Thanks for elaborating, OisĂn! I strongly upvoted the comment just above because I think it is nice when people make an effort to explain their views.
So, if all life got instantaneously wiped out, then this can be neither good nor bad
I agree painless total annihilation of all life would not be good/âbad in itself, in the sense there would be no difference in value relative to a world where it did not occur if we just consider the instant of the annihilation. However, I would still consider it extremely bad for instrumental reasons, as it would prevent future flourishing.
Imagining I had to press one of the following buttons:
A) eliminates all sentient beings, such that there is no more pain nor pleasure forever.
Button B) does nothing.
I would certainly press B. Would the Epicurean view say we should be indiferrent between the 2 options?
I feel like the act of consciously pushing the button to cause said consequences to occur vs the consequences of pushing button A or B occurring spontaneously and without anyone actually pushing either button are slightly different cases. Iâm not 100% sure if Epicurus would push button B or be indifferent as in his words:
But the wise man neither seeks to escape life nor fears the cessation of life, for neither does life offend him nor does the absence of life seem to be any evil.[1]
However, I still believe that one should be indifferent to which outcome occurs, in order to remain consistent with this view. I do feel as though this view would probably lean towards being indifferent to which button one choses to push.
Having said this, I too would push button B, but this is due to my deep-rooted biases about my life and death, however irrational they may be, but maybe I would be better off changing this stance, since according to Epicurus:
And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. So that the man speaks but idly who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when it comes, but because it is painful in anticipation.[2]
Also I just want to add that, on your point that annihilation would be bad because it prevents future flourishing, for whom would this be bad? It canât be bad for counterfactual non-existent beings, since they donât exist to perceive the badness of missing out on (the good bits of) life. Or am I misunderstanding your claim? And what exactly do you mean by instrumental reasons in this case? Could you give some examples?
However, I still believe that one should be indifferent to which outcome occurs, in order to remain consistent with this view.
FWIW, I think one should put ~0 weight on a view which is indifferent between doing nothing and eliminating all sentient beings forever, as I consider the latter way way worse.
Also I just want to add that, on your point that annihilation would be bad because it prevents future flourishing, for whom would this be bad?
My understanding is that you are saying that killing all sentient beings alive today would not be good/âbad/âneutral, whereas I think it would be extremely bad, even if there is a remote sense in which it would not be good/âbad for anyone. I encourage you to imagine there is an actual person in the real world who for some (impossible) reason had the power to kill all life. I would worry about what that person would do. Would you not, just because there is a sense in which killing all life would not be good/âbad for anyone?
And what exactly do you mean by instrumental reasons in this case? Could you give some examples?
Sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant survival is instrumentally valuable to have positive conscious experiences. For example, if someone kills me, I can no longer spend time with my family and friends.
FWIW, I think one should put ~0 weight on a view which is indifferent between doing nothing and eliminating all sentient beings forever, as I consider the latter way way worse.
In which way is it worse? Again, you cannot compare a state of existence where one can experience an perceive things against a âstateâ of nonexistence in a way which leads to a preference of one over the other. As in, you cannot compare positive/ânegative experiences to no experience whatsoever, because then what is the common factor which you are comparing in order to prefer one over the other? And anyways, you would need to compare being dead from the perspective of the dead âpersonâ against being alive from the perspective of the alive person. âTheyâ cannot experience anything (as âtheyâ donât exist) and thus they cannot have a preference for life. So this is, as I stated in my reply to your first comment, an example of mistakenly looking at death by imposing our c, the former of which is an actual experience and the latter of which doesnât exist.
I encourage you to imagine there is an actual person in the real world who for some (impossible) reason had the power to kill all life. I would worry about what that person would do. Would you not, just because there is a sense in which killing all life would not be good/âbad for anyone?
I would too, but only due to the vast amount of suffering they could potentially bring upon the world.
survival is instrumentally valuable to have positive conscious experiences
But what is it that makes positive experiences preferable to no experience at all? Sure, they are preferable to less positive experiences, because you can experience (or can understand the experience of) that worse event as well as the better one, and thus you can make a preference between them. This is not the case for death, since death must be understood as fundamentally different from anything else in life (we can only understand death as a (fuzzy) abstract concept, and never intrinsically).
For example, if someone kills me, I can no longer spend time with my family and friends.
Yes, but again you are imposing your experience of perceiving someone elseâs death and how that affects you (or how you believe it would affect you if you did experience losing someone close) onto you experiencing (âexperiencingâ) your own death, which are fundamentally different since one is an actual experience, and the other is simply nothing. And as a consequence, âyouâ also donât have anything like a memory when âyouâ are dead.
I would too, but only due to the vast amount of suffering they could potentially bring upon the world.
