Working on psychological questions related to minimalist axiologies and on reasons to be careful about the practical implications of abstract formalisms.
I have MA and BA degrees in psychology, with minors in mathematics, cognitive science, statistics, computer science, and analytic philosophy.
MDMA-assisted couples therapy has been studied a bit. Could MDMA also be useful for interpersonal conflict resolution more generally, such as for enabling more constructive conversations between people with very different perspectives?
I kindly ask third parties to be mindful of the following points concerning the above reply.
(1)
It calls a part of my comment extremely misleading based on an incomplete quote whose omitted context provides a better sense of what I am talking about. Specifically, the omitted beginning clarifies that I am discussing “strong pessimism [i.e. the view that there are no independent goods]”, and noting how I personally find it a perfectly valid view to equate my positive value with whether my life has overall positive roles under that view. And the omitted ending clarifies that I am therefore curious about the author’s reasons to “absolutely reject” impartial, minimalist consequentialism “in favor of, presumably, offsetting views” (→ such as “classical utilitarianism as well as ‘weak negative’ or ‘negative-leaning’ views”), all of which are impartial views. (My use of “this view” was ambiguous, but the reading of it felt uncharitable given the above.)
At any rate, I have no reason to question the impartiality of the author’s preferred views. I hope it is clear that what my comment is questioning is the relative plausibility of the assumptions and implications of impartial offsetting views (over those of impartial minimalist views).
It claims that my use of the phrase of “increasing suffering” is misleading on the grounds that my use differs from the (allegedly common) assumption that to bring about an outcome with “outweighed” suffering does not entail increasing suffering. Yet I would think that the literal use (i.e. counting suffering only) makes more common sense than does the alternative use that is based on the offsetting assumption. After all, such an assumption would imply that (e.g.) the offsetting choice of “Intense Bliss with Hellish Cessation” (see the diagram) does not entail increasing suffering, even though it brings about arbitrarily large amounts of torture-level suffering (as do the other two supposedly outweighed hells) in place of an alternative world that would contain only untroubled experiences.
(1) + (2)
It argues (from authority) that minimalist views lack basic justification, without engaging with any of the direct arguments in their favor (cf. here). In particular, it does not address the intuition that “torture-level suffering cannot be counterbalanced”. Rather, it seems to imply that the outweighability of torture follows from the supposedly obvious outweighability of mild suffering (such as a stubbed toe).
Indeed, proponents of offsetting views do not seem to find, by direct introspection, that a moment of happiness would seem to be outweighing a certain fraction of a torture-moment; instead, they appear to infer this from other assumptions (such as from the additive aggregation of experiences that are represented with positive and negative real numbers). To quote another commenter:
“A lot of disagreements about axiology and population ethics have this same dynamic. You infer from your intuition that [mild suffering] to please the blissful is acceptable that we can scale this up to torture to (more intensely) please many more blissful people. I infer from the intuitive absurdity of the latter that maybe we shouldn’t think it’s so obvious that [mild suffering] to please the blissful is good.”
It also claims that the theoretical implications of minimalist consequentialism are absolutely rejected by “pretty much every expert in moral philosophy”. Yet it does not account for the extent to which these rejections may be highly confounded by 1) our practical intuitions, by 2) the status quo bias and/or omission bias, and 3) by the fact that we ourselves are currently living in this world whose hypothetically instant and painless cessation (i.e. non-creation, cf. the diagram) we are supposed to be impartially evaluating in this thought experiment.
It also hints that the torture-for-greater-joy implications of offsetting views fare much better in terms of acceptance, yet does not provide support for whether this is the case.
To be clear, it does present a thought experiment about the creation of a causally isolated world, which is a step in the right direction to account for these confounders. Yet even there, the discussion is eventually framed in terms of whether we would “allow such a blissful world to exist”, which potentially brings in the confounders by making it sound like the option of non-creation entails interfering with a status quo where some blissful beings already exist, whereas the minimalist intuition is precisely that the non-creation of (causally isolated) beings with even perfectly fulfilled needs is, other things being equal, morally unproblematic (“no need, no problem”).
