I certainly share your intuition that there is no number of pinpricks such that it would ever be worse than 1 billion people in horrific torture. But if pinpricks can be aggregated to begin with, it seems arbitrary to assign an upper limit to the aggregate disvalue of pinpricks. So here’s weird solution that I just thought of (and probably has all kinds of obvious problems that I don’t have time to consider): Maybe there are some harms that are so small that they can’t aggregate to begin with. For me, this is an easier bullet to bite than the proposal that miniscule harms can be added together but only up to a certain point.
I certainly share your intuition that there is no number of pinpricks such that it would ever be worse than 1 billion people in horrific torture. But if pinpricks can be aggregated to begin with, it seems arbitrary to assign an upper limit to the aggregate disvalue of pinpricks. So here’s weird solution that I just thought of (and probably has all kinds of obvious problems that I don’t have time to consider): Maybe there are some harms that are so small that they can’t aggregate to begin with. For me, this is an easier bullet to bite than the proposal that miniscule harms can be added together but only up to a certain point.