Thanks for writing this up publicly! I think it’s a very thought provoking piece and I’m glad you’ve written it. Engaging with it has definitely helped me consider some of my own views in this space more deeply. As you know this is basically just a compilation of comments I’ve left in previous drafts, and am deferring to your preference to have these discussions in public. Some caveats for other readers: I don’t have any formal philosophical background so this is largely first principles reasoning rather than anything philosophically grounded.[1]
All of this is focussed on (to me) the more interesting metaphysical claim that “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness.”
TL;DR
The positive argument for the metaphysical claim and the title of this piece relies (IMO) too heavily on a single thought experiment, that I don’t think supports the topline claim as written.
The post illustrates an unintuitive finding about utilitarianism, but doesn’t seem to provide a substantive case for why utilitarianism that includes lexicality is the least unintuitive option compared to other unintuitive utilitarian conclusions. For example, my understanding of your view is that given a choice of the following options:
A) 70 years of non-offsettable suffering, followed by 1 trillion happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of non-offsettable suffering (NOS)], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at barely offsettable suffering (BOS), followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
You would prefer option B here. And it’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion, and I’m not sure you’ve made a compelling case for this, or that world B contains less relevant suffering.
Thought experiment variations: People’s intuitions about the suffering/bliss trade might reasonably change based on factors like:
Duration of suffering (70 minutes vs. 70 years vs. 70 billion years)
Whether experiences happen in series or parallel
Whether you can transfer the bliss to others
Threshold problem: Formalizing where the lexical threshold sits is IMO pretty important, because there are reasonable pushbacks to both, but they feel like meaningfully different views
High threshold (e.g.,”worst torture”) means the view is still susceptible to unintuitive package deals that endorse arbitrarily large amounts of barely-offsettable suffering (BOS) to avoid small amounts of suffering that does cross the threshold
Low threshold (e.g., “broken hip” or “shrimp suffering”) seems like it functionally becomes negative utilitarianism
Asymptotic compensation schedule: The claim that compensation requirements grow asymptotically and approach infinity (rather than linearly, or some other way) isn’t well-justified, and doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse.
============
Longer
As far as I can tell, the main positive argument you have for is the thought experiment where you reject the offer of 70 years of worst conceivable suffering in exchange for any amount of happiness afterwards”. But I do think it would be rational for an IHE as defined to accept this trade
I agree that package deals that permit or endorse the creation of extreme suffering as part of a package deal is an unintuitive / uncomfortable view to want to accept. But AFAICT most if not all utilitarian views have some plausibly unintuitive thought experiment like this, and my current view is that you have still not made a substantive positive claim for non-offsettability / negative lexical utilitarianism beyond broadly “here is this unintuitive result about total utilitarianism”, and I think an additional claim of “why is this the least unintuitive result / the one that we should accept out of all unintuitive options” would be helpful for readers, otherwise I agree more with your section “not a proof” than your topline metaphysical claim (and indeed your title “Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset””).
The thought experiment:
I do actually think that the IHE should take this trade. But I think a lot of my pushbacks apply even if you are uncertain about whether the IHE should or not.
For example, I think whether the thought experiment stipulates 70 minutes years or 70 years or 70 billion years of the worst possible suffering meaningfully changes how the thought experiment feels, but if lexicality was true we should not take the trade regardless of the duration. I know you’ve weakened your position on this, but it does open up more uncertainties of the kinds of tradeoffs you should be willing to make since the time aspect is continuous, and if this alone is sufficient to turn something from offsettable to not-offsettable then it could imply some weird things, like it seems a little weird to prioritise averting 1 case of a 1 hour cluster headache over 1 million cases of 5 minute cluster headaches.[2]
As Liv pointed out in a previous version of the draft, there are also versions of the thought experiment which I think people’s intuitive answer may reasonably change, shouldn’t if you think lexicality is true:
-is the suffering / bliss happening in parallel or in series -is there the option of taking the suffering on behalf of others (e.g. some might be more willing to take the trade if after you take the suffering, the arbitrary amounts of bliss can be transferred to other people as well, and not just yourself)
On the view more generally:
I’m not sure you explicitly make this claim so if this isn’t your view let me know! But I think your version of lexicality doesn’t just say “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should avert this no matter how much happiness we might lose / give up as a result”, but it also says “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should prioritise averting this over any amount of BOS”[3]
Why I think formalising the threshold is helpful in understanding the view you are arguing for:
If the threshold is very high, e.g. “worst torture imaginable”, then you are (like total utilitarianism) in a situation where you are also having uncomfortable/unintuitive package deals where you have to endorse high amounts of suffering. For example, you would prefer to avert 1 hour of the worst torture imaginable in exchange for never having any more happiness and positive value, but also actively produce arbitrarily high amounts of BOS.
My understanding of your view is that given a choice of living in series: A) 70 years of NOS, followed by 1 trilion positive happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or B) [70 years minus 1 hour of NOS], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at BOS, followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
you would prefer the latter. It’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. It’s also not clear to me that you have actually argued a world like world B would have to have “less relevant suffering” than world A (e.g. your footnote 24).
If the threshold is lower, e.g. “broken hip”, or much lower, e.g. “suffering of shrimp that has not been electrically stunned”, then you while you might less unintuitive suffering package deals, but you end up functionally very similar to negative utilitarianism, where averting one broken leg outweighs, or saving 1 shrimp outweighs all other benefits.
