"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?
Just thought I'd comment that the more I think about the question, the more confusing it becomes. I'm inclined to think that if we consider the max utility state of every person having maximal fulfilment, and a "dust speck" as the minimal amount of "unfulfilment" from the top a person can experience, then two people experiencing a single "dust speck" is not quite as bad as a sigle person two "dust specks" below optimal. I think the reason I'm thinking that is that the second speck takes away more proportionally than the first speck did.
Oh, one other thing. I was assuming for my replies both here and in the other thread that we're only talking about the actual "moment of suffering" caused by a dust speck event, with no potential "side effects"
If we consider that those can have consequences, I'm pretty sure that on average those would be negative/harmful, and when the law of large numbers is invoked via stupendously large numbers, well, in that case I'm going with TORTURE.
For the moment at least. :)