I think “speck of dust in the eye” was a bad choice for the central example of this debate, because in some situations a speck in your eye can be literally zero painful, and in others it can be actually quite painful and distressing. I think this leads to miscommunications and poor intuitions.
My preferred alternative would be something like “lightly scratching your palm with your fingernail”. And while this is technically pain, I find a single light scratch to be so minor that it has literally zero effect on my levels of happiness: in fact I will sometimes do this to myself on purpose when I get sufficiently bored.
I therefore think that that premise 1: “mild pain is bad”, is wrong for sufficiently small definitions of “mild pain”. I think you need a threshold of badness for the argument to work. Furthermore, I think most people who would side with the “dust specks” also have some threshold where they would pick the torture: for example if it was “punching a billion people in the face vs torture one person”.
I think human responses to pain are more complex than just thresholds too. In addition to your gentle scratching, or the near-zero amount of pain sensations registered when applauding, humans voluntarily inflict non-trivial amounts of pain upon themselves for entertainment and self-worth, and accept inevitability of pain as part of their hobbies. Is it meaningful to argue that a certain number of tattoo artists is more objectionable than a smaller number of puppy kickers, or that selecting someone to play football for 90 minutes which will aggravate their modest limb pain is morally more dubious than intentionally kicking them on that limb? I don’t think so.
And that’s not to mention the benefits of pain which such discussions ignore. For many millenia, one of the most feared diseases was leprosy, which manifests itself in numbness.
When it gets to complex organisms and torture much of it is measured as psychological responses rather than intensity of nervous sensation too, which also doesn’t align well with a neat cardinal pain scale; techniques like waterboarding actually trigger objectively useful reflexes rather than inflicting neurological pain. Is there a certain amount of cumulative experience of unexpected droplets in the nasal system aggregated across many people that approximates a single instance of waterboarding one individual? I would say no. I’d probably also say that there isn’t a certain amount of aggregated BSDM kink that’s worse than one actual torture chamber...
Hi David. I would be curious to know your thoughts on my reply to titotal. In the post, “more pain” is supposed to mean “more pain, and all else equal”. If the event that leads to additional pain comes with benefits, it could overall increase welfare. In contrast, a “speck of dust in the eye” is supposed to represent something which decreases welfare very little (considering all effects).
Hi titotal. A “speck of dust in the eye” is supposed to represent something which decreases welfare very little (considering all effects, including decreasing boredom), thus being very slightly bad, and worth avoiding (all else equal). So one can interpret premise 1 (“mild pain is bad”) as “mildly decreasing welfare is bad”. I believe the arguments in the post work for an arbitrarily small decrease in welfare. Do you agree?
I think “speck of dust in the eye” was a bad choice for the central example of this debate, because in some situations a speck in your eye can be literally zero painful, and in others it can be actually quite painful and distressing. I think this leads to miscommunications and poor intuitions.
My preferred alternative would be something like “lightly scratching your palm with your fingernail”. And while this is technically pain, I find a single light scratch to be so minor that it has literally zero effect on my levels of happiness: in fact I will sometimes do this to myself on purpose when I get sufficiently bored.
I therefore think that that premise 1: “mild pain is bad”, is wrong for sufficiently small definitions of “mild pain”. I think you need a threshold of badness for the argument to work. Furthermore, I think most people who would side with the “dust specks” also have some threshold where they would pick the torture: for example if it was “punching a billion people in the face vs torture one person”.
I think human responses to pain are more complex than just thresholds too. In addition to your gentle scratching, or the near-zero amount of pain sensations registered when applauding, humans voluntarily inflict non-trivial amounts of pain upon themselves for entertainment and self-worth, and accept inevitability of pain as part of their hobbies. Is it meaningful to argue that a certain number of tattoo artists is more objectionable than a smaller number of puppy kickers, or that selecting someone to play football for 90 minutes which will aggravate their modest limb pain is morally more dubious than intentionally kicking them on that limb? I don’t think so.
And that’s not to mention the benefits of pain which such discussions ignore. For many millenia, one of the most feared diseases was leprosy, which manifests itself in numbness.
When it gets to complex organisms and torture much of it is measured as psychological responses rather than intensity of nervous sensation too, which also doesn’t align well with a neat cardinal pain scale; techniques like waterboarding actually trigger objectively useful reflexes rather than inflicting neurological pain. Is there a certain amount of cumulative experience of unexpected droplets in the nasal system aggregated across many people that approximates a single instance of waterboarding one individual? I would say no. I’d probably also say that there isn’t a certain amount of aggregated BSDM kink that’s worse than one actual torture chamber...
Hi David. I would be curious to know your thoughts on my reply to titotal. In the post, “more pain” is supposed to mean “more pain, and all else equal”. If the event that leads to additional pain comes with benefits, it could overall increase welfare. In contrast, a “speck of dust in the eye” is supposed to represent something which decreases welfare very little (considering all effects).
Hi titotal. A “speck of dust in the eye” is supposed to represent something which decreases welfare very little (considering all effects, including decreasing boredom), thus being very slightly bad, and worth avoiding (all else equal). So one can interpret premise 1 (“mild pain is bad”) as “mildly decreasing welfare is bad”. I believe the arguments in the post work for an arbitrarily small decrease in welfare. Do you agree?