The latter view (i.e. “the Asymmetry”) has many defenders (some of whom are cited here). And if we acknowledge the consequentialist equivalence of cessation and non-creation, then this view also implies a theoretical endorsement of the (un-confounded) hypothetical cessation implication in the case of purely experientialist and consequentialist minimalism.
(To the extent that one feels like denying the equivalence, perhaps one’s intuitions are not captured by purely experientialist consequentialism.)
(2)
By italicizing “destroying the world”, the reply again forcefully brings in the aforementioned confounders, and omits to mention the theoretical equivalence with non-creation. Theoretically, offsetting versions of utilitarianism likewise imply that an ideal outcome is to unleash a utilitronium shockwave (“converting all matter and energy into pure utilitronium”), which is presumably no less “destructive” according to most people’s practical intuitions.
Some minimalist/”strong pessimist” views would also not consider cessation an ideal option, though these were beyond the scope of my post on the topic (cf. footnote 1).
It shares a worry (which I also have) that a naive reading of these views might lead someone to act in horrific ways. Yet it provides little justification for why this would make the rejection of minimalist views more “practically warranted” relative to the rejection of offsetting views. After all, the latter could also lead to violence based on naive ideas about how happiness may be increased, such as by targeting those who are perceived to have bad values (e.g. people with certain political or religious views). (Relatedly, Karl Popper argued that offsetting views were likely to lead to atrocities if they were accepted at an institutional level.) In any case, it seems to me that all consequentialist views imply a large gap between theory and practice, and my response to potentially naive minimalists (and other consequentialists) would be to always mind the gap.
More recent arguments for lexical views are found here:
Also, if we are comparing additively aggregationist NU with additively aggregationist CU, then we should arguably compare the plausibility of their (strongest) repugnant conclusions with each other:
For me, the core issue is the implicit assumption of all else being equal and what it implies for the metaphor of counterbalancing. Specifically, I don’t think any torture is positively counterbalanced by the creation of a causally isolated black box, regardless of what hedonic or non-hedonic things the box contains.
Regarding the independent value of hedonic goods, it is worth noting that the symmetric utilitarian already argues that people may be systematically conflating the instrumental value of non-hedonic goods with them being independently valuable. And the suffering-focused perspective may simply add that this also holds for what we call positive experiences (quote from footnote 49 here):
there is a prima facie argument that strong axiological asymmetries should seem especially plausible to those sympathetic to a hedonistic view. This is because the hedonistic utilitarian already holds that most people are systematically mistaken about the intrinsic value of non-hedonic goods. The fact that people report sincerely valuing things other than happiness and the absence of suffering, even when it is argued to them that such values could just be a conflation of intrinsic with instrumental value, often gives little pause to hedonistic utilitarians. But this is precisely the position a strongly suffering-focused utilitarian is in, relative to symmetric hedonists. That is, although this consideration is not decisive, a symmetric hedonist should not be convinced that suffering-focused views are untenable due to their immediate intuition or perception that happiness is valuable independent of relief of suffering. They would need to offer an argument for why happiness is indeed intrinsically valuable, despite the presence of similar debunking explanations for this inference as for non-hedonic goods.
Finally, I feel drawn to axiological monism as a solution to the problem of value incommensurability, to which I have not seen a satisfying response for pluralist views. For example, about the point that “transhumanism opens the possibility for extreme amounts of happiness, as great as the suffering from brutal torture”, I wonder how people could reach interpersonal agreement on such a tradeoff ratio even in principle. But I am (more) hopeful that people can agree on the independent badness of torture, and that we could use that as a common ground for prioritization if all else fails.
Thanks, and no worries about the scope! Others may know better about the practical/quantification questions, but I’ll say what comes to mind.