Ok, but I would still very much worry about someone having the power to painlessly kill all life, whereas you would not (assuming there would be no suffering involved, although net future welfare would massively decrease)? My understanding is that you would be indifferent about pressing a button (or any other action with a negligible cost to you) which would remove the power from that person. In contrast, I would be willing to die myself to ensure lots of beings could continue to have net positive experiences (e.g. to allow lots of people could continue to talk with their friends and family).
But what is it that makes positive experiences preferable to no experience at all?
Are you indifferent between continuing your life as expected and being painlessly killed, assuming the net welfare of the rest of the world is the same in both scenarios? Even if you are, I think we should pay attention to the desires of other beings. Arguing for all life being painlessly killed not being good/âbad seems quite selfish to me, because most beings would rather continue to live instead of being painlessly killed. By saying that all life being painlessly killed is not good/âbad, I would say you are being indifferent to what most beings want.
What is your basis for the statement that âmost beings would rather continue to live instead of being painlessly killedâ? This seems to me to be a huge assumption. Vinding and many others who write from a suffering-focused ethics perspective highlight that non-human animals in the wild experience a large amount of suffering, and thereâs even greater consensus on non-human animals bred for food experiencing a large amount of suffering; is there research suggesting that the majority of beings would actively choose to continue to live over a painless death if they had an informed choice or is this an assumption? Even just considering humans, we have millions of people in extreme poverty; and an unknown number of humans suffering daily physical and /â or sexual abuse. Too often thereâs both a significant underestimation of the number of beings experiencing extreme sufferingâand a cursory disregard for their lived experience with statements like âoh well if it was that bad theyâd kill themselvesâ, which completely ignores that a large proportion of humans follow religions in which they believe they will go to hell for eternity/âsimilar if they die via suicide. I would counter your selfishness statement with âIf we accept the theory that ceasing to live is a painless nothingness, and we say there is a button to kill all life painlessly, is it not selfish for those who want to continue to live to not push the button and cause the continuation of extreme suffering for other beings?â OisĂn Considineâs point may well be uncomfortable for many to think about and therefore unpopular, but I think itâs a sound question/âpoint to make. And one with potentially very significant implications when it comes to s-risks. If death (or non-existence) is neutral vs suffering is negative then that might imply we should dedicate more resources to preventing extreme suffering scenarios than to preventing extinction scenarios for example.
What is your basis for the statement that âmost beings would rather continue to live instead of being painlessly killedâ?
I just mean that most beings have a preference for continuing to live. If an animal or person is at risk of being killed, chances are they will try to avoid being killed, i.e. they have a preference to continue to live. A willingness to avoid being killed makes all sense from the point of view of evolutionary biology. Beings who do not have an aversion to death will more often be killed before having offspring, and therefore their populations will tend to collapse.
This seems to me to be a huge assumption. Vinding and many others who write from a suffering-focused ethics perspective highlight that non-human animals in the wild experience a large amount of suffering, and thereâs even greater consensus on non-human animals bred for food experiencing a large amount of suffering; is there research suggesting that the majority of beings would actively choose to continue to live over a painless death if they had an informed choice or is this an assumption? Even just considering humans, we have millions of people in extreme poverty; and an unknown number of humans suffering daily physical and /â or sexual abuse.
I estimated the scale of wild animal welfare is 50.8 M times that of human welfare, and I agree with Browning 2023 that it is unclear whether wild animals have positive/ânegative lives, so I think it is unclear whether the total welfare of all beings on Earth is positive/ânegative. However, in the same way I am not compelled to painlessly kill against their will people whose lives could be positive or negative, I am not compelled to press a button which would painlessly kill all beings. Would you painlessly kill people who are severely depressed or live in extreme poverty against their will if there was no risk of you being arrested or similar? I would not! Note I am in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide, but these are very different because they do not involve going against the will of the people being killed.
Thank you for clarifying, Vascoâand for the welcome. I think itâs important to distinguish between active reasoned preferences versus instinctive responses. There are lots of things that humans and other animals do instinctively that they might also choose not to do if given an informed choice. A trivial exampleâI scratch bug bites instinctively, including sometimes in my sleep, even though my preference is not to scratch them. Thereâs lots of other examples in the world from criminals who look directly at CCTV cameras with certain sounds to turtles who go towards man-made lights instead of the oceanâand Iâm sure many examples better than these ones I am thinking of off the top of my head. But in short, I am very reluctant to draw inferences on preferences from instinctive behaviour. I donât think the two are always linked. Iâm also not sureâif we could theoretically communicate such a question to themâwhat proportion of non-human animals are capable of the level of thinking to be able to consider whether they would want to continue living or not if given the option.