Formalising the threshold:
Using your example of a specific, concrete case of extreme suffering: “a cluster headache [for one human] lasting for one hour”.
If this uncontroversially crosses the non-offsetable threshold for you, consider how you’d view the headache if you hypothetically decrease the amount of time, the number of nociceptors that are exposed to the stimuli, how often they fire, etc until you get to 0 on some or all variables. This feels pretty continuous! And if you think there should be a discontinuity that isn’t explained by this, then it’d be helpful to map out categorically what it entails. For example, if someone is boiled alive[4] this is extreme suffering, because suffering involving extreme heat, confronting your perceived impending doom, loss of autonomy or some combination of the above. But you might still probably need more than this because not all suffering involving extreme heat or suffering involving loss of autonomy is necessarily extreme, and it’s not obvious how this maps onto e.g. cluster headaches. Or you might bite the bullet on “confronting your impending doom”, but this might be a pretty different view with different implications etc.
The radical implications (insofar as you think any of this is radical) aren’t at the threshold but in the approach to it. The compensation schedule growing without bound (i.e., asymptotically) means that some sub-threshold suffering would require 10^(10^10) happy lives to offset, or 1000^(1000^1000). (emphasis added)
============ This arbitrariness diminishes somewhat (though, again, not entirely) when viewed through the asymptotic structure. Once we accept that compensation requirements grow without bound as suffering intensifies, some threshold becomes inevitable. The asymptote must diverge somewhere; debates about exactly where are secondary to recognizing the underlying pattern.
It’s not clear that we have to accept the compensation schedule as growing asymptotically? Like if your response to “the discontinuity of tradeoffs caused by the lexical threshold does not seem to be well justified” is “actually the radical part isn’t the threshold, it’s because of the asymptotic compensation schedule”, then it would be helpful to explain why you think the asymptotic compensation schedule is the best model, or preferable to e.g. a linear one.
For example, suppose a standard utilitarian values converting 10 factory farmed pig lives to 1 happy pig life to 1 human life similarly, and they also value 1E4 happy pig lives to 1E3 human lives.
Suppose you are deeply uncertain about whether a factory farmed pig experiences NOS because it’s very close to the threshold of what you think constitutes extreme / NOS suffering.
If the answer is yes, then converting 1 factory farmed pig to a happy pig life should trade off against arbitrarily high numbers of human lives. But according to the asymptotic compensation schedule, if the answer is no, then you might need 10^(10^10) human lives to offset a happy pig life. But either way, it’s not obvious to the standard utilitarian why they should value 1 case of factory farmed pig experience this much!
Other comments:
In other words, let us consider a specific, concrete case of extreme suffering: say a cluster headache lasting for one hour.
Here, the lexical suffering-oriented utilitarian who claims that this crosses the threshold of in-principle compensability has much more in common with the standard utilitarian who thinks that in principle creating such an event would be morally justified by TREE(3) flourishing human life-years than the latter utilitarian has with the standard utilitarian who claims that the required compensation is merely a single flourishing human life-month.
I suspect this intended to be illustrative, but I would be surprised if there were many, if any standard utilitarians who would actually say that you need TREE(3)[5] flourishing human life years to offset a cluster headache lasting 1 hour, so this seems like a strawman?
Like it does seem like the more useful Q to ask is something more like: Does the lexical suffering-oriented utilitarian who claims that this crosses the threshold of in-principle compensability have more in common with the standard utilitarian who thinks the event would be morally justified by 50 flourishing human life years (which is already a lot!), than that latter utilitarian has with another standard utilitarian who claims the required compensation is a single flourishing life month?
Like 1 month : TREE(3) vs. TREE(3) : infinity seems less likely to map to the standard utilitarian view than something like 1 month : 50 years vs. 50 years : infinity.
Thanks again for the post, and all the discussions!
I’m also friends with Aaron and have already had these discussions with him and other mutual friends in other contexts and so have possibly made less effort into making sure the disagreements land as gently as possible than I would otherwise. I’ve also spent a long time on the comment already so have focussed on the disagreements rather than the parts of the post that are praiseworthy.
To be clear I find the time granularity issue very confusing personally, and I think it does have important implications for e.g. how we value extreme suffering (for example, if you define extreme suffering as “not tolerable even for a few seconds + would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain”, then much of human suffering is not extreme by definition, and the best way of reaching huge quantities of extreme suffering is by having many small creatures with a few seconds of pain (fish, shrimp, flies, nematodes). However, depending on how you discount for these small quantities of pain, it could change how you trade off between e.g. shrimp and human welfare, even without disagreements on likelihood of sentience or the non-time elements that contribute to suffering.
Here I use extreme suffering and non-offsetable suffering interchangeably, to mean anything worse than the lexical threshold, and thus not offsetable, and barely offsetable suffering to mean some suffering that is as close to the lexical threshold as possible but considered offsetable. Credit to Max’s blog post for helping me with wording some of this, though I prefer non-offsetable over extreme as this is more robust to different lexical thresholds).
The positive argument for the metaphysical claim and the title of this piece relies (IMO) too heavily on a single thought experiment, that I don’t think supports the topline claim as written.
