On the question of whether decision theory is useful in moral calculations, I would say there is an analogy with economics, where the utility question is simplified to be optimisation of a particular chosen variable, usually money. Once you have decided to optimise that variable, then a calculation becomes possible. But economics has no say in whether one variable should be optimised over another one.

It’s not an improvement for the person who is still being tortured.

If you’ve managed to save some people from being tortured, you have indeed done a good thing for those specific people.

You haven’t “done a good thing” in the abstract, utilitarian sense of “maximizing the greater good” from some imaginary omniscient perspective, because that perspective doesn’t exist.

I do think we should try to save as many people from torture as possible, and I realize that in the practical sense, it might not be possible to save everyone all the time. But that doesn’t make the “one guy is being tortured” situation morally acceptable, or more morally acceptable than the “everyone is being tortured” situation.

Both situations are equally unacceptable, because in each case, there is torture (which, again, is superlatively awful by design) being experienced from an individual perspective.

Perhaps if you’re the tortured individual, and you’re aware that everyone else has been saved, you might feel better from an empathic standpoint. But it seems doubtful that torturers would want to tell their victim anything that might make him feel better.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, acknowledging the practical limitations of one’s rescue tactics doesn’t equate to having achieved moral acceptability or superiority. I also think that these hypothetical zero-sum-game dilemmas are unrealistic. In real life, the choice is not usually really between “saving 1 person vs. saving 10 people” — and I think that people who train themselves to think in “zero-sum terms” risk stifling their creative faculties for dealing with difficult situations.

RE Nick’s comment, think about the implications of your claim. It’s actually worse – if everyone is being tortured and you can save all of them but a single person, that is not an improvement?

If you save one person from torture, but there are other people being tortured that you can’t do anything about, have you not done something good? I don’t think this is beside the point – part of the original dispute is to what extent suffering is additive.

My first thought was “specks” and after further internal deliberation and reading through the comments, I find myself at the same conclusion. The attempt to compare “specks” with “torture” in this manner is incoherent. It’s probably reasonable to assume that practically everyone gets a speck of dust in one or both of their eyes on a daily basis. Dust exists pretty much everywhere humans exist, and the probability of spending your day anywhere outside an industrial cleanroom *without* having dust contact your ocular region is likely very low.

So it’s not as if our present position is one of zero knowledge regarding the effect of dust specks in our eyes — this is something that happens in the real world, every day, and honestly, it’s not something that garners a lot of complaint. Torture, however, is superlatively awful *by design*. And I personally would rather live in a world where dust specks were commonplace, but nobody was being tortured, than the reverse.

How a person answers this question probably depends somewhat on how literally they take it. I immediately considered a situation consisting of a comparison between actual dust specks and actual torture, and my analysis was informed by that literalness. However, it seems that some respondents interpreted the question in a more purely abstract sense — e.g., rather than applying their ethical sense to the real world, they approached the problem as one of getting the “right” answer from a consciously algorithmic standpoint.

I am not getting why some seem tempted to invoke the viewpoint of an entity capable of somehow “feeling” the cumulative effect of tiny amounts of possible badness. If no such entity exists to experience this aggregate suffering, then it doesn’t make sense to suggest that imagining an aggregate suffering made up of a zillion teensy annoyances is the best way to reason out one’s moral decisions.

Also, the fact that different people are responding to this dilemma in different ways (and with different reasoning paths) hopefully demonstrates that there’s more than one way to consider such questions, and that no, there’s not likely to be a One True Algorithm that somehow allows a person to make “proper” moral decisions quickly and tidily in every case. A memorized “abstraction machine” cannot be used as a substitute for actual thinking, of the sort that engages directly with the relevant, real, data at hand in a given situation. Sure, abstraction machines can help a person structure their thoughts in some cases, but I firmly believe that people shouldn’t let their devotion to keeping their “isms” harmonious override their devotion to the well-being of individuals.

With regard to the original question again, I think the point might have better been served by simply asking whether torturing one person or torturing a whole lot of people was worse. (And I’m sure answers to this would vary as well — personally I see torturing anyone as just as bad as torturing everyone, but that’s beside the point right now).

The “dust specks” example was so inane as to be functionally meaningless in discussion — you might as well have said, “What would be worse, torturing one person for 50 years, or giving 3^^^3 people a stuffed toy unicorn?” Given that stuffed toy unicorns are bigger than dust specks, and potentially more dangerous (e.g., people could trip over them!), it would seem that there’s a greater Existential Unicorn Risk than an Existential Dust Speck Risk. But I’d still choose “Unicorns for All” world over “Torture One Guy” world any day.

I’m still struggling with how tiny dispersed ouches don’t *eventually* add up to one big ouch. The only way is if they represent zero harm. Personally, this was my first line of defense for my specks intuition but I decided that the question precluded the harm from actually being zero. In reality, I believe that there is a threshold of suffering below which there is no harm. Consider, perhaps, the level of harm you would be willing to suffer for a 1/N probability (N very large but not too large) that you would save a stranger’s life. If you willingly accept harm that has no benefit to you and almost no expected benefit to anyone, can we really call it harm? The specks seem like they would clearly meet this test.

Of course, to rcriii’s post, I’m not trying to make this a realistic question. And assuming nonzero harm, it has to aggregate somehow. Nick raises an interesting idea but what would make us believe that the disutility of harm is nonlinear enough to avoid the problem as the number of tiny harms goes to infinity?

- Very early in the thread someone noted that 3^^^3 is much greater than the likely number of humans ever. So we are asked to decide between something that has happened in the past and an impossibility.
- Elezier did not put any kind of value on the harm caused by the ’speck’. Is it 50/1^^^3 of 1 year of torture, more or less? How can we do any kind of ‘calculus’ if we don’t know?
- How do we account for the fact that a speck once washed or brushed out on the eye is quickly forgotten, but torture leaves physical and psychological scars that can last a lifetime? Or are these memorable specks?

If 3^^^3 people actually existed, then a 1/3^^^3 probability would not be trivial in absolute terms – for instance, torturing each existing person with probability 1/3^^^3 would be very bad, while it’s ridiculously trivial in our world.

I agree, but not because they’re somehow incommensurable; rather, suffering is linear with single pokes across multiple people but greater than linear when the same person is poked more than once, because of emotional effects on top of the raw pain from the pokes. I would indeed say there is some N between 1 and 5000 where N pokes to 1 person goes from better to worse than 1 poke to 5000 people, but I don’t see it as the “magic poke”; it’s just the point where a certain increasing nonlinear function crosses a certain constant value. In practice, we don’t and can’t know the function or the value, so we generally have to decide on principle, and this principle may include discrete “ouchie” and “brutalization” categories; but that doesn’t mean they’re not both “just” suffering.