Revisiting torture vs. dust specks

My (unfinished, don't ask for too much detail) ethical theory is based on rights, which can be waived by the would-be victim of an act that would otherwise be a rights violation. So in principle, if I could poll the 3^^^3 people, I would expect them to waive the right not to experience the dust specks. They aren't responsible for what I do, but my expectations of their dispositions about my choice inform that choice.

Not if each of them considers it a wrong choice. Refusing to multiply goes both ways, and no math can debate this choice: whatever thought experiment you present, an intuitive response would be stumped on top and given as a reply.

I did say:

I haven't yet worked out a good way to draw the line in the escalation scenario, since I suspect that "whatever level of discomfort I, personally, wouldn't voluntarily experience to save some random person from 50 years of torture" is unlikely to be the right answer.

The scenario you present is among those I have no suitable answer for for this reason. However, I lean towards preferring the 50 years of torture for 1 person over 49 years for 100.

And this is preference for fuzzies over utility, inability to shut up and multiply.

If this is true, then by reductio, preference of utility is incorrect.

It's in the feed now, and everyone subscribed will see it. You can not unpublish on the Internet! Can you somehow "undelete" it, I think it's fine enough a post.

If the utility function for torture were negative infinity:

• any choice with a nonzero probability of leading to torture gains infinite disutility,
• any torture of any duration has the same disutility - infinite,
• the criteria for torture vs. non-torture become rigid - something which is almost torture is literally infinitely better than something which is barely torture,

et cetera.

In other words, I don't think this is a rational moral stance.

Actually, I think your right. The escalation argument has caught me in a contradiction. I wonder why I didn't see it last time around.

I still prefer the specs though. My prior in favor of the specs is strong enough that I have to conclude that there's something wrong with the escalation argument that I'm not presently clever enough to find. It's a bit like reading a proof that 2+2 = 5. You know you've just read a proof, and you checked each step, but you still, justifiably, don't believe it. It's far more likely that the proof fooled you in some subtle way than it is that arithmetic is actually inconsistent.

Hello. I think the Escalation Argument can sometimes be found on the wrong side of Zeno's Paradox. Say there is negative utility to both dust specks and torture, where dust specks have finite negative utility. Both dust specks and torture can be assigned to a 'infliction of discomfort' scale that corresponds to a segment of the real number line. At minimal torture, there is a singularity in the utility function - it goes to negative infinity.

At any point on the number line corresponding to an infliction of discomfort between dust specks and minimal torture, the utility is negative but finite. The Escalation Argument begins in the torture zone, and slowly diminishes the duration of the torture. I believe the argument breaks down when the infliction of discomfort is no longer torture. At that point, non-torture has higher utility than all preceding torture scenarios. If it's always torture, then you never get to dust specks.

Orthonormal, you're rehashing things I've covered in the post. Yes, many reasonable discounting methods (like exponential discounting in the "proximity argument") do have a specific step where the derivative becomes negative.

What's more, that fact doesn't look especially unintuitive once you zoom in on it; do the math and see. For example, in the proximity argument the step involves the additional people suffering so far away from you that even an infinity of them sums up to less than e.g. one close relative of yours. Not so unrealistic for everyday humans, is it?

The proximity effect, as described in the post, makes your "derandomizing" step invalid.

Sure, makes sense. I imagine the probability is much less than 3^^^3/1000 of the consequences I'm hypothesizing, though, which makes the dust specks still worse.