Not sure what you mean by the last clause, and to quote myself from above:
I don’t expect to convince all readers, but I’d be largely satisfied if someone reads this and says: “You’re right about the logic, right about the hidden premise, right about the bridge from IHE preferences to moral facts, but I would personally, both in real life and as an IHE, accept literally anything, including a lifetime of being boiled alive, for sufficient happiness afterward.”
Yeah it’s possible I should (have) emphasized this specific thesis (“IHE thought experiment, I claim, is an especially epistemically productive way of exploring that territory, and indeed for doing moral philosophy more broadly”) more as an explicit claim, distinct from the two I highlight as the organizing/motivating claims corresponding to each section. Maybe I will add a note or something about this.
I don’t have a rock solid response to the “too heavily” thing because, idk, I think the thought experiment is actually what matters and what corresponds to the true answer. And I’ll add that a background stance I have is that I’m trying to convey what think is the right answer, not only in terms of explicit conclusions but in terms of what evidence matters and such.
A) 70 years of non-offsettable suffering, followed by 1 trillion happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of non-offsettable suffering (NOS)], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at barely offsettable suffering (BOS), followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS
You would prefer option B here. And it’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion, and I’m not sure you’ve made a compelling case for this.
Yeah not going to lie this is an important point, I have three semi-competing responses:
I’m much more confident about the (positive wellbeing + suffering) vs neither trade than intra-suffering trades. It sounds right that something like the tradeoff you describe follows from the most intuitive version of my model, but I’m not actually certain of this; like maybe there is a system that fits within the bounds of the thing I’m arguing for that chooses A instead of B (with no money pumps/very implausible conclusions following)
Well the question again is “what would the IHE under experiential totalization do?” Insofar as the answer is “A”, I endorse that. I want to lean on this type of thinking much more strongly than hyper-systematic quasi-formal inferences about what indirectly follows from my thesis.
I think it’s possible that the answer is just B because BOS is just radically qualitatively different from NOS.
Maybe most importantly I (tentatively?) object to the term “barely” here because under the asymptotic model I suggest, the value of subtracting arbitrarily small amount of suffering instrument ϵ from the NOS state results in no change in moral value at all because (to quote myself again) “Working in the extended reals, this is left-continuous: limis→is∗ϕ(is)=∞+=ϕ(is∗)”
So in order to get BOS, we need to remove something larger than ϵ, and now it’s a quasi-empirical question of how different that actually feels from the inside. Plausibly the answer is that “BOS” (scare quotes) doesn’t actually feel “barely” different—it feels extremely and categorically different
Consider “which of these responses if any is correct” a bit of an open question for me.
And I’ll add that insofar as the answer is (2) and NOT 3, I’m pretty inclined to update towards “I just haven’t developed an explicit formalization that handles both the happiness trade case and the intra-suffering trade case yet” more strongly than towards “the whole thing is wrong, suffering is offsetable by positive wellbeing”—after all, I don’t think it directly follows from “IHE chooses A” that “IHE would choose the 70 years of torture.” But I could be wrong about this! I 100% genuinely think I’m literally not smart enough to intuit super confidently whether or a formalization that chooses both A and no torture exists. I will think about this more!
Thought experiment variations: People’s intuitions about the suffering/bliss trade might reasonably change based on factors like:
Duration of suffering (70 minutes vs. 70 years vs. 70 billion years)
Whether experiences happen in series or parallel
Whether you can transfer the bliss to others
I agree (1) offers interesting variations. I do have a vague, vibey sense that one human lifetime seems like a pretty “fair” central case to start from but this is not well-justified.
I more strongly want to push back on (2) and (3) in the sense that I think parallel experience, while probably conceptually fine in principle, really greatly degrades the epistemic virtue of the thought experiment because this literally isn’t something human brains were/are designed to do or simulate. And likewise with (3), the self interest bit seems pretty epistemically important.
Threshold problem: Formalizing where the lexical threshold sits is IMO pretty important, because there are reasonable pushbacks to both, but they feel like meaningfully different views
High threshold (e.g.,”worst torture”) leads to unintuitive package deals where you’d accept vast amounts of barely-offsettable suffering (BOS) to avoid small amounts of suffering that does cross the threshold
Low threshold (e.g., “broken hip” or “shrimp suffering”) seems like it functionally becomes negative utilitarianism
I agree it is imporant! Someone should figure out the right answer! Also in terms of practical implementation, probably better to model as a probability distribution than a single certain line.
Asymptotic compensation schedule: The claim that compensation requirements grow asymptotically (rather than linearly, or some other way) isn’t well-justified, and doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse.
I disagree that it isn’t well-justified in principlle, but maybe I should have argued this more thoroughly. It just makes a ton of intuitive sense to me but possibly I am typical-minding. And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the second thing—see point 3 a few bullets up. It seems radically less plausible to me that the true nature of ethics involves discontinuous i_s vs i_h compensation schedules.
Ok lol your comment is pretty long so I think I will need to revisit the rest of it! Some vibes are likely to include:
“I literally don’t know what the threshold is. I agree it would be nice to formalize it! My uncertainty isn’t much evidence against the view as a whole”
I feel like we agree about continuity; the asymptote seems very intuitively like the most likely way to connect “paper cuts are acceptable to create in exchange for wellbeing” and “the IHE would refuse the torture trade”. I agree it’s not literally impossible that a discontinuous model is correct
I suspect this intended to be illustrative, but I would be surprised if there were many, if any standard utilitarians who would actually say that you need TREE(3)[5] flourishing human life years to offset a cluster headache lasting 1 hour, so this seems like a strawman?
