Howdy folks... still new to the field, would appreciate your guidance on the following (inelegant) thought experiment I've been cogitating on.

Imagine an alien lifeform came to earth and promised to make the human race immune to the pain of stubbed toes -- a pain that is very intense but also quick to dissipate, and therefore a quite minor form of suffering. In return for providing this gift, one randomly selected baby has to suffer their toes being stubbed repeatedly, with no other experience but pain, for their whole life until their natural death at 85.

Does humanity take the deal? Perhaps not, we might say, because the pain of 6 billion humans suffering minute amounts of pain doesn't outweigh a single individual suffering such pain repeatedly. But my question is this. Can extreme suffering ever be outweighed by minor suffering? What if the alien said they could stop any being in the universe from suffering stubbed toes, forever -- trillions or quadrillions would never have to suffer this relatively minor inconvenience again. All for the sacrifice of one human.

My intuition suggests no, we shouldn't take the deal, because some kinds of suffering are so extreme that they could never be outweighed by the removal of minor suffering, no matter how much minor suffering you remove. This seems like an ad-hoc rationalisation for sneaking in rights-based thinking. Any thoughts?

People have a horrible sense of scale. If you imagine one person suffering, then you imagine six billion people suffering, you will not imagine the latter being six billion times as bad. You'll imagine it being a few hundred times as bad, if that. No matter how much you increase the number of people, you won't be able to imagine the total suffering increasing by more than a few hundred times. Thus, if an extreme pain is more than a few hundred times as bad as a minor pain, it will seem like the minor pain will never outweigh it.

This is just how people think. It's generally excepted that this is a flawed way to think. If you try to build a skyscraper with that kind of thinking, it will fall down. There is no reason that physics will be any different.

Your example is particularly interesting as it shows that they way people's scale is messed up changes with what you're thinking about. The one person feeling pain for their whole life is still feeling the same minor pain. They're just feeling it over and over again. The scale is still pretty messed up. The average person lives for about two billion seconds. You will not imagine the pain of this person as being two billion times as bad as stubbing your toe. You might imagine it as being a thousand times as bad as stubbing your toe. However, you will still imagine it outweighing the six billion toe-stubbings that only seems a hundred times as bad as stubbing your toe.

To be clear, do you therefore think it's better for the one to avoid extreme suffering, or the many (billions or more) to avoid minor suffering?

It's a fairly arcane example...this might be a more applied problem. Imagine medical researchers have come up with a cure for (mild) hangovers. It's certain to work, but it requires excruciating vivisection of a chimpanzee -- performed with no anaesthetic, and extending relentlessly for weeks. Again, I don't see how I could support this research, no matter how many (billions or more) humans were saved from hangovers, because it seems so intuitively wrong to "stack up" a huge number of pinprick pains and have them, at any point, become equivalent to agony.

I'm pretty sure what DanielLC is saying is that it doesn't matter either way. Our intuitions tell us that it's worse to allocate all the stubs to one person, but that's just an illusion.

The illusion arises because of the following: we're not very good at understanding the random baby's pain because it's spread across a lifetime. But we're even worse at getting a handle on the pain when its spread across all the individuals on Earth. Spreading the pain across lots of individuals makes it harder to visualise, so it makes the pain not seem as bad as it really is.

To explain the psychology of the dillema, I'll show you a link which most of the other people on felicifia are probably getting a little tired of. Here (scroll down to 'session five') is an interview that discusses how bad we are at imagining the suffering of lots of individuals at once. In this instance, it's not human individuals, it's birds:

How much would you pay to save birds from drowning in oil ponds? There is a whole scenario of how the poor birds mistake the oil ponds for real water ponds, and so how much should we pay to basically cover the oil ponds with netting to prevent that from happening. Surprisingly, people are willing to pay quite a bit once you describe the scenario well enough. But one thing is, it doesn't matter what the number of birds is. Two thousand birds, two hundred thousand, two million, they will pay exactly the same amount.

QUESTION: This is not price per bird?

KAHNEMAN: No, this is total. And so the reason is the same reason that you had with time, taking an average instead of an integral. You're not thinking of saving two hundred thousand birds. You are thinking of saving a bird. The emotion is associated with the idea of saving a bird from drowning. The quantity is completely separate. Basically you're representing the whole set by a prototype incident, and you evaluate the prototype incident. All the rest are like that.

Right, gotcha. I can see that is what I'm doing.

A final question from a slightly different angle. I still have a strong sense that there are qualitatively different kinds of suffering -- utterly trivial seems so different from excruciating. To make my point sharper, imagine the medical research mentioned above was going to cure not hangovers (which can still involve moderate pain) but rather the mildest and most trivial discomfort conceivable -- say the barely perceptible sensation of a fly landing on one's arm then flying off after a 1/4 second. For each individual given this inoculation, a single fly is stopped from landing on their arm. And it only works on one fly for each person in a lifetime. (Also assume that we are all, like Australians, used to having flies around and gain no displeasure from touching them -- the sole benefit to us is that we avoid that briefest of sensations on our arm).

