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Notes -
Some further thoughts:
theMotte seems like it's kind of intended as a place for people to play on simulacrum level 1, not level 2 where you're telling lies to children to make them behave in the way you've explicitly reasoned about without (yet or ever) being able to do that explicit reasoning themselves. @Amadan am I barking up the wrong tree here?
I think "prison conditions" is much less susceptible to Ozy's argument than torture, because prison conditions up to a point have at least one tradeoff that is always in play i.e. expense. Like, at one end of the Pareto frontier you are basically Auschwitz, enslaving everyone who can/will work and incinerating those who can't/won't; this is maximally cheap (indeed, potentially cheaper than free) and also horrifying (though not maximally horrifying; you're not doing "rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into your clothing, and not in that order" because holy shit that's a lot of extra work). At the other end, jail is basically a hotel, with maintenance; this is maximally nice, but also horrifically expensive due to all the stuff that gets broken or stolen (raising the cost well above the already-substantial cost of a hotel that can actually kick people out). Nobody can currently afford the good end; if you look back in history a lot of societies couldn't afford better than the horror end (though as you look back further, you don't have incinerators or scalable oversight, so this starts to tend more toward "summary execution, (mass) unmarked grave" which AIUI was nearly omnipresent in prehistory). Thus, any "though the heavens fall" seems like an obviously contingent principle which for most values of "okay" that modern Westerners accept would, if applied to a pre-Black-Death society, not work; you'd be overthrown if you tried to implement them by a) peasants starving from your taxation and/or b) other elites trying to avoid a) in order to save their own skins, and if you somehow weren't overthrown then the law-abiding populace dies in plague from undernutrition and the criminals either escape or starve. You are thus, in a sense, always talking price, in a way that doesn't play nice with injunctions; you can argue that 2025 El Salvador is wealthy enough to comfortably pull off better conditions, or you can argue that it's importantly not at the Pareto frontier ("these conditions are worse than death; summarily executing them all would be more humane" is an example of such an argument, because summary executions are cheaper than any prison where the inmates can just sit around) - and the reason I'd not have commented there is that I literally don't know enough about the particulars to participate in either discussion about this case - but if you think there's a one-size-fits-all correct answer you're committing the just-world fallacy.
You will note that I haven't contradicted the claim that there are things worth letting the heavens (literally or metaphorically) fall to avoid, because obviously there are such things even for a first-order utilitarian; the heavens literally falling is not maximally bad, and the heavens metaphorically falling (e.g. WWIII) is generally less bad still, so it's worth WWIII to prevent the Earth being destroyed and it's worth the Earth being destroyed to prevent Allied Mastercomputer.
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