Yes illustrative, I’m not trying to claim that these people actually exist. I don’t think it’s a strawman. Maybe this is a grammatical thing with my use of the word the to refer to a hypothetical person
I’m much more confident about the (positive wellbeing + suffering) vs neither trade than intra-suffering trades. It sounds right that something like the tradeoff you describe follows from the most intuitive version of my model, but I’m not actually certain of this; like maybe there is a system that fits within the bounds of the thing I’m arguing for that chooses A instead of B (with no money pumps/very implausible conclusions following)
Ok interesting! I’d be interested in seeing this mapped out a bit more, because it does sound weird to have BOS be offsettable with positive wellbeing, positive wellbeing to be not offsettable with NOS, but BOS and NOS are offsetable with each other? Or maybe this isn’t your claim and I’m misunderstanding
2) Well the question again is “what would the IHE under experiential totalization do?” Insofar as the answer is “A”, I endorse that. I want to lean on this type of thinking much more strongly than hyper-systematic quasi-formal inferences about what indirectly follows from my thesis.
Right, but if IHE does prefer A over B in my case while also preferring the “neither” side of the [positive wellbeing + NOS] vs neither trade then there’s something pretty inconsistent right? Or a missing explanation for the perceived inconsistency that isn’t explained by a lexical threshold.
I think it’s possible that the answer is just B because BOS is just radically qualitatively different from NOS.
I think this is plausible but where does the radical qualitative difference come from? (see comments RE: formalising the threshold).
Maybe most importantly I (tentatively?) object to the term “barely” here because under the asymptotic model I suggest, the value of subtracting arbitrarily small amount of suffering instrument ϵ from the NOS state results in no change in moral value at all because (to quote myself again) “Working in the extended reals, this is left-continuous: limis→is∗ϕ(is)=∞+=ϕ(is∗)”
Sorry this is too much maths for my smooth brain but I think I’d be interested in understanding why I should accept the asymptotic model before trying to engage with the maths! (More on this below, under “On the asymptotic compensation schedule”)
So in order to get BOS, we need to remove something larger than ϵ, and now it’s a quasi-empirical question of how different that actually feels from the inside. Plausibly the answer is that “BOS” (scare quotes) doesn’t actually feel “barely” different—it feels extremely and categorically different
Can you think of one generalisable real world scenario here? Like “I think this is clearly non-offsetable and now I’ve removed X, I think it is clearly offsetable”
And I’ll add that insofar as the answer is (2) and NOT 3, I’m pretty inclined to update towards “I just haven’t developed an explicit formalization that handles both the happiness trade case and the intra-suffering trade case yet” more strongly than towards “the whole thing is wrong, suffering is offsetable by positive wellbeing”—after all, I don’t think it directly follows from “IHE chooses A” that “IHE would choose the 70 years of torture.” But I could be wrong about this! I 100% genuinely think I’m literally not smart enough to intuit super confidently whether or a formalization that chooses both A and no torture exists. I will think about this more!
Cool! Yeah I’d be excited to see the formalisation; I’m not making a claim that the whole thing is wrong, more making a claim that I’m not currently sufficiently convinced to hold the view that some suffering cannot be offsetable. I think while the intuitions and the hypotheticals are valuable, like you say later, there are a bunch of things about this that we aren’t well placed to simulate or think about well, and I suspect if you find yourself in a bunch of hypotheticals where you feel like your intuitions differ and you can’t find a way to resolve the inconsistencies then it is worth considering the possibility that you’re not adequately modelling what it is like to be the IHE in at least one of the hypotheticals
I more strongly want to push back on (2) and (3) in the sense that I think parallel experience, while probably conceptually fine in principle, really greatly degrades the epistemic virtue of the thought experiment because this literally isn’t something human brains were/are designed to do or simulate.
Yeah reasonable, but presumably this applies to answers for your main question[1] too?
Suppose the true value of exchange is at 10 years of happiness afterwards; this seems easier for our brains to simulate than if the true exchange rate is at 100,000 years of happiness, especially if you insist on parallel experiences. Perhaps it is just very difficult to be scope sensitive about exactly how much bliss 1E12 years of bliss is!
And likewise with (3), the self interest bit seems pretty epistemically important.
can you clarify what you mean here? Isn’t the IHE someone who is “maximally rational/makes no logical errors, have unlimited information processing capacity, complete information about experiences with perfect introspective access, and full understanding of what any hedonic state would actually feel like”?
On formalising where the lexical threshold is you say:
I agree it is imporant! Someone should figure out the right answer! Also in terms of practical implementation, probably better to model as a probability distribution than a single certain line.
This is reasonable, and I agree with probability distribution given uncertainty, but I guess it feels hard to engage with the metaphysical claim “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness” and their implications if you are so deeply uncertain about what counts as NOS. I guess my view is that conditional on physicalism then whatever combination of nociceptor / neuron firing and neurotransmitter release / you can think of, this is a measurable amount. some of these combinations will cross the threshold of NOS under your view, but you can decrease all of those in continuous ways that shouldn’t lead to a discontinuity in tradeoffs you’re willing to make. It does NOT mean that the relationship is linear, but it seems like there’s some reason to believe it’s continuous rather than discontinuous / has an asymptote here. And contra your later point:
“I literally don’t know what the threshold is. I agree it would be nice to formalize it! My uncertainty isn’t much evidence against the view as a whole”
I think if we don’t know where a reasonable threshold is it’s fine to remain uncertain about it, but I think that’s much weaker than accepting the metaphysical claim! It’s currently based just on the 70 years of worst-possible suffering VS ~infinite bliss hypothetical. Because your uncertainty about the threshold means I can conjure arbitrarily high numbers of hypotheticals that would count as evidence against your view in the same way your hypothetical is considered evidence for your view.
