It is threatening people just to test you. We can assume that Its behavior is completely different from ours. So Tom's argument still works.

The fact that he is not willing to kill his grandmother to save the chickens doesn't imply that chickens have 0 value or that his grandmother has infinite value.

Consider the problem from an egocentric point of view: to be responsible for one's grandmother's death feels awful, but also dedicating your life to a very unlikely possibility to save someone who has been declared dead, seems awful.

I think that he set the mind experiment in the Least convenient possible world. So your last hypothesis is right.

To be more precise: let's assume that the time will be quite short (5 second for example), in this case I think it is really better to let billions of people suffer 5 second of bearable pain than to let one person suffer 5 second of unbearable pain. After all, people can stand a bearable pain by definition.

However, pain tolerance is subjective and in real life we don't know exactly where the threshold is in every person, so we can prefer, as heuristic rule, the option with less people involved when the pains are similar to each other (maybe we have evolved some system to make such approximations, a sort of threshold insensitivity).

I think it's worst for 3^999999999 people to feel two dust specks than for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck. After all the next step is that it is worst for 3^1000000000 people to feel one dust speck than for 3^1000000001 people to feel less than one dust speck, which seem right.

I think that we “speckists” see injuries as poisons: they can destroy people lives only if they reach a certain concentration. So a greater but far more diluted pain can be less dangerous than a smaller but more concentrated one. 50 and 49 years of torture are still far over the threshold. One or two dust specks, on the other hand, are far below.

But consider this: the last exemplars of each species of hominids could reproduce with the firs exemplars of the following.

However, we probably wouldn’t be able to reproduce with Homo habilis.

This shows that small differences sum as the distance between the examined subjects increases, until we can clearly see that the two subjects are not part of the same category anymore.

The pains that are similar in intensity are still comparable. But there is too much difference between dust specks in the eye/stubbed toe and torture to consider them as part of the same category

Suppose that the qualitative difference is between bearable and unbearable, in other words things that are over o below the pain tolerance. A pain just below pain tolerance when experienced for a small quantity of time will remain bearable; however, if it is prolonged for lots of time it will become unbearable because human patience is limited. So, even if we give importance to qualitative differences, we can still choose to avoid torture and your second scenario, without going against our intuitions, or be incoherent.

Moreover, we can describe qualitative differences as the colors on the spectrum of visible light: their edges are nebulous but we can still agree that the grass is green and the sea is blue. This means that two very close points on the spectrum appear as part of the same color, but when their distance increases they became part of two different colors.

1,525,122 and 1,525,123 are so close that we can see them as shades of the same qualitative category. On the other hand, dust speck and torture are very distant from each other and we can consider them as part of two different qualitative categories.

Thanks for the informations.

I am rather new here and I would like to ask: what are the criterions that a post must respect to be put in the front page? How can I improve to reach such criterions?