I’m not sure there is an objective answer to your question because (to my knowledge) we don’t have good definitions of suffering and well-being and no objective way to compare their intensity. It also depends on whether by “worst suffering” you mean the worst suffering current humans can experience, or the worst theoretically possible suffering (and the best theoretically possible well-being). Some speculations related to the latter can be read here. You can probably find more such speculations by going through these search results.
If you are asking about current humans, it may be informative to ask people who have experienced both extreme suffering and extreme happiness for their opinion. However, in my experience different people answer such questions very differently. Also, I imagine that even the same person may answer the question differently depending on whether you are asking them while they are experiencing intense suffering or after it has already happened. And it’s unclear what to do with that.
Hm, interesting. I was more pointing to the current human, as you write. What I was trying to get at was that I would think it would be absurd for someone to accept, say, 50 years of burning of alive before the nerves die off, for any sort of well-being “within one current human” for 50 years. If this is true for the CU as well, it seems she have to account for such an asymmetry by ‘extrinsic’ means.
Your answer (and the links) definitely made me a lot more uncertain about a bunch of things though!
I’m not sure there is an objective answer to your question because (to my knowledge) we don’t have good definitions of suffering and well-being and no objective way to compare their intensity. It also depends on whether by “worst suffering” you mean the worst suffering current humans can experience, or the worst theoretically possible suffering (and the best theoretically possible well-being). Some speculations related to the latter can be read here. You can probably find more such speculations by going through these search results.
If you are asking about current humans, it may be informative to ask people who have experienced both extreme suffering and extreme happiness for their opinion. However, in my experience different people answer such questions very differently. Also, I imagine that even the same person may answer the question differently depending on whether you are asking them while they are experiencing intense suffering or after it has already happened. And it’s unclear what to do with that.
Hm, interesting. I was more pointing to the current human, as you write. What I was trying to get at was that I would think it would be absurd for someone to accept, say, 50 years of burning of alive before the nerves die off, for any sort of well-being “within one current human” for 50 years. If this is true for the CU as well, it seems she have to account for such an asymmetry by ‘extrinsic’ means.
Your answer (and the links) definitely made me a lot more uncertain about a bunch of things though!