If asked I were willing to have a dustspeck in my eye for 5s to prevent a guy from getting tortured if say sure. I would think very lowly If someone said no to that question. Given this it seems like we should all vote for getting a dust speck to save the guy.
suppose we could choose between one of two outcomes: (1) a million people get a single bit of dust in their eyes, causing a slight amount of irritation that lasts for less then a second, or (2) one person is tortured intensely and long enough so that the quantity is slightly less then the aggregate quantity of pain had by all in (1). outcome (2) seems worse than (1), since the single person in (2) is made way worse-off than any of the other people in (1). i believe that equal goods or equal bads matter more or less given how well-off or worse-off the person receiving the benefits or burdens is. this is the priority view, and is not based on the rule of diminishing marginal utility.
I think this is a complex issue. Let's not even consider dust in the eye. Let's instead say that we have a choice between viciously torturing 1 person and having an unfathomable amount of people experiencing a beautiful day in the 70s. Causally speaking even though the beauutiful day will be pleasant it will result in x amount of suffering that is greater than torturing one person. Therefore based on the reasoning given we should torture the man instead. I think the absurdity of this conclusion speaks to issues with this reasoning.
Why can’t you create a threshold for the difference between the two amounts of pain units? For example: On a scale from 1 to 100 one gets 100 units of pain and 101 people all get 1 unit of pain. In that Situation the second option would be much better because the difference between the two units of pain is so great such that I would favor the second option, even if we would Scale up the people to infinity. In another situation the pain contribution could be different such that it meets the threshold where I would say the First option is better. So it’s not rly about how many people, it’s about the pain difference in the two scenarios. Great video!
Thanks for the feedback. The issue is that if, for every amount of pain, if we can slightly lessen it, but inflict it upon more people, making that overall situation worse, then a repetition of that process would lead to any amount of suffering being comparable to any other amount. You are correct to identify that this does not require assuming that 1 person with 100 units of pain outweighs 101 people with 1 unit of pain. This argument just proves that smaller pains must be in some way comparable to larger pains, it does not require proving that they are linearly comparable. This doesn't prove that 101 people with one unit of pain outweighs one person with 100 units of pain, merely that 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 people with 1 unit of pain outweigh 1 person with 100 units of pain.
Descriptive Egoist here; I'd certainly prevent the torture (while recognizing that someone else may choose the prevent the dust specs); I would be much more comfortable inflicting (or not preventing given a reasonable capacity to do so) any amount of dust specks than inflicting (or not preventing given a reasonable capacity to do so) torture on any individual. The main error that I believe that you make is that you decompose suffering into "units of pain" that are interchangeable between people and between types of suffering, that also have mathematical properties. This is a very strong claim that I see no justification for. The closest justification that you 'debunked' was at the end was your claim that 'difference does not mean that they are incomparable'. While I agree with this, your dust spec/torture thought experiment is doing much more than simply 'comparing' the different types of suffering as I laid out. While different types of suffering can be compared in some sense, they certainly can't be decomposed into units of pain; furthermore every individual subjectively determines what type of suffering is worse or if (s)he even cares about the suffering of others. p.s. I loved your chats with David Friedman; he is my favorite intellectual today.
A few things 1 I'd be happy to hash this out in conversation on youtube at some point 2 Thanks, I too loved my chats with Friedman 3 I think that units of pain are obviously extremely imprecise, and it's hard to compare precisely between different types of pain, I think there is certainly a comparison, that could be done in theory. It's easier to think of it as a rough probabalistic map of pain, than a precise number. However, it's clear that very different types of pain can be compared, we can clearly say that malaria is worse than a toe stub, even though the pain is very different. Thus they are directly comparable. It also seems that pain could be measured precisely with perfect information, it's purely a chemical phenomenon. It also seems clear that pain being slightly lessened is coherent, we could imagine two identical tortures, but one employs a slightly more painful method, making it slightly more painful. From this we can derive that A Different types of pain are comparable B There is no threshold of pain that is categorically worse than anything below the threshold C Therefore, enough small pains in conjunction are worse than one big pain And from this it seems clear that D 10!!! dust specks are worse than one torture 4 In terms of your point about different peoples pain being incomparable, this seems again, false. While it's hard to calculate precisely, we can still make rough judgements. For example, we can say that the pain of the holocaust outweighs the pain of me stubbing my toe.
