Nunik

Karma: 37

Nunik 24 Nov 2025 20:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dennis Hackethal’s comment on: To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs
Sure there is a small chance, but the question is: what can we do about it and will the opportunity cost be justifiable? And for the same reason that Pascal’s Wager fails, we can’t just arbitrarily say “doing this may reduce suffering” and think it justifies the action, since the reversal “doing this may increase suffering” plausibly offsets it.

Nunik 24 Nov 2025 18:09 UTC
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in reply to: Dennis Hackethal’s comment on: To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is that it ignores reversed scenarios that would offset it: e.g. there could as well be a god that would punish you for believing in God without having good evidence.

I don’t think this would be applicable to our scenario. Whether we choose to help the human or the animals, there will always be uncertainty about the (long-term) effects of our intervention, but the intervention would ideally be researched well enough for us to have confidence that its expected value is robustly positive.

Nunik 23 Nov 2025 12:57 UTC
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in reply to: Dennis Hackethal’s comment on: To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs
Let’s say you faced a situation where you could either (a) improve the welfare of 1 human, or (b) potentially improve (conditional on sentience), to the same extent as the human, the welfare of X animals which you currently believe are not sentient.

Does your epistemology imply that no matter how large X was, you would never choose (b) until you found a “rational reason to drop your views”? But you admit there is a possibility that you will find such a reason in the future, including the possibility that credences are a superior way of representing beliefs?

Nunik 8 Oct 2025 21:04 UTC
9 points
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on: Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset”
Consider trade-offs between suffering of medium and extreme severity, where medium severity could be described as hurtful or disabling. It seems hard to defend that no duration of medium suffering could ever outweigh a short duration of extreme suffering. This is not a matter of downplaying the extreme suffering for its short duration, but rather of appreciating the magnitude of an eternity of medium suffering. (I think the idea of eternity really helps in imagining what is at stake when one assumes lexicality.)

It also seems a priori implausible that having any particular experience could somehow reveal information about it being lexically superior to other experiences. Experiencing extreme suffering can tell us that its quality is extremely bad, but this insight is duration-insensitive. Filling the entire universe with people experiencing medium suffering forever seems to be decidedly worse than a single person experiencing extreme suffering for a few hours.

So if one deems medium suffering offsetable by pleasure, then extreme suffering will be offsetable as well, assuming transitivity.

Nunik 12 Jul 2025 20:52 UTC
2 points
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on: A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies

As short-lived fish low on the food chain, they accumulate only minimal levels of contaminants like mercury and PCB

Sardines and anchovies seem to be high in PCBs. Did you come across any research that stated otherwise?

Nunik 3 Mar 2025 23:19 UTC
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: An experiment for those who think the intrinsic value of pleasure is beyond doubt
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.)

Nunik 2 Mar 2025 20:27 UTC
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: An experiment for those who think the intrinsic value of pleasure is beyond doubt
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 2 Mar 2025 16:46 UTC
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: An experiment for those who think the intrinsic value of pleasure is beyond doubt
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.

Nunik 21 Jan 2025 20:35 UTC
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in reply to: GoodHorse413🔸’s comment on: Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?
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.

Nunik 21 Jan 2025 19:04 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David T’s comment on: Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?
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.

Nunik 21 Jan 2025 18:23 UTC
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in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?
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.

Nunik 20 Jan 2025 20:57 UTC
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in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?
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.
What links here?
- Nunik's comment on An experiment for those who think the intrinsic value of pleasure is beyond doubt by Nunik (2 Mar 2025 20:27 UTC; 1 point)

Nunik 19 Jan 2025 19:20 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?
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.