I agree with you that it is unclear whether the total sum of experiences on Earth is positive or negative; but I also donât necessarily believe that there is an equivalence or that positive experiences can be netted off against negative experiences so Iâm not convinced that considering all beings experiences as a âtotalâ is the moral thing to do. If we do try and total them all together to get some kind of net positive or negative, how do you balance them outâhow much happiness is someoneâs torture worth or netted off against in this scenario? It feels very dangerous to me to try to infer some sort of equivalency. I personally feel that only the individuals affected by the suffering can say under what circumstances they feel the suffering is worth itâparticularly as different people can respond to and interpret the same stimuli differently. Like you, I am certainly not inclined to start killing people off against their will (and âagainst their willâ is a qualifier which adds completely different dimensions to the scenario; killing individuals is also extremely different to a hypothetical button painlessly ending all lifeâif you end all life, there is noone to mourn or to be upset or to feel pain or indeed injustice about individuals no longer being alive, which obviously isnât the case if you are talking about solitary deaths). If we are in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide though, that suggests there is an acceptance that death is preferable to at least some types of/âlevels of suffering. To go back to the original post, what I was defending is the need for there to be more active discussion of what the implications are of accepting that concept. I do fear that because many humans find it uncomfortable to talk about death and because we may personally prefer to be alive, it can be uncomfortable to think about and acknowledge the volume of suffering that exists. Itâs a reasonably frequent lament in the EA world that not enough people care about the suffering of non-human animals and there is criticism of people who are viewed to be effectively ignoring the plight of animals in the food industry because theyâd rather not know about it or not think about it. I worry though that many in EA do the same thing with this kind of question. I think we write off too easily the hypothetical kill all painlessly button because thereâs an instinctive desire to live and those of us who are happy living would rather not think about how many beings might prefer nothingness to living if given a choice. Iâm not saying I definitely would push such a button but I am saying that I think a lot of people who say they definitely wouldnât say it instinctively rather than because theyâve given adequate consideration to the scenario. Is it really so black and white as we definitely shouldnât press that hypothetical buttonâand if it is, what are the implications of that? We value positive experiences more than we disvalue suffering? We think some level of happiness can justify or balance out extreme suffering? Whatâs the tipping pointâif every being on Earth was being endlessly tortured, should we push the button? What about if every being on Earth bar one? What if itâs 50/â50? I will readily admit I do not have a philosophy PhD, I have lots of further reading to do in this space and I am not ready myself to say definitively what my view is on the hypothetical button one way or the other, but I do personally view death or non-existence as a neutral state, I do view suffering as a negative to be avoided and I do think thereâs an asymmetry between suffering and happiness/âpositive wellbeing. With that in mind I really donât think that there is any level of human satisfaction that I would be comfortable saying âthis volume of human joy/âpositive wellbeing is worth/âjustifies the continuation of one human being subject to extreme tortureâ. If thatâs the case, can I really say itâs the wrong thing to do to press the hypothetical painless end for all button in a world where we know there are beings experiencing extreme suffering?
I am very reluctant to draw inferences on preferences from instinctive behaviour
Fair! I would say instinctive behaviour could provide a prior for what beings want, but that we should remain open to going against them given enough evidence. I have complained about Our World in Dataâs implicitly assuming that nature conservation is good.
If we are in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide though, that suggests there is an acceptance that death is preferable to at least some types of/âlevels of suffering.
Agreed. For what it is worth, I estimated 6.37 % of people have negative lives. This is one reason I prefer using WELLBYs instead of DALYs/âQALYs, which assume lives are always positive.
Is it really so black and white as we definitely shouldnât press that hypothetical buttonâand if it is, what are the implications of that?
It is quite clear to me I should not painlessly eliminate all sentient beings forever. Even though I have no idea about whether the current total welfare is positive/ânegative, I am more confident that future total welfare is positive. I expect intelligent beings to control an ever increasing fraction of the resources in the universe. I estimated the scale of wild animal welfare is 50.8 M times that of human welfare, but this ratio used to be orders of magnitude larger when there were only a few humans. Extrapolating how this ratio has evolved across time into the future suggests the welfare of the beings in control of the future (humans now, presumably digital beings in the future) will dominate. In addition, I expect intelligent beings like humans to have positive lives for the most part, so I am guessing the expected value of the future is positive.
Even if I though the expected value of the future was negative, I would not want to press the button. In this case, pressing the button would be good, as it would increase the value of the future from negative to neutral. However, I guess there would be actions available to me which could make the future positive, thus being better than just pressing the button. For example, conditional on me having the chance to press such button, I would likely have a super important position in the world government, so I could direct lots of resources towards investigating which beings are having positive and negative lives, and then painlessly eliminate or improve the negative ones to maximise total welfare.
We value positive experiences more than we disvalue suffering?
As long as positive and negative experiences are being measured in the same unit, 1 unit of welfare plus 1 unit of suffering cancel out.
We think some level of happiness can justify or balance out extreme suffering?
I think so, as I strongly endorse the tota view. Yet, there are physical limits. If the amount of suffering is sufficiently large, there may not be enough energy in the universe to produce enough happiness to outweigh it.
Whatâs the tipping pointâif every being on Earth was being endlessly tortured, should we push the button?
