My immediate reaction is to think that all of your alleged counterexamples rest on misconceiving of the objective values at stake. E.g.:
* There's no value to knowledge of random factoids (which is all that most people know about Joan of Arc). If the imagined conspiracy led to sufficiently widespread fundamental misconceptions about deep and general historical processes and explanations then I do think that could be worse than one person being tortured.
* There's no special value to achieving arbitrarily formulated goals. The formulation doesn't matter. What matters is achieving something worthwhile. And whether you (as a trustworthy, non-threatening person) can walk through walls doesn't make any difference to the value (and hence achievement) of creating otherwise-reliable safe rooms that protect people from real threats.
* There's no special value to appreciating the existence of your friend *while they're being tortured to death* that's better than their just already being (painlessly) killed. There's value to appreciating the friendship (now effectively past, though you don't yet realize it). And if your friend was in a good state, there could be value to appreciating that. But they're not in a good state in your imagined case, there's nothing better about their being tortured, and so there's nothing that makes this state more worth appreciating than the less painful alternative.
For the knowledge case, I'd imagine we could come up with examples of actually important facts. For example, suppose that there are a very large number of future historians who learn important lessons from the holocaust. Is it really plausible that there's some number that would make the holocaust worthwhile, relative to a conspiracy? No. But if any knowledge is valuable, then surely this is.
When I think about the world as a whole after the fact, I do sort of get the intuition that if Joan of Arc not being burned resulted in widespread deception--even though this had no negative hedonic consequences relative to her being burned alive--this would be bad. But if you just imagine in the moment--you're deciding whether to save Joan of Arc from her grisly fate or imagine you're in the situation where you'll have to be the victim of immolation to prevent future historical errors about your life, it seems very obvious that that is not worthwhile.
In addition, I'd think that part of what believers in OLT would think is valuable is just the kind of knowledge that causes us to think of a person as informed and well read. Knowing stuff about lots of historical figures is like that.
In the goals case, your statement is slightly ambiguous. Suppose that a person fulfills an arbitrary goal--like succeeding in high-school sports--works really hard to achieve it, and then achieves that. That seems good. Specifically, that would be better than if they just got the same amount of pleasure from something they didn't have to work towards at all--that wasn't a goal. Perhaps you'd reply that that goal would be desirable because it brings them happiness, but I could say that also about the panic room.
You next suggested that "What matters is achieving something worthwhile." But surely if you work really hard trying to pursue A, but then happen to pursue B which you weren't trying to achieve, that's less valuable than if you'd achieved A. If I spend 4 years working really hard to succeed in high school sports, fail, but then randomly happen to achieve something else important, without investing any effort, then that's not as valuable. This is especially so if we don't care about the other goal, which we can stipulate is the attitude of the people in the panic room case.
In the friendship case, that seems odd. Suppose that I appreciate my friend from 1:00-2:00 every day. My friend has to have a painful surgery, in another state, from either 1:00-2:00 or 2:00-3:00. Is it really plausible that they have especially strong reason to schedule their surgery later just so that my appreciation will be more valuable. Remember, what the person is appreciating in this case is that they have the friend, which doesn't obtain if the friend is dead.
(i) some knowledge (of significant facts) has non-instrumental value
(ii) tiny values can aggregate to constitute arbitrarily large value
(iii) no amount of knowledge can outweigh significant hedonic harms.
But this is just because (ii) is counterintuitive. I don't think the trilemma gives us any reason to doubt (i) in particular. Assuming that (ii) is actually true, we should doubt intuition (iii). More precisely: instead of trying to assess (iii) directly, we should let this verdict be determined by our judgments regarding (i) and (ii). (Of course if you already reject (i), you'll reject (iii) too. But it would be methodologically backward to allow one's verdict on (iii) to determine one's verdict on (i).)
