I've always felt this line of argumentation makes a lot of unimaginative assumptions about the way in which we weight pleasure vs. displeasure. Take the example from the article:
> There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish
> person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the
> victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can
> give pleasure to all these Nazis?
This makes sense if the weight of pleasure is uncapped, but imagine a utility function where lots of pleasure still only has a bit of utility (say 10) whereas very extreme displeasure could have much more negative or nearly uncapped negative utility (say, -(10^20) for torture). Then no number of Nazis that could ever physically exist would be able to cause this situation to have negative utility.
Thinking in those terms, I find the criticism weak.
> There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish
> person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the
> victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can
> give pleasure to all these Nazis?
This makes sense if the weight of pleasure is uncapped, but imagine a utility function where lots of pleasure still only has a bit of utility (say 10) whereas very extreme displeasure could have much more negative or nearly uncapped negative utility (say, -(10^20) for torture). Then no number of Nazis that could ever physically exist would be able to cause this situation to have negative utility.
Thinking in those terms, I find the criticism weak.