I really like hypothetical moral dilemmas. One of my favorites is the "torture vs. dust specks" scenario from here. I'll try to give a simpler explanation:
We can agree that suffering is bad, and less suffering is preferable to more suffering. So think of the worst possible amount of suffering: torture. And think of the smallest possible amount of suffering: in this scenario it's a single dust speck getting into your eye. And then answer this question: should you prefer for one person to be tortured for 50 years, or a bazillion people get a single dust speck in their eye? If "bazillion" is not high enough, then just keep increasing the number. Should there be a point where one person's torture becomes preferable?
Almost everyone, myself included, intuitively prefer dust specks; most people in the comments of the blog I linked above did. But the author thinks it should be obvious that torture is better, and that anyone who disagrees just isn't being rational. After all, if we compare less extreme differences in pain, we usually would say there's a point where a smaller amount of pain on an extremely high number of people would be worse than higher pain on one person. So why would there be an arbitrary pain difference where that arithmetic no longer applies?
Because people are so uncomfortable with accepting this, I've seen this used as an argument against utilitarianism, but I think there's a utilitarian case to be made for choosing dust specks. If you are a hedonistic utilitarian, then there must be a point where torture is preferable because you simply "add up" the pain and choose the lesser value. But you can justify dust specks as a preference utilitarian, where what's best is what maximizes people's preferences. In that case, you don't have to assign a single value to all amounts of pain and add them up. You could think of it instead in terms of what one person would prefer: to be tortured for 50 years or have dust specks in your eye for a bazillion-or-more years. Human preferences are not necessarily "rational" or "mathematical". So if people would prefer a bazillion dust specks to 50 years of torture, then the dust specks are the right answer.
Hey, Blake. I am not impressed with this moral dilemma because torture, at least in common use, means that someone is torturing another, intentionally and maliciously. It's not an act of nature, but someone else's will being forcibly imposed on the tortured.
ReplyDeleteA better analogy might be a person who has to live for X years with a debilitating, painful illness that manifested itself through no fault of anyone.
In that case, I agree that it's very debatable whether it's worse for one person to suffer with this versus a quadrillion people getting a dust speck.
Now even if those two yield the same "sum of pain", there's also the matter of shared vs individual suffering. Shared suffering has always been much more palatable to mankind. Maybe due to a sense of fairness or equality. We find it unfair/unjust that someone is suffering through no fault of their own while we're all right. Irrational guilt?
Those are actually reasons why I like this scenario so much; thinking through it touches on many of the "basics" of different moral philosophies. I just addressed the possibilities of a utilitarian perspective because that's (mostly) my view. But as you said, one is an act of nature and one is not, so thinking through whether or not that matters addresses whether you are a consequentialist or not. And that aside, the fairness aspect of it is also very interesting to me - if someone thinks an infinite number of people getting a dust speck is always preferable to one person being tortured for that reason, then that brings up the question of whether egalitarianism can completely trump consequences - and in that case, does that justify socialism even though it makes everyone worse off? Another possible line of argument is from a rights-based morality - something as insignificant as a dust speck can be measured as having literally zero negative effect on one's basic rights, but torture does prohibit one's right to pursuit of happiness, so that could explain why dust specks can never "add up" to torture.
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