You seem to be suggesting that, so long as we can find enough people to give this inoculation to, utilitarianism suggests we must do the vivisection at some point. For the sake of reducing an amount of suffering that for each individual considered subjectively is almost completely imperceptible, we create hell on earth for an individual. That conclusion seems insupportable to me, because it's not doing what I want utilitarianism to do -- reducing "true" suffering.

Suppose there are two kinds of suffering: major and minor. Reducing minor suffering is good, but it should never be done if it requires an increase in minor suffering. Because of this, if there's any way to move resources from averting minor suffering to averting major suffering, you should do so. If, for instance, you could one second pressing a button that automatically gives everyone an inoculation to minor suffering, but this second could be spent thinking about major suffering, during which there is a tiny chance that find a way to avert it slightly (you have no way to be completely sure you didn't miss something), you should not waste time pressing the button. In effect, for all practical purposes, minor suffering does not exist. There is only one kind of suffering.

In short, if it's ever worth giving someone the inoculation, it will eventually be worth the vivisection.

Incidentally, this idea of two kinds of suffering is rather important in utilitarianism. In this case, the "major" suffering is infinite suffering. We might be able to find a way to violate the law of conservation of energy, and make the world last forever. Is it really worth spending time on things that don't matter in comparison?

spindoctor wrote:Also assume that we are all, like Australians, used to having flies around and gain no displeasure from touching them

Just to add to what Daniel said, this is a slightly odd sentence - if the thing being prevented doesn't involve any displeasure, why is preventing it a good thing on utilitarian calculation?

I assume he means negligible displeasure.

To answer the fly question first, I think that inflicting a billion flies on one person is worse than inflicting one fly each to a billion people. I think we australians take the experience of flies for granted and it does not really bother us. The problem with inflicting all the flies on the one person is that you're inflicting more than the sum of the billion experiences. You're also inflicting an emotional torture. I think that a mere fly landing on your hand is just the sensation of touch. It doesn't count as wellbeing. On the opposite extreme, a person might find mosquitos to be repulsive. But that's just an intuition. Wellbeing has to be at the intersection of sensation and intuition. It's when a mosquito lands on you and that mosquito represents things that you don't like, making you suffer.

I recall a patient described by the neurologist VS Ramachandran. This patient is a masochist. So, he set his alarm to four in the morning so that he could put himself through a cold shower. However, he came to discover that he enjoyed it too much, so he instead switched his alarm off! On certain levels he dislikes the shower but on other levels he hates it. What is the utilitarian to do?

Another interesting puzzle, I read about in a paper recently. It argued that utility doesn't come in big observable chunks. It sits on a continuous scale. If your experience shuffles just a short distance along the scale, you won't report it. You mightn't even notice it yourself. I had always regarded wellbeing to always involve experience. So it's a tricky business deciding whether unconscious wellbeing can be possible. It could descent into some complex philosophical debate about whether people are the ultimate authority about their experiences.

I think the answer to the latter puzzle is that in reflecting and reporting our feelings, we can muddle things up. For example, we can laugh at a joke then complain that it was not funny. We can intellectually dislike a job yet still enjoy it. It's hard to figure out whether the 4am shower brings the masochist pain, suffering, or a bit of each. If we knew him well, we might learn whether he was happier with or without it. With normal healthy people though, we can usually take people's word on such matters. If they say they like sport, it's a fair assumption that they do. I'd love to hear your takes on these puzzles.

Just to add to what Daniel said, this is a slightly odd sentence - if the thing being prevented doesn't involve any displeasure, why is preventing it a good thing on utilitarian calculation?

Yeah I misspoke there. I meant to capture the very mild annoyance that I (as an Australian who's used to them) get from flies. Perhaps the same that a cow gets from a fly sitting on its rump -- just irritated enough to bat it away, but a very routine sensation, no disgust (tourists can rather more upset by Australian crawly things). It was my attempt to find an example of a negligible but non-zero level of suffering.

My question's really been answered so feel free to ignore this last flogging of a dead horse... but it's just a much better example of what I was getting at in the first place.

Do you support the Draize test on rabbits when used to develop moisturisers for (everyday, non-pathological) dry skin? If so, give me a ballpark of how many cosmetics buyers you think would have to benefit to outweigh the torture of (say) a single rabbit?

In principal most people here would say that theoretically enough cosmetic pleasure would outweigh the rabbits' suffering, but in practice I doubt any of us would support it. It's a lot of suffering for potentially zero happiness gain (cosmetics seems to be potentially negative-sum - if all women stopped using them, it seems unlikely that men's happiness would dip much, but once one woman does there's a lot of pressure on others to follow the trend).

Here's an even better example of scope insensitivity.

Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group.