On achievement: the issue is more how you're describing it. The builders have successfully intentionally created sufficiently safe rooms! It's not as though they "weren't trying to achieve" this; it's just a sub-goal of what they conceptualized themselves as aiming at (perfectly impervious rooms). And it's a subgoal that encapsulates 100% of the value, and so is just as worthwhile an achievement.
On friendship: I don't think the timing matters. I don't think there's any normatively relevant sense in which you "have" a friend who is being tortured to death but don't "have" a friend who is already dead. In neither case will you ever see (or have valuable interactions with) the friend again. In both cases you do have the timeless (past) friendship. They're just the same so far as your friendship is concerned. Likewise with your new case -- what's happening in the distant state doesn't affect the friendship, which both has been and will continue to be (equally) good in either case.
On aggregation, these aren't just tiny values. There are no doubt some historians who have dedicated their lives to studying Joan of Arc. We have the intuition that Joan of Arc's death would be bad even if it undermined the knowledge of lots of people. In contrast, if Joan of Arc's death was required for some important event to happen, such that it makes millions of lives happier, then our intuitions are different. In addition, I think lots of OLT's will reject 2--in which case, they either have to accept that knowledge is lexically inferior to significant pain aversion.
On achievement, we could imagine that the builders' specific goal that they had in mind was for it to be impossible for any person to enter. Maybe the other goal is objectively just as good, just as perhaps getting second place in a race is just as good as getting first place objectively, but if a person got second place in a race and mistakenly believed they got first, and were happy about getting first, that would seem worse for them than if they got first.
On friendship:
1) we can imagine that what you appreciate is the existence of the friend, which only applies in the living case.
2) your view implies (counterintuitively) that if we scramble a life temporally so that it's lived out of order, and the appreciation of the friend is had at the end of the life--right before life--then this is very bad for a person. But changing when events occur doesn't seem morally relevant.
3) If you appreciate having a friend with some property, that's appreciating the existence of the friend, not their particular state or whether you'll see them again (think back to the Siberian work camp case--the person appreciates the existence of the family they'll never see again).
4) Finally, this view has odd implications according to which how good some experience is might depend on what will happen in 50 years. For example, suppose that someone's friend gets into a space ship for 50 years, where they can't have contact. After they do, the person appreciates them. It seems odd that to know if that is good, you have to see if they get out of the space ship after 50 years.
"We have the intuition that Joan of Arc's death would be bad even if it undermined the knowledge of lots of people." But no one who holds to an OLT has even the slightest reason to think otherwise. Of course Joan of Arc's death was bad. It's just that people are better off when they are well-informed regarding important historical events, and that includes the bad ones. Again, this is a product of your attempt to frame knowledge a discrete sort of quantized thing that human beings are "containers of" - that isn't how anyone who holds to an OLT would conceptualize it.
Here's a comparison: My Irish ancestors made the rational decision to flee to the United States during a terrible famine. If the famine had not actually happened, their flight would have been irrational. But that doesn't mean someone who is committed to the inherent value of rationality would say the famine was good because its existence preserved their rationality. In a world where the famine didn't happen, they could also have reacted rationally there by *not* fleeing. And some posited world where the famine didn't happen but everyone who fled Ireland was just wildly irrational would definitely be a bad one, *but not because the famine didn't happen.* It might be that the world with the famine is better, all told, than the world with persistent irrational behavior on the part of millions of Irish people, but there's no particular "link" that can connect them in the way you're attempting to set out.
Without Joan of Arc, France probably wouldn't exist. She was a young girl who got a vision from God about how to save France from the English. Great person to know about- not just for the happiness of knowing- but for the inspiration she provides. If people hear her story, they may be more inclined to listen to God, and to trust that God can do amazing things through frail people. I'm certain that Joan would approve of her own torture to achieve what she achieved. And shouldn't we factor in life after death in these scenarios? Joan endured torture, but she is glorified now, and what she did will be remembered and celebrated in her presence for eternity. Good deal.