On the asymptotic compensation schedule
I disagree that it isn’t well-justified in principlle, but maybe I should have argued this more thoroughly. It just makes a ton of intuitive sense to me but possibly I am typical-minding.
As far as I can tell, you just claim that it creates an asymptote and label it the correct view right? But why should it grow without bound? Sorry if I’ve missed something!
And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the second thing—see point 3 a few bullets up. It seems radically less plausible to me that the true nature of ethics involves discontinuous i_s vs i_h compensation schedules.
I was unclear about the “doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse” part you’re referring to here, and I agree RE: discontinuity. What I’m trying to communicate is that if someone isn’t convinced by the perceived discontinuity of NOS being non-offsettable and BOS being offsettable, a large subset of them also won’t be very convinced by the response “the radical part is in the approach to infinity, (in your words: the compensation schedule growing without bound (i.e., asymptotically) means that some sub-threshold suffering would require 10^(10^10) happy lives to offset, or 1000^(1000^1000). (emphasis added)”.
Because they could just reject the idea that an extremely bad headache (but not a cluster headache), or a short cluster headache episode, or a cluster headache managed by some amount of painkiller, etc, requires 1000^(1000^1000) happy lives to offset.
I guess this is just another way of saying “it seems like you’re assuming people are buying into the asymptotic model but you haven’t justified this”.
Ok interesting! I’d be interested in seeing this mapped out a bit more, because it does sound weird to have BOS be offsettable with positive wellbeing, positive wellbeing to be not offsettable with NOS, but BOS and NOS are offsetable with each other? Or maybe this isn’t your claim and I’m misunderstanding
This is what kills the proposal IMO, and EJT also pointed this out. The key difference between this proposal and standard utilitarianism where anything is offsettable isn’t the claim that that NOS is worse than TREE(3) or even 10^100 happy lives, since this isn’t a physically plausible tradeoff we will face anyway. It’s that once you believe in NOS, transitivity compels you to believe it is worse than any amounts of BOS, even a variety of BOS that, according to your best instruments, only differs from NOS in the tenth decimal place. Then once you believe this, the fact that you use a utility function compels you to create arbitrary amounts of BOS to avoid a tiny probability of a tiny amount of NOS.
Thanks for writing this up publicly! I think it’s a very thought provoking piece and I’m glad you’ve written it. Engaging with it has definitely helped me consider some of my own views in this space more deeply. As you know this is basically just a compilation of comments I’ve left in previous drafts, and am deferring to your preference to have these discussions in public. Some caveats for other readers: I don’t have any formal philosophical background so this is largely first principles reasoning rather than anything philosophically grounded.[1]
All of this is focussed on (to me) the more interesting metaphysical claim that “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness.”
TL;DR
The positive argument for the metaphysical claim and the title of this piece relies (IMO) too heavily on a single thought experiment, that I don’t think supports the topline claim as written.
The post illustrates an unintuitive finding about utilitarianism, but doesn’t seem to provide a substantive case for why utilitarianism that includes lexicality is the least unintuitive option compared to other unintuitive utilitarian conclusions. For example, my understanding of your view is that given a choice of the following options:
A) 70 years of non-offsettable suffering, followed by 1 trillion happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of non-offsettable suffering (NOS)], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at barely offsettable suffering (BOS), followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
You would prefer option B here. And it’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion, and I’m not sure you’ve made a compelling case for this, or that world B contains less relevant suffering.
Thought experiment variations:
People’s intuitions about the suffering/bliss trade might reasonably change based on factors like:
Duration of suffering (70 minutes vs. 70 years vs. 70 billion years)
Whether experiences happen in series or parallel
Whether you can transfer the bliss to others
Threshold problem:
Formalizing where the lexical threshold sits is IMO pretty important, because there are reasonable pushbacks to both, but they feel like meaningfully different views
High threshold (e.g.,”worst torture”) means the view is still susceptible to unintuitive package deals that endorse arbitrarily large amounts of barely-offsettable suffering (BOS) to avoid small amounts of suffering that does cross the threshold
Low threshold (e.g., “broken hip” or “shrimp suffering”) seems like it functionally becomes negative utilitarianism
Asymptotic compensation schedule:
The claim that compensation requirements grow asymptotically and approach infinity (rather than linearly, or some other way) isn’t well-justified, and doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse.
============
Longer
As far as I can tell, the main positive argument you have for is the thought experiment where you reject the offer of 70 years of worst conceivable suffering in exchange for any amount of happiness afterwards”. But I do think it would be rational for an IHE as defined to accept this trade
I agree that package deals that permit or endorse the creation of extreme suffering as part of a package deal is an unintuitive / uncomfortable view to want to accept. But AFAICT most if not all utilitarian views have some plausibly unintuitive thought experiment like this, and my current view is that you have still not made a substantive positive claim for non-offsettability / negative lexical utilitarianism beyond broadly “here is this unintuitive result about total utilitarianism”, and I think an additional claim of “why is this the least unintuitive result / the one that we should accept out of all unintuitive options” would be helpful for readers, otherwise I agree more with your section “not a proof” than your topline metaphysical claim (and indeed your title “Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset””).