1. Rather than assuming positive units, one could interpret wellbeing changes in comparative terms (of betterness/worseness), which don’t presuppose an offsetting view. For some existing measures, perhaps this would be only a matter of reinterpreting the data. A challenge would be how to account for the relational value of e.g. additional life years, given that experientialist minimalist views wouldn’t consider them an improvement in wellbeing solely for one’s own sake (all else equal). This raises the complex question of how to estimate the value of years added to the life of people who don’t live for their own sake; presumably the narrow, individual-focused approach wouldn’t see it as an improvement (in exp min terms), but then I’d probably search for less narrow approaches in practice.
a. Depends on how they’re defined. Purely suffering-focused views would be minimalist. Other suffering-focused views could allow offsetting in some cases. Prioritarianism could mean that we prioritize helping the worst off, but need not specify what counts as helping; for instance, it could still count the addition of ‘non-relieving goods’ as a form of helping that simply ought to go to the worst off first.
b. Sure, though I guess we could then raise them another life whose moments of unbearable agony are supposedly just barely outweighed by its other moments after accounting for the discounts. (At least for me, the common theme in why I tend to find such implications problematic seems to relate to the offsetting premise itself, namely to how the moments of subjectively unbearable agony presumably don’t agree with it.)
2. Perhaps the key difference is that minimalist preferentialism would equate complete preference satisfaction with “0%” preference frustration, whereas offsetting preferentialism would count (at least some) satisfied preferences as somehow positively good beyond their being 0% frustrated. The latter raises the problems of treating preference satisfaction as an independent good that could offset frustration. (Cf. “Making desires satisfied, making satisfied desires” by Dietz, 2023, e.g. the cases in section 2.3.)
Offtopic: This post was a joy to read. Would love to read if you have any thoughts to share about writing in general, but no worries if not. :) Welcome to the forum.
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 “+1001” followed by extreme suffering of “-1000″?
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 don’t buy the hedonic arithmetic, and who prefer the states of unexcited contentment over states of intense pleasure.
So I don’t 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 “clicked” 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.)
(Edit: Added a note(*) on minimalist views and the extended VRC of Budolfson & Spears.)
Thanks for highlighting an important section for discussion. Let me try to respond to your points. (I added the underline in them just to unburden the reader’s working memory.)
This seems wrong to me,
The quoted passage contained many claims; which one(s) seemed wrong to you?
and confusing ‘finding the VRC counter-intuitive’ with ‘counterbalancing (/extreme) bad with with good in any circumstance is counterintuitive’ (e.g. the linked article to Omelas) is unfortunate—especially as this error has been repeated a few times in and around SFE-land.
My argument was rather the other way around. Namely, if we accept any kind of counterbalancing of harms with isolated goods, then CU-like views would imply that it is net positive to create space colonies that are at least as good as the hellish + barely positive lives of the VRC. And given arguments like astronomical waste (AW) (Bostrom, 2003), the justified harm could be arbitrarily vast as long as the isolated positive lives are sufficiently numerous. (Tomasik’s Omelas article does not depend on the VRC, but speaks of the risk of astronomical harms given the views of Bostrom, which was also my intended focus.)
(To avoid needless polarization and promote fruitful dialogue, I think it might be best to generally avoid using “disjointing” territorial metaphors such as “SFE-land” or “CU-land”, not least considering the significant common ground among people in the EA(-adjacent) community.)
First, what is turning the screws in the VRC is primarily the aggregation, not the (severe/) suffering.
For minimalist views, there is a very relevant difference between the RC and VRC, which is that the RC can be non-problematic (provided that we assume that the lives “never suffer”, cf. footnote 16 here), but minimalist views would always reject the VRC. For minimalist views, the (severe) suffering is, of course, the main concern. My point about the VRC was to highlight how CU can justify astronomical harms even for (supposedly) barely positive isolated lives, and an even bigger commonsensical worry is how much harm it can justify for (supposedly) greatly positive isolated lives.
If the block of ‘positive lives/stuff’ in the VRC was high magnitude—say about as much (or even more) above neutral as the block of ‘negative lives/stuff’ lie below it—there is little about this more Omelas-type scenario a classical utilitarian would find troubling. “N terrible lives and k*N wonderful lives is better than N wonderful lives alone” seems plausible for sufficiently high values of k. (Notably, ‘Minimalist’ views seem to fare worse as it urges no value of k … would be high enough.)
It seems true that more people would find that more plausible. Even so, this is precisely what minimalists may find worrying about the CU approach to astronomical tradeoffs, namely that astronomical harms can be justified by the creation of sufficiently many instances of isolated goods.
Additionally, I feel like the point above applies more to classical utilitarianism (the view) rather than to the views of actual classical utilitarians, not to mention people who are mildly sympathetic to CU, which seems a particularly relevant group in this context given that they may represent an even larger number of people in the EA(-adjacent) community.