Sure, I'd love to chat about this. Your claim that pain can be measured precisely with perfect information doesn't sound convincing to me; sure, you can observe chemical reactions, but I don't see how you get from there to a comparison operator that determines which pain experience is greater. I think that there can be a scale on which some types of pain can be increased or lessened; for example, you can be hit with a bat, and intuitively, the harder you get hit, the more pain you would experience. However, such scales would necessarily encompass a very narrow range of experience. I would say that most pairs of pain experience don't have a well-defined ordering. (If we map this onto mathematics, we can easily compare 1-dimensional numbers, but it is much harder to compare pairs of numbers; e.g. in order to compare (1,4) and (3,2) we need some other mechanism of comparison rather than the numbers themselves.) However, even if I grant that we can somehow objectively measure pain and map it onto a single number, the biggest problem with your line of reasoning is that it is meaningful to sum up many different pain experiences across many people. This is the step that I by far have the most problem with. I totally reject the notion that 10!!! people experiencing slight discomfort can be meaningfully aggregated to be equivalent to (or be worse than) the torture of a single individual. In other words, why should I use the SUM() operator to aggregate all the pain experiences of these people? Why not MAX() or something else? (Intuitively, I would probably use some aggregation function that is monotonically increasing, but where the 'total cost' of the pain inflicted by the dust would be bounded by the sum of the pain experience of 10,000 individual specs of dust.)
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the best way to think about the original question is the following: The way to decide is to posit that you give each of the 10!!! people the option: "You either will have a spec of dust in your eye, or one of you (chosen randomly) will be tortured." Now suppose that I was one of the people that is offered this choice. I would definitely take the spec of dust in my eye. Therefore, inflicting 10!!! specs of dust (or preventing the torture) would be my overall answer as well. (If I had some reason to believe that most people would answer differently, then maybe I would have to think more about it, but I'm pretty sure I'm safe on this question) [edit: in order to make the comparison more valid, the question should probably specify that either 1 person will be tortured or 10!!! specs of dust will be inflicted, and the decision will be made based on some aggregation (majority?) of the answers given. This is to avoid the situation where everyone says they prefer someone to be tortured and we end up with 10!!! tortures, which would be a large deviation from the original hypothetical. This doesn't change any of my analysis though.]
@@yevgeniygrechka6431 1 I think that, while it's true that perhaps you would make that choice, I was attempting to show that one who was perfectly rational would not make that choice 2 The argument about continually making the pain slightly less intense, but affecting more people still applies 3 10!!! is such a massive number that it's effectively statistical noise.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105 1. I don't agree with your 'perfectly rational' descriptor. If you think its true that I would make that choice, presumably you would also think its true that the vast majority of people would make this choice. These are people expressing their actual preferences; I would say that this expression of preferences is the definition of rationality. 2. You didn't address why you choose to use the SUM() aggregation on these people's experiences. The situation that you describe is a bit like an extreme form of insurance, and the insurance industry exists precisely because people are much more willing to suffer a string of small losses than to even have a remote possibility of incurring a big loss.
Hey Deity Defeater. Sorry to comment here, but I couldn't find any contact info elsewhere. I am a Christian apologist looking to set up some debates. I noticed you've been doing some of those recently! And you seem like a great interlocutor. If you'd like, send a message to the email in my channel's "about" section and we'll set something up. Otherwise, feel free to ignore and delete. ~ Chris
If asked I were willing to have a dustspeck in my eye for 5s to prevent a guy from getting tortured if say sure.
I would think very lowly If someone said no to that question.
Given this it seems like we should all vote for getting a dust speck to save the guy.
We do indeed live in a society.
This video is a great example of why utilitarianism cannot possibly be the best moral system
No part assumed utilitarianism.
