[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.

[kybernetikos]

> 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.

Nearly all of whom prefer to receive the speck than to allow the individual to be tortured.

> 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.

Yes, I feel somewhat uncomfortable ignoring the agency of torturers and murderers in this scenario, and that reluctance would play into a very conservative estimate of where that threshold should be, but I would be reluctant to choose a lowest common denominator measure to establish morality.