After all, CU-like views contain a minimalist (sub)component, and probably many self-identified CUs and CU-sympathetic people would thereby be at least more than a “little” troubled by the implication that astronomical amounts of hellish lives — e.g. vastly more suffering than what has occurred on Earth to date — would be a worthwhile tradeoff for (greater) astronomical amounts of wonderful lives (what minimalist views would frame as unproblematic lives), especially given that the alternative was a wonderful (unproblematic) population with no hellish lives.
(For what it’s worth, I used to feel drawn to a CU axiology until I became too troubled by the logic of counterbalancing harm for some with isolated good for others. For many people on the fence, the core problem is probably this kind of counterbalancing itself, which is independent of the VRC but of course also clearly illustrated by it.)
If it were just ‘The VRC says you can counterbalance severe suffering with happiness’ simpliciter which was generally counterintuitive, we could skip the rigmarole of A, A+, B etc. and just offer Omelas-type scenarios (as Tomasik does in the linked piece) without stipulating the supposedly outweighing good stuff comprises a lot of trivial well-being.
Of course, minimalist views (as explored here) would deny all counterbalancing of severe problems with isolated goods, independent of the VRC.
The Mere-Addition Paradox, RC, and VRC are often-discussed problems to which minimalist views may provide satisfying answers. The first two were included in the post for many reasons, and not only as a build-up to the VRC. The build-up was also not meant to end with the VRC, but instead to further motivate the question of how much harm can be justified to reduce astronomical waste (AW).
If CU-like views can justify the creation of a lot of hellish lives even for vast amounts of isolated value-containers that have only “barely positive” contents (the VRC), then how much more hellish lives can they supposedly counterbalance once those containers are filled (cf. AW)?
Second, although scenarios where one may consider counterbalancing (/severe) suffering with happiness in general may not be purely theoretical (either now or in the future) the likelihood of something closely analogous to the VRC in particular looks very remote. In terms of ‘process’ the engine of the counter-intuitiveness relies on being able to parcel out good stuff in arbitrarily many arbitrarily small increments rather than in smaller more substantial portions; in terms of ‘outcome’ one needs a much smaller set of terrible lives outweighed by a truly vast multitude of just-about-better-than-nothing ones. I don’t see how either arise on credible stories of the future.
MichaelStJules already responded to this in the sibling comment. Additionally, I would again emphasize that the main worry is not so much the practical manifestation of the VRC in particular, but more the extent to which much worse problems might be justified by CU-like views given the creation of supposedly even greater amounts of isolated goods (i.e. reducing AW).
Third, there are other lines classical utilitarians or similar can take in response to the VRC besides biting the bullet (or attempting to undercut our intuitive responses): critical level views, playing with continuity, and other anti-aggregation devices to try and preserve trading-off in general but avoid the nickel and diming issues of the VRC in particular.
MichaelStJules already mentioned an arbitrariness objection to those lines. Additionally, my impressions (based on Budolfson & Spears, 2018) are that “the VRC cannot be avoided by any leading welfarist axiology despite prior consensus in the literature to the contrary” and that “[the extended] VRC cannot be avoided by any other welfarist axiology in the literature.”
Their literature did not include minimalist views(*). Did they also omit some CU-like views, or are the VRC-rejecting CU-like views not defended by anyone in the literature?
Obviously, these themselves introduce other challenges (so much so I’m more inclined to accept the costly counter-examples than the costs of (e.g.) non-continuity) and surveying all this terrain would be a gargantuan task far beyond the remit of work introducing a related but distinct issue.
This again leaves me wondering: Are all of the VRC-rejecting CU-like views so arbitrary or counterintuitive that people will just rather accept the VRC? And will even the most attractive of those views still justify astronomical harms for a sufficiently high amount of isolated lives that are “taller” than those in the VRC?
This does not ease the worry that CU-like views can justify astronomically large harms in order to create isolated positive lives that never needed to exist in the first place.
But I bring this up because I anticipate the likely moves you will make to avoid the counter-example Shulman and I have brought up will be along the lines of anti-aggregationist moves around lexicality, thresholds, and whatnot.
