Can you clarify your view on suffering to me? Are you saying that suffering is undesirable simply because we made it so? I would say there is something more to it, since all animals try to avoid, not only humans. Humans mostly try to avoid and when they don’t they sometimes come up with elaborate ideas on how to justify suffering, e.g. saying it’s a catalyst for self-development.
By “suffering,” you can refer to states that agents consider undesirable, or you can refer to a state that an agent does not necessarily consider undesirable. If the former, at what point would you need to posit that the state involves some kind of “intrinsically undesirability”? You wouldn’t. The class of states would just consist of those states you desire not to have. If, instead, it’s not a state that you necessarily find undesirable, then it’s possible for you to not find it undesirable, or even to desire it.
At now point in any discussion of suffering does it ever make sense, nor do we ever benefit, from proposing that things can good or bad, desirable or undesirable, and so on, independent of our own attitudes or preferences with respect to those things. Philosophers will talk of things being “intrinsically bad” or and so on. I think this is all total nonsense.
Can you clarify your view on suffering to me? Are you saying that suffering is undesirable simply because we made it so? I would say there is something more to it, since all animals try to avoid, not only humans. Humans mostly try to avoid and when they don’t they sometimes come up with elaborate ideas on how to justify suffering, e.g. saying it’s a catalyst for self-development.
By “suffering,” you can refer to states that agents consider undesirable, or you can refer to a state that an agent does not necessarily consider undesirable. If the former, at what point would you need to posit that the state involves some kind of “intrinsically undesirability”? You wouldn’t. The class of states would just consist of those states you desire not to have. If, instead, it’s not a state that you necessarily find undesirable, then it’s possible for you to not find it undesirable, or even to desire it.
At now point in any discussion of suffering does it ever make sense, nor do we ever benefit, from proposing that things can good or bad, desirable or undesirable, and so on, independent of our own attitudes or preferences with respect to those things. Philosophers will talk of things being “intrinsically bad” or and so on. I think this is all total nonsense.