It seems to me plausible that anyone who uses the word agony in the standard sense is committing her/himself to agony being undesirable. This is not an argument for irreducible normativity, but it may give you a feeling that there is some intrinsic connection underlying the set of self-evident cases.
Could you please clarify this? As someone who is mainly convinced of irreducible normativity by the self-evident badness of agony—in particular, considering the intuition that someone in agony has reason to end it even if they don’t consciously “desire” that end—I don’t think this can be dissolved as a linguistic confusion.
It’s true that for all practical purposes humans seem not to desire their own pain/suffering. But in my discussions with some antirealists they have argued that if a paperclip maximizer, for example, doesn’t want not to suffer (by hypothesis all it wants is to maximize paperclips), then such a being doesn’t have a reason to avoid suffering. That to me seems patently unbelievable. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood your point!
Could you please clarify this? As someone who is mainly convinced of irreducible normativity by the self-evident badness of agony—in particular, considering the intuition that someone in agony has reason to end it even if they don’t consciously “desire” that end—I don’t think this can be dissolved as a linguistic confusion.
It’s true that for all practical purposes humans seem not to desire their own pain/suffering. But in my discussions with some antirealists they have argued that if a paperclip maximizer, for example, doesn’t want not to suffer (by hypothesis all it wants is to maximize paperclips), then such a being doesn’t have a reason to avoid suffering. That to me seems patently unbelievable. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood your point!