Thank you for taking the time to reply. Your responses to 1a and 1b make sense to me. 2 I’m still exploring and turning these ideas around in my mind—thank you for the paper. I wonder if some of this can be tested by asking people about their number of desires, general life satisfaction, % life satisfaction/desires fulfilled.
If I may, I’d like to expand a bit on number 1.
It seems like in terms of extending lives minimalist views have an Epicurean view of the badness of death / value of life? The good of saving a life is only the spillovers (what the person would do to the wellbeing of others, the prevented grief, etc).
If we narrow the scope to improving existing lives, is the general conclusion of minimalist wellbeing theories that we should deliver interventions that prevent/reduce suffering rather than add wellbeing?
It seems like in terms of extending lives minimalist views have an Epicurean view of the badness of death / value of life? The good of saving a life is only the spillovers (what the person would do to the wellbeing of others, the prevented grief, etc).
Solely for one’s own sake, yes, I believe that experientialist minimalist views generally agree with the Epicurean view of the badness of death. But I think it’s practically wise to always be mindful of how narrow the theoretical, individual-focused, ‘all else equal’ view is. As I note in the introduction,
in practice, it is essential to always view the narrow question of ‘better for oneself’ within the broader context of ‘better overall’. In this context, all minimalist views agree that life can be worth living and protecting for its overall positive roles.
I also believe that exp min views formally agree with the meaning of your second sentence above (assuming that the “etc” encompasses the totality of the positive roles of the lives saved and of the saving itself). But perhaps it might be slightly misleading to say that the views imply that the goodness of lifesaving would be “only the spillovers” (🙂), given that the positive roles could be practically orders of magnitude more significant than what suffering the life would cause or contain. This applies of course also in the other direction (cf. the ‘meat-eater problem’ etc.). But then we may still have stronger (even if highly diffuse) instrumental reasons to uphold or avoid eroding impartial healthcare and lifesaving norms, which could normatively support extending also those lives whose future effects would look overall negative on exp min wellbeing views.
Additionally, whether or not we take an anthropocentric or an antispeciesist view, a separate axis still is whether the view is focused mainly on severe bads like torture-level suffering (as my own view tends to be). On such severe bad-focused views, one could roughly say that it’s always good to extend lives if their total future effects amount to a “negative torture footprint” (and conversely that the extension of lives with a positive such footprint might be overall bad, depending still on the complex value of upholding/eroding positive norms etc.).
(For extra-experientialist minimalist views, it’s not clear to what degree they agree with the Epicurean view of death. That class of views is arguably more diverse than are exp min views, with some of the former implying that a frustrated preference to stay alive, or a premature death, could itself be a severe bad — potentially a worse bad than what might otherwise befall one during one’s life. It depends on the specific view and on the individual/life in question.)
If we narrow the scope to improving existing lives, is the general conclusion of minimalist wellbeing theories that we should deliver interventions that prevent/reduce suffering rather than add wellbeing?
Strictly and perhaps pedantically speaking, theories of wellbeing alone don’t imply any particular actions in practice, since the practical implications will also depend on our normative views which many people might consider to be separate from theories of wellbeing per se.
But yeah, if one construes “adding wellbeing” as something that cannot be interpreted as “reducing experiential bads” (nor as reducing preference frustration, interest violations, or objective list bads), I guess it makes sense to say that minimalist wellbeing theories would favor interventions whose outcomes could be interpreted in the latter terms, such as preventing/reducing suffering rather than adding wellbeing as a ‘non-relieving good’.
Regarding the existing measures of ‘life satisfaction’ (and perhaps how to reinterpret them in minimalist terms), I should first note that I’m not very familiar with how they’re operationalized. But my hunch is that they might easily measure more of an ‘outside view’ of one’s entire life — as if one took a 3rd person, aggregative look at it — rather than a more direct, ‘inside view’ of how one feels in the present moment. And I think that at least for the experientialist minimalist views that were explored in the post, it might make more sense to think of such views as being focused on the inside view, i.e. on the momentary quality of one’s experiential state (which is explicitly the focus in tranquilism).
A problem with the ‘outside view’ could be that perhaps it becomes cognitively/emotionally inaccessible to us how we actually felt during times where we might have given a life satisfaction rating of 0⁄10 (or −5/10, or just a very “low” score), and thus we might effectively ignore their subjective weight (at the time) if we later attempt to aggregate over the varying degrees of frustration/satisfaction during our entire life. And if we as researchers care about how minimalist views would estimate the value of some wellbeing interventions, it’s worth noting that people with minimalist intuitions often see a theoretical or practical priority to reduce/prevent the most subjectively bad experiences. So perhaps a better practical wellbeing measure for (experientialist) minimalist views would be something like experience sampling — ideally such that it would capture how much people in fact appreciate the contrast in moving up from the lowest scores (and not only the perhaps relatively ‘non-relieving’ movement from 7–8, 8–9, or 9–10).