If there was no realistic way of stopping the widespread torture apart from killing everyone involved, I would be happy with killing all humans. However, I do not think it would be good to kill all beings, as I think wild animals have good lives, although I am quite uncertain.
I do think thereâs an asymmetry between suffering and happiness/âpositive wellbeing
In which sense do you think there is an asymmetry? As I said above, I think 1 unit of welfare plus 1 unit of suffering cancel out. However, I think it is quite possible that the maximum amount of suffering Smax which can be produced with a certain amount of energy exceeds the maximum amount of happiness Hmax which can be produced with the same energy. On the other hand, I think the opposite is also possible, so I am guessing Smax = Hmax (relatedly), although the total view does not require this.
With that in mind I really donât think that there is any level of human satisfaction that I would be comfortable saying âthis volume of human joy/âpositive wellbeing is worth/âjustifies the continuation of one human being subject to extreme tortureâ. If thatâs the case, can I really say itâs the wrong thing to do to press the hypothetical painless end for all button in a world where we know there are beings experiencing extreme suffering?
In the 1st sentence above, I think you are saying that âarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ*âvalue of happinessâ â âsome amount of extreme sufferingâ*âdisvalue of extreme sufferingâ, i.e. âvalue of happinessâ â âsome amount of extreme sufferingâ*âdisvalue of extreme sufferingâ/ââarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ. This inequality tends to âvalue of happinessâ â 0 as âarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ goes to infinity, and by definition âvalue of happinessâ >= 0 (otherwise it would not be happiness, but suffering). So I believe your 1st sentence implies âvalue of happinessâ = 0. In other words, I would say you are valuing happiness the same as non-existence. In this case, having maximally happy beings would be as valuable as non-existence. So painlessly eliminating all beings forever by pressing the button would be optimal, in the sense there is no action which would produce more value.
Of course, I personally do not think it makes any sense to value happiness and non-existence the same. I assume most people would have the same view on reflection.
I thinkâprobably about 90% sure rather than 100% - I agree that happiness is preferable to non-existence. However, I donât think thereâs an urgency/âmoral imperative to act to create happiness over neutral states in the same way that there is an urgency and moral imperative to reduce suffering. I.e. I think itâs much more important to spend the worldâs resources reducing suffering (taking people from a position of suffering to a position of neutral needs met/ânot in suffering) than to spend resources on boosting people from a neutral needs met state (which neednât be non-existence) to a heightened âhappinessâ state. I view that both: the value difference between neutral and suffering is much larger than the value difference between neutral and happiness AND that there is a moral imperative to reduce suffering where there isnât necessarily a moral imperative to increase happiness.
To give an example, if presented with the option to either give someone a paracetamol for a mild headache or to give someone a bit of cake that they would enjoy (but do not needâthey are not in famine/âhunger), I would always choose the painkiller. Andâperhaps Iâm wrongâI think this would be quite a common preference in the general population. I think most people on a case by case basis would make statements that indicate they do believe we should prioritise suffering. Yet, when we talk on aggregate, suffering-prioritisation seems to be less prevalent. It reminds me of some of the examples in the Frames and Reality chapter of Thinking Fast and Slow about how people will respond the essentially the same scenario differently depending on itâs framing.
WIth apologies for getting a bit dark - (with the possible exclusion of sociopaths etc.), I think people in general would agree they would refuse an ice-cream or the joy of being on a rollercoaster if the cost of it was that someone would be tortured or raped. My point is that I canât think of any amount of positive/âhappiness that I would be willing to say yes, this extra happiness for me balances out someone else being raped. So there are at least some examples of suffering, that I just donât think can be offset by any amount of happiness and therefore my viewpoint definitely includes asymmetry between happiness and suffering. Morally, I just donât think I can accept a view that says some amount of happiness can offset someone elseâs rape or torture.
And I am concerned that the views of people who have experience significant suffering are very under-represented and we donât think about their viewpoints because itâs easier not to and they often donât have a platform. What proportion of people working in population ethics have experienced destitution or been a severe burns victim? What proportion of people working in population ethics have spoken to and listened to the views of people who have experienced extreme suffering in order to try and mitigate their own experiential gap? How does this impact their conclusions?
Hi, sorry if Iâm a bit late here, and I donât want to be repeating myself too much, but since I feel it was not properly understood, one of the main points I originally made in this thread and I want to really hit home is that happiness as measured while in a state of happiness cannot be compared in any way to non-existence as âmeasuredâ in a state of non-existence, since we obviously cannot perceive sensations (or literally anything) when dead/ânot in existence. So the common intuition that happiness is preferable to non-existence is based upon our shallow understanding of what it is to âbeâ dead/ânon-existant, but from a rational point of view this idea simply does not hold. If I was being tortured with no way out, I would certainly want to die as quickly as I could, however when I imagine death in that moment, I am imagining (while in the state of suffering, and not in the âstateâ of death) a cessation of that suffering. However, to experience such a cessation I must be able to experience something to which I can compare against said experience of suffering. So technically speaking it doesnât make any sense at all to say that happiness/âsuffering is better than non-existence as measured in the respective states of happiness/âsuffering and death/ânon-existence. Itâs
And itâs not like death/ânon-existence is neutral in this case. If you picture a scale, with positive experiences (e.g. happiness/âsatisfaction) in the positive direction and negative experiences (e.g. pain/âsuffering) in the negative direction, death does NOT appear at 0 since what we are measuring is the perceived value of the experiences. Put another way in terms of utility functions, if someone has a utility function at some value, and then they die, rather than immediately going to zero, their utility function immediately ceases to exist, as a utility function must belong to someone.
