Abstract
A person is repeatedly given the option to increase his torture level by an undetectable increment, in exchange for $10,000. Each time, it seems rational to accept, but the end result is a life of agony that seems not worth the financial reward. The solution is to recognize that there can be an introspectively undetectable increment in pain, and that an undetectable harm can outweigh a detectable benefit.
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Notes
- 1.
This paradox discussed in this chapter derives from Warren Quinn (1990). I have altered the scenario in minor ways here.
- 2.
- 3.
Quinn 1990, p. 79.
- 4.
Andreou (2016) takes a similar strategy, which depends upon dividing up options into evaluatively described, qualitative categories, such as “terrible”, “poor”, “acceptable”, and the like.
- 5.
Quinn 1990, p. 87.
- 6.
More precisely, Quinn (1990, p. 85) says that we should reject the “Principle of Strategic Readjustment”, which holds that “Strategies continue to have authority only if they continue to offer him what he prefers overall. Otherwise, they should be changed.” The Principle of Strategic Readjustment, so described, is a special case of Preference Consistency.
- 7.
I say “qualitative properties” to exclude such things as haecceities or “the property of being this particular individual”.
- 8.
Quinn 1990, p. 81.
- 9.
What if we say that x and y “have the same intensity” provided that they have overlapping ranges? Then “having the same intensity” will not entail being equally bad: one pain might be worse than another in virtue of having a higher upper boundary and/or a higher lower boundary, even though the two pains have overlapping ranges.
I leave aside the question of what these ranges might mean, since the proposal in any case fails to avoid my argument for the existence of undetectable changes in the badness of a pain.
- 10.
Why is this true? The marginal value of money, by definition, is the rate at which wellbeing increases with increases in one’s wealth – in technical terms, the derivative of wellbeing with respect to wealth. The integral of this, say, from 0 to n, is the total increase in wellbeing obtained as one goes from 0 to n, which is the area under the marginal value curve. The same applies to the marginal disvalue of pain. Here, as an approximation, I treat the marginal value curve as continuous.
- 11.
According to Kahneman and Deaton (2010), money income increases one’s happiness, up to about $75,000 per year, after which it makes no discernible difference.
- 12.
For a general argument that almost any psychological state can be undetectable (that is, there can be a case in which one cannot know whether one is in the state), see Williamson 2000, ch. 4.
References
Andreou, Chrisoula. 2006. “Environmental Damage and the Puzzle of the Self-Torturer”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 34: 95–108.
Andreou, Chrisoula. 2016. “The Real Puzzle of the Self-Torturer: Uncovering a New Dimension of Instrumental Rationality”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45: 562–75.
Kahneman, Daniel and Angus Deaton. 2010. “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 16489–16493.
Quinn, Warren S. 1990. “The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer”, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 59: 79–90.
Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Huemer, M. (2018). The Self-Torturer. In: Paradox Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90490-0_4
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