I realized that there was not even one comment on this post, so I wanted to quickly drop in to say that this one of my favorite posts Iâve read on the forum. It has stuck with me in the past months. I appreciate how it remains relatively simple in its categories, while pointing out facts about our position in the world that we tend to take for granted.
It sometimes feels to me like in fundamental philosophical debates about value in EA (such as the value of existence or the moral value of individuals from different species), the crux is a sort of core, visceral intuition (I especially feel this way about questions regarding outweighing disvalue through value, or the importance of existence) - and the main defenders of suffering-focused ethics acknowledge this at times, supporting their arguments through vividreal-life examples that aim a the guts. It seems unlikely that any consensus will emergeâthough there is clearly a majority view for now that goes against suffering-focused views, but it is interesting to remind us where we are all speaking from, and this might be something that individuals with very different ethical positions can agree upon. An example of where this may help is during debates on the claim that âwe are biased against taking suffering seriously because we have experienced little to no extreme sufferingâ is equally true as âwe donât realize how important happiness is because we havenât experienced extreme happinessâ. I think that reminding ourselves that we are among the happier individuals existing right now on this planet makes might more likely to consider that we should, by default, be more prone to ignoring the intensity that suffering often reaches, than the intensity that happiness often reaches.
I realized that there was not even one comment on this post, so I wanted to quickly drop in to say that this one of my favorite posts Iâve read on the forum. It has stuck with me in the past months. I appreciate how it remains relatively simple in its categories, while pointing out facts about our position in the world that we tend to take for granted.
It sometimes feels to me like in fundamental philosophical debates about value in EA (such as the value of existence or the moral value of individuals from different species), the crux is a sort of core, visceral intuition (I especially feel this way about questions regarding outweighing disvalue through value, or the importance of existence) - and the main defenders of suffering-focused ethics acknowledge this at times, supporting their arguments through vivid real-life examples that aim a the guts. It seems unlikely that any consensus will emergeâthough there is clearly a majority view for now that goes against suffering-focused views, but it is interesting to remind us where we are all speaking from, and this might be something that individuals with very different ethical positions can agree upon. An example of where this may help is during debates on the claim that âwe are biased against taking suffering seriously because we have experienced little to no extreme sufferingâ is equally true as âwe donât realize how important happiness is because we havenât experienced extreme happinessâ. I think that reminding ourselves that we are among the happier individuals existing right now on this planet makes might more likely to consider that we should, by default, be more prone to ignoring the intensity that suffering often reaches, than the intensity that happiness often reaches.