[TheOtherHobbes]

Actually my decision probably depends on the person. [cough]

But anyway. This isn't even philosophy - it's a digital remix of medieval scholasticism pretending to be philosophy.

The irony is that politics proves empirically that ideas actually can be dangerous and harmful. And some ideas - actually narratives - can be very dangerous and harmful indeed.

There's over a century of "persuasion technology" (Bernays, etc) that exploits this.

Nothing I've seen Y write deals with the problem of politics as a social exploit in an insightful - never mind a useful - way.

Meanwhile real people are being tortured in real ways. What's his proposed rational solution to that problem?

[Neslit]

I notice you didn't actually say at which point you would prefer torturing (10^100)*X people for Y years each, over torturing X people for Y+0.0000001 years each, for X and Y at least 0.0000001.

(You may assume you don't know anything in particular about these people, other than that they are adult humans.)

[TheOtherHobbes]

Of course I didn't. When dealing with real moral issues the question is wholly trivial.

The fact that it includes some numbers that reduce to some other numbers doesn't change that.

Putting numbers into something doesn't make it scientific or objective. It just makes it numerical.

There is a difference, and it's not a small one.

[Neslit]

What the heck? Sorry, I didn't understand any of this. Are you saying that with real moral issues, it always trivially wrong to torture? This seems simply false.

If I capture person X and X's laptop Y, and X tells me under no duress that Y contains the location of a nuclear bomb that X has placed in a major city, and I have other strong evidence that this is true, but X refuses to give me the password to Y; then it is moral (but rightly illegal) for me to torture X for the password to Y.

Torture is not literally incommensurate with any other bad thing. Then the question arises, how do we, in full generality, determine which is the greater of two evils (or the better of two goods)? The torture vs. dust specks thing is supposed to disabuse people of the unhelpful notion that some things are somehow incomparable in terms of goodness and badness.