This is an interesting argument, but it seems structurally similar to familiar anti-utilitarian arguments in which it’s alleged to be implausible to think trivial benefits (here, knowledge of Joan of Arc’s torture, which I know you think is not an intrinsic benefit at all) can add up to outweigh a serious harm (the torture itself). Any utilitarian is used to biting these kinds of bullets all day long, and I would think an objective-list theorist might be willing to bite the bullet here and say it would have been worse if Joan of Arc hadn’t been tortured and everyone who lived after her was deceived.
But in the utilitarian case, we have good reasons to bite the bullets and the judgment seems less crazy. In addition, in the utilitarian case, worst case scenario we can just hold on to some goods being lexically superior to others to avoid having to bite the bullets (though that comes with its own bullets). But, as I argue, such a response is hard for the objective list theorist to stomach.
The objection to knowledge based on Joan of Arc is the same bad argumentation tactic you often use.
First you say that if knowledge is intrinsically good, then a conspiracy that defrauds millions probably outweighs torture because (despite our intuitions), small harms to lots of people outweigh massive agony.
Then you say that if one agrees with this one must believe that a random conspiracy is so bad it outweighs torture, which is absurd.
But this intitituve absurdity really stems from the same intuitions you assert are bad in your posts about dust specks outweighing torture. *Why* exactly do you think that people being more knowledgeable is categorically unable to outweigh torture? If someone told you that you would avoid billions and billions of people from getting a dust speck in the eye, you would apparently be fine with people being burned alive.
So at bottom this is just a long-winded way for you to disguise a value judgement that you believe knowledge is less valuable then fiat specks. The argumentation and analogies add nothing.
Then you go in to very obviously misunderstand the meaning of knowledge. At present if someone offered to burn you alive on the grounds that historians would learn of it, you should obviously say no even if you are an objective list theorist. Historians will exist in the future regardless of what you do, and if you are not burned alive chances are they will just learn some other cool facts. The marginal value of “knowledge” added would be near zero. Of course, if you had really solid evidence that you burning in agony would somehow inspire the next generation of scientists and philosophers, things would be different. But this is as likely as the utility monster trying to eat you alive and really really enjoying it.
The real question is whether you, at the present, would prefer a world in which Joan or Arc was burned alive or somehow secretly kept alive but out of the historical record that we now see. Personally I don’t think it’s altogether crazy to prefer her dead. Otherwise we would be living in a world where history is much more manipulator and the foundations of knowledge much less trustworthy. But this does not mean that Middle Ages people should have burned her alive. It just means that they should have not burned her alive and kept obvious records of that fact.
But, as I show, if you accept that lots of bad things can't add up to a few very bad things, you still have a problem because the OLT doesn't want to say that torture aversion is lexically superior to knowledge.
We can imagine that if I get burned alive, historians will learn that--it will dovetail very efficiently with the existing curricula, such that they'll just learn more facts.
In terms of knowledge being less trustworthy, we can imagine this is an isolated incident that no one will discover.
If you were burned alive, but it provided future historians numbering in the billions with extremely valuable historical knowledge they would never have otherwise learnt… it seems like the objections to it being good are the same as to dust specks not outweighing torture.
"If this is true, then knowledge is lexically inferior to averting intense agony—such that no amount of knowledge can add up to the goodness of averting intense agony. But, as I’ve argued before, it’s overwhelmingly plausible that some amount of pleasure is superior to averting intense agony. If we accept:
no amount of knowledge is as valuable as averting some extreme suffering.
Some amount of pleasure is more valuable than averting intense agony
then by transitivity, we’d accept
Some amount of pleasure is more valuable than any amount of knowledge. Notably, here we are talking about the addition of extra knowledge, regardless of whether the knowledge is paired up with goods. No doubt there are lots of people who get pleasure from knowledge involving Joan of Arc (nerds, for example, who enjoy learning about the topic)—despite that, Joan of Arc intense suffering can’t be counterbalanced by any amount of knowledge that it produced. But this conclusion is not amenable to objective list theory—no objective list theorist would want to hold that there’s some amount of pleasure that just barely balances out the badness of one torture, that is more valuable than all the knowledge in the world; however, this is what the objective list theorist is committed to.
