• Catherine_Steward [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    If we’re dealing with these infinities, we don’t even need to torture him. We can make him prick his finger every day for the rest of eternity, and technically that’s still -infinite utils.

    Definitely an interesting addition to the thought experiment, and I think I'd have to agree with you. One dude can take the finger-prick hell if it brings about FALGSC for the rest of us. So then the interesting question is, how bad does this torture need to be before we'd say it's probably not worth the solution of finite problems in our world? I don't have a good answer for it.

    Another aspect is that the "torture" in the initial framing can be a lot of things. What I imagine when someone says that is probably different from what you imagine. So we'd have to define exactly what kind of torture we're talking about.