"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?
Robin: dare I suggest that one area of relevant expertise is normative philosophy for-@#%(^^$-sake?!
It's just painful -- really, really, painful -- to see dozens of comments filled with blinkered nonsense like "the contradiction between intuition and philosophical conclusion" when the alleged "philosophical conclusion" hinges on some ridiculous simplistic Benthamite utilitarianism that nobody outside of certain economics departments and insular technocratic computer-geek blog communities actually accepts! My model for the torture case is swiftly becoming fifty years of reading the comments to this post.
The "obviousness" of the dust mote answer to people like Robin, Eliezer, and many commenters depends on the following three claims:
a) you can unproblematically aggregate pleasure and pain across time, space, and individuality,
b) all types of pleasures and pains are commensurable such that for all i, j, given a quantity of pleasure/pain experience i, you can find a quantity of pleasure/pain experience j that is equal to (or greater or less than) it. (i.e. that pleasures and pains exist on one dimension)
c) it is a moral fact that we ought to select the world with more pleasure and less pain.
But each of those three claims is hotly, hotly contested. And almost nobody who has ever thought about the questions seriously believes all three. I expect there are a few (has anyone posed the three beliefs in that form to Peter Singer?), but, man, if you're a Bayesian and you update your beliefs about those three claims based on the general opinions of people with expertise in the relevant area, well, you ain't accepting all three. No way, no how.
As someone who has studied moral philosophy for many years, I would like to point out that I agree with Robin and Eliezer, and that I know many professional moral philosophers who would agree with them, too, if presented with this moral dilemma. It is also worth noting that, many comments above, Gaverick Matheny provided a link to a paper by a professional moral philosopher, published in one of the two most prestigious moral philosophy journals in the English-sp... (read more)