Rule 1 of thinking in infinity: results may be counterintuitive and this does not mean you can generalize that surprising result back into the finite world.
The fact is that there is more than 1 person being tortured currently in the real world who will be tortured until their life ends. Making this finite makes the answer obvious in the other direction, which is why they chose to frame it in terms of infinity, to make themselves seem smarter for understanding the “unintuitive” answer
I think i just disagree with the utilitarian mindset. Trying to chart and compare everyone’s happiness like this, I don’t believe it can effectively be extrapolated into this situation. If it’s a pure mathematical problem, sure, you’re correct no torture! But I don’t follow this model at all.
If we’re dealing with these infinities, we don’t even need to torture him. We can make him prick his finger every day for the rest of eternity, and technically that’s still -infinite utils. But no one actually cares that much about this person, do they? If I were that person I wouldn’t give a fuck. Diabetics do that shit for free!
Yeah I think one of the major problems with utilitarianism is that it pushes ethics back onto refining the accuracy of a model. So the result is that the people who naively follow it (as in, people like me who have never actually engaged with the literature) will always be able to justify spending more time refining that model. This is a super common problem with online debate bro types.
But even if it’s not a great mental tool for individuals, when you’re talking about large organizations I’m not sure there’s an alternative other than… just guessing and letting the outcomes arise however they happen to.
Also, there are major issues with how exactly you define the good that you’re supposedly maximizing for, as well as the fact that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, you would need to understand the ramifications of an action unto the end of eternity in order to actually judge it
The other problem with utilitarianism was very elegantly pointed out by @Chapo_is_Red . “Who the fuck made this button?”
A lot of utilitarian ideas tend to accept some false dichotomy or some condition as absolute. Like “is torture ok if it stops terrorist attacks?” But wait, why are terrorists attacking in the first place? And why are we assuming the torture will work? etc etc.
If we’re dealing with these infinities, we don’t even need to torture him. We can make him prick his finger every day for the rest of eternity, and technically that’s still -infinite utils.
Definitely an interesting addition to the thought experiment, and I think I’d have to agree with you. One dude can take the finger-prick hell if it brings about FALGSC for the rest of us. So then the interesting question is, how bad does this torture need to be before we’d say it’s probably not worth the solution of finite problems in our world? I don’t have a good answer for it.
Another aspect is that the “torture” in the initial framing can be a lot of things. What I imagine when someone says that is probably different from what you imagine. So we’d have to define exactly what kind of torture we’re talking about.
also why start with happiness or pleasure, if there is one thing the Stoics can teach us is that even Epicurianism isn’t fail safe and we should really consider our own nature as social animals first, this doesn’t mean serving for the death machine but taking seriously that we only thrive as an instrumental part of a greater whole, not seeking happiness and pleasure (also those are kinda bourgeois and liberal but that’s for another day)
I think i just disagree with the utilitarian mindset. Trying to chart and compare everyone’s happiness like this, I don’t believe it can effectively be extrapolated into this situation. If it’s a pure mathematical problem, sure, you’re correct no torture! But I don’t follow this model at all.
Relevant comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03
What would Picard do?
:picard-excited:
or
:picard-annoyed:
This is just The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
we can write the utilities from both outcomes as an inequality. the sophomoric utilitarian might simply write this as utils from current world on the left side, and utils from current world + utils from erasing unhappiness - utils of perpetual suffering.
however, this model neglects something very important. advanced utilitarians may realize we are lacking the probability of masochism. indeed, some people may actually enjoy this eternal suffering. current studies estimate that 1-5% of the population are masochists. we will take the average as 3% of the population being masochists. assume that torture for the median human is more painful than it is pleasurable for the masochists.
following conventions, we assign median human -1000 util/time and the masochist +100 util/time. we can then rewrite the right side of the inequality as follows
utils from current world + utils from eliminating unhappiness - ( 1000 utils/time)(0.97)(infinity (time) ) + (100 utils /time) (0.03)(infinity (time)).
we can then reduce the infinity terms to simply infinity as infinity times any number is equal to infinity. the infinities cancel, and we are left with
utils from current world + utils from eliminating unhappiness
which is necessarily bigger than the left side utils from current world.
therefore, we push the button.
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