I feel that strong negative utilitarianism (we should only consider disutility) is just a non-starter. It doesn’t match any of my moral intuitions.
But a weaker negative utilitarianism is a powerful and potentially valid position. These are my views:
Good things are actually good. Pleasure is usually good. Laughing/ smiling/ dancing/ sex/ rollercoasters/ MDMA trips are actually really good.
Bad things might be a bit worse than good things are good (at least our intuitions might be skewed). But a rudimentary thought experiment can calibrate your scales here—I don’t see how you can end up at a strong negative position.
There is a hedonic treadmill/ normalisation effect, making ‘normality’ into suffering, but this is not always the case—some hedonistic pleasure can give you a warm glow for a long time, and make you genuinely happier in the long term.
We probably have a weak bias towards pleasure and suffering in our lives being more balanced than they are, and towards believing that our lives are more positive than they actually are. E.g. someone can say that his life is 6⁄10 on a happiness scale, but he could be totally wrong, and his life could actually not be worth living.
This bias is unlikely to be so strong that even the happiest-seeming people actually have net-negative lives. So there are almost definitely some net-positive lives in the world.
Lots of human lives are net-negative. My median estimate would be 25% (around 5⁄10 on a happiness scale), but I have very wide error margins.
This is just a rounding error compared to animal lives, which are more likely to be net-negative, therefore the world is likely to be net-negative, even from a standard utilitarian position.
Even under very weak negative utilitarianism, the ‘benevolent world-exploder’ argument may be valid from a near-termist view, and is compatible with fear of s-risks. But, even to a moderate weak negative utilitarian, it can be countered with an optimistic long-termism where we may be able to both eradicate suffering and normalise increasingly wondrous states of pleasure.
I feel that strong negative utilitarianism (we should only consider disutility) is just a non-starter. It doesn’t match any of my moral intuitions.
But a weaker negative utilitarianism is a powerful and potentially valid position. These are my views:
Good things are actually good. Pleasure is usually good. Laughing/ smiling/ dancing/ sex/ rollercoasters/ MDMA trips are actually really good.
Bad things might be a bit worse than good things are good (at least our intuitions might be skewed). But a rudimentary thought experiment can calibrate your scales here—I don’t see how you can end up at a strong negative position.
There is a hedonic treadmill/ normalisation effect, making ‘normality’ into suffering, but this is not always the case—some hedonistic pleasure can give you a warm glow for a long time, and make you genuinely happier in the long term.
We probably have a weak bias towards pleasure and suffering in our lives being more balanced than they are, and towards believing that our lives are more positive than they actually are. E.g. someone can say that his life is 6⁄10 on a happiness scale, but he could be totally wrong, and his life could actually not be worth living.
This bias is unlikely to be so strong that even the happiest-seeming people actually have net-negative lives. So there are almost definitely some net-positive lives in the world.
Lots of human lives are net-negative. My median estimate would be 25% (around 5⁄10 on a happiness scale), but I have very wide error margins.
This is just a rounding error compared to animal lives, which are more likely to be net-negative, therefore the world is likely to be net-negative, even from a standard utilitarian position.
Even under very weak negative utilitarianism, the ‘benevolent world-exploder’ argument may be valid from a near-termist view, and is compatible with fear of s-risks. But, even to a moderate weak negative utilitarian, it can be countered with an optimistic long-termism where we may be able to both eradicate suffering and normalise increasingly wondrous states of pleasure.