You might object and deny that any pleasure can outweigh the badness of extreme torture. I think this is an untenable implication as I’ve described before. But if you think this, then you should support the extinction of life on earth—because the continued existence of our species guarantees some extreme suffering, and on this account, that extreme suffering can’t be counterbalanced by joy or knowledge."
Yeah, objective list theories don't imply there's value in simply ascertaining as many true propositions as possible, nor do they imply that we ought to act so as to bring about "know-able" things. They just say there's inherent value in understanding reality. And if Joan of Arc hadn't been burned at the stake, such a burning would not be a feature of reality and therefore there would be no value in knowing it. It's similar to how someone who thinks it's good to fulfill promises would also say there's no reason to make promises just so you can fulfill them - what matters is fulfilling promises that have been made, just like what matters is knowing about things that have actually come to pass.
" Finding out that some aliens worked hard to get the universe to consist only of one arm people would not prompt us to saw off our arms if they have no way of ever finding out."
I feel like this is just not wholly obvious. This is fundamentally an argument from intuition where cutting arms off seems absurd from our perspective, however I think this is not taking the scenario seriously. If we actually discovered an entire universe dedicated to one arming a large section of humanity would intuitively want to match their morality.
While there are no true examples of similar human behavior for obvious reasons I think cargo cults are a fair comparison. When native people saw Europeans valuing certain behaviors(such as standing in strict lines waring certain clothes etc) they attempted to imitate them. This was not motivated by communication but an attempt to emulate a richer culture.
I think it is very reasonable to believe that if we discovered an entire universe dedicated to one arming a significant part of human society would intuitively want to emulate them and their morality. The fact that this seems absurd from our far removed perceptive has more to do with the absurdity of the situation than the proposed reaction.
I have a less substantiated feeling that the focus on knowledge sharing basically presupposes the value of these things is instrumental to happiness. This might be inherent to arguments around moral intuition, I just feel that people can more reasonably bite the bullet on 'its better for my friend to be alive and tortured longer even if I don't know' than you make out
I guess it doesn't strike me as odd that someone who valued knowledge as an intrinsic good would consider centuries of deception, dishonesty, confusion, and error on the part of billions to be worse than one person's violent death? It only seems counterintuitive when you frame the impact of the conspiracy as merely a reduction in the global "amount of knowledge" rather than a massive expansion in the global "amount of delusion." It's not as if anyone who holds to objective list theories thinks it would be good for someone to be burned at the stake, just so a sufficient number of people could learn about it; they would obviously be happy to choose a world where Joan of Arc was not burned to death and nobody thought she was. But if the choice is between a world in which one person is tortured or billions are severely deluded, then I think most people who hold to objective list theories would happily say the latter might be better, all told.
Not centuries of deception or confusion. No one is deceived or confused--we can imagine the "conspiracy" was just a series of misunderstandings. They just hold a mistaken historical belief.
And if knowledge is good, then it seems like it would be good for Joan of Arc to be burned at the stake, not just relative to a world where it didn't happen.
But this is just a straightforward misunderstanding of objective list theories. The claim is not that "knowledge is good," per simpliciter. The claim is that (paraphrasing Finnis) an individual who is well-informed is better-off, other things being equal, than an individual who is deluded, confused, ignorant, etc. So if Joan of Arc wasn't burned at the stake, then someone who believed she wasn't burned at the stake would be well-informed and thus better off in exactly the same way I am better off knowing she *was* burned at the stake in this world. The "units of knowledge" involved don't matter in the least. You're trying to fit OLTs into the sort of agent-neutral framework that underlies your hedonic utilitarianism, but this is a fundamentally different approach.
