No one can define what a “unit” “of” “pain” is with any specificity.
Maybe (maybe) we can imagine that “1000 units of pain” is the average “pain” of a torture. Though again no one can actually define pain without appealing to assertive logic.
But I cannot actually comprehend how one can turn that into “999 units of pain”. It is gibberish to me.
Second
The “pain” caused by torture and the “pain” caused by dust specks are simply incommensurable. Perhaps there’s a fuzzy diving zone where the ratio between the two grows hyperbolically, but ultimately they cannot be compared.
Third,
Death is often preferable to torture. It is easy to find historical examples of such torture.
Fourth,
There is an a priori deontological duty to not commit certain acts of torture.
This is at least as clear to me as the raw assertion that pleasure is good at the heart of your utilitarian calculus.
Torture for whom, dust specks for whom? Tiny micro aggravations experienced by huge numbers of people aren't experientially equivalent to agonising pain experienced by one subject.. utilitarianism says that the are morally equivalent, because you just multiply number of people by amount of pain....but you don't have to believe that. Since the two situations actually are different, why should they be weighted the same?
I provided an argument for it in the article--the spectrum considerations, and then I provided two concrete cases of spectrums. Tell me which step of the argument you reject.
Remember the "for whom," question. It isn't physically possible for one person to experience 3^^^3 dust-in-the-eye incidents, so the only way you can get a sufficiently large multiplier to equate a dust speck with torture is by assuming a huge number of people.
So you are multiplying one thing, the number of people, x, by another thing, y, the level of of pain, to get a theoretical, notional value: x*y=z.
You explain at length why some values of z are greater than others, but that's not the problem. The problem is the notional, abstract nature of z.
A large amount of agony endured by one subject just isn't the same thing as a tiny amount of inconvenience experienced by many...however many. To use a physics analogy , a widely dispersed cloud of dust particles can have the same mass, a million tonnes say, as a single large asteroid...but it still isn't the *same thing*. It's equivalent in one way, by mass, but not in another, volume. Which should count the more? At this point you hit an is-ought gap. What purely physical or mathematical consideration tells you that diffuse micro-suffering counts as much as concentrated macro-suffering? It is of course an assumption of utilitarianism that things work that way, but notice the word "assumption". Utilitarianism isn't a mathematical theorem or physical fact: it's an ethical claim, so it's on the wrong side of the is-ought divide.
Look, I provided an argument for this in the article. Explain where the argument went wrong -- you're not doing that. All that you're doing is pointing out that non-utilitarians would reject the straightforwardly utilitarian argument for it -- an argument I haven't made, that even Coase's Ghost accepts.
Maybe the whole thing assumes utilitarianism. If so, it would be better to make it explicit that it is not an argument for utilitarianism, just bullet biting about its consequences.
Of course, the original Torture versus Dust Specks article had the same problem.
It is not a bullet bite if we have independent reasons to accept the utilitarian judgment about a case. Utilitarianism says some number of dust specks are worse than a torture -- that turns out to be correct, as I argue here.
In the future, it might be worth reading my arguments for a position, rather than dismissing them out of hand, assuming they just assume utilitarianism.
It doesn't turn out to be correct without assuming utilitarianism. What you have written does not constitute an independent argument for utilitarianism.
First
No one can define what a “unit” “of” “pain” is with any specificity.
Maybe (maybe) we can imagine that “1000 units of pain” is the average “pain” of a torture. Though again no one can actually define pain without appealing to assertive logic.
But I cannot actually comprehend how one can turn that into “999 units of pain”. It is gibberish to me.
Second
The “pain” caused by torture and the “pain” caused by dust specks are simply incommensurable. Perhaps there’s a fuzzy diving zone where the ratio between the two grows hyperbolically, but ultimately they cannot be compared.
Third,
Death is often preferable to torture. It is easy to find historical examples of such torture.
Fourth,
There is an a priori deontological duty to not commit certain acts of torture.
This is at least as clear to me as the raw assertion that pleasure is good at the heart of your utilitarian calculus.
1 You don't have to--we all know what a dust speck is. But you obviously can. https://benthams.substack.com/p/addressing-a-bad-objection-to-utilitarianism
2 The claim of incommensurability would mean that you can't compare them and neither is worse--not that torture is worse.
3 Sure but some number of deaths is worse than one torture. A billion dying is worse than one torture.
4 Irrelevant, this is about axiology not deontology.
We know that humans suck at reasoning about large numbers.
Torture for whom, dust specks for whom? Tiny micro aggravations experienced by huge numbers of people aren't experientially equivalent to agonising pain experienced by one subject.. utilitarianism says that the are morally equivalent, because you just multiply number of people by amount of pain....but you don't have to believe that. Since the two situations actually are different, why should they be weighted the same?
I provided an argument for it in the article--the spectrum considerations, and then I provided two concrete cases of spectrums. Tell me which step of the argument you reject.
Remember the "for whom," question. It isn't physically possible for one person to experience 3^^^3 dust-in-the-eye incidents, so the only way you can get a sufficiently large multiplier to equate a dust speck with torture is by assuming a huge number of people.
So you are multiplying one thing, the number of people, x, by another thing, y, the level of of pain, to get a theoretical, notional value: x*y=z.
You explain at length why some values of z are greater than others, but that's not the problem. The problem is the notional, abstract nature of z.
A large amount of agony endured by one subject just isn't the same thing as a tiny amount of inconvenience experienced by many...however many. To use a physics analogy , a widely dispersed cloud of dust particles can have the same mass, a million tonnes say, as a single large asteroid...but it still isn't the *same thing*. It's equivalent in one way, by mass, but not in another, volume. Which should count the more? At this point you hit an is-ought gap. What purely physical or mathematical consideration tells you that diffuse micro-suffering counts as much as concentrated macro-suffering? It is of course an assumption of utilitarianism that things work that way, but notice the word "assumption". Utilitarianism isn't a mathematical theorem or physical fact: it's an ethical claim, so it's on the wrong side of the is-ought divide.
Look, I provided an argument for this in the article. Explain where the argument went wrong -- you're not doing that. All that you're doing is pointing out that non-utilitarians would reject the straightforwardly utilitarian argument for it -- an argument I haven't made, that even Coase's Ghost accepts.
Maybe the whole thing assumes utilitarianism. If so, it would be better to make it explicit that it is not an argument for utilitarianism, just bullet biting about its consequences.
Of course, the original Torture versus Dust Specks article had the same problem.
It is not a bullet bite if we have independent reasons to accept the utilitarian judgment about a case. Utilitarianism says some number of dust specks are worse than a torture -- that turns out to be correct, as I argue here.
In the future, it might be worth reading my arguments for a position, rather than dismissing them out of hand, assuming they just assume utilitarianism.
It doesn't turn out to be correct without assuming utilitarianism. What you have written does not constitute an independent argument for utilitarianism.
I used to think that (for decades), but no longer, as I discuss in the philosophy chapters
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Can you just post the relevant quote defending the view?