Why are pleasure and suffering fundamentally different? I hear this a lot but it’s not at all obvious to me why this is the case. They certainly seem to share a great deal in common, for example in terms of their evolutionary origins, functional purpose, and apparently inherent (dis)preferability.
Obviously pleasure and suffering are fundamentally different in that one seems good and the other seems bad, but as I understand it the essential claim here is that they are fundamentally different in other key respects. Which respects are those?
See this comment for one way in which they seem different.
In my writings on tranquilism, I also tried to show that there are important differences in function. This part is a bit complicated to explain because there seem to be (at least) two different systems involved in our decision-making.
1. When I am feeling agenty, the machinery in my brain responsible for rational thought and long-term planning can look at pleasure-pain tradeoffs dispassionately and choose whichever course of action seems most appealing, all-things-considered. (For what it’s worth, I think that because people differ with respect to their approach and inhibition tendencies, there’s no hope to figure out the “true best way” to make tradeoffs of this sort.)
2. When I’m feeling non-agenty, I’m tempted to go the way of least resistance, impulsively pursuing short-term “pleasures” over long-term goals.
Now, I think when we look mostly at 1. (“agenty mode”), it seems as though pleasure and pain are symmetrical.
However, the roles are very different for 2. (“impulsive mode”). Suffering is the driving force behind 2. When you’re in 2., the goal is not pleasure maximization. Instead, you just want the dissatisfaction to stop, somehow. Different ways of accomplishing that count for the same as far as your impulsive mode is concerned.
Maybe fundamentally different is too strong a claim, and it’s not really central. The main point is that even if we had absolute cardinal scales for pleasure and pain separately, it wasn’t clear to me how you could possibly combine these scales. However, based on the answers, if you start from preferences and assume a single scale for these, and then ignore things that don’t matter, you could get a common scale. This makes sense to me.
Why are pleasure and suffering fundamentally different? I hear this a lot but it’s not at all obvious to me why this is the case. They certainly seem to share a great deal in common, for example in terms of their evolutionary origins, functional purpose, and apparently inherent (dis)preferability.
Obviously pleasure and suffering are fundamentally different in that one seems good and the other seems bad, but as I understand it the essential claim here is that they are fundamentally different in other key respects. Which respects are those?
See this comment for one way in which they seem different.
In my writings on tranquilism, I also tried to show that there are important differences in function. This part is a bit complicated to explain because there seem to be (at least) two different systems involved in our decision-making.
1. When I am feeling agenty, the machinery in my brain responsible for rational thought and long-term planning can look at pleasure-pain tradeoffs dispassionately and choose whichever course of action seems most appealing, all-things-considered. (For what it’s worth, I think that because people differ with respect to their approach and inhibition tendencies, there’s no hope to figure out the “true best way” to make tradeoffs of this sort.)
2. When I’m feeling non-agenty, I’m tempted to go the way of least resistance, impulsively pursuing short-term “pleasures” over long-term goals.
Now, I think when we look mostly at 1. (“agenty mode”), it seems as though pleasure and pain are symmetrical.
However, the roles are very different for 2. (“impulsive mode”). Suffering is the driving force behind 2. When you’re in 2., the goal is not pleasure maximization. Instead, you just want the dissatisfaction to stop, somehow. Different ways of accomplishing that count for the same as far as your impulsive mode is concerned.
Maybe fundamentally different is too strong a claim, and it’s not really central. The main point is that even if we had absolute cardinal scales for pleasure and pain separately, it wasn’t clear to me how you could possibly combine these scales. However, based on the answers, if you start from preferences and assume a single scale for these, and then ignore things that don’t matter, you could get a common scale. This makes sense to me.