What is your compelling reason to doubt happiness is good? Is it thought experiments such as the ones Magnus has put forward? I think these argue that alleviating suffering is more pressing than creating happiness, but I don’t think these argue that creating happiness isn’t good.
I do happen to think suffering is bad, but here is a potentially reasonable counterargument—some people think that suffering is what makes life meaningful. For example some think of the idea of drugs being widespread, alleviating everyone of all pain all the time, is monstrous. People’s children would get killed and the parents just wouldn’t feel any negative emotion—this seems a bit wrong...
You could try to use your pareto improvement argument here i.e. that it’s better if parents still have a preference for their child not to have been killed, but also not to feel any sort of pain related to it. Firstly, I do think many people would want there to be some pain in this situation and that they would think of a lack of pain being disrespectful and grotesque. Otherwise I’m slightly confused about one having a preference that the child wasn’t killed, but also not feeling any sort of hedonic pain about it...is this contradictory?
As I said I do think suffering is bad, but I’m yet to be convinced this is less of a leap of faith than saying happiness is good.
It would certainly be a good thing to do. And if I could do it costlessly I think I would see it as an obligation, although I’m slightly fuzzy on the concept of moral obligations in the first place.
In reality however there would be an opportunity cost. We’re generally more effective at alleviating suffering than creating pleasure, so we should generally focus on doing the former.
To modify the monk case, what if we could (costlessly; all else equal) make the solitary monk feel a notional 11 units of pleasure followed by 10 units of suffering?
Or, extreme pleasure of “+1001” followed by extreme suffering of “-1000″?
Cases like these make me doubt the assumption of happiness as an independent good. I know meditators who claim to have learned to generate pleasure at will in jhana states, who don’t buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.
So I don’t want to impose, from the outside, assumptions about the hedonic arithmetic onto mind-moments who may not buy them from the inside.
Additionally, I feel no personal need for the concept of intrinsic positive value anymore, because all my perceptions of positive value seem just fine explicable in terms of their indirect connections to subjective problems. (I used to use the concept, and it took me many years to translate it into relational terms in all the contexts where it pops up, but I seem to have now uprooted it so that it no longer pops to mind, or at least it stopped doing so over the past four years. In programming terms, one could say that uprooting the concept entailed refactoring a lot of dependencies regarding other concepts, but eventually the tab explosion started shrinking back down again, and it appeared perfectly possible to think without the concept. It would be interesting to hear whether this has simply “clicked” for anyone when reading analytical thought experiments, because for me it felt more like how I would imagine a crisis of faith to feel like for a person who loses their faith in a <core concept>, including the possibly arduous cognitive task of learning to fill the void and seeing what roles the concept played.)
I’m not sure if “pleasure” is the right word. I certainly think that improving one’s mental state is always good, even if this starts at a point in which there is no negative experience at all.
This might not involve increasing “pleasure”. Instead it could be increasing the amount of “meaning” felt or “love” felt. If monks say they prefer contentment over intense pleasure then fine—I would say the contentment state is hedonically better in some way.
This is probably me defining “hedonically better” differently to you but it doesn’t really matter. The point is I think you can improve the wellbeing of someone who is experiencing no suffering and that this is objectively a desirable thing to do.
I think one crux here is that Teo and I would say, calling an increase in the intensity of a happy experience “improving one’s mental state” is a substantive philosophical claim. The kind of view we’re defending does not say something like, “Improvements of one’s mental state are only good if they relieve suffering.” I would agree that that sounds kind of arbitrary.
The more defensible alternative is that replacing contentment (or absence of any experience) with increasingly intense happiness / meaning / love is not itself an improvement in mental state. And this follows from intuitions like “If a mind doesn’t experience a need for change (and won’t do so in the future), what is there to improve?”
Can you elaborate a bit on why the seemingly arbitrary view you quoted in your first paragraph wouldn’t follow, from the view that you and Teo are defending? Are you saying that from your and Teo’s POVs, there’s a way to ‘improve a mental state’ that doesn’t amount to decreasing suffering (/preventing it)? The statement itself seems a bit odd, since ‘improvements’ seems to imply ‘goodness’, and the statement hypothetically considers situations where improvements may not be good..so thought I would see if you could clarify.
In regards to the ‘defensible alternative’, it seems that one could defend a plausible view that a state of contentment, moved to a state of increased bliss, is indeed an improvement, even though there wasn’t a needfor change. Such an understanding seems plausible in a self-intimating way when one valence state transitions to the next, insofar as we concede that there are states of more or less pleasure, outside an negatively valanced states. It seems that one could do this all the while maintaining that such improvements are never capable of outweighing the mitigation of problematic, suffering states. **Note, using the term improvement can easily lead to accidental equivocation between scenarios of mitigating suffering versus increasing pleasure, but the ethical discernment between each seems manageable.
