EPTLW strikes me as similar to all the highly emotive supposed counterexamples to consequentialism. On the one side, you've got limbic system triggering language like "unimaginably intense agony", and on the other you've got a boring old representation of a number whose size our empathy is utterly incapable of approaching. When I adjust for this bias, EPTLW is clearly false.
Interesting. Let's consider a concrete example--suppose that a person gained all the knowledge on wikipedia while being waterboarded. Would you really say that they're well off?
Maybe. I can't intuit what it's like to have that much information as conscious knowledge. And Wikipedia doesn't scratch the surface of the possible knowledge in the universe relevant to EPTLW.
When I say it seems similar to emotive objections to consequentialism, imagine something like "How could you consequentialists say that it's morally good to torture a child to prevent 10^67 stubbed toes?" You and I are in no way equipped to empathize with 10^67 stubbed toes, but we still ought to conclude that someone who says one tortured child is worse simply doesn't appreciate what 10^67 means.
One of them is, and this may sound arrogant, but I feel like I actually just do intuitively appreciate how big 10^68 is in the context of ethics--my intuitions do actually say that 10^40 pinpricks are worse than one torture. Like, I don't think it's illegal to just say that you trust your own intuitions because they've been right about lots of cases when others have been wrong, even with big numbers.
Second, I actually do think that the fact that consequentialists says that a lot of pinpricks is worse than a torture may, in a vacuum, count against it because it's unintuitive. But I think in that there are other countervailing intuitions that make it so that, even if we did not think that consequentialism were correct, we'd still conclude 10^58 dustspecks are worse than one torture (E.g. the intuition that, for any bad experience, a lot of experiences slightly less bad will collectively be worse).
Third, I think that we can gain intuitions about this by thinking about nearbye cases. Think about a time you've learned something while having a bad headache. If you'd learned twice as much, could that really have been a good experience while you were having it? What about three times? Assume the headache was very intense.
Fourth, I think there's a big difference between the two kinds of intuitions. Everyone has the intuition that a pinprick is bad--people just don't think that infinity slightly bad things can add up to be as bad as one very bad things. But it doesn't seem like, at the margin, an extra piece of knowledge that brings one no pleasure is valuable after one has a lot of knowledge.
(1) Doesn't strike me as arrogant, but I wonder whether you're just using "intuition" to refer to something I'd call an expert's "highly routinized application of reasoning".
(2) I fully agree. The intuitions per se do weigh against my conclusions, in both the anti-pluralist case and the deontological one. I think both intuitions are strongly overridden by taking the numerical part of the proposition seriously and correcting for likely intuitive bias appropriately.
(3) I've won high-pressure tournament Scrabble games with the understandable tightness in my chest and throbbing of my temples, and yes, the intrinsic positive value of my difficult finds and clever strategic decisions, could have been further improved if the finds would have been more difficult and the strategy more clever.
(4) This seems like question-begging. Thinking that marginal utils work in a similar way with things other than pleasure as they do with pleasure, is almost just what I mean by pluralism.
I should also describe a pluralist take on waterboarding: a large part of what makes it so horrendous is the helplessness and exploitation, the context of larger experience strands in which it's situated. A similar amount of pain might never be *good*, but it could certainly be much less bad in a very different context.
1) I just take intuitions to be what seems the case non-inferentially.
3) But just imagine those both increasing greatly in the same direction--I don't think it could be made better.
4) I don't think it's question begging. It's just an intuition.
One worry is that in the case of the torture vs dust specks we're comparing a thing we can imagine to one we can't. But in this case, we're comparing two things that we can imagine roughly equally well, so scope neglect would go both ways.
3) I would tend to agree. But that's not what EPTLW asserts. Proportionally increasing suffering might remain ahead of a non-hedonic intrinsic good. What I deny is that that the negative utils of a *constant* suffering must remain larger than the positive util asymptote of a non-hedonic intrinsic good.
