As a parallel comment, here is more (from a previous discussion) of why I am gravitating towards suffering as the only independent (dis)value and everything else as interdependently valuable in terms of preventing suffering:
“Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one’s own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc.”
but I don’t know how to ultimately prioritize between them unless they are commensurable. I make them commensurable by weighing their interdependent value in terms of the one thing we all(?) agree is an independent motivation: preventable suffering. (If preventable suffering is not worth preventing for its own sake, what is it worth preventing for, and is this other thing agreeable to someone undergoing the suffering as the reason for its motivating power?) This does not mean that I constantly think of them in these terms (that would be counterproductive), but in conflict resolution I do not assign them independent positive numerical values, which pluralism would imply one way or another.
Any pluralist theory begs the question of outweighing suffering with enough of any independently positive value. If you think about it for five minutes, aggregate happiness (or any other experience) does not exist. If our first priority is to prevent preventable suffering, that alone is an infinite game; it does not help to make a detour to boost/copy positive states unless this is causally connected to preventing suffering. (Aggregates of suffering do not exist either, but each moment of suffering is terminally worth preventing, and we have limited attention, so aggregates and chain-reactions of suffering are useful tools of thought for preventing as many as we can. So are many other things without requiring our attaching them independent positive value, or else we would be tiling Mars with them whenever it outweighed helping suffering on Earth according to some formula.)
My experience so far with this kind of unification is that it avoids many (or even all) of the theoretical problems that are still considered canonical challenges for pluralist utilitarianisms that assign both independent negative value to suffering and independent positive value to other things. I do not claim that this would be simple or intuitive – that would be analogous to reading about some Buddhist system, realizing its theoretical unity, and teleporting past its lifelong experiential integration – but I do claim that a unified theory with grounding in a universally accepted terminal value might be worth exploring further, because we cannot presuppose that any kind of CEV would be intuitive or easy to align oneself with.
[...]
People also differ along their background assumptions on whether AGI makes the universally life-preventing button a relevant question, because for many, the idea of an AGI represents an omnipotent optimizer that will decide everything about the future. If so, we want to be careful about assigning independent positive value to all the things, because each one of those invites this AGI to consider {outweighing suffering} with {producing those things}, since pluralist theories do not require a causal connection between the things being weighed.
As a parallel comment, here is more (from a previous discussion) of why I am gravitating towards suffering as the only independent (dis)value and everything else as interdependently valuable in terms of preventing suffering:
––––
I experience all of the things quoted in Complexity of value,
but I don’t know how to ultimately prioritize between them unless they are commensurable. I make them commensurable by weighing their interdependent value in terms of the one thing we all(?) agree is an independent motivation: preventable suffering. (If preventable suffering is not worth preventing for its own sake, what is it worth preventing for, and is this other thing agreeable to someone undergoing the suffering as the reason for its motivating power?) This does not mean that I constantly think of them in these terms (that would be counterproductive), but in conflict resolution I do not assign them independent positive numerical values, which pluralism would imply one way or another.
Any pluralist theory begs the question of outweighing suffering with enough of any independently positive value. If you think about it for five minutes, aggregate happiness (or any other experience) does not exist. If our first priority is to prevent preventable suffering, that alone is an infinite game; it does not help to make a detour to boost/copy positive states unless this is causally connected to preventing suffering. (Aggregates of suffering do not exist either, but each moment of suffering is terminally worth preventing, and we have limited attention, so aggregates and chain-reactions of suffering are useful tools of thought for preventing as many as we can. So are many other things without requiring our attaching them independent positive value, or else we would be tiling Mars with them whenever it outweighed helping suffering on Earth according to some formula.)
My experience so far with this kind of unification is that it avoids many (or even all) of the theoretical problems that are still considered canonical challenges for pluralist utilitarianisms that assign both independent negative value to suffering and independent positive value to other things. I do not claim that this would be simple or intuitive – that would be analogous to reading about some Buddhist system, realizing its theoretical unity, and teleporting past its lifelong experiential integration – but I do claim that a unified theory with grounding in a universally accepted terminal value might be worth exploring further, because we cannot presuppose that any kind of CEV would be intuitive or easy to align oneself with.
[...]
People also differ along their background assumptions on whether AGI makes the universally life-preventing button a relevant question, because for many, the idea of an AGI represents an omnipotent optimizer that will decide everything about the future. If so, we want to be careful about assigning independent positive value to all the things, because each one of those invites this AGI to consider {outweighing suffering} with {producing those things}, since pluralist theories do not require a causal connection between the things being weighed.