[kybernetikos]

We're social animals. There's an amount of discomfort (maybe not large) I would be prepared to undergo to help someone else, and I find myself thinking that others "should" also be prepared to undergo such an amount of discomfort to assist others. Given the choice to accept a dust mote temporarily in my eye as part of a huge crowd in order to save another person from torture, I would gladly accept that, and I think all reasonable people would too, therefore there is no number of people such that I believe the utility of dustmote vs torture turns out in favour of torture.

[philh]

> I would gladly accept that, and I think all reasonable people would too

Hello, apparently I'm unreasonable. And so is everyone else who has said that they choose torture over dust specks. If you select 3^^^3 people, you're going to find an awful lot of us. (And also some sociopaths who literally don't care if someone else gets tortured.)

Your argument seems to boil down to "specks is the correct answer, so anyone who gets it wrong doesn't count; and because we all agree that specks is the correct answer, it's okay to do specks".

On the other hand, I would totally accept the torture for myself, if it would prevent the specks. (At least I hope I would, and to the extent that I can model how I would act in that situation, it does seem plausible that I would.)

[ikeboy]

You aren't quite grokking the difference between "huge crowd" and 3||3. How do you deal with the argument from circularity? Are your preferences circular, and if not, which part do you reject?

[kybernetikos]

The size of the numbers is irrelevant. I personally would consider a world in which I had no mote of dust and someone else was tortured as a world with less utility than a world in which I had a mote of dust in my eye. I expect every single one of those 3||3 individuals to feel the same way. Therefore, there is no number of individuals that I would choose not to suffer the dust mote in preference to torturing someone.

The answer to the argument from circularity is obvious - there is a discontinuity. I can see the discontinuity in my own thinking, and you probably can too. I would accept a dust mote to save an individual from years of torture (and I think almost all reasonable people would), but I would not accept a dust mote to save two people from a dust mote. That may be unethical of me, since I would of course prefer the world that has fewer people with dust motes, but for me to expect the greater number of people to make the sacrifice, I must be prepared to make the sacrifice myself and it must be a sacrifice that I think all people should make. Exactly how much I think people should sacrifice for others is difficult to say, but there is a clear step change at some point.

[ikeboy]

I don't see how that's relevant to answering the circularity argument. How are you avoiding the claim that your preferences are inconsistent? At some point, you need to accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, where the decrease can be pretty much arbitrarily small and the jump can be arbitrarily large.

(Also, if you click on the comment you can reply).

[kybernetikos]

There's a difference between the utility of a world where one person has a mote of dust in their eye and the utility of a world where one person has a mote of dust in their eye because it saves someone else.

>At some point, you need to accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, where the decrease can be pretty much arbitrarily small and the jump can be arbitrarily large.

Well, the boundary is fuzzy, so I believe that different people will draw the line in different places, but yes, that is correct. There is a point at which I accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, and that point is the point at which I determine that the hurt falls under the threshold I would expect every person to be prepared to sacrifice for any other person.

I think the debatable range is actually quite large, so the tiny decrease part might not be fair (there are a lot of degrees of pain I would not demand someone to suffer to save others), but at that point of expected sacrifice, the number of people jumps to infinite.

[zyxley]

> and that point is the point at which I determine that the hurt falls under the threshold I would expect every person to be prepared to sacrifice for any other person.

That seems like a good way to put it.

The number of people doesn't really matter, when it the amount of hurt per person is so small that you can say with all confidence something like "I believe that literally any sane person would agree to get one speck in their eye to save a stranger from fifty years of torture".

[ikeboy]

So first of all, your preferences are still circular, unless you bite another bullet somewhere. But even your argument isn't quite accurate. It's not this one person who needs to get a speck, it's a literally unimaginable amount of people.

As it happens to be, a number of people in our tiny world have said they would choose torture, so your argument fails just considering them.

[ikeboy]

So your intuition says that there's some point where everyone is suffering pain X, where X is very large, and they would each agree to cause the X-(1 mote speck) to a trillion times as many people, in return for reducing their own suffering by 1 mote speck? That strikes me as beyond regular selfishness, and non intuitive.

[kybernetikos]

Can you explain more clearly why what I said implies that, because I don't think I mean to say that.

I believe that there is an amount of suffering that it is reasonable to expect anyone to accept in order to help another person. That amount depends on the amount to be suffered, and the amount benefited by the recipient. Once the suffering falls under that threshold, I do not believe the number of people required to make the sacrifice comes into consideration, as each of them if reasonable would say "I prefer to belong to this world, where as part of a huge group I accept this small ill in order that someone else benefits". Therefore, the implied sacrifice results in greater utility for that choice.

Let me try a different tack.

Let's say that you observe a universe with some large number of people suffering dust specks in their eye. That sounds bad. But what if every single one of those people actually suffering thinks that this universe is better than the alternatives. You don't suffer from a dust spec, but are you going to ignore all those people in their estimation of the utility of the universe? If you switched to a universe where all of those people didn't suffer from dust specs, but someone else was suffering, they would tell you that that was a worse universe.

It's pretty obvious to me that even if that isn't the exact case, it's close to being the case in reality - that's why people find the dust speck argument to be unintuitive, not the large numbers thing. It's because some measure of sacrifice for other people is part of what we expect from everyone, and most people know instinctively that if everyone asked to make a sacrifice agrees that it's right to make that sacrifice, then the world is better because of it.

[ikeboy]

We're not talking about you accepting a dust mite in any of the scenarios. It's always other people.

So saying that you are selfish doesn't get you out of this, as long as you do prefer the world with less other people having specks.

Where is there a discontinuity when talking about other people being tortured or specked?

[kybernetikos]

I know that that is the formulation of the question, But since you're asking me to make the choice, you're asking me to inflict suffering on many extra people who would not have suffered otherwise. If what is gained by their suffering is large enough compared to that suffering that I believe they all (or nearly all) would have chosen voluntarily to accept the suffering for the benefit, then I am happy with the choice, and my best model for that is what suffering I would be prepared to undergo for what benefit. I think the confusion is between evaluating the utility between two possible alternatives (where obviously the world with fewer people suffering is better) vs evaluating the utility between two possible alternatives where those were the only two alternatives. If it's just two of many alternatives, the utility placed on a meaningful sacrifice doesn't come into it, but if it's a choice, the utility placed on a meaningful sacrifice does.