Robin is absolutely wrong, because different instances of human suffering cannot be added together in any meaningful way. The cumulative effect when placed on one person is far greater than the sum of many tiny nuisances experienced by many. Whereas small irritants such as a dust mote do not cause "suffering" in any standard sense of the word, the sum total of those motes concentrated at one time and placed into one person's eye could cause serious injury or even blindness. Dispersing the dust (either over time or across many people) mitigates... (read more)
The problem with this claim is that you can construct a series of overlapping comparisons involving experiences that differ but slightly in how painful they are. Then, provided that the series has sufficiently many elements, you'll reach the conclusion that an experience of pain, no matter how intense, is preferable to arbitrarily many instances of the mildest pain imaginable.
(Strictly speaking, you could actually avoid this conclusion by assuming that painful experiences of a given intensity have diminishing marginal value and that this value converges to a finite quantity. Then if the limiting value of a very mild pain is less than the value of a single extremely painful experience, the continuity argument wouldn't work. However, I see no independent motivation for embracing a theory of value of this sort. Moreover, such a theory would have incredible implications, e.g., that to determine how bad someone's pain is one needs to consider whether sentient beings have already experienced pains of that intensity in remote regions of spacetime.)
Robin is absolutely wrong, because different instances of human suffering cannot be added together in any meaningful way. The cumulative effect when placed on one person is far greater than the sum of many tiny nuisances experienced by many. Whereas small irritants such as a dust mote do not cause "suffering" in any standard sense of the word, the sum total of those motes concentrated at one time and placed into one person's eye could cause serious injury or even blindness. Dispersing the dust (either over time or across many people) mitigates... (read more)