First, in terms of practical relevance, one could argue that the choice to “prefer hell to prevent an imperfect heaven” is much more speculative and unlikely than is the VRC for CU-like views, not to mention the likelihood of CU justifying astronomical harms for supposedly greater goods regardless of the VRC (i.e. for reducing AW). In other words, the former can much more plausibly be disregarded as practically irrelevant than can the latter.
Second, lexical views do indeed avoid the conclusion in question, but these need not entail abrupt thresholds (per the arguments here and here), and even if they do, the threshold need not be an arbitrary or ad hoc move. For example, one could hold that there is a difference between psychologically consentable and unconsentable suffering, which is normally ignored by the logic of additive aggregationism. Moreover, the OP entails no commitment to additive aggregationism, as it only specifies that the minimalist views in question are monist, impartial, and welfarist.
If so, what is good for the goose is good for the gander: it seems better to use similarly adapted versions of total utilitarianism as a ‘like for like’ comparison. ‘Lexical threshold total utilitarianism’, which lexically de-prioritises dis/value below some magnitude can accept mere addition, accept trading off suffering for sufficient (non-trivial) happiness, but avoid both the RC and VRC. This seems a better point of departure for weighing up minimalism or not, rather than discussing counter-examples to one or the other view which only apply given an (ex hypothesi) mistaken account of how to aggregate harms and benefits.
First, I am happy to compare like views in this way in my forthcoming post. I would greatly appreciate it if people were to present or refer me to specific such views to be compared.
Second, the point above may seem to imply that there is a symmetry between these lexical adaptations, i.e. that we can “similarly” construct lexical minimalism and lexical symmetric totalism (if you allow the short expression). Yet the fact that we can make formally symmetric constructions for these different views does not imply that the respective plausibility of these constructions is symmetric at the substantive level. In this sense, what is good for the goose may do nothing for the gander. (But again, I’m happy to explore the possibility that it might.)
Specifically, how would one set the threshold(s) on the lexical symmetric view in a non-arbitrary way, and has anyone presented and defended plausible versions of such views?
Furthermore, most people would probably find it much more plausible that some harms cannot be counterbalanced by any amount of isolated goods (“a lexical minimalist component”), than that some goods can counterbalance any amount of isolated harms (a similarly lexical positive component). At least I’ve never heard anyone defend or outline the latter kind of view. (By contrast, beyond examples in academic philosophy, there are numerous examples in literature hinting at “minimalist lexicality”.)
Overall, I remain worried about the vast harms that CU-like views could justify for the supposed greater good, also considering that even you feel inclined to rather accept the VRC than deal with the apparently arbitrary or counterintuitive features of the versions of CU-like views that avoid it. (And if one proposes a positive lexical threshold, it seems that above the lexical threshold there is always a higher isolated good that can justify vast harms.)
Lastly, why do we need to “accept trading off suffering for sufficient (non-trivial) [isolated] happiness” in the first place? Would not a relational account of the value of happiness suffice? What seems to be the problem with relational goods, without isolated goods?
(*) A note on minimalist views and the extended VRC of Budolfson & Spears (2018).
Strictly speaking, the extended VRC in the formulation of Budolfson & Spears does not pertain to minimalist views, because they say “u^h>0” (i.e. strictly greater than zero). So minimalist views fall outside of the domain that they draw conclusions for.
But if we allow the “high-utility lives” to be exactly zero, or even less than zero, then their conclusion would also hold for (continuous, aggregationist) minimalist views. (But the conclusion arguably also becomes much less implausible in the minimalist case compared to the symmetric case, cf. the final point below.)
So it (also) holds for continuous aggregationist minimalist views that there exists a base population “such that it is better to both add to the base population the negative-utility lives and cause [a sufficiently large number of] ε-changes”.
But beyond questioning the continuous aggregationist component of these views (indeed a possibility that lies open to many kinds of views with such a component), and beyond questioning the practical relevance of this conclusion for minimalist views versus for symmetric views (as I do above), one may further argue that the conclusion is significantly more plausible in the minimalist case than in the case where we allow torture for the sake of isolated, purported goods that arguably do not need to exist. For in the minimalist case, the overall burden of subjective problems is still lessened (assuming continuous aggregationist minimalism). We are not creating extreme suffering for the mere sake of isolated, “unrelieving” goods.
