Guy—thank you for this comment. I’m very sorry about your suffering.
I think EAs should take much more seriously the views of people like you who have first-hand experience with these issues. We should not be assuming that ‘below neutral utility’ implies ‘it’s better not to be alive’. We should be much more empirical about this, and not make strong a priori assumptions grounded in some over-simplified, over-abstracted view of utilitarianism.
We should listen to the people, like you, who have been living with chronic conditions—whether pain, depression, PTSD, physical handicaps, cognitive impairments, or whatever—and try to understand what keeps people going, and why they keep going.
Guy—thank you for this comment. I’m very sorry about your suffering.
I think EAs should take much more seriously the views of people like you who have first-hand experience with these issues. We should not be assuming that ‘below neutral utility’ implies ‘it’s better not to be alive’. We should be much more empirical about this, and not make strong a priori assumptions grounded in some over-simplified, over-abstracted view of utilitarianism.
We should listen to the people, like you, who have been living with chronic conditions—whether pain, depression, PTSD, physical handicaps, cognitive impairments, or whatever—and try to understand what keeps people going, and why they keep going.