Thank you for taking the time to reply. Your responses to 1a and 1b make sense to me. 2 I’m still exploring and turning these ideas around in my mind—thank you for the paper. I wonder if some of this can be tested by asking people about their number of desires, general life satisfaction, % life satisfaction/desires fulfilled.
If I may, I’d like to expand a bit on number 1.
It seems like in terms of extending lives minimalist views have an Epicurean view of the badness of death / value of life? The good of saving a life is only the spillovers (what the person would do to the wellbeing of others, the prevented grief, etc).
If we narrow the scope to improving existing lives, is the general conclusion of minimalist wellbeing theories that we should deliver interventions that prevent/reduce suffering rather than add wellbeing?
Solely for one’s own sake, yes, I believe that experientialist minimalist views generally agree with the Epicurean view of the badness of death. But I think it’s practically wise to always be mindful of how narrow the theoretical, individual-focused, ‘all else equal’ view is. As I note in the introduction,
I also believe that exp min views formally agree with the meaning of your second sentence above (assuming that the “etc” encompasses the totality of the positive roles of the lives saved and of the saving itself). But perhaps it might be slightly misleading to say that the views imply that the goodness of lifesaving would be “only the spillovers” (🙂), given that the positive roles could be practically orders of magnitude more significant than what suffering the life would cause or contain. This applies of course also in the other direction (cf. the ‘meat-eater problem’ etc.). But then we may still have stronger (even if highly diffuse) instrumental reasons to uphold or avoid eroding impartial healthcare and lifesaving norms, which could normatively support extending also those lives whose future effects would look overall negative on exp min wellbeing views.
Additionally, whether or not we take an anthropocentric or an antispeciesist view, a separate axis still is whether the view is focused mainly on severe bads like torture-level suffering (as my own view tends to be). On such severe bad-focused views, one could roughly say that it’s always good to extend lives if their total future effects amount to a “negative torture footprint” (and conversely that the extension of lives with a positive such footprint might be overall bad, depending still on the complex value of upholding/eroding positive norms etc.).
(For extra-experientialist minimalist views, it’s not clear to what degree they agree with the Epicurean view of death. That class of views is arguably more diverse than are exp min views, with some of the former implying that a frustrated preference to stay alive, or a premature death, could itself be a severe bad — potentially a worse bad than what might otherwise befall one during one’s life. It depends on the specific view and on the individual/life in question.)
Strictly and perhaps pedantically speaking, theories of wellbeing alone don’t imply any particular actions in practice, since the practical implications will also depend on our normative views which many people might consider to be separate from theories of wellbeing per se.
But yeah, if one construes “adding wellbeing” as something that cannot be interpreted as “reducing experiential bads” (nor as reducing preference frustration, interest violations, or objective list bads), I guess it makes sense to say that minimalist wellbeing theories would favor interventions whose outcomes could be interpreted in the latter terms, such as preventing/reducing suffering rather than adding wellbeing as a ‘non-relieving good’.
Regarding the existing measures of ‘life satisfaction’ (and perhaps how to reinterpret them in minimalist terms), I should first note that I’m not very familiar with how they’re operationalized. But my hunch is that they might easily measure more of an ‘outside view’ of one’s entire life — as if one took a 3rd person, aggregative look at it — rather than a more direct, ‘inside view’ of how one feels in the present moment. And I think that at least for the experientialist minimalist views that were explored in the post, it might make more sense to think of such views as being focused on the inside view, i.e. on the momentary quality of one’s experiential state (which is explicitly the focus in tranquilism).
A problem with the ‘outside view’ could be that perhaps it becomes cognitively/emotionally inaccessible to us how we actually felt during times where we might have given a life satisfaction rating of 0⁄10 (or −5/10, or just a very “low” score), and thus we might effectively ignore their subjective weight (at the time) if we later attempt to aggregate over the varying degrees of frustration/satisfaction during our entire life. And if we as researchers care about how minimalist views would estimate the value of some wellbeing interventions, it’s worth noting that people with minimalist intuitions often see a theoretical or practical priority to reduce/prevent the most subjectively bad experiences. So perhaps a better practical wellbeing measure for (experientialist) minimalist views would be something like experience sampling — ideally such that it would capture how much people in fact appreciate the contrast in moving up from the lowest scores (and not only the perhaps relatively ‘non-relieving’ movement from 7–8, 8–9, or 9–10).