Greetings. :) This comment seems to concern a strongly NU-focused reading of the nonconsequentialist sections, which is understandable given that NU, particularly, its hedonistic version, NHU, is probably by far the most salient and well-known example of a minimalist moral view.
However, my post’s focus is much broader than that. The post doesn’t even mention NU except in the example given in footnote 2, and is never restricted to NHU (nor to NU of any kind, if the utilitarian part would entail a commitment to additive aggregation). For brevity, many examples were framed in terms of reducing suffering. Yet the points aren’t restricted to hedonistic views, as they would apply also to minimalist moral views with non-hedonistic views of wellbeing. And if we consider only NHU, then the most relevant sections would be the ones on minimalist rule and multi-level consequentialism.
The comment seems to assume that the minimalist versions of {virtue ethics / deontology / social contract theory / care ethics} would have their nonconsequentialist moral reasons grounded in NHU. Yet then they wouldn’t contain genuinely nonconsequentialist elements, but would rather be practical heuristics in the service of NHU. My main point there was that a minimalist moral view could endorse separate moral reasons against engaging in {vice, rights violations, breaking of norms, or uncaring responses}, independent of their effects on conscious experiences. To define the former in terms of the latter would seem to collapse back into welfarism.
I like how the sequence engages with several kinds of uncertainties that one might have.
I had two questions:
1. Does the sequence assume a ‘good minus bad’ view, where independent bads (particularly, severe bads like torture-level suffering) can always be counterbalanced or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods?
(Some of the main problems with this premise are outlined here, as part of a post where I explore what might be the most intuitive ways to think of wellbeing without it.)
2. Does the sequence assume an additive / summative / Archimedean theory of aggregation (i.e. that “quantity can always substitute for quality”), or does it also engage with some forms of lexical priority views (i.e. that “some qualities get categorical priority”)?
The links are to a post where I visualize and compare the aggregation-related ‘repugnant conclusions’ of different Archimedean and lexical views. (It’s essentially a response to Budolfson & Spears, 2018/2021, but can be read without having read them.) To me, the comparison makes it highly non-obvious whether Archimedean aggregation should be a default assumption, especially given points like those in my footnote 15, where I argue/point to arguments that a lexical priority view of aggregation need not, on a closer look, be implausible in theory nor practice:
it seems plausible to prioritize the reduction of certainly unbearable suffering over certainly bearable suffering (and over the creation of non-relieving goods) in theory. Additionally, such a priority is, at the practical level, quite compatible with an intuitive and continuous view of aggregation based on the expected amount of lexically bad states that one’s decisions may influence (Vinding, 2022b, 2022e).
Thus, ‘expectational lexical minimalism’ need not be implausible in theory nor in practice, because in practice we always have nontrivial uncertainty about when and where an instance of suffering becomes unbearable. Consequently, we should still be sensitive to variations in the intensity and quantity of suffering-moments. Yet we need not necessarily formalize any part of our decision-making process as a performance of Archimedean aggregation over tiny intrinsic disvalue, as opposed to thinking in terms of continuous probabilities, and expected amounts, of lexically bad suffering.
The above questions/assumptions seem practically relevant for whether to prioritize (e.g.) x-risk reduction over the reduction of severe bads / s-risks. However, it seems to me that these questions are (within EA) often sidelined, not deeply engaged with, or are given strong implicit answers one way or another, without flagging their crucial relevance for cause prioritization.
Thus, for anyone who feels uncertain about these questions (i.e. resisting a dichotomous yes/no answer), it could be valuable to engage with them as additional kinds of uncertainties that one might have.
Would an agent who accepted strong pessimism [i.e. the view that there are no independent goods]—which I absolutely believe we should reject—have most reason to end their own life? Not necessarily. An altruistic agent with this evaluative outlook would have strong instrumental reason to remain alive, in order to alleviate the suffering of others.
I agree that life can be worth living for our positive roles in terms of reducing overall suffering or dukkha. More than that, such a view seems (to me at least) like a perfectly valid view on what constitutes evaluative meaning and positive value.
