Got it. That objection doesn’t apply to purely additive NU, which I’m more sympathetic to and which you dismissed as “trivially false.” Basically my response to your argument there is: If these googolplex “utils” are created de novo or provided to beings who are already totally free from suffering, including having no frustrated desire for the utils, why should I care about their nonexistence when pain is at stake—even mild pain?
More than that, though, while I understand why you find the pinprick conclusion absurd, my view is that the available alternatives are even worse. i.e., Either accepting a lexical threshold vulnerable to your continuity argument, or accepting that any arbitrarily horrible degree of suffering can be morally outweighed by enough happiness (or anything else). When I reflect on just how bad “arbitrarily horrible” can get, indeed even just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensity, I have to say that last option seems more absurd than pure NU’s flaws. It seems like the least-bad way to reconcile continuity with the intuition I notice from that reflection.
(I prefer not to go much further down this rabbit hole because I’ve had this same debate many times, and it unfortunately just seems to keep coming down to bedrock intuitions. I also have mixed thoughts on the sign of value spreading. Suffice it to say I think it’s still valuable to give some information about why some of us don’t find pure NU trivially false. If you’re curious for more details, I recommend Section 1 of this post I wrote, this comment, and Tomasik’s “Three Types of Negative Utilitarianism.” Incidentally I’m working on a blog post responding to your last objection, the error theory based on empirical asymmetries and scope neglect. The “even just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensity” thing I said above is a teaser. Happy to share when it’s finished!)
Okay. One question would be whether you share my intuitions in the case I posed to Brian Tomasik. For reference here it is. “Hmm, this may be a case of divergent intuitions but to me it seems very obvious that if we could make it so that at the end of people’s lives they have an experience of unfathomable bliss right before death, containing more well-being than the sum total of all positive experiences that humans have experienced so far, at the cost of one pinprick, it would be extremely good to do so. In this case it avoids the objection that well-being is only desirable instrumentally, because this is a form of well-being that would have otherwise not been even been considered. That seems far more obvious than any more specific claims about the amount of well-being needed to offset a unit of suffering, particularly because of the trickiness of intuitions dealing with very large numbers. ”
Before reflection, sure, that seems like a worthy trade.
But the trichotomy posed in “Three Types of NU,” which I noted in the second paragraph of my last comment, seems inescapable. Suppose I accept it as morally good to inflict small pain along with lots of superhappiness, and reject lexicality (though I don’t think this is off the table, despite the continuity arguments). Then I’d have to conclude that any degree of horrible experience has its price. That doesn’t just seem absurd, it flies in the face of what ethics just is to me. Sufficiently intense suffering just seems morally serious in a way that nothing else is. If that doesn’t resonate with you, I’m stumped.
Well I think I grasp the force of the initial intuition. I just abandon it upon reflection. I have a strong intuition that extreme suffering is very very bad. I don’t have the intuition that it’s badness can’t be outweighed by anything else, regardless of what the other thing is.
Thanks. :) When I imagine moderate (not unbearable) pains versus moderate pleasures experienced by different people, my intuition is that creating a small number of new moderate pleasures that wouldn’t otherwise exist doesn’t outweigh a single moderate pain, but there’s probably a large enough number (maybe thousands?) of newly created moderate pleasures that outweighs a moderate pain. I guess that would imply weak NU using this particular thought experiment. (Other thought experiments may yield different conclusions.)
The one I explained in the post starting with “This view runs into a problem.”
Got it. That objection doesn’t apply to purely additive NU, which I’m more sympathetic to and which you dismissed as “trivially false.” Basically my response to your argument there is: If these googolplex “utils” are created de novo or provided to beings who are already totally free from suffering, including having no frustrated desire for the utils, why should I care about their nonexistence when pain is at stake—even mild pain?
More than that, though, while I understand why you find the pinprick conclusion absurd, my view is that the available alternatives are even worse. i.e., Either accepting a lexical threshold vulnerable to your continuity argument, or accepting that any arbitrarily horrible degree of suffering can be morally outweighed by enough happiness (or anything else). When I reflect on just how bad “arbitrarily horrible” can get, indeed even just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensity, I have to say that last option seems more absurd than pure NU’s flaws. It seems like the least-bad way to reconcile continuity with the intuition I notice from that reflection.
(I prefer not to go much further down this rabbit hole because I’ve had this same debate many times, and it unfortunately just seems to keep coming down to bedrock intuitions. I also have mixed thoughts on the sign of value spreading. Suffice it to say I think it’s still valuable to give some information about why some of us don’t find pure NU trivially false. If you’re curious for more details, I recommend Section 1 of this post I wrote, this comment, and Tomasik’s “Three Types of Negative Utilitarianism.” Incidentally I’m working on a blog post responding to your last objection, the error theory based on empirical asymmetries and scope neglect. The “even just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensity” thing I said above is a teaser. Happy to share when it’s finished!)
Okay. One question would be whether you share my intuitions in the case I posed to Brian Tomasik. For reference here it is. “Hmm, this may be a case of divergent intuitions but to me it seems very obvious that if we could make it so that at the end of people’s lives they have an experience of unfathomable bliss right before death, containing more well-being than the sum total of all positive experiences that humans have experienced so far, at the cost of one pinprick, it would be extremely good to do so. In this case it avoids the objection that well-being is only desirable instrumentally, because this is a form of well-being that would have otherwise not been even been considered. That seems far more obvious than any more specific claims about the amount of well-being needed to offset a unit of suffering, particularly because of the trickiness of intuitions dealing with very large numbers. ”
Before reflection, sure, that seems like a worthy trade.
But the trichotomy posed in “Three Types of NU,” which I noted in the second paragraph of my last comment, seems inescapable. Suppose I accept it as morally good to inflict small pain along with lots of superhappiness, and reject lexicality (though I don’t think this is off the table, despite the continuity arguments). Then I’d have to conclude that any degree of horrible experience has its price. That doesn’t just seem absurd, it flies in the face of what ethics just is to me. Sufficiently intense suffering just seems morally serious in a way that nothing else is. If that doesn’t resonate with you, I’m stumped.
Well I think I grasp the force of the initial intuition. I just abandon it upon reflection. I have a strong intuition that extreme suffering is very very bad. I don’t have the intuition that it’s badness can’t be outweighed by anything else, regardless of what the other thing is.
Here’s the post I said I was writing, in my other comment.
Thanks. :) When I imagine moderate (not unbearable) pains versus moderate pleasures experienced by different people, my intuition is that creating a small number of new moderate pleasures that wouldn’t otherwise exist doesn’t outweigh a single moderate pain, but there’s probably a large enough number (maybe thousands?) of newly created moderate pleasures that outweighs a moderate pain. I guess that would imply weak NU using this particular thought experiment. (Other thought experiments may yield different conclusions.)