EPTLW strikes me as similar to all the highly emotive supposed counterexamples to consequentialism. On the one side, you've got limbic system triggering language like "unimaginably intense agony", and on the other you've got a boring old representation of a number whose size our empathy is utterly incapable of approaching. When I adjust for this bias, EPTLW is clearly false.
Interesting. Let's consider a concrete example--suppose that a person gained all the knowledge on wikipedia while being waterboarded. Would you really say that they're well off?
Maybe. I can't intuit what it's like to have that much information as conscious knowledge. And Wikipedia doesn't scratch the surface of the possible knowledge in the universe relevant to EPTLW.
When I say it seems similar to emotive objections to consequentialism, imagine something like "How could you consequentialists say that it's morally good to torture a child to prevent 10^67 stubbed toes?" You and I are in no way equipped to empathize with 10^67 stubbed toes, but we still ought to conclude that someone who says one tortured child is worse simply doesn't appreciate what 10^67 means.
I'd make a few points.
One of them is, and this may sound arrogant, but I feel like I actually just do intuitively appreciate how big 10^68 is in the context of ethics--my intuitions do actually say that 10^40 pinpricks are worse than one torture. Like, I don't think it's illegal to just say that you trust your own intuitions because they've been right about lots of cases when others have been wrong, even with big numbers.
Second, I actually do think that the fact that consequentialists says that a lot of pinpricks is worse than a torture may, in a vacuum, count against it because it's unintuitive. But I think in that there are other countervailing intuitions that make it so that, even if we did not think that consequentialism were correct, we'd still conclude 10^58 dustspecks are worse than one torture (E.g. the intuition that, for any bad experience, a lot of experiences slightly less bad will collectively be worse).
Third, I think that we can gain intuitions about this by thinking about nearbye cases. Think about a time you've learned something while having a bad headache. If you'd learned twice as much, could that really have been a good experience while you were having it? What about three times? Assume the headache was very intense.
Fourth, I think there's a big difference between the two kinds of intuitions. Everyone has the intuition that a pinprick is bad--people just don't think that infinity slightly bad things can add up to be as bad as one very bad things. But it doesn't seem like, at the margin, an extra piece of knowledge that brings one no pleasure is valuable after one has a lot of knowledge.
(1) Doesn't strike me as arrogant, but I wonder whether you're just using "intuition" to refer to something I'd call an expert's "highly routinized application of reasoning".
(2) I fully agree. The intuitions per se do weigh against my conclusions, in both the anti-pluralist case and the deontological one. I think both intuitions are strongly overridden by taking the numerical part of the proposition seriously and correcting for likely intuitive bias appropriately.
(3) I've won high-pressure tournament Scrabble games with the understandable tightness in my chest and throbbing of my temples, and yes, the intrinsic positive value of my difficult finds and clever strategic decisions, could have been further improved if the finds would have been more difficult and the strategy more clever.
(4) This seems like question-begging. Thinking that marginal utils work in a similar way with things other than pleasure as they do with pleasure, is almost just what I mean by pluralism.
I should also describe a pluralist take on waterboarding: a large part of what makes it so horrendous is the helplessness and exploitation, the context of larger experience strands in which it's situated. A similar amount of pain might never be *good*, but it could certainly be much less bad in a very different context.
1) I just take intuitions to be what seems the case non-inferentially.
3) But just imagine those both increasing greatly in the same direction--I don't think it could be made better.
4) I don't think it's question begging. It's just an intuition.
One worry is that in the case of the torture vs dust specks we're comparing a thing we can imagine to one we can't. But in this case, we're comparing two things that we can imagine roughly equally well, so scope neglect would go both ways.
3) I would tend to agree. But that's not what EPTLW asserts. Proportionally increasing suffering might remain ahead of a non-hedonic intrinsic good. What I deny is that that the negative utils of a *constant* suffering must remain larger than the positive util asymptote of a non-hedonic intrinsic good.