This is one reason to pay extra attention to cases of near-simultaneous comparisons
In cases of extreme suffering (and maybe also extreme pleasure), it seems to me there’s an empathy gap: when things are going well, you don’t truly understand how bad extreme suffering is, and when you’re in severe pain, you can’t properly care about large volumes of future pleasure. When the suffering is bad enough, it’s as if a different brain takes over that can’t see things from the other perspective, and vice versa for the pleasure-seeking brain. This seems closer to the case of “univocal viewpoints” that you mention.
I can see how for moderate pains and pleasures, a person could experience them in succession and make tradeoffs while still being in roughly the same kind of mental state without too much of an empathy gap. But the fact of those experiences being moderate and exchangeable is the reason I don’t think the suffering in such cases is that morally noteworthy.
we can better trust people’s self-benevolence than their benevolence towards others
Good point. :) OTOH, we might think it’s morally right to have a more cautious approach to imposing suffering on others for the sake of positive goods than we would use for ourselves. In other words, we might favor a moral view that’s different from MacAskill’s proposal to imagine yourself living through every being’s experience in succession.
Strong rejection of interpersonal comparisons is also used to argue that relieving one or more pains can’t compensate for losses to another individual.
Yeah. I support doing interpersonal comparisons, but there’s inherent arbitrariness in how to weigh conflicting preferences across individuals (or sufficiently different mental states of the same individual), and I favor giving more weight to the extreme-suffering preferences.
But if we’re in the business of helping others for their own sakes rather than ours, I don’t see the case for excluding either one’s concern from our moral circle.
That’s fair. :) In my opinion, there’s just an ethical asymmetry between creating a mind that desperately wishes not to exist versus failing to create a mind that desperately would be glad to exist. The first one is horrifying, while the second one is at most mildly unfortunate. I can see how some people would consider this a failure to impartially consider the preferences of others for their own sakes, and if my view makes me less “altruistic” in that sense, then I’m ok with that (as you suspected). My intuition that it’s wrong to allow creating lots of extra torture is stronger than my intuition that I should be an impartial altruist.
If it’s not mainly about others and their perspectives, why care so much about shaping (some of) their lives and attending to (some of) their concerns?
The extreme-suffering concerns are the ones that speak to me most strongly.
seems at odds to me with my idea of impartial benevolence, which I would identify more with trying to be a friend to all
Makes sense. While raw numbers count, it also matters to me what the content of the preference is. If 99% of individuals passionately wanted to create paperclips, while 1% wanted to avoid suffering, I would mostly side with those wanting to avoid suffering, because that just seems more important to me.
Your reply is an eloquent case for your view. :)
In cases of extreme suffering (and maybe also extreme pleasure), it seems to me there’s an empathy gap: when things are going well, you don’t truly understand how bad extreme suffering is, and when you’re in severe pain, you can’t properly care about large volumes of future pleasure. When the suffering is bad enough, it’s as if a different brain takes over that can’t see things from the other perspective, and vice versa for the pleasure-seeking brain. This seems closer to the case of “univocal viewpoints” that you mention.
I can see how for moderate pains and pleasures, a person could experience them in succession and make tradeoffs while still being in roughly the same kind of mental state without too much of an empathy gap. But the fact of those experiences being moderate and exchangeable is the reason I don’t think the suffering in such cases is that morally noteworthy.
Good point. :) OTOH, we might think it’s morally right to have a more cautious approach to imposing suffering on others for the sake of positive goods than we would use for ourselves. In other words, we might favor a moral view that’s different from MacAskill’s proposal to imagine yourself living through every being’s experience in succession.
Yeah. I support doing interpersonal comparisons, but there’s inherent arbitrariness in how to weigh conflicting preferences across individuals (or sufficiently different mental states of the same individual), and I favor giving more weight to the extreme-suffering preferences.
That’s fair. :) In my opinion, there’s just an ethical asymmetry between creating a mind that desperately wishes not to exist versus failing to create a mind that desperately would be glad to exist. The first one is horrifying, while the second one is at most mildly unfortunate. I can see how some people would consider this a failure to impartially consider the preferences of others for their own sakes, and if my view makes me less “altruistic” in that sense, then I’m ok with that (as you suspected). My intuition that it’s wrong to allow creating lots of extra torture is stronger than my intuition that I should be an impartial altruist.
The extreme-suffering concerns are the ones that speak to me most strongly.
Makes sense. While raw numbers count, it also matters to me what the content of the preference is. If 99% of individuals passionately wanted to create paperclips, while 1% wanted to avoid suffering, I would mostly side with those wanting to avoid suffering, because that just seems more important to me.