The thought experiment:
I do actually think that the IHE should take this trade. But I think a lot of my pushbacks apply even if you are uncertain about whether the IHE should or not.
For example, I think whether the thought experiment stipulates 70 minutes years or 70 years or 70 billion years of the worst possible suffering meaningfully changes how the thought experiment feels, but if lexicality was true we should not take the trade regardless of the duration. I know you’ve weakened your position on this, but it does open up more uncertainties of the kinds of tradeoffs you should be willing to make since the time aspect is continuous, and if this alone is sufficient to turn something from offsettable to not-offsettable then it could imply some weird things, like it seems a little weird to prioritise averting 1 case of a 1 hour cluster headache over 1 million cases of 5 minute cluster headaches.[2]
As Liv pointed out in a previous version of the draft, there are also versions of the thought experiment which I think people’s intuitive answer may reasonably change, shouldn’t if you think lexicality is true:
-is the suffering / bliss happening in parallel or in series
-is there the option of taking the suffering on behalf of others (e.g. some might be more willing to take the trade if after you take the suffering, the arbitrary amounts of bliss can be transferred to other people as well, and not just yourself)
On the view more generally:
I’m not sure you explicitly make this claim so if this isn’t your view let me know! But I think your version of lexicality doesn’t just say “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should avert this no matter how much happiness we might lose / give up as a result”, but it also says “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should prioritise averting this over any amount of BOS”[3]
Why I think formalising the threshold is helpful in understanding the view you are arguing for:
If the threshold is very high, e.g. “worst torture imaginable”, then you are (like total utilitarianism) in a situation where you are also having uncomfortable/unintuitive package deals where you have to endorse high amounts of suffering. For example, you would prefer to avert 1 hour of the worst torture imaginable in exchange for never having any more happiness and positive value, but also actively produce arbitrarily high amounts of BOS.
My understanding of your view is that given a choice of living in series:
A) 70 years of NOS, followed by 1 trilion positive happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of NOS], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at BOS, followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
you would prefer the latter. It’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. It’s also not clear to me that you have actually argued a world like world B would have to have “less relevant suffering” than world A (e.g. your footnote 24).
If the threshold is lower, e.g. “broken hip”, or much lower, e.g. “suffering of shrimp that has not been electrically stunned”, then you while you might less unintuitive suffering package deals, but you end up functionally very similar to negative utilitarianism, where averting one broken leg outweighs, or saving 1 shrimp outweighs all other benefits.
Formalising the threshold:
Using your example of a specific, concrete case of extreme suffering: “a cluster headache [for one human] lasting for one hour”.
If this uncontroversially crosses the non-offsetable threshold for you, consider how you’d view the headache if you hypothetically decrease the amount of time, the number of nociceptors that are exposed to the stimuli, how often they fire, etc until you get to 0 on some or all variables. This feels pretty continuous! And if you think there should be a discontinuity that isn’t explained by this, then it’d be helpful to map out categorically what it entails. For example, if someone is boiled alive[4] this is extreme suffering, because suffering involving extreme heat, confronting your perceived impending doom, loss of autonomy or some combination of the above. But you might still probably need more than this because not all suffering involving extreme heat or suffering involving loss of autonomy is necessarily extreme, and it’s not obvious how this maps onto e.g. cluster headaches. Or you might bite the bullet on “confronting your impending doom”, but this might be a pretty different view with different implications etc.
On “Continuity and the Location of the Threshold”
It’s not clear that we have to accept the compensation schedule as growing asymptotically? Like if your response to “the discontinuity of tradeoffs caused by the lexical threshold does not seem to be well justified” is “actually the radical part isn’t the threshold, it’s because of the asymptotic compensation schedule”, then it would be helpful to explain why you think the asymptotic compensation schedule is the best model, or preferable to e.g. a linear one.
For example, suppose a standard utilitarian values converting 10 factory farmed pig lives to 1 happy pig life to 1 human life similarly, and they also value 1E4 happy pig lives to 1E3 human lives.
Suppose you are deeply uncertain about whether a factory farmed pig experiences NOS because it’s very close to the threshold of what you think constitutes extreme / NOS suffering.
If the answer is yes, then converting 1 factory farmed pig to a happy pig life should trade off against arbitrarily high numbers of human lives. But according to the asymptotic compensation schedule, if the answer is no, then you might need 10^(10^10) human lives to offset a happy pig life. But either way, it’s not obvious to the standard utilitarian why they should value 1 case of factory farmed pig experience this much!
Other comments:
I suspect this intended to be illustrative, but I would be surprised if there were many, if any standard utilitarians who would actually say that you need TREE(3)[5] flourishing human life years to offset a cluster headache lasting 1 hour, so this seems like a strawman?
Like it does seem like the more useful Q to ask is something more like:
Does the lexical suffering-oriented utilitarian who claims that this crosses the threshold of in-principle compensability have more in common with the standard utilitarian who thinks the event would be morally justified by 50 flourishing human life years (which is already a lot!), than that latter utilitarian has with another standard utilitarian who claims the required compensation is a single flourishing life month?
