"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 drop the number into a numbers-to-words converter and get "seven trillion six hundred twenty-five billion five hundred ninety-seven million four hundred eighty-four thousand nine hundred eighty-seven". (I don't do it by hand, because a script that somebody tested is likely to make fewer errors than me). Google says there are roughly 7 billion people on earth at the moment. Does that mean that each person gets roughly 1089 dust specks, or that everyone who's born gets one dust speck until the 7 trillion and change speck quota has been met? I ask because if each person is allowed multiple specks, you could have one person getting all 7-odd trillion of them in their lifetime, and that sounds like an outcome that the sufferer might describe as "horrible torture for 50 years without hope or rest" while they were experiencing it.
The answer that looks initially obvious to me is the specks, but that's because I calculate it with a societal system of morality in which it's absolutely not okay to perform certain experiments on humans which would be expected to make minor alleviations to the biological inconveniences experienced by all subsequent humans.
This seems to hinge on an intuition that if you have to do something to people without their consent, it's do-unto-others-wise better to do a small thing to more people than a big thing to a few people. If the torture or specs would only be done to consenting parties, it'd be very different -- I think people could get to competing to see who could last to 50 years of torture, or who could take the most specks in the Dust Speck Challenge, because the human organism is a strange and beautiful thing.