Is Group Suffering Worse than Individual Suffering?

Question

1. There are two jails. Both employ torture of prisoners as a means to gain confessions.

2. Jail A has one prisoner. One guard tortures him.

3. Jail B has 1000 prisoners, all of whom are also tortured, each by a different guard.

Question: Is the Chief Warden of Jail B guilty of a worse act than that of Jail A?

The intuitive response will for many be "of course", yet whilst Jail B is torturing 1000 times as many people as Jail A, the amount of suffering sustained by each prisoner (and each guard) never exceeds one person's suffering. The amount of suffering by each person in Jail B is the same as that endured by each person in Jail A.

What is it - if anything - that makes Jail B's actions worse that Jail A's?

What is it - if anything - about the suffering of a group that is worse than the suffering of an individual?

Perhaps a simpler way to put it would be: "All else being equal, what - if anything - makes the suffering of a group worse than the suffering of an individual?".

Is it, for example, because of an innate evolutionary desire to maximise the group's odds of survival (thereby increasing our our own chances of survival)?

NOTE: This question has been refined thanks to feedback and answers. Thank-you.

Answer 1

Well, say that at first the warden has 1 prisoner that he tortures. Then he is given the choice to acquire a second prisoner to also torture.

Are you indifferent as to whether he acquires and tortures this second prisoner, or does not?

If you aren't indifferent, then you must be agreeing that (in your value system) it is worse to torture two prisoners than to torture one. And so on, up to 1000.

Another way to phrase the question: If you have the power to easily and immediately stop the warden from acquiring the second prisoner, would you do so?

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We acquired the values we have because of multiple factors.

Evolution. We evolved to maximize our reproductive success. Saving people from being tortured gains us social credit with those people, and with their relatives and friends. This social credit translates into social status and material support, with translates into reproductive fitness. Also, by saving more people, the local tribe would become stronger through their contributions, which would benefit everyone in the tribe, including yourself and your relatives.

Culture. We are born into a society that teaches us certain ways of thinking. We adopt these teachings largely because we evolved to learn from our elders. And so, if a child grows up in a religion or a secular culture that teaches him a certain thing is wrong, the child will grow up to believe that thing is wrong. We also evolved to seek out social status, which causes us to mimic the beliefs of high-status members of our community. High status members of our community say torture is wrong, so we also believe it to be wrong, in addition to our innate revulsion to it. Members of different cultures will have different values.

Consistency. We evolved a sense of reason and consistency. We evolved this sense because a consistent set of beliefs tends to be more effective at guiding our actions to acquire rewards. We do not want to hold inconsistent beliefs when it comes to purely practical knowledge, and we apply this same instinct for consistency in the moral domain. So, we take our initial values, given to us through innate instincts or through culture, and we try to resolve any inconsistencies they have with each other. A career criminal may value not hurting people, but also value providing for their own family, and these values may come into conflict. The criminal then alters their values to remove the conflict - either he finds another line of work, or he decides that hurting non-family members is not so bad.

Answer 2

Welcome, Futilitarian. Your question sets a poser but I will try to formulate a response.

To fix ideas, I assume that torture is (1) the deliberate infliction of physical pain or psychological suffering (2) beyond a threshhold of mere mistreatment (c) applied by a state actor in order (d) to gain information (e) relevant to the vital security of the state (or community) where (f) it is known for certain that the person tortured possesses the required information.

This will not cover all cases of torture - of course not - but it will give us a starting point.

1.It is possible to hold that torture is always morally wrong and should never occur. Let's consider the weaker position that torture is always morally bad. Moral judgements are sensitive to considerations of pain and suffering (among much else) and so it follows that the use of torture (as defined) is always morally bad, always a moral evil, always something that has moral disvalue. But badness does not entail wrongness. This is clear from the many cases in which we have to act and our action has to be a choice of evils. We choose the lesser evil, X rather than Y.

This means that both X and Y are bad. It seems clear to me that, so far as pain and suffering go, i.e. employing only that moral criterion, the equal pain and suffering of 1000 people (X) embodies greater moral disvalue than the torture of 1 person (Y). It is in your language 'a worse act'. This rests on a comparative judgement of the numbers of persons and their equal experience: it is morally worse that more rather than fewer people should equally experience deliberately applied pain and suffering.

Here in the words of your question group sufffering is worse than individual suffering.

2.To turn now to the second possibility: if torture is morally bad, for the reasons just given, is it always morally wrong? If you hold the principle that torture is always morally wrong and should never occur, that practically ends the discussion. Are there, however, or could there be cases in which the torture of 1000 persons does not embody as much moral disvalue as the torture of one person?

I need to change the terms of the example. Suppose the one person is innnocent and does not have the information his torturers require. Suppose also that the 1000 do have this information. If the torturers of the one person are persecuting him because as a dissident he fails to vote for the ruling pary, then his torture is morally wrong as well as morally bad.

If the information-possessing 1000 will not disclose what they know, conditions are imaginable in which for the sake of the survival of a community of millions, torture at the minimum level necessary to extract the information would be justified in terms of communal self-defence. If (as is widely acknowledged) it is morally justifiable, and in that sense morally right, for me to kill in self-defence, is there not a parallel with a state's right to torture in self-defence? Here is a case where the torture of 1000 embodies less moral disvalue than the torture of one.

Here in the words of your question individual suffering is worse than group suffering.

Two caveats: (1) such conditions, while imaginable and not wholly unrealistic, are so rare that they would (even if my parallel works) hardly ever justify torture and make it morally right. (2) The means of torture remain subject to moral constraints. If torture involves merciless beatings, powerful and dangerous electric shocks, 'rape, acts which resemble drowning and suffocation, burning with fire and chemicals, sensory deprivation, the witness of the torture of others, especially loved ones, and threats of the same, and sham execution' (Blakely: 376) then these are not justified merely because, and if, torture is justified. Extreme discomfort, yes and with compunction and regret, but not acts such as these.

Note

I am less than certain about the above arguments. But they represent what I am currently inclined to think. If they contain errors, these can and I'm sure will be easily exposed.

References

Ruth Blakely, 'Why Torture?', Review of International Studies , Jul., 2007, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 373-394.

Ben Juratowitch, 'Torture Is Always Wrong', Public Affairs Quarterly, Apr., 2008, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Apr., 2008), pp. 81-90.

Answer 3

If everyone is equal, it is worse to torture 1000. If one person however is worth 1001 units of value, relative to the others, then it is worse to torture the one individual.

Answer 4

They are both terrible, however the 1000 inmate scenario shows that it's now a habit done thousands of times, it's progressively worse (going in the wrong direction)

Who is better: The man that does one really good thing, but just once, or the man that does many small good things, but has made it into a habit?

Answer 5

I think the answer by causative is pretty clear and straightforward about why we would like to stop more people from suffering.

This answer isn't an answer to the actual question but an invitation to look at an even more difficult argument: The Repugnant Conclusion.

It touches on the same topic - the ethical mathematics of groups - and it raises some questions that are genuinely very hard to answer.

Answer 6

Of course the suffering of the group is far more a bad thing then the suffering of the individual. It seems a bit of trick question when the language suggests that if each person sufers the same amount no more no less.each person treated the same in a one on one setting. It gives the impression that this form of treatment spares the group suffering. There I said it and you only have to hear it a second time to see the problem with jail B it's group suffering its the difference between finding and treating some form of abuse at a late age and the individual leading a suitable life and something a kin to genocide that group suffering can couse.