Almost There Dogwise

[malorum]

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You must check a box after which a random human will die six hours sooner than his time or three ownerless dogs will be excruciatingly tortured for a half an hour.


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Oh cool. Now I see what your asking. At last. I think u still have some way to go with the question though.

The answer (for each individual) could then be potentially be found by using a questionaire, but I hope the attempt to formulate this below highlights the deficits in your question as presented. I trust you will do better next time:

1. Place a personal utility between 1 and 100 on how you would feel about shortening a persons life by n%

to find 'n' you need to specify the age or life expectancy of the person.
You suggest a 'random' selection of individuals.
so 'n' may vary between 100 and 5.8 x 10 ^-6
The distribution would depend on demographic data and
this means however you may select a baby due to die painlessly six hours after birth, and you would thus deprive the child of life altogether (this could be good or bad for parents or child.)What matters in the utilitarian analysis is weather you would feel worse about this than about the woman who is 120 losing a few hours.

My first approximation is that it is more usefull to view a shortening of life in terms of a % of total lifetime, for the purposes of such analyses.

The problem is that the first part of this analysis becomes compplex because of variations in life expectancy.

The latter part of the analysis about the dogs, is possibly simpler. You have to place a weighting on how bad the decision maker feels about three dogs suffering for the given period of time.
I'm not sure why the number three is used. I suspect most humans use a non-linear weighting when it comes to the number of animals suffering and how they feel about it (Do you eat eggs from battery farmed hens?)


Good luck, and God speed in your quest for the perfect question.