Are you saying that from your and Teo’s POVs, there’s a way to ‘improve a mental state’ that doesn’t amount to decreasing suffering (/preventing it)?
No, that’s precisely what I’m denying. So, the reason I mentioned that “arbitrary” view was that I thought Jack might be conflating my/Teo’s view with one that (1) agrees that happiness intrinsically improves a mental state, but (2) denies that improving a mental state in this particular way is good (while improving a mental state via suffering-reduction is good).
Such an understanding seems plausible in a self-intimating way when one valence state transitions to the next, insofar as we concede that there are states of more or less pleasure, outside an negatively valanced states.
It’s prima facie plausible that there’s an improvement, sure, but upon reflection I don’t think my experience that happiness has varying intensities implies that moving from contentment to more intense happiness is an improvement. Analogously, you can increase the complexity and artistic sophistication of some painting, say, but if no one ever observes it (which I’m comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), there’s no “improvement” to the painting.
It seems that one could do this all the while maintaining that such improvements are never capable of outweighing the mitigation of problematic, suffering states.
You could, yeah, but I think “improvement” has such a strong connotation to most people that something of intrinsic value has been added. So I’d worry that using that language would be confusing, especially to welfarist consequentialists who think (as seems really plausible to me) that you should do an act to the extent that it improves the state of the world.
Okay, thanks for clarifying for me! I think I was confused in that opening line when you clarified that your views do not say that only a relief of suffering improves a mental state, but in reality it’s that you do think such is the case, just not in conjunction with the claim that happiness also intrinsically improves a mental state, correct?
>Analogously, you can increase the complexity and artistic sophistication of some painting, say, but if no one ever observes it (which I’m comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), there’s no “improvement” to the painting.
With respect to this, I should have clarified that the state of contentment, that becomes a more intense positive state was one of an existing and experiencing being, not a content state of non-existence and then pleasure is brought into existence. Given the latter, would the painting analogy hold, since in this thought experiment there is an experiencer who has some sort of improvement in their mental state, albeit not a categorical sort of improvement that is on par with the sort the relives suffering? I.e. It wasn’t a problem per se (no suffering) that they were being deprived of the more intense pleasure, but the move from lower pleasure to higher pleasure is still an improvement in some way (albeit perhaps a better word would be needed to distinguish the lexical importance between these sorts of *improvements*).
Is it thought experiments such as the ones Magnus has put forward? I think these argue that alleviating suffering is more pressing than creating happiness, but I don’t think these argue that creating happiness isn’t good.
I think they do argue that creating happiness isn’t intrinsically good, because you can always construct a version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion that applies to a view that says suffering is weighed some finite X times more than happiness, and I find those versions almost as repugnant. E.g. suppose that on classical utilitarianism we prefer to create 100 purely miserable lives plus some large N micro-pleasure lives over creating 10 purely blissful lives. On this new view, we’d prefer to create 100 purely miserable lives plus X*N micro-pleasure lives over the 10 purely blissful lives. Another variant you could try is a symmetric lexical view where only sufficiently blissful experiences are allowed to outweigh misery. But while some people find that dissolves the repugnance of the VRC, I can’t say the same.
Increasing the X, or introducing lexicalities, to try to escape the VRC just misses the point, I think. The problem is that (even super-awesome/profound) happiness is treated as intrinsically commensurable with miserable experiences, as if giving someone else happiness in itself solves the miserable person’s urgent problem. That’s just fundamentally opposed to what I find morally compelling.
(I like the monk example given in the other response to your question, anywho. I’ve written about why I find strong SFE compelling elsewhere, like here and here.)
You could try to use your pareto improvement argument here i.e. that it’s better if parents still have a preference for their child not to have been killed, but also not to feel any sort of pain related to it.
Yeah, that is indeed my response; I have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario. This view seems to clearly conflate intrinsic with instrumental value. “Disrespect” and “grotesqueness” are just not things that seem intrinsically important to me, at all.
having a preference that the child wasn’t killed, but also not feeling any sort of hedonic pain about it...is this contradictory?
Depends how you define a preference, I guess, but the point of the thought experiment is to suspend your disbelief about the flow-through effects here. Just imagine that literally nothing changes about the world other than that the suffering is relieved. This seems so obviously better than the default that I’m at a loss for a further response.
“I have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario.”
I wasn’t expecting you to. I don’t have any sympathy for it either! I was just giving you an argument that I suspect many others would find compelling. Certainly if my sister died and I didn’t feel anything, my parents wouldn’t like that!
