I’m pretty new here so apologies if this is a stupid question or if it has been covered before. I couldn’t find anything on this topic so thought I’d ask the question before writing a full post on the idea.
If we believe that discomfort can be quantified and ‘stacked’ (e.g. X people with specks of dust in their eye = 1 death), is there any reason why this has to scale linearly from all perspectives?
What if the total can be less than the sum of its parts depending on the observer?
Picture a dynamic logarithmic scale of discomfort stacking with a ‘hard cap’ where every new instance contributes less and less to the total to the point of flatlining on a graph.
Each discrete level of discomfort has a different starting value - so an infinite number of something extremely mild could never amount to the value of even a single instance of extreme torture.
Every individual instance is ‘worth’ the full n=1 level of discomfort – but, when stacked, this is augmented and dynamically shifts, though only to an observer looking at the entire set of cumulative instances.
No matter how many people have a speck of dust in their eye – to an outside observer it would never amount to the cumulative discomfort of even one single death, despite every individual feeling the full extent of it as if they were the only one.
I'm confused, is the death to discomfort comparison based on the cumulative experience that the loved ones and friends of a person who has died might experience in grief and despair that someone they cared about died? Or are you suggesting that a death is a superlatively uncomfortable event for the individual who is dying?
I can't see a way of making discomfort to death fungible, at least partly because to experience discomfort requires someone to continue on living.
Oh, sure. I was wondering about the reverse question: is there something that doesn't really qualify as torture where subjecting a billion people to it is worse than subjecting one person to torture.
I'm also interested in how this forms some sort of "layered" discontinuous scale. If it were continuous, then you could form a chain of relations of the form "10 people suffering A is as bad as 1 person suffering B", "10 people suffering B is as bad as 1 person suffering C", and so on to span the entire spectrum.
Then it would take some additional justification for saying that 100 people suffering A is not as bad as 1 person suffering C, 1000 A vs 1 D, and so on.