Are any of these arguments against symmetry fleshed out anywhere? I’d be interested if there’s anything that goes into these in more detail.
Excruciating pain makes us desperate to end it. The urgency seems inherent to its intensity, and its subjective urgency lifts to its moral urgency and importance when we weight individuals’ subjective wellbeing.
I’m not sure I buy that the urgency of extreme pain is a necessary component of its intensity. It makes more sense to me that the intensity drives the urgency rather than the other way around, but I’m not sure. You could probably define the intensity of pain by the strength of one’s preference to stop it, but this just seems like a very good proxy to me.
Suffering is also cognitively disruptive in a way pleasure seems not to be. And pain seems to be more tied to motivation than pleasure seems to be
I suspect these are due to implementation details in the brain that aren’t guaranteed to hold in longtermism (if we leave open the possibility of advanced neurotechnology).
I’m sympathetic to functionalism, and the attention, urgency or priority given to something seems likely defining of its intensity to me, at least for pain, and possibly generally. I don’t know what other effects would ground intensity in a way that’s not overly particular to specific physical/behavioural capacities or non-brain physiological responses (heart rate, stress hormones, etc.). (I don’t think reinforcement strength is defining.)
There are some attempts at functional definitions of pain and pleasure intensities here, and they seem fairly symmetric:
I’ll add that our understanding of pleasure and suffering and the moral value we assign to them may be necessarily human-relative, so if those phenomena turn out to be functionally asymmetric in humans (e.g. one defined by the necessity of a certain function with no sufficiently similar/symmetric counterpart in the other), then our concepts of pleasure and suffering will also be functionally asymmetric. I make some similar/related arguments in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L4Cv8hvuun6vNL8rm/solution-to-the-two-envelopes-problem-for-moral-weights
I think any functionalist definition for the intensity of either would have to be asymmetric, at least insofar as intense pleasures (e.g. drug highs or euphoria associated with temporal lobe epilepsy) are associated with extreme contentedness rather than desperation for it to continue. Similarly-intense pains, on the other hand, do create a strong urgency for it to stop. This particular asymmetry seems present in the definitions you linked, so I’m a little sceptical of the claim that “super-pleasure” would necessitate an urgency for it to continue.
I’m not sure whether these kinds of functional asymmetries give much evidence one way or the other—it seems like it could skew positive just as much as negative. I agree that our understanding might very well be human-relative; I think that the cognitive disruptiveness of pain could be explained by the wider activation of networks across the brain compared to pleasure, for instance. I think a pleasure of the sort that activates a similar breadth of networks would feel qualitatively different, and that experiencing such a pleasure might change our views here.
Are any of these arguments against symmetry fleshed out anywhere? I’d be interested if there’s anything that goes into these in more detail.
I’m not sure I buy that the urgency of extreme pain is a necessary component of its intensity. It makes more sense to me that the intensity drives the urgency rather than the other way around, but I’m not sure. You could probably define the intensity of pain by the strength of one’s preference to stop it, but this just seems like a very good proxy to me.
I suspect these are due to implementation details in the brain that aren’t guaranteed to hold in longtermism (if we leave open the possibility of advanced neurotechnology).
I’m sympathetic to functionalism, and the attention, urgency or priority given to something seems likely defining of its intensity to me, at least for pain, and possibly generally. I don’t know what other effects would ground intensity in a way that’s not overly particular to specific physical/behavioural capacities or non-brain physiological responses (heart rate, stress hormones, etc.). (I don’t think reinforcement strength is defining.)
There are some attempts at functional definitions of pain and pleasure intensities here, and they seem fairly symmetric:
https://welfarefootprint.org/technical-definitions/
and some more discussion here:
https://welfarefootprint.org/2024/03/12/positive-animal-welfare/
I’m afraid I don’t know anywhere else these arguments are fleshed out in more detail than what I shared in my first comment (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-013-0171-2).
I’ll add that our understanding of pleasure and suffering and the moral value we assign to them may be necessarily human-relative, so if those phenomena turn out to be functionally asymmetric in humans (e.g. one defined by the necessity of a certain function with no sufficiently similar/symmetric counterpart in the other), then our concepts of pleasure and suffering will also be functionally asymmetric. I make some similar/related arguments in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L4Cv8hvuun6vNL8rm/solution-to-the-two-envelopes-problem-for-moral-weights
I think any functionalist definition for the intensity of either would have to be asymmetric, at least insofar as intense pleasures (e.g. drug highs or euphoria associated with temporal lobe epilepsy) are associated with extreme contentedness rather than desperation for it to continue. Similarly-intense pains, on the other hand, do create a strong urgency for it to stop. This particular asymmetry seems present in the definitions you linked, so I’m a little sceptical of the claim that “super-pleasure” would necessitate an urgency for it to continue.
I’m not sure whether these kinds of functional asymmetries give much evidence one way or the other—it seems like it could skew positive just as much as negative. I agree that our understanding might very well be human-relative; I think that the cognitive disruptiveness of pain could be explained by the wider activation of networks across the brain compared to pleasure, for instance. I think a pleasure of the sort that activates a similar breadth of networks would feel qualitatively different, and that experiencing such a pleasure might change our views here.