Maybe it’s not particularly relevant to you if an argument is considered compelling by others, but I wanted to raise it just in case. I certainly don’t expect to change your mind on this—nor do I want to as I also think suffering is bad! I’m just not sure suffering being bad is a smaller leap than saying happiness is good.
What is your compelling reason to doubt happiness is good? Is it thought experiments such as the ones Magnus has put forward? I think these argue that alleviating suffering is more pressing than creating happiness, but I don’t think these argue that creating happiness isn’t good.
I do happen to think suffering is bad, but here is a potentially reasonable counterargument—some people think that suffering is what makes life meaningful. For example some think of the idea of drugs being widespread, alleviating everyone of all pain all the time, is monstrous. People’s children would get killed and the parents just wouldn’t feel any negative emotion—this seems a bit wrong...
You could try to use your pareto improvement argument here i.e. that it’s better if parents still have a preference for their child not to have been killed, but also not to feel any sort of pain related to it. Firstly, I do think many people would want there to be some pain in this situation and that they would think of a lack of pain being disrespectful and grotesque. Otherwise I’m slightly confused about one having a preference that the child wasn’t killed, but also not feeling any sort of hedonic pain about it...is this contradictory?
As I said I do think suffering is bad, but I’m yet to be convinced this is less of a leap of faith than saying happiness is good.
Say there is a perfectly content monk who isn’t suffering at all. Do you have a moral obligation to make them feel pleasure?
It would certainly be a good thing to do. And if I could do it costlessly I think I would see it as an obligation, although I’m slightly fuzzy on the concept of moral obligations in the first place.
In reality however there would be an opportunity cost. We’re generally more effective at alleviating suffering than creating pleasure, so we should generally focus on doing the former.
To modify the monk case, what if we could (costlessly; all else equal) make the solitary monk feel a notional 11 units of pleasure followed by 10 units of suffering?
Or, extreme pleasure of “+1001” followed by extreme suffering of “-1000″?
Cases like these make me doubt the assumption of happiness as an independent good. I know meditators who claim to have learned to generate pleasure at will in jhana states, who don’t buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.
So I don’t want to impose, from the outside, assumptions about the hedonic arithmetic onto mind-moments who may not buy them from the inside.
Additionally, I feel no personal need for the concept of intrinsic positive value anymore, because all my perceptions of positive value seem just fine explicable in terms of their indirect connections to subjective problems. (I used to use the concept, and it took me many years to translate it into relational terms in all the contexts where it pops up, but I seem to have now uprooted it so that it no longer pops to mind, or at least it stopped doing so over the past four years. In programming terms, one could say that uprooting the concept entailed refactoring a lot of dependencies regarding other concepts, but eventually the tab explosion started shrinking back down again, and it appeared perfectly possible to think without the concept. It would be interesting to hear whether this has simply “clicked” for anyone when reading analytical thought experiments, because for me it felt more like how I would imagine a crisis of faith to feel like for a person who loses their faith in a <core concept>, including the possibly arduous cognitive task of learning to fill the void and seeing what roles the concept played.)
I’m not sure if “pleasure” is the right word. I certainly think that improving one’s mental state is always good, even if this starts at a point in which there is no negative experience at all.
This might not involve increasing “pleasure”. Instead it could be increasing the amount of “meaning” felt or “love” felt. If monks say they prefer contentment over intense pleasure then fine—I would say the contentment state is hedonically better in some way.
This is probably me defining “hedonically better” differently to you but it doesn’t really matter. The point is I think you can improve the wellbeing of someone who is experiencing no suffering and that this is objectively a desirable thing to do.
Relevant recent posts:
https://www.simonknutsson.com/undisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/
https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/phenomenological-argument/
(I think these unpack a view I share, better than I have.)
Edit: For tranquilist and Epicurean takes, I also like Gloor (2017, sec. 2.1) and Sherman (2017, pp. 103–107), respectively.
I think one crux here is that Teo and I would say, calling an increase in the intensity of a happy experience “improving one’s mental state” is a substantive philosophical claim. The kind of view we’re defending does not say something like, “Improvements of one’s mental state are only good if they relieve suffering.” I would agree that that sounds kind of arbitrary.
The more defensible alternative is that replacing contentment (or absence of any experience) with increasingly intense happiness / meaning / love is not itself an improvement in mental state. And this follows from intuitions like “If a mind doesn’t experience a need for change (and won’t do so in the future), what is there to improve?”
Can you elaborate a bit on why the seemingly arbitrary view you quoted in your first paragraph wouldn’t follow, from the view that you and Teo are defending? Are you saying that from your and Teo’s POVs, there’s a way to ‘improve a mental state’ that doesn’t amount to decreasing suffering (/preventing it)? The statement itself seems a bit odd, since ‘improvements’ seems to imply ‘goodness’, and the statement hypothetically considers situations where improvements may not be good..so thought I would see if you could clarify.