Also this idea of mine is somewhat new to me (a few months old maybe), so I havenât thought through many implications and edge-cases too thoroughly (yet). However this idea, however difficult for me to wrestle with, is something which I find myself simply unable to reason out of.
Thanks for elaborating, OisĂn! I strongly upvoted the comment just above because I think it is nice when people make an effort to explain their views.
I agree painless total annihilation of all life would not be good/âbad in itself, in the sense there would be no difference in value relative to a world where it did not occur if we just consider the instant of the annihilation. However, I would still consider it extremely bad for instrumental reasons, as it would prevent future flourishing.
Imagining I had to press one of the following buttons:
A) eliminates all sentient beings, such that there is no more pain nor pleasure forever.
Button B) does nothing.
I would certainly press B. Would the Epicurean view say we should be indiferrent between the 2 options?
I feel like the act of consciously pushing the button to cause said consequences to occur vs the consequences of pushing button A or B occurring spontaneously and without anyone actually pushing either button are slightly different cases. Iâm not 100% sure if Epicurus would push button B or be indifferent as in his words:
However, I still believe that one should be indifferent to which outcome occurs, in order to remain consistent with this view. I do feel as though this view would probably lean towards being indifferent to which button one choses to push.
Having said this, I too would push button B, but this is due to my deep-rooted biases about my life and death, however irrational they may be, but maybe I would be better off changing this stance, since according to Epicurus:
Also I just want to add that, on your point that annihilation would be bad because it prevents future flourishing, for whom would this be bad? It canât be bad for counterfactual non-existent beings, since they donât exist to perceive the badness of missing out on (the good bits of) life. Or am I misunderstanding your claim? And what exactly do you mean by instrumental reasons in this case? Could you give some examples?
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus [4], translated by Cyril Bailey (1926)
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus [3], translated by Cyril Bailey (1926)
FWIW, I think one should put ~0 weight on a view which is indifferent between doing nothing and eliminating all sentient beings forever, as I consider the latter way way worse.
My understanding is that you are saying that killing all sentient beings alive today would not be good/âbad/âneutral, whereas I think it would be extremely bad, even if there is a remote sense in which it would not be good/âbad for anyone. I encourage you to imagine there is an actual person in the real world who for some (impossible) reason had the power to kill all life. I would worry about what that person would do. Would you not, just because there is a sense in which killing all life would not be good/âbad for anyone?
Sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant survival is instrumentally valuable to have positive conscious experiences. For example, if someone kills me, I can no longer spend time with my family and friends.
In which way is it worse? Again, you cannot compare a state of existence where one can experience an perceive things against a âstateâ of nonexistence in a way which leads to a preference of one over the other. As in, you cannot compare positive/ânegative experiences to no experience whatsoever, because then what is the common factor which you are comparing in order to prefer one over the other? And anyways, you would need to compare being dead from the perspective of the dead âpersonâ against being alive from the perspective of the alive person. âTheyâ cannot experience anything (as âtheyâ donât exist) and thus they cannot have a preference for life. So this is, as I stated in my reply to your first comment, an example of mistakenly looking at death by imposing our c, the former of which is an actual experience and the latter of which doesnât exist.
I would too, but only due to the vast amount of suffering they could potentially bring upon the world.
But what is it that makes positive experiences preferable to no experience at all? Sure, they are preferable to less positive experiences, because you can experience (or can understand the experience of) that worse event as well as the better one, and thus you can make a preference between them. This is not the case for death, since death must be understood as fundamentally different from anything else in life (we can only understand death as a (fuzzy) abstract concept, and never intrinsically).
Yes, but again you are imposing your experience of perceiving someone elseâs death and how that affects you (or how you believe it would affect you if you did experience losing someone close) onto you experiencing (âexperiencingâ) your own death, which are fundamentally different since one is an actual experience, and the other is simply nothing. And as a consequence, âyouâ also donât have anything like a memory when âyouâ are dead.
Ok, but I would still very much worry about someone having the power to painlessly kill all life, whereas you would not (assuming there would be no suffering involved, although net future welfare would massively decrease)? My understanding is that you would be indifferent about pressing a button (or any other action with a negligible cost to you) which would remove the power from that person. In contrast, I would be willing to die myself to ensure lots of beings could continue to have net positive experiences (e.g. to allow lots of people could continue to talk with their friends and family).
