for the mis-type (as well as for saying "you're" when I meant "your").

But the point is, if there are no additional consequences to the suffering, then it's irrelevant. I don't care how many people experience the 1-second of suffering. There is no number large enough to make it matter.

Eliezer had a good point. It works if we're considering lives saved. It doesn't work with dust-specks and torture. It's not because torture is a taboo that only hard-headed rationalists are able to consider with a clear-mind. It's because something that's non-consequential is non-consequential, even when you multiply it by unimaginably large numbers. But we can't imagine torture and 50 years of lost time as being non-consequential for good reason. The example was bad. We should move on to more productive endeavors.