"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?
I think I have to go with the dust specks. Tomorrow, all 3^^^3 of those people will have forgotten entirely about the speck of dust. It is an event nearly indistinguishable from thermal noise. People, all of them everywhere, get dust specks in their eyes just going about their daily lives with no ill effect.
The torture actually hurts someone. And in a way that's rather non-recoverable. Recoverability plays a large part in my moral calculations.
But there's a limit to how many times I can make that trade. 3^^^3 people is a LOT of people, and it doesn't take a significant fraction of THAT at all before I have to stop saving torture victims, lest everyone everywhere's lives consist of nothing but a sandblaster to the face.
What you're doing there is positing a "qualitative threshold" of sorts where the anti-hedons from the dust specks cause absolutely zero disutility whatsoever. This can be an acceptable real-world evaluation within loaded subjective context.
However, the problem states that the dust specks have non-zero disutility. This means that they do have some sort of predicted net negative impact somewhere. If that impact is merely to slow down the brain's visual recognition of one word by even 0.03 seconds, in a manner that is directly causal and where the ... (read more)