I’m not a purely hedonic utilitarian but I think understanding and eliminating the sources of the greatest pain and suffering is important. Humans aren’t good at reasoning about pain severity. There’s a trick the brain plays (especially when depressed) that the pain being experienced is “the worst possible”. However, it can’t be that everyone’s pain is the worst (although it may in truth be the worst the person has experienced themselves). Several times I’ve experienced pain (either psychological or physical, or some combination) which felt like the worst possible (at least along some dimension) only to find later that far greater pain is possible.
You know that Black Mirror episode where the doctor uses a BCI device to feel his patient’s pain (S4E6: “Black Museum”)? I think that could be useful here for comparing instantaneous pain states across wildly different situations.
It’s pretty obvious that what matters is the integral, and philosophers arguing otherwise just seem to be spinning yarn. The integral over instantaneous values is what matters. Unfortunately this is hard to measure and retrospective analyses trying to gauge this integral really suck. Pain experienced is not any less a tragedy if forgotten shortly afterwards. We all die in the end, the ultimate forgetting.
I’m not a purely hedonic utilitarian but I think understanding and eliminating the sources of the greatest pain and suffering is important. Humans aren’t good at reasoning about pain severity. There’s a trick the brain plays (especially when depressed) that the pain being experienced is “the worst possible”. However, it can’t be that everyone’s pain is the worst (although it may in truth be the worst the person has experienced themselves). Several times I’ve experienced pain (either psychological or physical, or some combination) which felt like the worst possible (at least along some dimension) only to find later that far greater pain is possible.
You know that Black Mirror episode where the doctor uses a BCI device to feel his patient’s pain (S4E6: “Black Museum”)? I think that could be useful here for comparing instantaneous pain states across wildly different situations.
It’s pretty obvious that what matters is the integral, and philosophers arguing otherwise just seem to be spinning yarn. The integral over instantaneous values is what matters. Unfortunately this is hard to measure and retrospective analyses trying to gauge this integral really suck. Pain experienced is not any less a tragedy if forgotten shortly afterwards. We all die in the end, the ultimate forgetting.