"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?
It seems to me that preference utilitarianism neatly reconciles the general intuitive view against torture with a mathematical utilitarian position. If a proportion p of those 3^^^3 people have a moral compunction against people being tortured, and the remainder are indifferent to torture but have a very slight preference against dust specks, then as long as p is not very small, the overall preference would be for dust specks (and if p was very small, then the moral intuitions of humanity in general have completely changed and we shouldn't be in a position to make any decisions anyway). Is there something I'm missing?
I'm not sure I'm understanding your reasoning here. It seems like you're simply thinking about people's preferences for a dust speck in the eye, relative to their preferences for torture, without reference to how many dust specks and how much torture... is that right?
If so, that doesn't seem to capture the general intuitive view. Intuitively, I strongly prefer losing a finger to losing an arm, but I prefer 1 person losing an arm to a million people losing a finger. (Or, put differently, I prefer a one-in-a-million chance of losing my arm to the certainty of losing a finger.) Quantity seems to matter.