I don’t have settled views on whether or not suffering is necessarily bad in itself.
That someone (or almost everyone) disprefers suffering doesn’t mean suffering is bad in itself. Even if people always disprefer less pleasure, it wouldn’t follow that the absence of pleasure is bad in itself. Even those with symmetric views wouldn’t say so; they’d say its absence is neutral and its presence is good and better. We wouldn’t say dispreferring suffering makes the absence of suffering an intrinsic good.
I’m sympathetic to a more general “relative-only” view according to which suffering is an evaluative impression against the state someone is in relative to an “empty” state or nonexistence, so a kind of self-undermining evaluation. Maybe this is close enough to intrinsic badness and can be treated like intrinsic badness, but it doesn’t seem to actually be intrinsic badness. I think Frick’s approach, Bader’s approach and Actualism, each applied to preferences that are “relative only” rather than whole lives, could still imply that worlds with less suffering are better and some lives with suffering are better not started, all else equal, while no lives are better started, all else equal.
This is compatible with the reason we suffer sometimes being because of mere relative evaluations between states of the world without being “against” the current state or things being worse than nothing.
It seems that a hedonist would need to say that removing my motivation is no harm to me personally, either (except for instrumental reasons), but that violates an interest of mine so seems wrong to me. This doesn’t necessarily count against suffering being bad in itself or respond to your proposed Pareto improvement, it could just count against only suffering mattering.
I don’t have settled views on whether or not suffering is necessarily bad in itself.
That someone (or almost everyone) disprefers suffering doesn’t mean suffering is bad in itself. Even if people always disprefer less pleasure, it wouldn’t follow that the absence of pleasure is bad in itself. Even those with symmetric views wouldn’t say so; they’d say its absence is neutral and its presence is good and better. We wouldn’t say dispreferring suffering makes the absence of suffering an intrinsic good.
I’m sympathetic to a more general “relative-only” view according to which suffering is an evaluative impression against the state someone is in relative to an “empty” state or nonexistence, so a kind of self-undermining evaluation. Maybe this is close enough to intrinsic badness and can be treated like intrinsic badness, but it doesn’t seem to actually be intrinsic badness. I think Frick’s approach, Bader’s approach and Actualism, each applied to preferences that are “relative only” rather than whole lives, could still imply that worlds with less suffering are better and some lives with suffering are better not started, all else equal, while no lives are better started, all else equal.
This is compatible with the reason we suffer sometimes being because of mere relative evaluations between states of the world without being “against” the current state or things being worse than nothing.
It seems that a hedonist would need to say that removing my motivation is no harm to me personally, either (except for instrumental reasons), but that violates an interest of mine so seems wrong to me. This doesn’t necessarily count against suffering being bad in itself or respond to your proposed Pareto improvement, it could just count against only suffering mattering.