My immediate reaction is to think that all of your alleged counterexamples rest on misconceiving of the objective values at stake. E.g.:
* There's no value to knowledge of random factoids (which is all that most people know about Joan of Arc). If the imagined conspiracy led to sufficiently widespread fundamental misconceptions about deep and general historical processes and explanations then I do think that could be worse than one person being tortured.
* There's no special value to achieving arbitrarily formulated goals. The formulation doesn't matter. What matters is achieving something worthwhile. And whether you (as a trustworthy, non-threatening person) can walk through walls doesn't make any difference to the value (and hence achievement) of creating otherwise-reliable safe rooms that protect people from real threats.
* There's no special value to appreciating the existence of your friend *while they're being tortured to death* that's better than their just already being (painlessly) killed. There's value to appreciating the friendship (now effectively past, though you don't yet realize it). And if your friend was in a good state, there could be value to appreciating that. But they're not in a good state in your imagined case, there's nothing better about their being tortured, and so there's nothing that makes this state more worth appreciating than the less painful alternative.
For the knowledge case, I'd imagine we could come up with examples of actually important facts. For example, suppose that there are a very large number of future historians who learn important lessons from the holocaust. Is it really plausible that there's some number that would make the holocaust worthwhile, relative to a conspiracy? No. But if any knowledge is valuable, then surely this is.
When I think about the world as a whole after the fact, I do sort of get the intuition that if Joan of Arc not being burned resulted in widespread deception--even though this had no negative hedonic consequences relative to her being burned alive--this would be bad. But if you just imagine in the moment--you're deciding whether to save Joan of Arc from her grisly fate or imagine you're in the situation where you'll have to be the victim of immolation to prevent future historical errors about your life, it seems very obvious that that is not worthwhile.
In addition, I'd think that part of what believers in OLT would think is valuable is just the kind of knowledge that causes us to think of a person as informed and well read. Knowing stuff about lots of historical figures is like that.
In the goals case, your statement is slightly ambiguous. Suppose that a person fulfills an arbitrary goal--like succeeding in high-school sports--works really hard to achieve it, and then achieves that. That seems good. Specifically, that would be better than if they just got the same amount of pleasure from something they didn't have to work towards at all--that wasn't a goal. Perhaps you'd reply that that goal would be desirable because it brings them happiness, but I could say that also about the panic room.
You next suggested that "What matters is achieving something worthwhile." But surely if you work really hard trying to pursue A, but then happen to pursue B which you weren't trying to achieve, that's less valuable than if you'd achieved A. If I spend 4 years working really hard to succeed in high school sports, fail, but then randomly happen to achieve something else important, without investing any effort, then that's not as valuable. This is especially so if we don't care about the other goal, which we can stipulate is the attitude of the people in the panic room case.
In the friendship case, that seems odd. Suppose that I appreciate my friend from 1:00-2:00 every day. My friend has to have a painful surgery, in another state, from either 1:00-2:00 or 2:00-3:00. Is it really plausible that they have especially strong reason to schedule their surgery later just so that my appreciation will be more valuable. Remember, what the person is appreciating in this case is that they have the friend, which doesn't obtain if the friend is dead.
There's an intuitive conflict between:
(i) some knowledge (of significant facts) has non-instrumental value
(ii) tiny values can aggregate to constitute arbitrarily large value
(iii) no amount of knowledge can outweigh significant hedonic harms.
But this is just because (ii) is counterintuitive. I don't think the trilemma gives us any reason to doubt (i) in particular. Assuming that (ii) is actually true, we should doubt intuition (iii). More precisely: instead of trying to assess (iii) directly, we should let this verdict be determined by our judgments regarding (i) and (ii). (Of course if you already reject (i), you'll reject (iii) too. But it would be methodologically backward to allow one's verdict on (iii) to determine one's verdict on (i).)