1:35 “any tiny amount of pain below the cutoff outweighs any tiny amount above the cutoff” why would the threshold have to be set like that?
How can you claim to be “Bentham’s Bulldog” when your utilitarian analysis lacks a shred of analysis on fecundity
suppose we could choose between one of two outcomes:
(1) a million people get a single bit of dust in their eyes, causing a slight amount of irritation that lasts for less then a second,
or
(2) one person is tortured intensely and long enough so that the quantity is slightly less then the aggregate quantity of pain had by all in (1).
outcome (2) seems worse than (1), since the single person in (2) is made way worse-off than any of the other people in (1). i believe that equal goods or equal bads matter more or less given how well-off or worse-off the person receiving the benefits or burdens is.
this is the priority view, and is not based on the rule of diminishing marginal utility.
I think this is a complex issue. Let's not even consider dust in the eye. Let's instead say that we have a choice between viciously torturing 1 person and having an unfathomable amount of people experiencing a beautiful day in the 70s. Causally speaking even though the beauutiful day will be pleasant it will result in x amount of suffering that is greater than torturing one person. Therefore based on the reasoning given we should torture the man instead. I think the absurdity of this conclusion speaks to issues with this reasoning.
Why can’t you create a threshold for the difference between the two amounts of pain units?
For example:
On a scale from 1 to 100 one gets 100 units of pain and 101 people all get 1 unit of pain.
In that Situation the second option would be much better because the difference between the two units of pain is so great such that I would favor the second option, even if we would Scale up the people to infinity.
In another situation the pain contribution could be different such that it meets the threshold where I would say the First option is better.
So it’s not rly about how many people, it’s about the pain difference in the two scenarios.
Great video!
Thanks for the feedback. The issue is that if, for every amount of pain, if we can slightly lessen it, but inflict it upon more people, making that overall situation worse, then a repetition of that process would lead to any amount of suffering being comparable to any other amount. You are correct to identify that this does not require assuming that 1 person with 100 units of pain outweighs 101 people with 1 unit of pain. This argument just proves that smaller pains must be in some way comparable to larger pains, it does not require proving that they are linearly comparable. This doesn't prove that 101 people with one unit of pain outweighs one person with 100 units of pain, merely that 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 people with 1 unit of pain outweigh 1 person with 100 units of pain.
I emailed you a couple of times. Make sure to check .
Descriptive Egoist here; I'd certainly prevent the torture (while recognizing that someone else may choose the prevent the dust specs); I would be much more comfortable inflicting (or not preventing given a reasonable capacity to do so) any amount of dust specks than inflicting (or not preventing given a reasonable capacity to do so) torture on any individual.
The main error that I believe that you make is that you decompose suffering into "units of pain" that are interchangeable between people and between types of suffering, that also have mathematical properties. This is a very strong claim that I see no justification for.
The closest justification that you 'debunked' was at the end was your claim that 'difference does not mean that they are incomparable'. While I agree with this, your dust spec/torture thought experiment is doing much more than simply 'comparing' the different types of suffering as I laid out. While different types of suffering can be compared in some sense, they certainly can't be decomposed into units of pain; furthermore every individual subjectively determines what type of suffering is worse or if (s)he even cares about the suffering of others.
p.s.
I loved your chats with David Friedman; he is my favorite intellectual today.
A few things
1 I'd be happy to hash this out in conversation on youtube at some point
2 Thanks, I too loved my chats with Friedman
3 I think that units of pain are obviously extremely imprecise, and it's hard to compare precisely between different types of pain, I think there is certainly a comparison, that could be done in theory. It's easier to think of it as a rough probabalistic map of pain, than a precise number. However, it's clear that very different types of pain can be compared, we can clearly say that malaria is worse than a toe stub, even though the pain is very different. Thus they are directly comparable. It also seems that pain could be measured precisely with perfect information, it's purely a chemical phenomenon. It also seems clear that pain being slightly lessened is coherent, we could imagine two identical tortures, but one employs a slightly more painful method, making it slightly more painful. From this we can derive that
A Different types of pain are comparable
B There is no threshold of pain that is categorically worse than anything below the threshold
C Therefore, enough small pains in conjunction are worse than one big pain
And from this it seems clear that
D 10!!! dust specks are worse than one torture
4 In terms of your point about different peoples pain being incomparable, this seems again, false. While it's hard to calculate precisely, we can still make rough judgements. For example, we can say that the pain of the holocaust outweighs the pain of me stubbing my toe.
