The moral asymmetry is most intuitively compelling when it is interpersonal. Most of us judge that it is wrong to make a person suffer even if it would make another person happy, or trade the intense suffering of a single person for the mild enjoyment of a large crowd, however large the crowd is.
Furthermore, these thought experiments would be much less compelling had they been reversed. It does not seem obviously wrong to reduce a person’s happiness to prevent someone’s suffering. Neither does it seem wrong to prevent intense pleasure for a single person in order to stop a large number of people’s mild suffering. This suggests that the intuitive force behind these thought experiments is driven by an asymmetry between suffering and happiness, rather than a moral prohibition against instrumentalization.
These are important points that I think often get missed in discussions of SFE—thanks for including them!
You mention the Repugnant Conclusion (I’d prefer to call it the Mere Addition Paradox for neutrality, though I’m guilty of not always doing this) as something that SFE escapes. I think this depends on theformulation, though in my estimation the form of RC that SFE endorses is really not so problematic, as many non-SFE longtermists seem to agree. The Very Repugnant Conclusion (also not the most neutral name :)) also strikes me as far worse and worth more attention in population ethics discourse, much as SFE has its own counterintuitive implications that make me put some weight on other views.
Including Arrhenius and Bykvist as examples of supporting negative utilitarianism might be a bit misleading. In Knutsson’s sources, they do claim to put more weight on suffering than happiness, but I think that when most people use the term “negative utilitarianism” they mean more than this, something like the set of views that hold at least some forms of suffering cannot be morally outweighed by any happiness / other purported goods. In the context of at least Arrhenius’s other writings (I’m less familiar with Bykvist), as I understand them, he doesn’t fall in that group. Though, Arrhenius did propose the VRC as an important population ethics problem, and that seems to afflict most non-NU views.
These are important points that I think often get missed in discussions of SFE—thanks for including them!
You mention the Repugnant Conclusion (I’d prefer to call it the Mere Addition Paradox for neutrality, though I’m guilty of not always doing this) as something that SFE escapes. I think this depends on the formulation, though in my estimation the form of RC that SFE endorses is really not so problematic, as many non-SFE longtermists seem to agree. The Very Repugnant Conclusion (also not the most neutral name :)) also strikes me as far worse and worth more attention in population ethics discourse, much as SFE has its own counterintuitive implications that make me put some weight on other views.
Including Arrhenius and Bykvist as examples of supporting negative utilitarianism might be a bit misleading. In Knutsson’s sources, they do claim to put more weight on suffering than happiness, but I think that when most people use the term “negative utilitarianism” they mean more than this, something like the set of views that hold at least some forms of suffering cannot be morally outweighed by any happiness / other purported goods. In the context of at least Arrhenius’s other writings (I’m less familiar with Bykvist), as I understand them, he doesn’t fall in that group. Though, Arrhenius did propose the VRC as an important population ethics problem, and that seems to afflict most non-NU views.