Like 1 month : TREE(3) vs. TREE(3) : infinity seems less likely to map to the standard utilitarian view than something like 1 month : 50 years vs. 50 years : infinity.
Thanks again for the post, and all the discussions!
I’m also friends with Aaron and have already had these discussions with him and other mutual friends in other contexts and so have possibly made less effort into making sure the disagreements land as gently as possible than I would otherwise. I’ve also spent a long time on the comment already so have focussed on the disagreements rather than the parts of the post that are praiseworthy.
To be clear I find the time granularity issue very confusing personally, and I think it does have important implications for e.g. how we value extreme suffering (for example, if you define extreme suffering as “not tolerable even for a few seconds + would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain”, then much of human suffering is not extreme by definition, and the best way of reaching huge quantities of extreme suffering is by having many small creatures with a few seconds of pain (fish, shrimp, flies, nematodes). However, depending on how you discount for these small quantities of pain, it could change how you trade off between e.g. shrimp and human welfare, even without disagreements on likelihood of sentience or the non-time elements that contribute to suffering.
Here I use extreme suffering and non-offsetable suffering interchangeably, to mean anything worse than the lexical threshold, and thus not offsetable, and barely offsetable suffering to mean some suffering that is as close to the lexical threshold as possible but considered offsetable. Credit to Max’s blog post for helping me with wording some of this, though I prefer non-offsetable over extreme as this is more robust to different lexical thresholds).
to use your example
I don’t even have the maths ability to process how big this is, I’m just deferring to Wikipedia saying it’s larger than g64
Again I appreciate your serious engagement!
Not sure what you mean by the last clause, and to quote myself from above:
Yeah it’s possible I should (have) emphasized this specific thesis (“IHE thought experiment, I claim, is an especially epistemically productive way of exploring that territory, and indeed for doing moral philosophy more broadly”) more as an explicit claim, distinct from the two I highlight as the organizing/motivating claims corresponding to each section. Maybe I will add a note or something about this.
I don’t have a rock solid response to the “too heavily” thing because, idk, I think the thought experiment is actually what matters and what corresponds to the true answer. And I’ll add that a background stance I have is that I’m trying to convey what think is the right answer, not only in terms of explicit conclusions but in terms of what evidence matters and such.
Yeah not going to lie this is an important point, I have three semi-competing responses:
I’m much more confident about the (positive wellbeing + suffering) vs neither trade than intra-suffering trades. It sounds right that something like the tradeoff you describe follows from the most intuitive version of my model, but I’m not actually certain of this; like maybe there is a system that fits within the bounds of the thing I’m arguing for that chooses A instead of B (with no money pumps/very implausible conclusions following)
Well the question again is “what would the IHE under experiential totalization do?” Insofar as the answer is “A”, I endorse that. I want to lean on this type of thinking much more strongly than hyper-systematic quasi-formal inferences about what indirectly follows from my thesis.
I think it’s possible that the answer is just B because BOS is just radically qualitatively different from NOS.
Maybe most importantly I (tentatively?) object to the term “barely” here because under the asymptotic model I suggest, the value of subtracting arbitrarily small amount of suffering instrument ϵ from the NOS state results in no change in moral value at all because (to quote myself again) “Working in the extended reals, this is left-continuous: limis→is∗ϕ(is)=∞+=ϕ(is∗)”
So in order to get BOS, we need to remove something larger than ϵ, and now it’s a quasi-empirical question of how different that actually feels from the inside. Plausibly the answer is that “BOS” (scare quotes) doesn’t actually feel “barely” different—it feels extremely and categorically different
Consider “which of these responses if any is correct” a bit of an open question for me.
And I’ll add that insofar as the answer is (2) and NOT 3, I’m pretty inclined to update towards “I just haven’t developed an explicit formalization that handles both the happiness trade case and the intra-suffering trade case yet” more strongly than towards “the whole thing is wrong, suffering is offsetable by positive wellbeing”—after all, I don’t think it directly follows from “IHE chooses A” that “IHE would choose the 70 years of torture.” But I could be wrong about this! I 100% genuinely think I’m literally not smart enough to intuit super confidently whether or a formalization that chooses both A and no torture exists. I will think about this more!
I agree (1) offers interesting variations. I do have a vague, vibey sense that one human lifetime seems like a pretty “fair” central case to start from but this is not well-justified.
I more strongly want to push back on (2) and (3) in the sense that I think parallel experience, while probably conceptually fine in principle, really greatly degrades the epistemic virtue of the thought experiment because this literally isn’t something human brains were/are designed to do or simulate. And likewise with (3), the self interest bit seems pretty epistemically important.
I agree it is imporant! Someone should figure out the right answer! Also in terms of practical implementation, probably better to model as a probability distribution than a single certain line.
I disagree that it isn’t well-justified in principlle, but maybe I should have argued this more thoroughly. It just makes a ton of intuitive sense to me but possibly I am typical-minding. And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the second thing—see point 3 a few bullets up. It seems radically less plausible to me that the true nature of ethics involves discontinuous i_s vs i_h compensation schedules.
