Got it. That objection doesnāt apply to purely additive NU, which Iām more sympathetic to and which you dismissed as ātrivially false.ā Basically my response to your argument there is: If these googolplex āutilsā 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 stakeāeven 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 āarbitrarily horribleā 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 NUās 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 Iāve 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 itās still valuable to give some information about why some of us donāt find pure NU trivially false. If youāre curious for more details, I recommend Section 1 of this post I wrote, this comment, and Tomasikās āThree Types of Negative Utilitarianism.ā Incidentally Iām working on a blog post responding to your last objection, the error theory based on empirical asymmetries and scope neglect. The āeven just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensityā thing I said above is a teaser. Happy to share when itās finished!)
Okay. One question would be whether you share my intuitions in the case I posed to Brian Tomasik. For reference here it is. āHmm, 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 peopleās 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. ā
Before reflection, sure, that seems like a worthy trade.
But the trichotomy posed in āThree Types of NU,ā 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 donāt think this is off the table, despite the continuity arguments). Then Iād have to conclude that any degree of horrible experience has its price. That doesnāt 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 doesnāt resonate with you, Iām 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 donāt have the intuition that itās badness canāt 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 wouldnāt otherwise exist doesnāt outweigh a single moderate pain, but thereās 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.)
What do you consider the main objection?
The one I explained in the post starting with āThis view runs into a problem.ā
Got it. That objection doesnāt apply to purely additive NU, which Iām more sympathetic to and which you dismissed as ātrivially false.ā Basically my response to your argument there is: If these googolplex āutilsā 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 stakeāeven 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 āarbitrarily horribleā 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 NUās 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 Iāve 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 itās still valuable to give some information about why some of us donāt find pure NU trivially false. If youāre curious for more details, I recommend Section 1 of this post I wrote, this comment, and Tomasikās āThree Types of Negative Utilitarianism.ā Incidentally Iām working on a blog post responding to your last objection, the error theory based on empirical asymmetries and scope neglect. The āeven just reflecting on bad experiences for which there exist happy experiences of matching or greater intensityā thing I said above is a teaser. Happy to share when itās finished!)
Okay. One question would be whether you share my intuitions in the case I posed to Brian Tomasik. For reference here it is. āHmm, 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 peopleās 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. ā
Before reflection, sure, that seems like a worthy trade.
But the trichotomy posed in āThree Types of NU,ā 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 donāt think this is off the table, despite the continuity arguments). Then Iād have to conclude that any degree of horrible experience has its price. That doesnāt 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 doesnāt resonate with you, Iām 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 donāt have the intuition that itās badness canāt be outweighed by anything else, regardless of what the other thing is.
Hereās 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 wouldnāt otherwise exist doesnāt outweigh a single moderate pain, but thereās 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.)