In my last post I made this mind experiment: Let’s assume that Omega has an evil twin: Psi. Psi really likes to play with human minds, and today it will force some people to do difficult choices. Alice is a very nice person: she does volunteer, donates moneys to important...
This post’s aim is not to prove or disprove the morality of utilitarianism. I only want to raise some provocative questions through mind experiments that shows extreme consequences of some forms of utilitarianism. Let’s assume that Omega has an evil twin: Psi. Psi really likes to play with human minds,...
Probably I am making a huge mistake resuming a ten years old discussion, especially because this is my first post. Anyway, let’s make this experiment. One common argument for choosing “dust specks” over “torture” is that the experience of torture is qualitatively different form the experience of receiving a dust...
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... (read more)
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?
In my last post I made this mind experiment:
Let’s assume that Omega has an evil twin: Psi.
Psi really likes to play with human minds, and today it will force some people to do difficult choices.
Alice is a very nice person: she does volunteer, donates moneys to important causes, is vegetarian, and she is always kind to the people she interact with.
Bob on the other hand is a murderer and torturer: he has kidnapped lots of people and then tortured them for many days in horrible ways that are worse than your deepest fears.
Psi offers two option:
A) Alice will be tortured for 1 day and then killed, while Bob will be... (read 502 more words →)
This post’s aim is not to prove or disprove the morality of utilitarianism. I only want to raise some provocative questions through mind experiments that shows extreme consequences of some forms of utilitarianism.
Let’s assume that Omega has an evil twin: Psi.
Psi really likes to play with human minds, and today it will force some people to do difficult choices.
Experiment A
Let’s suppose that Alice is a very nice person: she does volunteer, donates moneys to important causes, is vegetarian, and she is always kind to the people she interact with.
Bob on the other hand is a murderer and torturer: he has kidnapped lots of people and then... (read 359 more words →)
Probably I am making a huge mistake resuming a ten years old discussion, especially because this is my first post. Anyway, let’s make this experiment.
One common argument for choosing “dust specks” over “torture” is that the experience of torture is qualitatively different form the experience of receiving a dust speck in the eye and so the two should not be compared (assuming that there won’t be other long term negative consequences such as car accidents and surgical mistakes).
A moderate pain doesn’t cause the same reactions in the human organism that happen during an extreme and prolonged distress such as: panic attacks, alterations of physiological functions and psychological trauma with all the capacity... (read 1388 more words →)
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.