āIt also takes suffering seriously, is overall reasonable, and lacks implausible implications such as when a view recommends that a clearly immoral act should be carried out.ā
āIn my view, there is no positive value and no positive quality of life, and there are no positive experiences.ā
The view obviously does have āimplausibleā implications, if that means āimplications that conflict with what seems obvious to most people at first glanceā. Few people agree that āpleasureā and āhappinessā are totally worthless in themselves. They easily identify experiences they think are good! People easily classify some pleasures as more or less intense (insofar as that is being denied, which isnāt completely clear.) Iām sure Knutsson would argue that his views arenāt really implausible, because if people worked through his arguments in a rational and unbiased way, theyād see he was right. But thatās what everyone else says about the counterintuitive parts of their theories too! Maybe people agree with the negative utilitarian idea that some suffering is so bad that no amount of pleasure can compensate for it, or donāt really think its good to bring happy people into existence, but those are both distinct from the claim that no experiences are good for people who are already here.
For example people have given arguments with plausible premises for many āharshā sounding classical utilitarian conclusions, even though those conclusions are not themselves plausible to most people. I.e. for example, (roughly, may not be completely accurate characterization of Chappelās argument) that it follows from the idea that itās never wrong to bring about the course of events that a benevolent impartial observer would desire happen on any reasonable moral theory to the conclusion that sometimes you should kill one to save five: https://āārychappell.substack.com/āāp/āāa-new-paradox-of-deontology Nonetheless, I think itās still reasonable to call the conclusion of this argument an āimplausibleā consequence of Richardās views, for the same reason as āthere is no motionā is implausible even if you find the premises of some version of Zenoās paradox all look plausible. (Though obviously āyou should kill one to save five in some moral dilemmasā or even āno experiences are goodā are less implausible than āmotionā doesnāt exist.)
EDIT: I suppose if it turned out ordinary people sometimes accept moral antirealism, there might be a sense in which āno experiences are goodā is not āimplausibleā. But thatās not really much help to Knutsson, because I take it he wants his view to contain nothing implausible āfrom a moral perspectiveā, however exactly we understand that.
The view obviously does have āimplausibleā implications, if that means āimplications that conflict with what seems obvious to most people at first glanceā.
I donāt think what Knutsson means by āplausibleā is āwhat seems obvious to most people at first glanceā. I also donāt think thatās a particularly common or plausible use of the term āplausibleā. (Some examples of where āplausibleā and āwhat seems obvious to most people at first glanceā plausibly come apart include what most people in the past might at first glance have considered obvious about the moral status of human slavery, as well as what most people today might at first glance say about the moral status of farming and killing non-human animals.)
Few people agree that āpleasureā and āhappinessā are totally worthless in themselves.
Note that Knutsson does not deny that pleasure and happiness are worthwhile in the sense of being better for a person than unpleasure and unhappiness (cf. āWhat about making individuals happier? Yes, we should do that.ā). Nor does he deny that certain experiences can benefit existing beings (e.g. by satisfying certain needs). What he argues against is instead that pleasure and experiential happiness are something āaboveā or āon the other side ofā a completely undisturbed state.
As for the claim about āfew peopleā (and setting aside that majority opinion is hardly a good standard for plausibility, as I suspect youād agree), itās not clear that this āfew peopleā claim is empirically accurate, especially if it concerns the idea that pleasure isnāt something āaboveā a completely undisturbed state. The following is an apropos quote:
The intuition that the badness of suffering doesnāt compare to the supposed badness of inanimate matter (as non-pleasure) seems very common, and the same goes for the view that contentment is what matters, not pleasure-intensity [cf. Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.1]. There are nearly 1.5 billion Buddhists and Hindus, and while Buddhism is less explicit and less consequentialist than negative utilitarianism, the basic (though not uniform) Buddhist view on how pleasure and suffering are being valued is very similar to negative utilitarianism; Hinduism contains some similar views. Ancient Western philosophers such as Epicurus and some Stoics proposed definitions of āhappinessā in terms of the absence of suffering.
āIt also takes suffering seriously, is overall reasonable, and lacks implausible implications such as when a view recommends that a clearly immoral act should be carried out.ā
āIn my view, there is no positive value and no positive quality of life, and there are no positive experiences.ā
The view obviously does have āimplausibleā implications, if that means āimplications that conflict with what seems obvious to most people at first glanceā. Few people agree that āpleasureā and āhappinessā are totally worthless in themselves. They easily identify experiences they think are good! People easily classify some pleasures as more or less intense (insofar as that is being denied, which isnāt completely clear.) Iām sure Knutsson would argue that his views arenāt really implausible, because if people worked through his arguments in a rational and unbiased way, theyād see he was right. But thatās what everyone else says about the counterintuitive parts of their theories too! Maybe people agree with the negative utilitarian idea that some suffering is so bad that no amount of pleasure can compensate for it, or donāt really think its good to bring happy people into existence, but those are both distinct from the claim that no experiences are good for people who are already here.
For example people have given arguments with plausible premises for many āharshā sounding classical utilitarian conclusions, even though those conclusions are not themselves plausible to most people. I.e. for example, (roughly, may not be completely accurate characterization of Chappelās argument) that it follows from the idea that itās never wrong to bring about the course of events that a benevolent impartial observer would desire happen on any reasonable moral theory to the conclusion that sometimes you should kill one to save five: https://āārychappell.substack.com/āāp/āāa-new-paradox-of-deontology Nonetheless, I think itās still reasonable to call the conclusion of this argument an āimplausibleā consequence of Richardās views, for the same reason as āthere is no motionā is implausible even if you find the premises of some version of Zenoās paradox all look plausible. (Though obviously āyou should kill one to save five in some moral dilemmasā or even āno experiences are goodā are less implausible than āmotionā doesnāt exist.)
EDIT: I suppose if it turned out ordinary people sometimes accept moral antirealism, there might be a sense in which āno experiences are goodā is not āimplausibleā. But thatās not really much help to Knutsson, because I take it he wants his view to contain nothing implausible āfrom a moral perspectiveā, however exactly we understand that.
I donāt think what Knutsson means by āplausibleā is āwhat seems obvious to most people at first glanceā. I also donāt think thatās a particularly common or plausible use of the term āplausibleā. (Some examples of where āplausibleā and āwhat seems obvious to most people at first glanceā plausibly come apart include what most people in the past might at first glance have considered obvious about the moral status of human slavery, as well as what most people today might at first glance say about the moral status of farming and killing non-human animals.)
Note that Knutsson does not deny that pleasure and happiness are worthwhile in the sense of being better for a person than unpleasure and unhappiness (cf. āWhat about making individuals happier? Yes, we should do that.ā). Nor does he deny that certain experiences can benefit existing beings (e.g. by satisfying certain needs). What he argues against is instead that pleasure and experiential happiness are something āaboveā or āon the other side ofā a completely undisturbed state.
As for the claim about āfew peopleā (and setting aside that majority opinion is hardly a good standard for plausibility, as I suspect youād agree), itās not clear that this āfew peopleā claim is empirically accurate, especially if it concerns the idea that pleasure isnāt something āaboveā a completely undisturbed state. The following is an apropos quote:
(On Buddhism and Epicureanism, see e.g. Breyer, 2015; Sherman, 2017; and the recent review of minimalist views of wellbeing by Teo Ajantaival.)