since we simply deal with another case of "dust speck vs torture"
There is no contradiction to rejecting total utilitarianism and choosing torture. Choosing torture and becoming a total utilitarian both involve bullet biting in ways that feel similar. But choosing torture is the natural consequences of almost all preferences, once you make them consistent and accept to make the choice. Becoming total ut is not (for instance, average utilitarians would also choose torture, but would obviously feel no compulsion to change their population ethics).
Though I think can descriptively say that, structurally, refusing total utilitarianism because of the repugnant conclusion is equal to refusing total utilitarianism in another world where we are bad at imagining "17" and where we find it absurd that 17 people being tortured could be considered as worse than 5 peope being tortured.
You can also descriptively say that, structurally, refusing total utilitarianism because of the repugnant conclusion is equal to refusing deontology because we've realise that two deontological absolutes can contradict each other. Or, more simply, refusing X because of A is structurally the same as refusing X' because of A'.
Just because one can reject total utilitarianism (or anything) for erroneous reasons, does not mean that every reason for rejecting total utilitarianism must be an error.
There is no contradiction to rejecting total utilitarianism and choosing torture.
For one thing, I compared choosing torture with the repugnant conclusion, not with total utilitarianism. For another thing, I didn't suspect there to be any contradiction. However, agents with intransitive dispositions are exploitable.
...You can also descriptively say that, structurally, refusing total utilitarianism because of the repugnant conclusion is equal to refusing deontology because we've realise that two deontological absolutes can contradict each other. Or, mor
I want to thank Irgy for this idea.
As people generally know, total utilitarianism leads to the repugnant conclusion - the idea that no matter how great a universe X would be, filled without trillions of ultimately happy people having ultimately meaningful lives filled with adventure and joy, there is another universe Y which is better - and that is filled with nothing but dull, boring people whose quasi-empty and repetitive lives are just one tiny iota above being too miserable to endure. But since the second universe is much bigger than the first, it comes out on top. Not only in that if we had Y it would be immoral to move to X (which is perfectly respectable, as doing so might involve killing a lot of people, or at least allowing a lot of people to die). But in that, if we planned for our future world now, we would desperately want to bring Y into existence rather than X - and could run great costs or great risks to do so. And if we were in world X, we must at all costs move to Y, making all current people much more miserable as we do so.
The repugnant conclusion is the main reason I reject total utilitarianism (the other one being that total utilitarianism sees no problem with painlessly killing someone by surprise, as long as you also gave birth to someone else of equal happiness). But the repugnant conclusion can emerge from many other population ethics as well. If adding more people of slightly less happiness than the average is always a bonus ("mere addition"), and if equalising happiness is never a penalty, then you get the repugnant conclusion (caveat: there are some subtleties to do with infinite series).
But repugnant conclusions reached in that way may not be so repugnant, in practice. Let S be a system of population ethics that accepts the repugnant conclusion, due to the argument above. S may indeed conclude that the big world Y is better than the super-human world X. But S need not conclude that Y is the best world we can build, given any fixed and finite amount of resources. Total utilitarianism is indifferent to having a world with half the population and twice the happiness. But S need to be indifferent to that - it may much prefer the twice-happiness world. Instead of the world Y, it may prefer to reallocate resources to instead achieve the world X', which has the same average happiness as X but is slightly larger.
Of course, since it accepts the repugnant conclusion, there will be a barely-worth-living world Y' which it prefers to X'. But then it might prefer reallocating the resources of Y' to the happy world X'', and so on.
This is not an argument for efficiency of resource allocation: even if it's four times as hard to get people twice as happy, S can still want to do so. You can accept the repugnant conclusion and still want to reallocate any fixed amount of resources towards low population and extreme happiness.
It's always best to have some examples, so here is one: an S whose value is the product of average agent happiness times the logarithm of population size.