On achievement: the issue is more how you're describing it. The builders have successfully intentionally created sufficiently safe rooms! It's not as though they "weren't trying to achieve" this; it's just a sub-goal of what they conceptualized themselves as aiming at (perfectly impervious rooms). And it's a subgoal that encapsulates 100% of the value, and so is just as worthwhile an achievement.
On friendship: I don't think the timing matters. I don't think there's any normatively relevant sense in which you "have" a friend who is being tortured to death but don't "have" a friend who is already dead. In neither case will you ever see (or have valuable interactions with) the friend again. In both cases you do have the timeless (past) friendship. They're just the same so far as your friendship is concerned. Likewise with your new case -- what's happening in the distant state doesn't affect the friendship, which both has been and will continue to be (equally) good in either case.
On aggregation, these aren't just tiny values. There are no doubt some historians who have dedicated their lives to studying Joan of Arc. We have the intuition that Joan of Arc's death would be bad even if it undermined the knowledge of lots of people. In contrast, if Joan of Arc's death was required for some important event to happen, such that it makes millions of lives happier, then our intuitions are different. In addition, I think lots of OLT's will reject 2--in which case, they either have to accept that knowledge is lexically inferior to significant pain aversion.
On achievement, we could imagine that the builders' specific goal that they had in mind was for it to be impossible for any person to enter. Maybe the other goal is objectively just as good, just as perhaps getting second place in a race is just as good as getting first place objectively, but if a person got second place in a race and mistakenly believed they got first, and were happy about getting first, that would seem worse for them than if they got first.
On friendship:
1) we can imagine that what you appreciate is the existence of the friend, which only applies in the living case.
2) your view implies (counterintuitively) that if we scramble a life temporally so that it's lived out of order, and the appreciation of the friend is had at the end of the life--right before life--then this is very bad for a person. But changing when events occur doesn't seem morally relevant.
3) If you appreciate having a friend with some property, that's appreciating the existence of the friend, not their particular state or whether you'll see them again (think back to the Siberian work camp case--the person appreciates the existence of the family they'll never see again).
4) Finally, this view has odd implications according to which how good some experience is might depend on what will happen in 50 years. For example, suppose that someone's friend gets into a space ship for 50 years, where they can't have contact. After they do, the person appreciates them. It seems odd that to know if that is good, you have to see if they get out of the space ship after 50 years.
"We have the intuition that Joan of Arc's death would be bad even if it undermined the knowledge of lots of people." But no one who holds to an OLT has even the slightest reason to think otherwise. Of course Joan of Arc's death was bad. It's just that people are better off when they are well-informed regarding important historical events, and that includes the bad ones. Again, this is a product of your attempt to frame knowledge a discrete sort of quantized thing that human beings are "containers of" - that isn't how anyone who holds to an OLT would conceptualize it.
Here's a comparison: My Irish ancestors made the rational decision to flee to the United States during a terrible famine. If the famine had not actually happened, their flight would have been irrational. But that doesn't mean someone who is committed to the inherent value of rationality would say the famine was good because its existence preserved their rationality. In a world where the famine didn't happen, they could also have reacted rationally there by *not* fleeing. And some posited world where the famine didn't happen but everyone who fled Ireland was just wildly irrational would definitely be a bad one, *but not because the famine didn't happen.* It might be that the world with the famine is better, all told, than the world with persistent irrational behavior on the part of millions of Irish people, but there's no particular "link" that can connect them in the way you're attempting to set out.
Without Joan of Arc, France probably wouldn't exist. She was a young girl who got a vision from God about how to save France from the English. Great person to know about- not just for the happiness of knowing- but for the inspiration she provides. If people hear her story, they may be more inclined to listen to God, and to trust that God can do amazing things through frail people. I'm certain that Joan would approve of her own torture to achieve what she achieved. And shouldn't we factor in life after death in these scenarios? Joan endured torture, but she is glorified now, and what she did will be remembered and celebrated in her presence for eternity. Good deal.
