That case does run counter to āsuffering is intrinsically bad but happiness isnāt,ā but it doesnāt run counter to āsuffering is bad,ā which is what your last comment asked about. I donāt see any compelling reasons to doubt that suffering is bad, but I do see some compelling reasons to doubt that happiness is good.
Thatās just an intuition, no? (i.e. that everyone painlessly dying would be bad.) I donāt really understand why you want to call it an āaxiomā that happiness is intrinsically good, as if this is stronger than an intuition, which seemed to be the point of your original comment.
See this post for why I donāt think the case you presented is decisive against the view Iām defending.
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 donāt think these argue that creating happiness isnāt good.
I do happen to think suffering is bad, but here is a potentially reasonable counterargumentāsome 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. Peopleās children would get killed and the parents just wouldnāt feel any negative emotionāthis seems a bit wrong...
You could try to use your pareto improvement argument here i.e. that itās 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 Iām slightly confused about one having a preference that the child wasnāt 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 Iām 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 Iām slightly fuzzy on the concept of moral obligations in the first place.
In reality however there would be an opportunity cost. Weāre 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 ā+1001ā followed by extreme suffering of ā-1000ā³?
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 donāt buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.
So I donāt 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 āclickedā 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.)
Iām not sure if āpleasureā is the right word. I certainly think that improving oneās 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 āpleasureā. Instead it could be increasing the amount of āmeaningā felt or āloveā felt. If monks say they prefer contentment over intense pleasure then fineāI would say the contentment state is hedonically better in some way.
This is probably me defining āhedonically betterā differently to you but it doesnāt 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 āimproving oneās mental stateā is a substantive philosophical claim. The kind of view weāre defending does not say something like, āImprovements of oneās mental state are only good if they relieve suffering.ā 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 /ā meaning /ā love is not itself an improvement in mental state. And this follows from intuitions like āIf a mind doesnāt experience a need for change (and wonāt do so in the future), what is there to improve?ā
Can you elaborate a bit on why the seemingly arbitrary view you quoted in your first paragraph wouldnāt follow, from the view that you and Teo are defending? Are you saying that from your and Teoās POVs, thereās a way to āimprove a mental stateā that doesnāt amount to decreasing suffering (/āpreventing it)? The statement itself seems a bit odd, since āimprovementsā seems to imply āgoodnessā, 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 ādefensible alternativeā, 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 wasnāt 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 Teoās POVs, thereās a way to āimprove a mental stateā that doesnāt amount to decreasing suffering (/āpreventing it)?
No, thatās precisely what Iām denying. So, the reason I mentioned that āarbitraryā view was that I thought Jack might be conflating my/āTeoās 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.
Itās prima facie plausible that thereās an improvement, sure, but upon reflection I donāt 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 Iām comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), thereās no āimprovementā 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 āimprovementā has such a strong connotation to most people that something of intrinsic value has been added. So Iād 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 itās 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 Iām comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), thereās no āimprovementā 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 wasnāt 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 donāt think these argue that creating happiness isnāt good.
I think they do argue that creating happiness isnāt 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, weād 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 canāt 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/āprofound) happiness is treated as intrinsically commensurable with miserable experiences, as if giving someone else happiness in itself solves the miserable personās urgent problem. Thatās just fundamentally opposed to what I find morally compelling.
(I like the monk example given in the other response to your question, anywho. Iāve 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 itās 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. āDisrespectā and āgrotesquenessā are just not things that seem intrinsically important to me, at all.
having a preference that the child wasnāt 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 Iām at a loss for a further response.
āI have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario.ā
I wasnāt expecting you to. I donāt 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 didnāt feel anything, my parents wouldnāt like that!
Maybe itās not particularly relevant to you if an argument is considered compelling by others, but I wanted to raise it just in case. I certainly donāt expect to change your mind on thisānor do I want to as I also think suffering is bad! Iām just not sure suffering being bad is a smaller leap than saying happiness is good.
