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I definitely think it is obvious what Eliezer is going for: 3^^^3 people getting dusk specks in their eyes being the favorable outcome. I understand his reasonig, but I'm not sure I agree with the simple Benthamite way of calculating utility. Popular among modern philosophers is preference utilitarianism, where the preferences of the people involved are what constitute utility. Now consider that each of those 3^^^3 people has a preference that people not be tortured. Assuming that the negative utility each individual computes for someone being tortured is larger in value than the negative utility of a speck of dust in their eyes, then even discounting the person being tortured (which of course you might as well given the disparity in magnitude, which is more or less Eliezer's point) you would have higher utility with the flecks of dust.
There are in fact numerous other ways to calculate the utility so such that 3^^^3 people with dust flecks in their eyes is preferable to one person undergoing fifty years of torture while still preserving the essential consequentialist nature of the argument. John Stuart Mill might argue there is a qualitative difference between torture and dust flecks in your eyes that keeps you from adding them in this way while an existentialist might argue that pain and pleasure aren't what should be computing with the utility function but something closer to "human flourishing" or "eudaimonia" and that in this calculation any number of dust flecks has zero utility while torture has a large negative utility. It all depends on how you define your utility function.