This is an interesting argument, but it seems structurally similar to familiar anti-utilitarian arguments in which it’s alleged to be implausible to think trivial benefits (here, knowledge of Joan of Arc’s torture, which I know you think is not an intrinsic benefit at all) can add up to outweigh a serious harm (the torture itself). Any utilitarian is used to biting these kinds of bullets all day long, and I would think an objective-list theorist might be willing to bite the bullet here and say it would have been worse if Joan of Arc hadn’t been tortured and everyone who lived after her was deceived.
But in the utilitarian case, we have good reasons to bite the bullets and the judgment seems less crazy. In addition, in the utilitarian case, worst case scenario we can just hold on to some goods being lexically superior to others to avoid having to bite the bullets (though that comes with its own bullets). But, as I argue, such a response is hard for the objective list theorist to stomach.
The objection to knowledge based on Joan of Arc is the same bad argumentation tactic you often use.
First you say that if knowledge is intrinsically good, then a conspiracy that defrauds millions probably outweighs torture because (despite our intuitions), small harms to lots of people outweigh massive agony.
Then you say that if one agrees with this one must believe that a random conspiracy is so bad it outweighs torture, which is absurd.
But this intitituve absurdity really stems from the same intuitions you assert are bad in your posts about dust specks outweighing torture. *Why* exactly do you think that people being more knowledgeable is categorically unable to outweigh torture? If someone told you that you would avoid billions and billions of people from getting a dust speck in the eye, you would apparently be fine with people being burned alive.
So at bottom this is just a long-winded way for you to disguise a value judgement that you believe knowledge is less valuable then fiat specks. The argumentation and analogies add nothing.
Then you go in to very obviously misunderstand the meaning of knowledge. At present if someone offered to burn you alive on the grounds that historians would learn of it, you should obviously say no even if you are an objective list theorist. Historians will exist in the future regardless of what you do, and if you are not burned alive chances are they will just learn some other cool facts. The marginal value of “knowledge” added would be near zero. Of course, if you had really solid evidence that you burning in agony would somehow inspire the next generation of scientists and philosophers, things would be different. But this is as likely as the utility monster trying to eat you alive and really really enjoying it.
The real question is whether you, at the present, would prefer a world in which Joan or Arc was burned alive or somehow secretly kept alive but out of the historical record that we now see. Personally I don’t think it’s altogether crazy to prefer her dead. Otherwise we would be living in a world where history is much more manipulator and the foundations of knowledge much less trustworthy. But this does not mean that Middle Ages people should have burned her alive. It just means that they should have not burned her alive and kept obvious records of that fact.
But, as I show, if you accept that lots of bad things can't add up to a few very bad things, you still have a problem because the OLT doesn't want to say that torture aversion is lexically superior to knowledge.
We can imagine that if I get burned alive, historians will learn that--it will dovetail very efficiently with the existing curricula, such that they'll just learn more facts.
In terms of knowledge being less trustworthy, we can imagine this is an isolated incident that no one will discover.
If you were burned alive, but it provided future historians numbering in the billions with extremely valuable historical knowledge they would never have otherwise learnt… it seems like the objections to it being good are the same as to dust specks not outweighing torture.
No . . .
"If this is true, then knowledge is lexically inferior to averting intense agony—such that no amount of knowledge can add up to the goodness of averting intense agony. But, as I’ve argued before, it’s overwhelmingly plausible that some amount of pleasure is superior to averting intense agony. If we accept:
no amount of knowledge is as valuable as averting some extreme suffering.
Some amount of pleasure is more valuable than averting intense agony
then by transitivity, we’d accept
Some amount of pleasure is more valuable than any amount of knowledge. Notably, here we are talking about the addition of extra knowledge, regardless of whether the knowledge is paired up with goods. No doubt there are lots of people who get pleasure from knowledge involving Joan of Arc (nerds, for example, who enjoy learning about the topic)—despite that, Joan of Arc intense suffering can’t be counterbalanced by any amount of knowledge that it produced. But this conclusion is not amenable to objective list theory—no objective list theorist would want to hold that there’s some amount of pleasure that just barely balances out the badness of one torture, that is more valuable than all the knowledge in the world; however, this is what the objective list theorist is committed to.
