Note also that you can accept outweighability and still believe that extreme suffering is really bad. You could—e.g. - think that 1 second of a cluster headache can only be outweighed by trillions upon trillions of years of bliss. That would give you all the same practical implications without the theoretical trouble.
+1 to this, this echoes some earlier discussion we’ve had privately and I think it would be interesting to see it fleshed out more, if your current view is to reject outweighability in theory
More importantly I think this points to a potential drawback RE: “IHE thought experiment, I claim, is an especially epistemically productive way of exploring that territory, and indeed for doing moral philosophy more broadly”[1]
For example, if your intuition is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is worse than 1E10 and 1E100 and 10^10^10 years of bliss, and these all feel like ~equally clear tradeoffs to you, there doesn’t seem (to me) to be a clear way of knowing whether you should believe your conclusion is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is “not offsetable in theory” or “offsetable in theory but not in practice, + scope insensitivity”,[2] or some other option.
+1 to this, this echoes some earlier discussion we’ve had privately and I think it would be interesting to see it fleshed out more, if your current view is to reject outweighability in theory
More importantly I think this points to a potential drawback RE: “IHE thought experiment, I claim, is an especially epistemically productive way of exploring that territory, and indeed for doing moral philosophy more broadly”[1]
For example, if your intuition is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is worse than 1E10 and 1E100 and 10^10^10 years of bliss, and these all feel like ~equally clear tradeoffs to you, there doesn’t seem (to me) to be a clear way of knowing whether you should believe your conclusion is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is “not offsetable in theory” or “offsetable in theory but not in practice, + scope insensitivity”,[2] or some other option.
Though I do think it’s valuable as one of the tools we should use, and for interrogating our intuitions!
The scope insensitivity may explain why the tradeoff across vastly different timeframes feels ~equally certain to you