I’ve considered a possible pithy framing of the Life Despite Suffering question as a grim orthogonality thesis (though I’m not sure how useful it is):
We sometimes point to the substantial majority’s revealed preference for staying alive as evidence of a ‘life worth living’. But perhaps ‘staying-aliveness’ and ‘moral patient value’ can vary more independently than that claim assumes. This is the grim orthogonality thesis.
An existence proof for the ‘high staying-aliveness x low moral patient value’ quadrant is the complex of torturer+torturee, which quite clearly can reveal a preference for staying alive, while quite plausibly being net negative value.
Can we rescue the correlation of revealed ‘staying-aliveness’ preference with ‘life worth livingness’?
We can maybe reason about value from the origin of moral patients we see, without having a physical theory of value. All the patients we see at present are presumably products of natural selection. Let’s also assume for now that patienthood comes from consciousness.
Two obvious but countervailing observations
to the extent that conscious content is upstream of behaviour but downstream of genetic content, natural selection will operate on conscious content to produce behaviour which is fitness-correlated
if positive conscious content produces attractive behaviour (and vice versa), we might anticipate that an organism ‘doing well’ according to suitable fitness-correlates would be experiencing positive conscious content
this seems maybe true of humans?
to the extent that behaviour is downstream of non-conscious control processes, natural selection will operate on non-conscious control processes to produce behaviour which is fitness-correlated
we can not rule out experiences ‘not worth living’ which nevertheless produce net revealed staying-aliveness preference, if the behaviour is sufficiently under non-conscious control, or if the selection for behaviour downstream of negative conscious experience is weak
weak selection is especially likely in novel out-of-distribution situations
in general, organisms which reveal preferences for not staying alive will never be ceteris paribus fitter (though there are special cases of course)
For non-naturally-selected moral patients, I think even the above bets are basically off.
I’ve considered a possible pithy framing of the Life Despite Suffering question as a grim orthogonality thesis (though I’m not sure how useful it is):
We sometimes point to the substantial majority’s revealed preference for staying alive as evidence of a ‘life worth living’. But perhaps ‘staying-aliveness’ and ‘moral patient value’ can vary more independently than that claim assumes. This is the grim orthogonality thesis.
An existence proof for the ‘high staying-aliveness x low moral patient value’ quadrant is the complex of torturer+torturee, which quite clearly can reveal a preference for staying alive, while quite plausibly being net negative value.
Can we rescue the correlation of revealed ‘staying-aliveness’ preference with ‘life worth livingness’?
We can maybe reason about value from the origin of moral patients we see, without having a physical theory of value. All the patients we see at present are presumably products of natural selection. Let’s also assume for now that patienthood comes from consciousness.
Two obvious but countervailing observations
to the extent that conscious content is upstream of behaviour but downstream of genetic content, natural selection will operate on conscious content to produce behaviour which is fitness-correlated
if positive conscious content produces attractive behaviour (and vice versa), we might anticipate that an organism ‘doing well’ according to suitable fitness-correlates would be experiencing positive conscious content
this seems maybe true of humans?
to the extent that behaviour is downstream of non-conscious control processes, natural selection will operate on non-conscious control processes to produce behaviour which is fitness-correlated
we can not rule out experiences ‘not worth living’ which nevertheless produce net revealed staying-aliveness preference, if the behaviour is sufficiently under non-conscious control, or if the selection for behaviour downstream of negative conscious experience is weak
weak selection is especially likely in novel out-of-distribution situations
in general, organisms which reveal preferences for not staying alive will never be ceteris paribus fitter (though there are special cases of course)
For non-naturally-selected moral patients, I think even the above bets are basically off.