(March 4, 2011 at 8:45 am)DoubtVsFaith Wrote: I've also got a parallel moral dilemma for you:
You have a choice between saving ten million women from being raped, each with a suffering value of 1000, or saving an infinite number of people suffering a pinprick each with a suffering value of 1.
What do you choose, and why?
I'll respond to the longer post when I have time, for now I'll tackle this.
This is two different questions to me, I'll explain why.
1. In terms of the amount of suffering the infinite pinpricks is a situation with more quantitative suffering and less qualitative suffering, ∞ x 1 > 10,000,000 x 1,000.
2. Does this make it morally good to save the people from pinpricks over the people being raped? No. Why? Because I don't consider pain/pleasure to be objects of moral evaluation, I consider desires to be the object of moral evaluation, and in a specific way, not in terms of desire fulfilment (as in desire fulfilment acts utilitarianism) but in terms of the tendency of desires to promote or thwart more and/or stronger other desires within the context of a universal consideration of all of the desires of all people.
The whole ∞ thing makes the mathematics invalid, talking about ∞ + 10,000,000 people makes absolutely no sense, so for the sake of saving myself a shit load of extra work in clarifications I'll put it in a different way where the suffering from the pinpricks still vastly more in total than the rapes, it should make no difference to the evaluation it's self, it's simply easier to deal with in an efficient manner.
Even though we can ignore suffering for my moral evaluation I'll lay it out all the same:
The number of rapes is 10^10 with a suffering (S) of 1,000 for a total (t) of 10^13tS
The number of pinpricked people is 10^100 with an S of 1 for 10^100tS
The pinpricks quantitatively + qualitatively is 10^83 times more tS .
We have a total of 10^110 people.
Now on to the desires.
Desire to prick someone with a pin is a desire than tends to thwart a single very small desire.
A desire to rape is a desire that necessarily thwarts an absolute desire (it is impossible to desire to be raped)
All of our 10^110 people necessarily desire not to be raped.
We will assume that none of our 10^110 people are masochists, so none of them desire to be pricked with a pin.
To simplify the evaluation we will assume that neither the desire to rape nor the desire to prick someone with a pin is one one that thwarts or promotes any other desires.
If we were forced to chose to promote one of these desires over the other and want to know what choice is the more moral one we need to ask, what would a moral person do?
A moral person is a person with the desires that tend to promote more and/or stronger desires than they thwart. A desire to rape is one that, when applied to all people, would thwart more and/or stronger desires than a desire to prick someone with a pin, thus the moral person would promote the desire to prick someone with a pin.
Thus, the desire that I would promote is the desire to prick someone with a pin.
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