I think the reason for those intuitions is that (reasonably enough!) we can’t imagine there being 10^100 people without there also being a story behind that situation. A world in which e.g. some kind of entity breeds humans on purpose to then torture them, leading to those insane amounts, sounds indeed absolutely hellish! But the badness of it is due to the context; a world in which there exists only one person, and that person is being horribly tortured, is also extremely upsetting and sad, just in a different way and for different reasons (and all paths to there are also very disturbing; but we’ll maybe think “at least everyone else just died without suffering as much” so it feels less horrible than the 10^100 humans torture world).
But my intuition on the situation alone is more along the lines of: imagine you know you’re going to be born into this world. Would you like you odds? And in both the “one tortured human” and the “10^100 tortured humans” worlds, your odds would be exactly the same: 100% chance of being tortured.
But all of these are just abstract thought experiments. In any realistic situations, torture worlds don’t just happen—there is a story leading to them, and for any kind of torture world, that story is godawful. So in practice the two things can’t be separated. I think it’s fairly correct to say that in all realistic scenarios the 10^100 world will be in practice worse, or have a worse past, though both worlds would be awful.
I think the reason for those intuitions is that (reasonably enough!) we can’t imagine there being 10^100 people without there also being a story behind that situation.
At least for me, that does not matter. I would always pick a world where 1 person is tortured over a world where 10^100 are tortured (holding the amount of torture per person constant), regardless of the past history. Here is another question. You are just at the beginning of the universe, so no past history, and you can either click one button which would create 10^100 people who would be tortured for 100 years, or another button which would create 1 person who would be tortured for 100 years. If you had to then pick one world to live in, as an individual, you would suffer the same in both worlds, as you would have 100 % chance of being tortured for 100 years either way. So you could conclude which button you chose does not really matter. However, I certainly think such choice would matter! I care not only about my own welfare, but also that of others, so I would certainly pick the button leading to less total torture.
You said before that total utilitarianism is problematic because it can, at least in principle, lead one to endorse situations where a population is made extinct in order for its resources to be used more efficiently to produce welfare. However, average utilitarianism is way more problematic. It can, at least in principle, lead to a situation where the average welfare is kept constant, but we arbitrarily expand the amount of torture by increasing the number of beings. Even in practice this would be possible. For example, net global welfare accounting for animals may well be negative due to wild animal suffering (or even just farmed animal suffering; see this analysis), which means just replicating Earth’s ecosystem in Earth-like planets across the universe may well be a way of expanding suffering (and average suffering per being can be kept roughly the same for the sake of a thought experiment). If net global welfare is indeed negative, I would consider this super bad!
I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense because yes, in theory from my viewpoint all “torture worlds” (N agents, all suffering the same amount of torture) are equivalent. I feel like that intuition is more right than just “more people = more torture”. I would call them equally bad worlds, and if the torture is preternatural and inescapable I have no way of choosing between them. But I also feel like this is twisting ourselves into examples that are completely unrealistic, to the point of almost uselessness; it is no wonder that our theories of ethics break down, same as most physics does at a black hole singularity.
I think the reason for those intuitions is that (reasonably enough!) we can’t imagine there being 10^100 people without there also being a story behind that situation. A world in which e.g. some kind of entity breeds humans on purpose to then torture them, leading to those insane amounts, sounds indeed absolutely hellish! But the badness of it is due to the context; a world in which there exists only one person, and that person is being horribly tortured, is also extremely upsetting and sad, just in a different way and for different reasons (and all paths to there are also very disturbing; but we’ll maybe think “at least everyone else just died without suffering as much” so it feels less horrible than the 10^100 humans torture world).
But my intuition on the situation alone is more along the lines of: imagine you know you’re going to be born into this world. Would you like you odds? And in both the “one tortured human” and the “10^100 tortured humans” worlds, your odds would be exactly the same: 100% chance of being tortured.
But all of these are just abstract thought experiments. In any realistic situations, torture worlds don’t just happen—there is a story leading to them, and for any kind of torture world, that story is godawful. So in practice the two things can’t be separated. I think it’s fairly correct to say that in all realistic scenarios the 10^100 world will be in practice worse, or have a worse past, though both worlds would be awful.
At least for me, that does not matter. I would always pick a world where 1 person is tortured over a world where 10^100 are tortured (holding the amount of torture per person constant), regardless of the past history. Here is another question. You are just at the beginning of the universe, so no past history, and you can either click one button which would create 10^100 people who would be tortured for 100 years, or another button which would create 1 person who would be tortured for 100 years. If you had to then pick one world to live in, as an individual, you would suffer the same in both worlds, as you would have 100 % chance of being tortured for 100 years either way. So you could conclude which button you chose does not really matter. However, I certainly think such choice would matter! I care not only about my own welfare, but also that of others, so I would certainly pick the button leading to less total torture.
You said before that total utilitarianism is problematic because it can, at least in principle, lead one to endorse situations where a population is made extinct in order for its resources to be used more efficiently to produce welfare. However, average utilitarianism is way more problematic. It can, at least in principle, lead to a situation where the average welfare is kept constant, but we arbitrarily expand the amount of torture by increasing the number of beings. Even in practice this would be possible. For example, net global welfare accounting for animals may well be negative due to wild animal suffering (or even just farmed animal suffering; see this analysis), which means just replicating Earth’s ecosystem in Earth-like planets across the universe may well be a way of expanding suffering (and average suffering per being can be kept roughly the same for the sake of a thought experiment). If net global welfare is indeed negative, I would consider this super bad!
I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense because yes, in theory from my viewpoint all “torture worlds” (N agents, all suffering the same amount of torture) are equivalent. I feel like that intuition is more right than just “more people = more torture”. I would call them equally bad worlds, and if the torture is preternatural and inescapable I have no way of choosing between them. But I also feel like this is twisting ourselves into examples that are completely unrealistic, to the point of almost uselessness; it is no wonder that our theories of ethics break down, same as most physics does at a black hole singularity.