"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?
Fascinating, and scary, the extent to which we adhere to established models of moral reasoning despite the obvious inconsistencies. Someone here pointed out that the problem wasn't sufficiently defined, but then proceeded to offer examples of objective factors that would appear necessary to evaluation of a consequentialist solution. Robin seized upon the "obvious" answer that any significant amount of discomfort, over such a vast population, would easily dominate, with any conceivable scaling factor, the utilitarian value of the torture of a single individual. But I think he took the problem statement too literally; the discomfort of the dust mote was intended to be vanishingly small, over a vast population, thus keeping the problem interesting rather than "obvious."
But most interesting to me is that no one pointed out that fundamentally, the assessed goodness of any act is a function of the values (effective, but not necessarily explicit) of the assessor. And assessed morality as a function of group agreement on the "goodness" of an act, promoting the increasingly coherent values of the group over increasing scope of expected consequences.
Now the values of any agent will necessarily be rooted in an evolutionary branch of reality, and this is the basis for increasing agreement as we move toward the common root, but this evolving agreement in principle on the direction of increasing morality should never be considered to point to any particular destination of goodness or morality in any objective sense, for that way lies the "repugnant conclusion" and other paradoxes of utilitarianism.
Obvious? Not at all, for while we can increasingly converge on principles promoting "what works" to promote our increasingly coherent values over increasing scope, our expression of those values will increasingly diverge.