Are you indifferent between continuing your life as expected and being painlessly killed, assuming the net welfare of the rest of the world is the same in both scenarios? Even if you are, I think we should pay attention to the desires of other beings. Arguing for all life being painlessly killed not being good/âbad seems quite selfish to me, because most beings would rather continue to live instead of being painlessly killed. By saying that all life being painlessly killed is not good/âbad, I would say you are being indifferent to what most beings want.
What is your basis for the statement that âmost beings would rather continue to live instead of being painlessly killedâ? This seems to me to be a huge assumption. Vinding and many others who write from a suffering-focused ethics perspective highlight that non-human animals in the wild experience a large amount of suffering, and thereâs even greater consensus on non-human animals bred for food experiencing a large amount of suffering; is there research suggesting that the majority of beings would actively choose to continue to live over a painless death if they had an informed choice or is this an assumption? Even just considering humans, we have millions of people in extreme poverty; and an unknown number of humans suffering daily physical and /â or sexual abuse. Too often thereâs both a significant underestimation of the number of beings experiencing extreme sufferingâand a cursory disregard for their lived experience with statements like âoh well if it was that bad theyâd kill themselvesâ, which completely ignores that a large proportion of humans follow religions in which they believe they will go to hell for eternity/âsimilar if they die via suicide. I would counter your selfishness statement with âIf we accept the theory that ceasing to live is a painless nothingness, and we say there is a button to kill all life painlessly, is it not selfish for those who want to continue to live to not push the button and cause the continuation of extreme suffering for other beings?â
OisĂn Considineâs point may well be uncomfortable for many to think about and therefore unpopular, but I think itâs a sound question/âpoint to make. And one with potentially very significant implications when it comes to s-risks. If death (or non-existence) is neutral vs suffering is negative then that might imply we should dedicate more resources to preventing extreme suffering scenarios than to preventing extinction scenarios for example.
Welcome to the EA Forum, RedTeam!
I just mean that most beings have a preference for continuing to live. If an animal or person is at risk of being killed, chances are they will try to avoid being killed, i.e. they have a preference to continue to live. A willingness to avoid being killed makes all sense from the point of view of evolutionary biology. Beings who do not have an aversion to death will more often be killed before having offspring, and therefore their populations will tend to collapse.
I estimated the scale of wild animal welfare is 50.8 M times that of human welfare, and I agree with Browning 2023 that it is unclear whether wild animals have positive/ânegative lives, so I think it is unclear whether the total welfare of all beings on Earth is positive/ânegative. However, in the same way I am not compelled to painlessly kill against their will people whose lives could be positive or negative, I am not compelled to press a button which would painlessly kill all beings. Would you painlessly kill people who are severely depressed or live in extreme poverty against their will if there was no risk of you being arrested or similar? I would not! Note I am in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide, but these are very different because they do not involve going against the will of the people being killed.
Thank you for clarifying, Vascoâand for the welcome. I think itâs important to distinguish between active reasoned preferences versus instinctive responses. There are lots of things that humans and other animals do instinctively that they might also choose not to do if given an informed choice. A trivial exampleâI scratch bug bites instinctively, including sometimes in my sleep, even though my preference is not to scratch them. Thereâs lots of other examples in the world from criminals who look directly at CCTV cameras with certain sounds to turtles who go towards man-made lights instead of the oceanâand Iâm sure many examples better than these ones I am thinking of off the top of my head. But in short, I am very reluctant to draw inferences on preferences from instinctive behaviour. I donât think the two are always linked. Iâm also not sureâif we could theoretically communicate such a question to themâwhat proportion of non-human animals are capable of the level of thinking to be able to consider whether they would want to continue living or not if given the option.
I agree with you that it is unclear whether the total sum of experiences on Earth is positive or negative; but I also donât necessarily believe that there is an equivalence or that positive experiences can be netted off against negative experiences so Iâm not convinced that considering all beings experiences as a âtotalâ is the moral thing to do. If we do try and total them all together to get some kind of net positive or negative, how do you balance them outâhow much happiness is someoneâs torture worth or netted off against in this scenario? It feels very dangerous to me to try to infer some sort of equivalency. I personally feel that only the individuals affected by the suffering can say under what circumstances they feel the suffering is worth itâparticularly as different people can respond to and interpret the same stimuli differently.
