Regarding this moral dilemma:
Torture vs. Dust Specks by Eliezer Yudkowsky
This post does not explicitly state the opinion of the author, but since he bothered to write it down I'm assuming he is taking the Utilitarian stance that torturing one person is better than inconveniencing many others.
My initial thought is that
I would never volunteer to suffer for 50 years so that a bunch of people don't get a speck of dust in their eye. And I don't think I know anyone who would. Therefore I suspect it would be immoral to force someone else to do it.
As a starting point, I don't consider suffering to be on a linear scale. I think one person suffering at level-five is far, far worse than five people suffering at level-one.
The medical pain scale describes level-one pain as my pain is hardly noticeable
and level-five pain as I think about my pain most of the time; I cannot do some of the activities I need to do each day because of the pain.
If physical pain could be subdivided and spread out, that is something I would volunteer to help with.
Here is a linear scale.
Each step up is +10 the previous step.
Here is a logarithmic scale.
Each step up is x10 the previous step.
I think that suffering is measured on a logarithmic scale.
So it would take
a lot of inconvenienced people to outweigh one person being tortured in the Utilitarian equation. But you can still theoretically increase the number of inconvenienced people until the equation "works". Therefore, I suspect the use of an equation at all is faulty.
Utilitarianism gives a useful swag for a lot of moral questions. Often, reducing the number of people who are suffering is a good path to take.
But I don't think Utilitarianism should be used as an absolute arbiter.
So how do we know what is moral and immoral?
Going back to the first question I asked myself:
Would I volunteer? I think the key to whether a sacrifice is moral is do you have a volunteer or are you forcing someone to do it?
Like this other moral dilemma I've heard:
There is a doctor with 10 dying patients; they each need different organ transplants. Someone wanders in, a healthy adult with all healthy organs. The doctor thinks "I could save 10 lives if I killed this 1 person for their organs". What should the doctor do?
I absolutely do not want myself or anyone else murdered for organ harvesting. But I'm be ok with someone volunteering to donate their entire body to save lives. The only difference is did they volunteer or were they forced.
I think it's a common opinion to be ok with people volunteering to sacrifice themselves, in small ways and big ways. We all do it all the time.
If that's a common opinion, then is Utilitarianism only useful for providing a mathematical proof that it is ok to force people into being the sacrifice?
Do I consistently believe that using force is wrong?
No, for instance I'm in favor of confiscating the vast wealth of billionaires and redistributing it across the population. Why do I think that is ok to do?
I think a big part of it is that billionaires do not need such wealth to live and not even to thrive. And other people do need those resources to live.
So in the case that one person requires a resource for life, and another person has a surplus of that resource, then it is ok to enforce sharing.
Still thinking this through, though.