Sure, I'd love to chat about this.
Your claim that pain can be measured precisely with perfect information doesn't sound convincing to me; sure, you can observe chemical reactions, but I don't see how you get from there to a comparison operator that determines which pain experience is greater.
I think that there can be a scale on which some types of pain can be increased or lessened; for example, you can be hit with a bat, and intuitively, the harder you get hit, the more pain you would experience. However, such scales would necessarily encompass a very narrow range of experience. I would say that most pairs of pain experience don't have a well-defined ordering. (If we map this onto mathematics, we can easily compare 1-dimensional numbers, but it is much harder to compare pairs of numbers; e.g. in order to compare (1,4) and (3,2) we need some other mechanism of comparison rather than the numbers themselves.)
However, even if I grant that we can somehow objectively measure pain and map it onto a single number, the biggest problem with your line of reasoning is that it is meaningful to sum up many different pain experiences across many people. This is the step that I by far have the most problem with. I totally reject the notion that 10!!! people experiencing slight discomfort can be meaningfully aggregated to be equivalent to (or be worse than) the torture of a single individual.
In other words, why should I use the SUM() operator to aggregate all the pain experiences of these people? Why not MAX() or something else? (Intuitively, I would probably use some aggregation function that is monotonically increasing, but where the 'total cost' of the pain inflicted by the dust would be bounded by the sum of the pain experience of 10,000 individual specs of dust.)
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the best way to think about the original question is the following:
The way to decide is to posit that you give each of the 10!!! people the option: "You either will have a spec of dust in your eye, or one of you (chosen randomly) will be tortured."
Now suppose that I was one of the people that is offered this choice. I would definitely take the spec of dust in my eye.
Therefore, inflicting 10!!! specs of dust (or preventing the torture) would be my overall answer as well. (If I had some reason to believe that most people would answer differently, then maybe I would have to think more about it, but I'm pretty sure I'm safe on this question)
[edit: in order to make the comparison more valid, the question should probably specify that either 1 person will be tortured or 10!!! specs of dust will be inflicted, and the decision will be made based on some aggregation (majority?) of the answers given. This is to avoid the situation where everyone says they prefer someone to be tortured and we end up with 10!!! tortures, which would be a large deviation from the original hypothetical. This doesn't change any of my analysis though.]
@@yevgeniygrechka6431
1 I think that, while it's true that perhaps you would make that choice, I was attempting to show that one who was perfectly rational would not make that choice
2 The argument about continually making the pain slightly less intense, but affecting more people still applies
3 10!!! is such a massive number that it's effectively statistical noise.
@@deliberationunderidealcond5105
1. I don't agree with your 'perfectly rational' descriptor. If you think its true that I would make that choice, presumably you would also think its true that the vast majority of people would make this choice. These are people expressing their actual preferences; I would say that this expression of preferences is the definition of rationality.
2. You didn't address why you choose to use the SUM() aggregation on these people's experiences. The situation that you describe is a bit like an extreme form of insurance, and the insurance industry exists precisely because people are much more willing to suffer a string of small losses than to even have a remote possibility of incurring a big loss.
Good video amigo
Thank you fellow amigo
Hey Deity Defeater. Sorry to comment here, but I couldn't find any contact info elsewhere. I am a Christian apologist looking to set up some debates. I noticed you've been doing some of those recently! And you seem like a great interlocutor. If you'd like, send a message to the email in my channel's "about" section and we'll set something up. Otherwise, feel free to ignore and delete. ~ Chris
Just saw this, I'll debate you any time.