Like you, I am certainly not inclined to start killing people off against their will (and âagainst their willâ is a qualifier which adds completely different dimensions to the scenario; killing individuals is also extremely different to a hypothetical button painlessly ending all lifeâif you end all life, there is noone to mourn or to be upset or to feel pain or indeed injustice about individuals no longer being alive, which obviously isnât the case if you are talking about solitary deaths). If we are in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide though, that suggests there is an acceptance that death is preferable to at least some types of/âlevels of suffering. To go back to the original post, what I was defending is the need for there to be more active discussion of what the implications are of accepting that concept. I do fear that because many humans find it uncomfortable to talk about death and because we may personally prefer to be alive, it can be uncomfortable to think about and acknowledge the volume of suffering that exists. Itâs a reasonably frequent lament in the EA world that not enough people care about the suffering of non-human animals and there is criticism of people who are viewed to be effectively ignoring the plight of animals in the food industry because theyâd rather not know about it or not think about it. I worry though that many in EA do the same thing with this kind of question. I think we write off too easily the hypothetical kill all painlessly button because thereâs an instinctive desire to live and those of us who are happy living would rather not think about how many beings might prefer nothingness to living if given a choice. Iâm not saying I definitely would push such a button but I am saying that I think a lot of people who say they definitely wouldnât say it instinctively rather than because theyâve given adequate consideration to the scenario. Is it really so black and white as we definitely shouldnât press that hypothetical buttonâand if it is, what are the implications of that? We value positive experiences more than we disvalue suffering? We think some level of happiness can justify or balance out extreme suffering? Whatâs the tipping pointâif every being on Earth was being endlessly tortured, should we push the button? What about if every being on Earth bar one? What if itâs 50/â50?
I will readily admit I do not have a philosophy PhD, I have lots of further reading to do in this space and I am not ready myself to say definitively what my view is on the hypothetical button one way or the other, but I do personally view death or non-existence as a neutral state, I do view suffering as a negative to be avoided and I do think thereâs an asymmetry between suffering and happiness/âpositive wellbeing. With that in mind I really donât think that there is any level of human satisfaction that I would be comfortable saying âthis volume of human joy/âpositive wellbeing is worth/âjustifies the continuation of one human being subject to extreme tortureâ. If thatâs the case, can I really say itâs the wrong thing to do to press the hypothetical painless end for all button in a world where we know there are beings experiencing extreme suffering?
Thanks for clarifying too! Strongly upvoted.
Fair! I would say instinctive behaviour could provide a prior for what beings want, but that we should remain open to going against them given enough evidence. I have complained about Our World in Dataâs implicitly assuming that nature conservation is good.
Agreed. For what it is worth, I estimated 6.37 % of people have negative lives. This is one reason I prefer using WELLBYs instead of DALYs/âQALYs, which assume lives are always positive.
It is quite clear to me I should not painlessly eliminate all sentient beings forever. Even though I have no idea about whether the current total welfare is positive/ânegative, I am more confident that future total welfare is positive. I expect intelligent beings to control an ever increasing fraction of the resources in the universe. I estimated the scale of wild animal welfare is 50.8 M times that of human welfare, but this ratio used to be orders of magnitude larger when there were only a few humans. Extrapolating how this ratio has evolved across time into the future suggests the welfare of the beings in control of the future (humans now, presumably digital beings in the future) will dominate. In addition, I expect intelligent beings like humans to have positive lives for the most part, so I am guessing the expected value of the future is positive.
Even if I though the expected value of the future was negative, I would not want to press the button. In this case, pressing the button would be good, as it would increase the value of the future from negative to neutral. However, I guess there would be actions available to me which could make the future positive, thus being better than just pressing the button. For example, conditional on me having the chance to press such button, I would likely have a super important position in the world government, so I could direct lots of resources towards investigating which beings are having positive and negative lives, and then painlessly eliminate or improve the negative ones to maximise total welfare.
As long as positive and negative experiences are being measured in the same unit, 1 unit of welfare plus 1 unit of suffering cancel out.
I think so, as I strongly endorse the tota view. Yet, there are physical limits. If the amount of suffering is sufficiently large, there may not be enough energy in the universe to produce enough happiness to outweigh it.
If there was no realistic way of stopping the widespread torture apart from killing everyone involved, I would be happy with killing all humans. However, I do not think it would be good to kill all beings, as I think wild animals have good lives, although I am quite uncertain.
In which sense do you think there is an asymmetry? As I said above, I think 1 unit of welfare plus 1 unit of suffering cancel out. However, I think it is quite possible that the maximum amount of suffering Smax which can be produced with a certain amount of energy exceeds the maximum amount of happiness Hmax which can be produced with the same energy. On the other hand, I think the opposite is also possible, so I am guessing Smax = Hmax (relatedly), although the total view does not require this.
In the 1st sentence above, I think you are saying that âarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ*âvalue of happinessâ â âsome amount of extreme sufferingâ*âdisvalue of extreme sufferingâ, i.e. âvalue of happinessâ â âsome amount of extreme sufferingâ*âdisvalue of extreme sufferingâ/ââarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ. This inequality tends to âvalue of happinessâ â 0 as âarbitrarily large amount of happinessâ goes to infinity, and by definition âvalue of happinessâ >= 0 (otherwise it would not be happiness, but suffering). So I believe your 1st sentence implies âvalue of happinessâ = 0. In other words, I would say you are valuing happiness the same as non-existence. In this case, having maximally happy beings would be as valuable as non-existence. So painlessly eliminating all beings forever by pressing the button would be optimal, in the sense there is no action which would produce more value.
