For all practical purposes suffering is dispreferred by beings who experience it, as you know, so I don’t find this to be a counterexample. When you say you don’t want someone to make you less sad about the problems in the world, it seems like a Pareto improvement would be to relieve your sadness without changing your motivation to solve those problems—if you agree, it seems you should agree the sadness itself is intrinsically bad.
This response is a bit weird to me because the linked post has two counter-examples and you only answered one, but I feel like the other still applies.
The other thought experiment mentioned in the piece is that of a cow separated from her calf and the two bovines being distressed by this. Michael says (and I’m sympathetic) that the moral action here is to fulfill the bovines preferences to be together, not remove their pain at separation without fulfilling that preference (e.g. through drugging the cows into bliss).
Your response about Pareto Improvements doesn’t seem to work here, or seems less intuitive to me at least. Removing their sadness at separation while leaving their desire to be together intact isn’t a clear Pareto improvement unless one already accepts that pain is what is bad. And it is precisely the imagining of a separated cow/calf duo drugged into happiness but wanting one another that makes me think maybe it isn’t the pain that matters.
I didn’t directly respond to the other one because the principle is exactly the same. I’m puzzled that you think otherwise.
Removing their sadness at separation while leaving their desire to be together intact isn’t a clear Pareto improvement unless one already accepts that pain is what is bad.
I mean, in thought experiments like this all one can hope for is to probe intuitions that you either do or don’t have. It’s not question-begging on my part because my point is: Imagine that you can remove the cow’s suffering but leave everything else practically the same. (This, by definition, assesses the intrinsic value of relieving suffering.) How could that not be better? It’s a Pareto improvement because, contra the “drugged into happiness” image, the idea is not that you’ve relieved the suffering but thwarted the cow’s goal to be reunited with its child; the goals are exactly the same, but the suffering is gone, and it just seems pretty obvious to me that that’s a much better state of the world.
Sticking with the cow example, I agree with you that if we removed their pain at being separated while leaving the desire to be together intact, this seems like a Pareto improvement over not removing their pain.
A preferentist would insist here that the removal of pain is not what makes that situation better, but rather that pain is (probably) dis-prefered by the cows, so removing it gives them something they want.
But the negative hedonist (pain is bad, pleasure is neutral) is stuck with saying that the “drugged into happiness” image is as good as the “cows happily reunited” image. A preferentist by contrast can (I think intuitively) assert that reuniting the cows is better than just removing their pain, because reunification fulfills (1) the cows desire to be free of pain and (2) their desire to be together.
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.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GK7Qq4kww5D8ndckR/michaelstjules-s-shortform?commentId=LZNATg5BoBT3w5AYz
For all practical purposes suffering is dispreferred by beings who experience it, as you know, so I don’t find this to be a counterexample. When you say you don’t want someone to make you less sad about the problems in the world, it seems like a Pareto improvement would be to relieve your sadness without changing your motivation to solve those problems—if you agree, it seems you should agree the sadness itself is intrinsically bad.
This response is a bit weird to me because the linked post has two counter-examples and you only answered one, but I feel like the other still applies.
The other thought experiment mentioned in the piece is that of a cow separated from her calf and the two bovines being distressed by this. Michael says (and I’m sympathetic) that the moral action here is to fulfill the bovines preferences to be together, not remove their pain at separation without fulfilling that preference (e.g. through drugging the cows into bliss).
Your response about Pareto Improvements doesn’t seem to work here, or seems less intuitive to me at least. Removing their sadness at separation while leaving their desire to be together intact isn’t a clear Pareto improvement unless one already accepts that pain is what is bad. And it is precisely the imagining of a separated cow/calf duo drugged into happiness but wanting one another that makes me think maybe it isn’t the pain that matters.
I didn’t directly respond to the other one because the principle is exactly the same. I’m puzzled that you think otherwise.
I mean, in thought experiments like this all one can hope for is to probe intuitions that you either do or don’t have. It’s not question-begging on my part because my point is: Imagine that you can remove the cow’s suffering but leave everything else practically the same. (This, by definition, assesses the intrinsic value of relieving suffering.) How could that not be better? It’s a Pareto improvement because, contra the “drugged into happiness” image, the idea is not that you’ve relieved the suffering but thwarted the cow’s goal to be reunited with its child; the goals are exactly the same, but the suffering is gone, and it just seems pretty obvious to me that that’s a much better state of the world.
I think my above reply missed the mark here.
Sticking with the cow example, I agree with you that if we removed their pain at being separated while leaving the desire to be together intact, this seems like a Pareto improvement over not removing their pain.
A preferentist would insist here that the removal of pain is not what makes that situation better, but rather that pain is (probably) dis-prefered by the cows, so removing it gives them something they want.
But the negative hedonist (pain is bad, pleasure is neutral) is stuck with saying that the “drugged into happiness” image is as good as the “cows happily reunited” image. A preferentist by contrast can (I think intuitively) assert that reuniting the cows is better than just removing their pain, because reunification fulfills (1) the cows desire to be free of pain and (2) their desire to be together.
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.