You might object and deny that any pleasure can outweigh the badness of extreme torture. I think this is an untenable implication as I’ve described before. But if you think this, then you should support the extinction of life on earth—because the continued existence of our species guarantees some extreme suffering, and on this account, that extreme suffering can’t be counterbalanced by joy or knowledge."
Yeah, objective list theories don't imply there's value in simply ascertaining as many true propositions as possible, nor do they imply that we ought to act so as to bring about "know-able" things. They just say there's inherent value in understanding reality. And if Joan of Arc hadn't been burned at the stake, such a burning would not be a feature of reality and therefore there would be no value in knowing it. It's similar to how someone who thinks it's good to fulfill promises would also say there's no reason to make promises just so you can fulfill them - what matters is fulfilling promises that have been made, just like what matters is knowing about things that have actually come to pass.
" Finding out that some aliens worked hard to get the universe to consist only of one arm people would not prompt us to saw off our arms if they have no way of ever finding out."
I feel like this is just not wholly obvious. This is fundamentally an argument from intuition where cutting arms off seems absurd from our perspective, however I think this is not taking the scenario seriously. If we actually discovered an entire universe dedicated to one arming a large section of humanity would intuitively want to match their morality.
While there are no true examples of similar human behavior for obvious reasons I think cargo cults are a fair comparison. When native people saw Europeans valuing certain behaviors(such as standing in strict lines waring certain clothes etc) they attempted to imitate them. This was not motivated by communication but an attempt to emulate a richer culture.
I think it is very reasonable to believe that if we discovered an entire universe dedicated to one arming a significant part of human society would intuitively want to emulate them and their morality. The fact that this seems absurd from our far removed perceptive has more to do with the absurdity of the situation than the proposed reaction.
I have a less substantiated feeling that the focus on knowledge sharing basically presupposes the value of these things is instrumental to happiness. This might be inherent to arguments around moral intuition, I just feel that people can more reasonably bite the bullet on 'its better for my friend to be alive and tortured longer even if I don't know' than you make out
I guess it doesn't strike me as odd that someone who valued knowledge as an intrinsic good would consider centuries of deception, dishonesty, confusion, and error on the part of billions to be worse than one person's violent death? It only seems counterintuitive when you frame the impact of the conspiracy as merely a reduction in the global "amount of knowledge" rather than a massive expansion in the global "amount of delusion." It's not as if anyone who holds to objective list theories thinks it would be good for someone to be burned at the stake, just so a sufficient number of people could learn about it; they would obviously be happy to choose a world where Joan of Arc was not burned to death and nobody thought she was. But if the choice is between a world in which one person is tortured or billions are severely deluded, then I think most people who hold to objective list theories would happily say the latter might be better, all told.
Not centuries of deception or confusion. No one is deceived or confused--we can imagine the "conspiracy" was just a series of misunderstandings. They just hold a mistaken historical belief.
And if knowledge is good, then it seems like it would be good for Joan of Arc to be burned at the stake, not just relative to a world where it didn't happen.
But this is just a straightforward misunderstanding of objective list theories. The claim is not that "knowledge is good," per simpliciter. The claim is that (paraphrasing Finnis) an individual who is well-informed is better-off, other things being equal, than an individual who is deluded, confused, ignorant, etc. So if Joan of Arc wasn't burned at the stake, then someone who believed she wasn't burned at the stake would be well-informed and thus better off in exactly the same way I am better off knowing she *was* burned at the stake in this world. The "units of knowledge" involved don't matter in the least. You're trying to fit OLTs into the sort of agent-neutral framework that underlies your hedonic utilitarianism, but this is a fundamentally different approach.