"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?
Very-Related Question: Typical homeopathic dilutions are 10^(-60). On average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.
Could one argue that if we administer a homeopathic pill of vitamin C in the above dilution to every living person for the next 3^^^3 generations, the impact would be a humongous amount of flu-elimination?
If anyone convinces me that yes, I might accept to be a Torturer. Otherwise, I assume that the negligibility of the speck, plus people's resilience, would make no lasting effects. Disutility would vanish in miliseconds. If they wouldn't even notice or have memory of the specks after a while, it'd equate to zero disutility.
It's not that I can't do the maths. It's that the evil of the speck seems too diluted to do harm.
Just like homeopathy is too diluted to do good.
That's not really the point. The "dust speck" just means the mildest possible harm that a person can suffer; if you don't think a dust speck with no long-term consequences can be harmful, you should mentally substitute a stubbed toe (with no long-term consequences) or the like.