Specks versus torture

Status
Not open for further replies.
capefeather

capefeather

toot
is a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a CAP Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
Maybe I'll actually read the replies to this thread for once...

Anyway, I ran into this thought experiment a few times, and I've been thinking, might as well see what happens when I unleash it on Smogon. You have two choices:

Specks: 1 googolplex people get dust specks in their eyes.

OR

Torture: 1 person is subjected to torture for 50 years.

Just to try to make sense of the scales involved in the former: There are about 10^80 particles in the entire universe. 1 googol is 10^100. 1 googolplex is 10^10^100. On the other hand, it's a dust speck in your eye. You're inconvenienced for a short while, then you manage to blink it away.

The first time I saw this thought experiment, I thought, surely, one should pick [censored]! But then when I saw it again and saw some arguments about it, I shifted to [censored]. I'm not giving my answer because I want to know: Which would you choose?
 
As long as I am not the person who is tortured I would choose torture unless the dust specks would be guaranteed to never cross my path
 
To me, the momentary annoyance of getting a dust spec in your eye is so close to 0 when quantitatively compared with torture that I'd chose that one no matter how short the torture time or how many people implicated in the dust specs. I'd chose the specs even if it implicated every possible human in every possible universe and the torture time was only a minute. I mean its a dust spec, it isn't that painful, it takes very little time to go away, and has no lasting impact. Compared to torture, I'm rounding that down to a quantitative 0.
 
Pretty much what Ace Emerald said. This kind of thought experiment can be kind of interesting but this version doesn't really work; a speck of dust is just too small of a thing. Like, I could get a speck of dust in my eye every day and it would start to get really really frustrating but even then I couldn't say that it's substantially reducing how much I enjoy life overall.
 
Yeah this thought experiment is kind of ridiculous, but it all depends on how exactly the dust will affect the people. If it's just a simple matter of everyone getting a speck in their eye and then blinking it away, then obviously you would choose that over torture unless you're a terrible person. If the dust has a chance of causing infections/blindness in people then it's probably worth a debate, along with the idea of people getting dust in their eye when they're, I don't know, crossing the street or something. Maybe they'd get hit by a car? Or are driving a car and might crash into a pile of babies or something? I don't know. I'm not sure why I'm responding to this either because I also don't care.
 
There aren't even that many people!!!

Sometimes I think philosophers are really dumb. Hey Borel, if you give a monkey an infinite amount of time, it will still starve to death. Hey Hobbes, you can't replace a ship's keel. Hey Maxwell, demons aren't real.
 
Last edited:
Agreeing that this kind of experiment is very interesting, but the difference between the two choices is too large; dust specs is obvious choice.
 
Not sure what part of my intuitions this thought experiment is trying to gauge.

Non-consequentialist answers from me:

1. This question is not problematic on the basis of the distinction between doing and allowing. According to the Doctrine of Doing vs. Allowing, it is sometimes permissible to allow something to happen that you would be forbidden to bring about yourself. This is an intuitive: it does not seem as bad to let people in Africa starve, as it is to send them poisoned food. In this thought experiment, whatever option you choose, you are bringing about a certain consequence, so the distinction between bringing about consequence, and allowing that consequence to happen, does not apply to this case.

2. The Doctrine of Double-effect states that it is permissible to bring about a bad consequence in the pursuit of another consequence, if that other consequence is 'good enough' to justify the bad consequence, and if the bad consequence is not the primarily intended consequence. For example, according to Double-Effect, it may be permissible to administer dangerously high doses of morphine to a patient in pain near the end of his/her life, as your intention is to ease the patients suffering, and you do not 'directly intend' (note: intention is really complicated and a huge problem for double effect) for the patient to die from the drugs, even though you foresee that it is possible that it could happen as a consequence of easing their pain. This doctrine does not apply to the thought experiment either (imo, i anticipate that an argument could be made that it does apply, but i doubt it would be a really good one) as it merely asks you to choose between too bad consequences, and double-effect only applies to consequences that are good.

