Thank you. My remaining question is: how do you make sense of the non-hedonistic life goals? When it comes to suffering, in the moment of experiencing it I am extremely confident about its disvalue because I think the experience provides real-time firsthand evidence of the disvalue. Whereas with other purported goods or bads it seems to me like the best that can be said in favor is something like “many reasonable people say so”. But why do they say so? Because they have a feeling that something or other has value? See also this comment.
Nunik
Karma: 27
Cannot moral realism be grounded at least in suffering, though? It seems inescapable to me that generating suffering in an experience machine would be disvaluable. For the experience to be suffering, it may require a component of wanting it to end, but this would still be a felt quality, right? So no matter when or where the suffering was experienced, no matter “who” experienced it, it would still be disvaluable due to its inherent nature.
We are mostly in agreement, though I don’t quite understand what you meant by:
These seem to be examples where maximizing hedonistic utility functions leads to bad things happening, because they are.
If suffering and pleasure are incommensurable, in what way are such outcomes bad?
I would also be interested in your response to the argument that suffering is inherently urgent, while pleasure does not have this quality. Imagine you are incapable of suffering, and you are currently experiencing pleasure. One could say that you would be indifferent to the pleasure being taken away from you (or being increased to a higher level). Now imagine that you are instead incapable of experiencing pleasure, and you are currently suffering. In this case it would arguably be very clear to you that reducing suffering is important.
What I meant is that the disvalue of suffering becomes evident at the moment of experiencing it. Once you know what disvalue is, the next step is figuring out who can experience this disvalue. Given that you and I e.g. have a very similar nervous system, and that we behave similarly in response to noxious stimuli, my subjective probability that you are capable of suffering will be much higher than the probability that a rock can suffer.
I don’t think I properly understand your position. You are not sure that you are currently having an experience? Because if you are having an experience, then the experience necessarily exists, otherwise you can’t be having it.
When you say “what is good for us”, could it be translated as “what we are attached to”? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.
In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I don’t mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.
So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.
When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color “looks” a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the “realest” part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really “out there” that we are interpreting.
If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn’t ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about. I could just go chop my arm off and it wouldn’t matter. The fact that I wouldn’t want to do this would be irrelevant, because the wanting wouldn’t by itself translate into any value. “I” am just a flow or sequence of experiences, and wanting is just a kind of experience with no intrinsic value.
The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.
I think I can see why anti-realism is not an “anything goes” approach, but I still can’t see why “subjective” values (or meaning) should matter. Of course, I also used to look at value in terms of what I cared about, or what motivated me. But at some point I realized that what holding a belief about the importance of something boils down to is that I will feel various emotions and do various actions in response to situations that are related to the belief. There is no intrinsic (dis)value in me (dis)valuing something, I concluded, and this drove me to full-blown nihilism.
But then I realized that (dis)value is something that is, not something that I can choose for myself based on some criteria. Suffering is what gives meaning to the word “bad”. No possible belief about the experience of suffering could change its badness. Even when I was convinced that nothing mattered, my despair was producing genuine disvalue.
So now I care about reducing suffering, but if I thought I was failing in achieving the goal of reducing suffering, this wouldn’t by itself be bad. The world contains some amount of disvalue. My belief in the disvalue of suffering is an empirical claim about a feature of the world, and it motivates my actions and evokes emotions in me.
(I haven’t finished reading all the relevant texts you linked, but I am posting this comment for today.)