Could I Make You Eat A Massive Second Helping Of Shit?

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One of my favourite essays on this app is Misha Valdman’s “Could I Make You Eat Shit?”. It begins:

Chances are that there’s already some shit in whatever you’re eating. But you probably think that I couldn’t make you eat more of it, at least not without resorting to unsavory means. But you’d be wrong, and Derek Parfit’s trailblazing work in population ethics explains why. Parfit could make anyone eat shit – willingly, gladly, and in quantities you could scarcely imagine – and not just in the seminar room. Bribery and blandishments did not become him. He couldn’t hurt a fly. He couldn’t tell a lie. But he could make you eat shit. All he needed was your rationality and the power to make things better.

Valdman proceeds to argue—with a rapier wit—that a retooled version of Derek Parfit’s mere addition paradox can be used to persuade any rational burger-enjoyer to eat unconscionable amounts of shit:

Like a cross between Monty Hall and Don Corleone, Parfit’s gambit was to make you an offer that you couldn’t rationally refuse. Or many such offers, really, in rapid succession. Suppose that you’re sitting on a park bench about to eat a sad little veggie burger – the A-burger – that happens to contain, say, 50 molecules of shit. That’s when Parfit swoops in, like Tarzan on a vine, and offers to replace your sad little burger with another – the B-burger – that’s just like the A-burger except that it’s twice as delectable and contains just a bit more shit. A burger with fifty molecules of shit is barely distinguishable from one with a hundred; even the world’s leading scatologists can’t tell the difference. But the B-burger is twice as delectable. You’d be crazy – irrational – to refuse. And Parfit knows it.

But no sooner do you accept the B-burger that Parfit offers you another – the C-burger – that’s just like the B-burger except that it’s twice as delectable and contains just a bit more shit. If you’d be crazy to refuse B for A, you’d be crazy to refuse C for B. And D for C, E for D, and so on, until you reach the Z-burger – the last in Parfit’s stash – twice as delectable as Y but not so as compared to A because it’s so profoundly full of shit. Welcome to Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. Enjoy your meal!  

I’m not sure Valdman’s argument that Parfit’s logic commits us to shit-consumption works, but the essay is delectable and you’d be crazy — irrational — not to read it. However: if you haven’t got the time (because, like most of my readers, you’re a blue-collar worker who hurriedly reads my blog during lunch-breaks at the wooden board mill) here is a shittier essay on another way I could persuade you to eat copious amounts shit.

I don’t even have to wrap it in food.

“I love my Going Awol readers! Going Awol. One of ‘em came to me, tears in her eyes, and said: ‘Donald, Donald, he’s so truthful!’ I said, ‘It’s true’. True—I was the first to assign that truth value. To a proposition! I call it, pro-po-sition! I assigned it very early and very strong, now everyone’s assigning it, even Democrats—it’s true. ‘Truthful Amos’, that’s what I like to call him.” — Donald Trump, Truth Social, 05/09/2024

As even former presidents have attested, everything you read on this blog is can be trusted. If I say it, you’d best believe it’s true.

Now suppose—hypothetically—I put out the following post, addressed specifically to you.

Dear [embarrassing Substack username],

To prove a philosophical point, I'm going to make you eat shit.

I have a cloning device (bro, just trust me), which can 3D print a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you. It was given to me by the Canadian government, because I am their best friend, although they’re not my best friend. Last night, I 3D printed a perfect replica of you, and, additionally, 3D printed a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of everything that’s currently in your field of vision. As such, now that I’ve woken [preferred pronoun] up, your duplicate has—qualitatively—the exact same memories and experiences as you.

Unfortunately, I sent this email to both of you. So, I’m afraid, you now don’t know whether you’re the clone or the original. :p

In five minutes, I am going to torture the clone—razor blades, rats, you name it—and do so for sixty years. Unless, that is, you eat shit. Right now. (I have cameras, so don’t even think about cheating.)

Yours truly,

Amos Wollen.

(P.S. do not forget to like and subscribe <33333333)

If you’re a rational person—you must be, you read me!—you’d rather eat shit than be tortured for twenty years in my basement, with razors and rats and such. In fact, even if there’s only a 50% chance of being tortured for sixty years in my basement with razors and rats and such, you’d rather eat shit if that’s what it would take to avoid being tortured. (If sixty years isn’t enough, adjust the torture as needed.)

So—assuming you believe me about the clone—should you really be 50/50 about whether you’re the clone or the original? In “Defeating Dr. Evil With Self-Locating Belief”, philosopher Adam Elga presents the canonical case for Yes.

His argument is fairly straightforward: before I graced your inbox, you believed (I assume) that your current experiences are instantiated once and only once. But now, having read my letter (which you believe to be spitting facts), you believe that your current experiences are instantiated twice: once in the clone, and once in the original. Since you have no reason to believe, from your experiences, that you are the original and not the clone, you should be indifferent between the two alternatives, weighting them 50/50. (Sidenote: even if you’re not 100% sure my letter is spitting facts, then so long as you’re highly confident that it is, and so long as the punishment for not eating shit is sufficiently severe, you’re still going to want to eat shit, just to be safe. After all, if there’s even a 40% chance I’ll be tortured for sixty years, eating shit still seems worth it.)

Hold on!, I hear you object, fork halfway between toilet and mouth. Can’t I rely on my memories to tell me if I’m the clone or not? Nice try, but no. Granted, it’s rational to start out assuming your memories of the past are real—your memories are innocent until proven guilty, so to speak. But it’s possible to receive new information that should cause you to suspend judgement about whether your memories of the past are real.

For example, suppose you find out you once underwent a long process of patriotic brainwashing during your time at the CIA. (This example is pandering, since many of my readers are international spies.) In that case, while you might have been initially justified in believing that the Statue of Liberty once bought you an ice cream, you now have a powerful reason to lose confidence in that belief. Likewise, in the case of the clone, you have a powerful reason to think that there’s only a 50% chance your apparent memories are real, since I said in the letter than the clone will have the exact same memories as the original.

Fortunately, you are not without defence.

As Elga points out, you could safeguard against my extortion by simply cloning hundreds of versions of yourself, moving them far away from me, placing them in identical surroundings, giving them all of your memories (including the memory of producing all these clones), and having them receive an identical ‘eat-shit-or-be-tortured’ letter.

That way, once you’re done, you should be highly confident that you are one of the clones who is safe from torture, since the vast majority of people with your experiences are far away from me and my villainous schemes.

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