In regards to the ‘defensible alternative’, it seems that one could defend a plausible view that a state of contentment, moved to a state of increased bliss, is indeed an improvement, even though there wasn’t a need for change. Such an understanding seems plausible in a self-intimating way when one valence state transitions to the next, insofar as we concede that there are states of more or less pleasure, outside an negatively valanced states. It seems that one could do this all the while maintaining that such improvements are never capable of outweighing the mitigation of problematic, suffering states. **Note, using the term improvement can easily lead to accidental equivocation between scenarios of mitigating suffering versus increasing pleasure, but the ethical discernment between each seems manageable.
No, that’s precisely what I’m denying. So, the reason I mentioned that “arbitrary” view was that I thought Jack might be conflating my/Teo’s view with one that (1) agrees that happiness intrinsically improves a mental state, but (2) denies that improving a mental state in this particular way is good (while improving a mental state via suffering-reduction is good).
It’s prima facie plausible that there’s an improvement, sure, but upon reflection I don’t think my experience that happiness has varying intensities implies that moving from contentment to more intense happiness is an improvement. Analogously, you can increase the complexity and artistic sophistication of some painting, say, but if no one ever observes it (which I’m comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), there’s no “improvement” to the painting.
You could, yeah, but I think “improvement” has such a strong connotation to most people that something of intrinsic value has been added. So I’d worry that using that language would be confusing, especially to welfarist consequentialists who think (as seems really plausible to me) that you should do an act to the extent that it improves the state of the world.
Okay, thanks for clarifying for me! I think I was confused in that opening line when you clarified that your views do not say that only a relief of suffering improves a mental state, but in reality it’s that you do think such is the case, just not in conjunction with the claim that happiness also intrinsically improves a mental state, correct?
>Analogously, you can increase the complexity and artistic sophistication of some painting, say, but if no one ever observes it (which I’m comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), there’s no “improvement” to the painting.
With respect to this, I should have clarified that the state of contentment, that becomes a more intense positive state was one of an existing and experiencing being, not a content state of non-existence and then pleasure is brought into existence. Given the latter, would the painting analogy hold, since in this thought experiment there is an experiencer who has some sort of improvement in their mental state, albeit not a categorical sort of improvement that is on par with the sort the relives suffering? I.e. It wasn’t a problem per se (no suffering) that they were being deprived of the more intense pleasure, but the move from lower pleasure to higher pleasure is still an improvement in some way (albeit perhaps a better word would be needed to distinguish the lexical importance between these sorts of *improvements*).
I think they do argue that creating happiness isn’t intrinsically good, because you can always construct a version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion that applies to a view that says suffering is weighed some finite X times more than happiness, and I find those versions almost as repugnant. E.g. suppose that on classical utilitarianism we prefer to create 100 purely miserable lives plus some large N micro-pleasure lives over creating 10 purely blissful lives. On this new view, we’d prefer to create 100 purely miserable lives plus X*N micro-pleasure lives over the 10 purely blissful lives. Another variant you could try is a symmetric lexical view where only sufficiently blissful experiences are allowed to outweigh misery. But while some people find that dissolves the repugnance of the VRC, I can’t say the same.
Increasing the X, or introducing lexicalities, to try to escape the VRC just misses the point, I think. The problem is that (even super-awesome/profound) happiness is treated as intrinsically commensurable with miserable experiences, as if giving someone else happiness in itself solves the miserable person’s urgent problem. That’s just fundamentally opposed to what I find morally compelling.
(I like the monk example given in the other response to your question, anywho. I’ve written about why I find strong SFE compelling elsewhere, like here and here.)
Yeah, that is indeed my response; I have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario. This view seems to clearly conflate intrinsic with instrumental value. “Disrespect” and “grotesqueness” are just not things that seem intrinsically important to me, at all.
Depends how you define a preference, I guess, but the point of the thought experiment is to suspend your disbelief about the flow-through effects here. Just imagine that literally nothing changes about the world other than that the suffering is relieved. This seems so obviously better than the default that I’m at a loss for a further response.
“I have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario.”
I wasn’t expecting you to. I don’t have any sympathy for it either! I was just giving you an argument that I suspect many others would find compelling. Certainly if my sister died and I didn’t feel anything, my parents wouldn’t like that!
Maybe it’s not particularly relevant to you if an argument is considered compelling by others, but I wanted to raise it just in case. I certainly don’t expect to change your mind on this—nor do I want to as I also think suffering is bad! I’m just not sure suffering being bad is a smaller leap than saying happiness is good.