A relatively simple way of making the repugnant conclusion more intuitive to me is to recognise that individual selves are largely an illusion, i.e. that empty individualism (or, its better marketed/more spiritual sounding but functional equivalent open individualism) is correct.
Suppose you’ve set up your parameters such that pinpricks actually involve negative utility—because (trigger warning of slightly graphical image for the second of these links) in manycases it obviously isn’t actually negative, which muddies our intuitions. Then for empty individualism a tiny amount of torture either is actually closely analogous to a large number of pinpricks (that just happen to be locally clustered). The OI equivalent is that a small amount of torture is analogous to a pinprick on the cosmic entity
Even in the case of humans, we can imagine how pinpricks could add up. A single superficial pinprick isn’t that bad—and the difference between a 1mm and 2mm insertion would be very slight. But if you insert hundreds or thousands of pins 10+mm deep, gradually you move towards an experience that seems as bad as any other torture.
To put it simply, sufficiently many pinpricks, of sufficient depth to be unpleasant, are torture. And they can be torture at a degree of virtually any level of pain a human is capable of experiencing—so I don’t see a need to introduce dramatic discontinuities in our moral evaluation to explain why other tortures are somehow still morally worse.
Thanks! Upvoted because I agree that we should consider EI/OI in population ethics, but disagree with the conclusion, which depends on the specifics of how you aggregate the pinpricks. Without going into too much detail, an analogy here is that if you have two soap bubbles and you bring them closer together until they touch, they can merge into a bigger bubble, possibly with emergent properties that go beyond those of the two individual bubbles. It’s a new kind of thing, well defined through topology, and having little to no resemblance to the two-separate-small-bubbles system.
A relatively simple way of making the repugnant conclusion more intuitive to me is to recognise that individual selves are largely an illusion, i.e. that empty individualism (or, its better marketed/more spiritual sounding but functional equivalent open individualism) is correct.
Suppose you’ve set up your parameters such that pinpricks actually involve negative utility—because (trigger warning of slightly graphical image for the second of these links) in many cases it obviously isn’t actually negative, which muddies our intuitions. Then for empty individualism a tiny amount of torture either is actually closely analogous to a large number of pinpricks (that just happen to be locally clustered). The OI equivalent is that a small amount of torture is analogous to a pinprick on the cosmic entity
Even in the case of humans, we can imagine how pinpricks could add up. A single superficial pinprick isn’t that bad—and the difference between a 1mm and 2mm insertion would be very slight. But if you insert hundreds or thousands of pins 10+mm deep, gradually you move towards an experience that seems as bad as any other torture.
To put it simply, sufficiently many pinpricks, of sufficient depth to be unpleasant, are torture. And they can be torture at a degree of virtually any level of pain a human is capable of experiencing—so I don’t see a need to introduce dramatic discontinuities in our moral evaluation to explain why other tortures are somehow still morally worse.
Thanks! Upvoted because I agree that we should consider EI/OI in population ethics, but disagree with the conclusion, which depends on the specifics of how you aggregate the pinpricks. Without going into too much detail, an analogy here is that if you have two soap bubbles and you bring them closer together until they touch, they can merge into a bigger bubble, possibly with emergent properties that go beyond those of the two individual bubbles. It’s a new kind of thing, well defined through topology, and having little to no resemblance to the two-separate-small-bubbles system.
Will publish more on this topic soon!