The veil of ignorance as Rawls put it ..."no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like."
The device allows for certain issues like slavery and income distribution to be determined beforehand. Would one vote for a society in which there is a chance of severe misfortune, but greater total utility? e.g, a world where 1% earn $1 a day and 99% earn $1,000,000 vs. a world where everyone earns $900,000 a day. Assume that dollars are utilons and they are linear (2 dollars indeed gives twice as much utility). What is the obvious answer? Bob chooses $900,000 a day for everyone.
But Bob is clever and he does not trust himself that his choice is the rational choice, so he goes into self-dialogue to investigate:
Q: "What is my preference, value or goal(PVG), such that, instrumental rationality may achieve it?"
A "I my preference/value/goal is for there to be a world in which total utility is less, but severe misfortune eliminated for everyone"
Q " As an agent are you maximizing your own utility by your actions of choosing a $900,000 a day world?
A " Yes, my actions are consistent with my preferences; I will maximize my utility by achieving my preference of limiting everyone's utility. This preference takes precedence.
Q: "I will now attack your position with the transitivity argument. At which point does your consistency change? What if the choices where 1% earns $999,999 and 99% earn 1,000,000?"
A: "My preference,values and goals have already determined a threshold, in fact my threshold is my PVG. Regardless the fact that my threshold may be different from everyone else's threshold, my threshold is my PVG. And achieving my PVG is rational."
Q: "I will now attack your position one last time, with the "piling argument". If every time you save one person from destitution, you must pile on the punishment on the others such that everyone will be suffering."
A: "If piling is allowed then it is to me a completely different question. Altering what my PVG is. I have one set of values for a non piling and piling scenario. I am consistent because piling and not piling are two different problems."
In the insurance industry, purchasing insurance comes with a price. Perhaps 1.5% premium of the cost of reimbursing you for your house that may burn down. The actuaries have run the probabilities and determine that you have a 1% chance that your house will burn down. Assume that all dollar amounts are utilons across all assets. Bob once again is a rational man. Every year Bob is chooses to pay 1.5% in premium even though his average risk is technically a 1% loss, because Bob is risk adverse. So risk adverse that he prefers a world in which he has less wealth, the .5% went to the insurance companies making a profit. Once again Bob questions his rationality on purchasing insurance:
Q: "What is my preference?"
A: "I would prefer to sacrifice more than my share of losses( .5% more), for the safety-net of zero chance catastrophic loss."
Q "Are your actions achieving your values?"
A "Yes, I purchased insurance, maximizing my preference for safety."
Q "Shall I attack you with the transitivity argument?"
A "It wont work. I have already set my PVG, it is a premium price at which I judge to make the costs prohibitive. I will not pay 99% premium to protect my house , but I will pay 5%."
Q "Piling?"
A "This is a different problem now."
Eliezer's post on Torture vs. Dust Specks [Here] has generated lots of discussion as well as what Eliezer describes as interesting [ways] of [avoiding] the question. We will do no sort of thing in this post, we will answer the question as intended; I will interpret that eye specks is cumulatively greater suffering than the suffering of 50 years.
My PVG tells me that I would rather have a speck in my eye, as well as the eye's of 3^^^3 people, than to risk to have one (perhaps me) suffer torture for 50 years, even though my risk is only 1/(3^^^3) which is a lot less than 50 years (Veil of ignorance). My PVG is what I will maximize, and doing so is the definition of instrumental rationality.
In short, the rational answer is not TORTURE or SPECKS, but depends on what your preference, values and goals are. You may be one of those whose preference is to let that one person feel torture for 50 years, as long as your actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences, you are right too.
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought rationality did not imply that there were absolute rational preferences, but rather rational ways to achieve your preferences...
I want to emphasize that in no way did I intend for this post to declare anything. And want to thank everyone in advance for picking apart every single word I have written. Being wrong is like winning the lottery. I do not claim to know anything, the assertive manner in which I wrote this post was merely a way to convey my ideas, of which, I am not sure off.
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I just went over how the scenarios differ from each other in considerable detail. I could repeat myself in grotesque detail, but I'm starting to think it wouldn't buy very much for me, for you, or for anyone who might be reading this exchange.
So let's try another angle. It sounds to me like you're trying to draw an ethical equivalence between dust-subjects in TvDS and rapists in TVCR: more than questionable in real life, but I'll grant that level of suffering to the latter for the sake of argument. Also misses the point of drawing attention to scope insensitivity, but that's only obvious if you're running a utilitarian framework already, so let's go ahead and drop it for now. That leaves us with the mathematics of the scenarios, which do have something close to the same form.
Specifically: in both cases we're depriving some single unlucky subject of N utility in exchange for not withholding N * K utility divided up among several subjects for some K > 1. At this level we can establish a mapping between both thought experiments, although the exact K, the number of subjects, and the normative overtones are vastly, sillily different between the two.
Fine so far, but you seem to be treating this as an open-and-shut argument on its own: "you surely would not let the victim [suffer]". Well, that's begging the question, isn't it? From a utilitarian perspective it doesn't matter how many people we divide up N * K among, be it ten or some Knuth up-arrow abomination, as long as the resulting suffering can register as suffering. The fewer slices we use, the more our flawed moral intuitions take notice of them and the more commensurate they look; actually, for small numbers of subjects it starts to look like a choice between letting one person suffer horribly and doing the same to multiple people, at which point the right answer is either trivially obvious or cognate to the trolley problem depending on how we cast it.
About the only way I can make sense of what you're saying is by treating the N case -- and not just for the sake of argument, but as an unquestioned base assumption -- as a special kind of evil, incommensurate with any lesser crime. Which, frankly, I don't. It all gets mapped to people's preferences in the end, no matter how squicky and emotionally loaded the words you choose to describe it are.
I agree with this statement 100%. That was the point in my TvCR thought experiment. People who obviously picked T should again pick T. No one except one commentor actually conceded this point.
Again, I feel as if you are making my argument for me. The problem is as you say obvious to the trolley problem on how we cast it.
You say my experiment is not really the same as Eliezer's. fine. If doesn't matter because we could just use your example. If utilitarians do not care for how many people we divide N*K with, then these utilitarians should state that they would indeed allow T to happen no matter what subject matter the K is as long as K is >1