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jkaufman comments on The Argument From Marginal Cases - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm a utilitarian; I'm not claiming anything about rights. The question of "moral status" to me is whether something should get included when aggregating utility.
Clearly not a utilitarian enough to prefer torture over dust specks.
I don't think utilitarians should prefer torture over dust specks. Dust specks are such an infinitesimally minor amount of disutility that even if they happen to 3^^^3 people, it's still much better than being tortured even for one minute.
The general argument is one of net suffering. The trouble is that weird things happen when you try to assign values to suffering, add those together across multiple agents, etc. On the one hand, we should avoid scope insensitivity. On the other hand, the assertion that adding up 3^^^3 dust specs is worse than 50 years of torture packs in quite a few other assertions (that suffering should be added linearly across all agents and all types of suffering, for one).
I don't think you really get how big 3^^^3 is.
What if you replaced 3^^^3 with BusyBeaver(3^^^3), or BusyBeaver(BusyBeaver(3^^^3))?