That case does run counter to āsuffering is intrinsically bad but happiness isnāt,ā but it doesnāt run counter to āsuffering is bad,ā which is what your last comment asked about. I donāt see any compelling reasons to doubt that suffering is bad, but I do see some compelling reasons to doubt that happiness is good.
Thatās just an intuition, no? (i.e. that everyone painlessly dying would be bad.) I donāt really understand why you want to call it an āaxiomā that happiness is intrinsically good, as if this is stronger than an intuition, which seemed to be the point of your original comment.
See this post for why I donāt think the case you presented is decisive against the view Iām defending.
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 donāt think these argue that creating happiness isnāt good.
I do happen to think suffering is bad, but here is a potentially reasonable counterargumentāsome 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. Peopleās children would get killed and the parents just wouldnāt feel any negative emotionāthis seems a bit wrong...
You could try to use your pareto improvement argument here i.e. that itās 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 Iām slightly confused about one having a preference that the child wasnāt 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 Iām 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 isnāt 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 Iām slightly fuzzy on the concept of moral obligations in the first place.
In reality however there would be an opportunity cost. Weāre 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 ā+1001ā followed by extreme suffering of ā-1000ā³?
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 donāt buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.
So I donāt 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 āclickedā 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.)
Iām not sure if āpleasureā is the right word. I certainly think that improving oneās 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 āpleasureā. Instead it could be increasing the amount of āmeaningā felt or āloveā felt. If monks say they prefer contentment over intense pleasure then fineāI would say the contentment state is hedonically better in some way.
This is probably me defining āhedonically betterā differently to you but it doesnāt 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://āāwww.simonknutsson.com/āāundisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/āā
https://āācenterforreducingsuffering.org/āāphenomenological-argument/āā
(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. 103ā107), respectively.
I think one crux here is that Teo and I would say, calling an increase in the intensity of a happy experience āimproving oneās mental stateā is a substantive philosophical claim. The kind of view weāre defending does not say something like, āImprovements of oneās mental state are only good if they relieve suffering.ā 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 /ā meaning /ā love is not itself an improvement in mental state. And this follows from intuitions like āIf a mind doesnāt experience a need for change (and wonāt do so in the future), what is there to improve?ā
Can you elaborate a bit on why the seemingly arbitrary view you quoted in your first paragraph wouldnāt follow, from the view that you and Teo are defending? Are you saying that from your and Teoās POVs, thereās a way to āimprove a mental stateā that doesnāt amount to decreasing suffering (/āpreventing it)? The statement itself seems a bit odd, since āimprovementsā seems to imply āgoodnessā, 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 ādefensible alternativeā, 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 wasnāt 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, thatās precisely what Iām denying. So, the reason I mentioned that āarbitraryā view was that I thought Jack might be conflating my/āTeoās 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).
Itās prima facie plausible that thereās an improvement, sure, but upon reflection I donāt 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 Iām comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), thereās no āimprovementā to the painting.
You could, yeah, but I think āimprovementā has such a strong connotation to most people that something of intrinsic value has been added. So Iād 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 itās 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 Iām comparing to no one suffering from the lack of more intense happiness), thereās no āimprovementā 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 wasnāt 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 isnāt 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, weād 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 canāt 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/āprofound) happiness is treated as intrinsically commensurable with miserable experiences, as if giving someone else happiness in itself solves the miserable personās urgent problem. Thatās just fundamentally opposed to what I find morally compelling.
(I like the monk example given in the other response to your question, anywho. Iāve 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. āDisrespectā and āgrotesquenessā 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 Iām at a loss for a further response.
āI have basically no sympathy to the perspective that considers the pain intrinsically necessary in this scenario, or any scenario.ā
I wasnāt expecting you to. I donāt 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 didnāt feel anything, my parents wouldnāt like that!
Maybe itās not particularly relevant to you if an argument is considered compelling by others, but I wanted to raise it just in case. I certainly donāt expect to change your mind on thisānor do I want to as I also think suffering is bad! Iām just not sure suffering being bad is a smaller leap than saying happiness is good.