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I think OP's objection is that - even granting that a "badness value" can be assigned to headaches and that 3 people with headaches is worse than 2 - there's no
by n4r9 2y ago
I think OP's objection is that - even granting that a "badness value" can be assigned to headaches and that 3 people with headaches is worse than 2 - there's no clear reason to suppose that 3 is exactly half again as bad as 2. It may be that the function mapping headaches to badness is logarithmic, or even that it asymptotes towards some limit. In mathematical terms it can be both monotonic and bounded.
Thus, when comparing headaches to a man being tortured, there's no clear reason to suppose that there is a number of headaches that is worse than the torture.
- sdwr 2y agoThat's reversed. The number of people can be mapped linearly, but not the intensity of the pain. (Intuitively, it's hard to say saving 100 people is 100x as good as saving 1, because we can't have 100 best friends, but it doesn't affect the math at all)
- BenthamsBulldog 2y agoRight but Norcross gives an argument against that. You either have to think that slightly reducing pain and making it 1000 times as prevalent doesn't always make a worse state of affairs or deny that worse than is transitive.
- n4r9 2y agoWhat are the arguments for "worse than" being transitive? It's not immediately clear to me that it ought to be.