Consequentialists:

This is an easy thought experiment for consequentialists, once they have calculated which option does the least harm or the most good, they choose that option. In this thought experiment it is not easy to tell which is worse, though, in any argumentative way, it is subjective.

A liberal consequentialist might say that humans have positive and negative rights. A negative right such as 'the right to not be killed' (a negative right is the right to have something NOT DONE TO YOU), and a positive right such as 'the right to a tax-payer supported education' (positive rights describe things you have the right to access). In the thought experiment, it seems that either option would harm someone, violating each individuals negative rights to not be harmed in that way. However I would probably conclude that torture is a much more serious violation of negative rights than specks of dust in the eye, but the thought experiment explicates that only one person would be tortured, where as a significant amount of people would get dust in their eyes which makes the calculus much more difficult. So even consequentialism provides no answer to this question.


Basically, I know of no ethical framework that resolves this question, so to me this experiment is purely a gauge of intuition and does not inform us about any other ethical dilemma. I would choose to have everyone get specks of dust, but there is no justification in ethical theory for this beyond existentialism, or 'do what you think is right.'
 
Eh, this seems a little dishonest as a thought experiment. That number's so large that you may as well have said "A planet full of people get blown up or INFINITY PEOPLE GET KICKED IN THE SHIN!!!?" People can't really think about that except in the abstract and so it seems to me that it's just trying to invoke an emotional response. A Reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism or whatever.

But you wanted an answer so I'd probably go for the dust specks one. Torture guy kind of tugs on the heart strings and I'm not gonna be able to verify the existance of enough of the googolplex of people to care about those fuckers. So hooray for egoism, I guess.
 
@ op
It'd be really cool to hear the arguments for choosing torture, because I'm pretty sure everybody here thinks that the specks are the better choice. I'm just sort of curious.
 
googleplex people don't exist

heck, if I am not mistaken, googleplex comes "close" (and by close I mean relatively close in scientific notation) to the amount atoms hypothesized in the known universe
 
maybe i'm missing the point of this question but it seems like the pretty obvious answer is the (at worst) mildly annoying speck of dust.
 
at least 10 people driving cars will crash because of the dust and kill their family in the car, countless more will suffer from allergy attacks that cause them to fall off ladders and impale themselves, and some people will just decide this dust in my eye is the final note of this shitty day and kills themselves

ill pick the tortured guy
 
I don't think the dust in this hypothetical is supposed to be considered as killing people... I mean it's described as being so minutely annoying that blinking once clears it from your eyes.

Is it that the additive "bad" of dusting a googolplex of people outweighs the bad of 1 guy getting tortured?
 
if you continue to go on about crashing cars, allergies, and suicide, then you are missing the point of this thought experiment. the hypothetical aftermath of people getting dust in their eyes is not meant to be taken into account, and that's why i feel that the op was badly phrased. but the point of the experiment is to pose the question "is it better for an extremely large number of beings to suffer a minimal discomfort for a short period of time, or for an extremely small number of beings to suffer near-maximum discomfort for a very long period of time?" in short, do you believe slightly decreased welfare of the masses is a better alternative than enormously decreased welfare of the very few?

if i phrased this differently, it might make more sense, so...

"Specks": 1 googolplex people have their thumb pricked by a pin, drawing no blood and causing minor pain.

OR

Torture: 1 person is tortured for 50 years.

edit: somewhat ninja'd by lonelyness in regards to the hypothetical aftermath thing
 
if i phrased this differently, it might make more sense, so...

"Specks": 1 googolplex people have their thumb pricked by a pin, drawing no blood and causing minor pain.

OR

Torture: 1 person is tortured for 50 years.
Click to expand...

how can the undead feel pain, what kind of man has no blood

but since everyones picking the specks, ill lay a new one on u:

Spics: 1 googolplex of mexicans cross over the border by the truckload to steal your jobs

or

Torture: 1 person is tortured for 50 years
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top