Ok lol your comment is pretty long so I think I will need to revisit the rest of it! Some vibes are likely to include:
“I literally don’t know what the threshold is. I agree it would be nice to formalize it! My uncertainty isn’t much evidence against the view as a whole”
I feel like we agree about continuity; the asymptote seems very intuitively like the most likely way to connect “paper cuts are acceptable to create in exchange for wellbeing” and “the IHE would refuse the torture trade”. I agree it’s not literally impossible that a discontinuous model is correct
Yes illustrative, I’m not trying to claim that these people actually exist. I don’t think it’s a strawman. Maybe this is a grammatical thing with my use of the word the to refer to a hypothetical person
Ok interesting! I’d be interested in seeing this mapped out a bit more, because it does sound weird to have BOS be offsettable with positive wellbeing, positive wellbeing to be not offsettable with NOS, but BOS and NOS are offsetable with each other? Or maybe this isn’t your claim and I’m misunderstanding
Right, but if IHE does prefer A over B in my case while also preferring the “neither” side of the [positive wellbeing + NOS] vs neither trade then there’s something pretty inconsistent right? Or a missing explanation for the perceived inconsistency that isn’t explained by a lexical threshold.
I think this is plausible but where does the radical qualitative difference come from? (see comments RE: formalising the threshold).
Sorry this is too much maths for my smooth brain but I think I’d be interested in understanding why I should accept the asymptotic model before trying to engage with the maths! (More on this below, under “On the asymptotic compensation schedule”)
Can you think of one generalisable real world scenario here? Like “I think this is clearly non-offsetable and now I’ve removed X, I think it is clearly offsetable”
Cool! Yeah I’d be excited to see the formalisation; I’m not making a claim that the whole thing is wrong, more making a claim that I’m not currently sufficiently convinced to hold the view that some suffering cannot be offsetable. I think while the intuitions and the hypotheticals are valuable, like you say later, there are a bunch of things about this that we aren’t well placed to simulate or think about well, and I suspect if you find yourself in a bunch of hypotheticals where you feel like your intuitions differ and you can’t find a way to resolve the inconsistencies then it is worth considering the possibility that you’re not adequately modelling what it is like to be the IHE in at least one of the hypotheticals
Yeah reasonable, but presumably this applies to answers for your main question[1] too?
Suppose the true value of exchange is at 10 years of happiness afterwards; this seems easier for our brains to simulate than if the true exchange rate is at 100,000 years of happiness, especially if you insist on parallel experiences. Perhaps it is just very difficult to be scope sensitive about exactly how much bliss 1E12 years of bliss is!
can you clarify what you mean here? Isn’t the IHE someone who is “maximally rational/makes no logical errors, have unlimited information processing capacity, complete information about experiences with perfect introspective access, and full understanding of what any hedonic state would actually feel like”?
On formalising where the lexical threshold is you say:
This is reasonable, and I agree with probability distribution given uncertainty, but I guess it feels hard to engage with the metaphysical claim “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness” and their implications if you are so deeply uncertain about what counts as NOS. I guess my view is that conditional on physicalism then whatever combination of nociceptor / neuron firing and neurotransmitter release / you can think of, this is a measurable amount. some of these combinations will cross the threshold of NOS under your view, but you can decrease all of those in continuous ways that shouldn’t lead to a discontinuity in tradeoffs you’re willing to make. It does NOT mean that the relationship is linear, but it seems like there’s some reason to believe it’s continuous rather than discontinuous / has an asymptote here. And contra your later point:
I think if we don’t know where a reasonable threshold is it’s fine to remain uncertain about it, but I think that’s much weaker than accepting the metaphysical claim! It’s currently based just on the 70 years of worst-possible suffering VS ~infinite bliss hypothetical. Because your uncertainty about the threshold means I can conjure arbitrarily high numbers of hypotheticals that would count as evidence against your view in the same way your hypothetical is considered evidence for your view.
On the asymptotic compensation schedule
As far as I can tell, you just claim that it creates an asymptote and label it the correct view right? But why should it grow without bound? Sorry if I’ve missed something!
I was unclear about the “doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse” part you’re referring to here, and I agree RE: discontinuity. What I’m trying to communicate is that if someone isn’t convinced by the perceived discontinuity of NOS being non-offsettable and BOS being offsettable, a large subset of them also won’t be very convinced by the response “the radical part is in the approach to infinity, (in your words: the compensation schedule growing without bound (i.e., asymptotically) means that some sub-threshold suffering would require 10^(10^10) happy lives to offset, or 1000^(1000^1000). (emphasis added)”.
Because they could just reject the idea that an extremely bad headache (but not a cluster headache), or a short cluster headache episode, or a cluster headache managed by some amount of painkiller, etc, requires 1000^(1000^1000) happy lives to offset.
I guess this is just another way of saying “it seems like you’re assuming people are buying into the asymptotic model but you haven’t justified this”.
“Would you accept 70 years of the worst conceivable torture in exchange for any amount of happiness afterward?”
This is what kills the proposal IMO, and EJT also pointed this out. The key difference between this proposal and standard utilitarianism where anything is offsettable isn’t the claim that that NOS is worse than TREE(3) or even 10^100 happy lives, since this isn’t a physically plausible tradeoff we will face anyway. It’s that once you believe in NOS, transitivity compels you to believe it is worse than any amounts of BOS, even a variety of BOS that, according to your best instruments, only differs from NOS in the tenth decimal place. Then once you believe this, the fact that you use a utility function compels you to create arbitrary amounts of BOS to avoid a tiny probability of a tiny amount of NOS.