"What's the worst that can happen?" goes the optimistic saying. It's probably a bad question to ask anyone with a creative imagination. Let's consider the problem on an individual level: it's not really the worst that can happen, but would nonetheless be fairly bad, if you were horribly tortured for a number of years. This is one of the worse things that can realistically happen to one person in today's world.
What's the least bad, bad thing that can happen? Well, suppose a dust speck floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck.
For our next ingredient, we need a large number. Let's use 3^^^3, written in Knuth's up-arrow notation:
- 3^3 = 27.
- 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987.
- 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))).
3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.
Now here's the moral dilemma. If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:
Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I think the answer is obvious. How about you?
...except that, if I'm right about the biases involved, the Speckists won't be horrified at each other.
If you trade off thirty seconds of waterboarding for one person against twenty seconds of waterboarding for two people, you're not visibly treading on a "sacred" value against a "mundane" value. It will rouse no moral indignation.
Indeed, if I'm right about the bias here, the Speckists will never be able to identify a discrete jump in utility across a single neuron firing, even though the transition from dust speck to torture can be broken up into a series of such jumps. There's no difference of a single neuron firing that leads to the feeling of a comparison between a sacred and an unsacred value. The feeling of sacredness, itself, is quantitative and comes upon you in gradual increments of neurons firing - even though it supposedly describes a utility cliff with a slope higher than 3^^^3.
The prohibition against torture is clearly very sacred, and a dust speck is clearly very unsacred, so there must be a cliff sharper than 3^^^3 between them. But the distinction between one dust speck and two dust specks doesn't seem to involve a comparison between a sacred and mundane value, and the distinction between 50 and 49.99 years of torture doesn't seem to involve a comparison between a sacred and a mundane value...
So we're left with cyclical prefrences. The one will trade 3 people suffering 49.99 years of torture for 1 person suffering 50 years of torture; after having previously traded 9 people suffering 49.98 years of torture for 3 people suffering 49.99 years of torture; and so on back to the starting point where it's better for 3^999999999 people to feel two dust specks than for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck; right after, a moment before, having traded one person suffering 50 years of torture for 3^1000000000 people feeling one dust speck.
I think it's worst for 3^999999999 people to feel two dust specks than for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck. After all the next step is that it is worst for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck than for 3^1000000001 people to feel less than one dust speck, which seem right.