Of course, I personally do not think it makes any sense to value happiness and non-existence the same. I assume most people would have the same view on reflection.
On asymmetryâand indeed most of the points Iâm trying to makeâMagnus Vinding gives better explanations than I could. On asymmetry specifically Iâd recommend: https://ââcenterforreducingsuffering.org/ââresearch/ââsuffering-and-happiness-morally-symmetric-or-orthogonal/ââ
and on whether positive can outweigh suffering: https://ââcenterforreducingsuffering.org/ââresearch/ââon-purported-positive-goods-outweighing-suffering/ââ
To get a better understanding of these points, I highly recommend his book âSuffering-focused ethicsâ - it is the most compelling thing Iâve read on these topics.
I thinkâprobably about 90% sure rather than 100% - I agree that happiness is preferable to non-existence. However, I donât think thereâs an urgency/âmoral imperative to act to create happiness over neutral states in the same way that there is an urgency and moral imperative to reduce suffering. I.e. I think itâs much more important to spend the worldâs resources reducing suffering (taking people from a position of suffering to a position of neutral needs met/ânot in suffering) than to spend resources on boosting people from a neutral needs met state (which neednât be non-existence) to a heightened âhappinessâ state.
I view that both: the value difference between neutral and suffering is much larger than the value difference between neutral and happiness AND that there is a moral imperative to reduce suffering where there isnât necessarily a moral imperative to increase happiness.
To give an example, if presented with the option to either give someone a paracetamol for a mild headache or to give someone a bit of cake that they would enjoy (but do not needâthey are not in famine/âhunger), I would always choose the painkiller. Andâperhaps Iâm wrongâI think this would be quite a common preference in the general population. I think most people on a case by case basis would make statements that indicate they do believe we should prioritise suffering. Yet, when we talk on aggregate, suffering-prioritisation seems to be less prevalent. It reminds me of some of the examples in the Frames and Reality chapter of Thinking Fast and Slow about how people will respond the essentially the same scenario differently depending on itâs framing.
WIth apologies for getting a bit dark - (with the possible exclusion of sociopaths etc.), I think people in general would agree they would refuse an ice-cream or the joy of being on a rollercoaster if the cost of it was that someone would be tortured or raped. My point is that I canât think of any amount of positive/âhappiness that I would be willing to say yes, this extra happiness for me balances out someone else being raped. So there are at least some examples of suffering, that I just donât think can be offset by any amount of happiness and therefore my viewpoint definitely includes asymmetry between happiness and suffering. Morally, I just donât think I can accept a view that says some amount of happiness can offset someone elseâs rape or torture.
And I am concerned that the views of people who have experience significant suffering are very under-represented and we donât think about their viewpoints because itâs easier not to and they often donât have a platform. What proportion of people working in population ethics have experienced destitution or been a severe burns victim? What proportion of people working in population ethics have spoken to and listened to the views of people who have experienced extreme suffering in order to try and mitigate their own experiential gap? How does this impact their conclusions?
Hi, sorry if Iâm a bit late here, and I donât want to be repeating myself too much, but since I feel it was not properly understood, one of the main points I originally made in this thread and I want to really hit home is that happiness as measured while in a state of happiness cannot be compared in any way to non-existence as âmeasuredâ in a state of non-existence, since we obviously cannot perceive sensations (or literally anything) when dead/ânot in existence. So the common intuition that happiness is preferable to non-existence is based upon our shallow understanding of what it is to âbeâ dead/ânon-existant, but from a rational point of view this idea simply does not hold. If I was being tortured with no way out, I would certainly want to die as quickly as I could, however when I imagine death in that moment, I am imagining (while in the state of suffering, and not in the âstateâ of death) a cessation of that suffering. However, to experience such a cessation I must be able to experience something to which I can compare against said experience of suffering. So technically speaking it doesnât make any sense at all to say that happiness/âsuffering is better than non-existence as measured in the respective states of happiness/âsuffering and death/ânon-existence. Itâs
And itâs not like death/ânon-existence is neutral in this case. If you picture a scale, with positive experiences (e.g. happiness/âsatisfaction) in the positive direction and negative experiences (e.g. pain/âsuffering) in the negative direction, death does NOT appear at 0 since what we are measuring is the perceived value of the experiences. Put another way in terms of utility functions, if someone has a utility function at some value, and then they die, rather than immediately going to zero, their utility function immediately ceases to exist, as a utility function must belong to someone.
Also this idea of mine is somewhat new to me (a few months old maybe), so I havenât thought through many implications and edge-cases too thoroughly (yet). However this idea, however difficult for me to wrestle with, is something which I find myself simply unable to reason out of.