Indeed, if I knew for a fact that my life were overall (hopelessly) increasing suffering or dukkha, then this would seem to me like a strong reason not to live it, regardless of what I get to experience. So I’m curious how the author has come to believe that we should absolutely reject this view in favor of, presumably, offsetting views.
However, such an agent would be forced to accept the infamous null-bomb implication, which says that the best thing to do would be to permanently destroy all sentient life in the universe. I join almost every other philosopher in taking the fact that an ethical theory accepts the null-bomb implication as a decisive reason to reject the theory (as not merely misguided, but horrifically so).
To properly consider such a theoretical reductio, I trust that most philosophers would agree (on reflection) that we need to account for potential confounders such as status quo bias, omission bias, self-serving bias, and whether alternative views have any less horrific theoretical implications.
In particular, offsetting views theoretically imply things like the “Very Repugnant Conclusion”, “Creating Hell to Please the Blissful”, and “Intense Bliss with Hellish Cessation”, none of which seems to me any less horrific than does the non-creation of an imperfect world (cf. the consequentialist equivalence of cessation and non-creation).
Are these decisive reasons to reject offsetting views? A proponent of such views could still argue that such implications are only theoretical, that we shouldn’t let them (mis)guide us in practice, and that the practical implications of impartial consequentialism are a separate question.
Yet the quoted passage neglects to mention that the very same response applies to minimalist consequentialism (whose proponents take pains to practically highlight the importance of cooperation, the avoidance of accidental harm, and the promotion of nonviolence).
I would just generally caution against performing such theoretical reductios so hastily. After all, a more bridge-building and illuminating approach is to consider the confounding factors and intuitions behind our differing perceptions on such questions, which I hope we can all do to better understand each other’s views.
Thanks for summarizing it.
The worries I respond to are complex and the essay has many main points. Like any author, I hope that people would consider the points in their proper context (and not take them out of context). One main point is the contextualization of the worries itself, which is highlighted by the overviews (1.1–1.2) focusing a lot on the relevant assumptions and on minding the gap between theory and practice.
To complex questions, I don’t think it’s useful to reduce answers to either “yes” or “no”, especially when the answers rest on unrealistic assumptions and look very different in theory versus practice. Between theory and practice, I also tend to consider the practical implications more important.
Red team: What non-arbitrary views in population axiology do avoid the “Very Repugnant Conclusion” (VRC)?
Context/Explanation:
According to Budolfson & Spears (2018), “the VRC cannot be avoided by any leading welfarist axiology despite prior consensus in the literature to the contrary”, and “[the extended] VRC cannot be avoided by any other welfarist axiology in the literature.”
Yet surely we need not limit our views to the ones that were included in their analysis.
Bonus points if the team scrutinizes some assumptions that are commonly taken as unquestioned starting points, such as additive aggregationism, impersonal compensation, or independent positive value.
(By “non-arbitrary”, I mean that the views would be attractive for other reasons besides avoiding the VRC.)
Thanks for compiling this! The structure feels very approachable. The bar for engagement is also greatly lowered by your inclusion of the recap, the comparison of theories, and the pointers for discussion and feedback.
Regarding the linked sections, the strongest consensus about the definition of flourishing indeed seems to involve an emphasis on relationships, purpose, and meaning. To me, this emphasis seems to be in tension with the tendency of standard (welfarist) population ethics to only count welfare as a kind of isolated “score” that applies to each life under the (radical) assumption of “all else being equal”.
Specifically, perhaps none of the popular notions of flourishing is even possible to actualize in an “all else equal” life. After all, those notions seem to depend (at least partly, if not fully) on our life making a positive difference for others. For me, the centrality of such a causal link back to others casts doubt on the concept of ‘flourishing lives’ as something that could be mass-produced to independently improve the overall value of the world (contra arguments such as astronomical waste / Bostrom, 2003).
In other words, I think a perfectly valid rejection of the experience machine is to say that entering the machine would sever the essential causal connections of what positive roles we play for how others feel, which seems central to many if not all definitions of flourishing (i.e. the kind of life that we want ours to become).
—
So I’m curious what you, or the reviewed theorists, might say about:
1. Is flourishing even possible “all else being equal”, such as in an experience machine?
2. Relatedly: To what degree does flourishing refer to positive intrinsic vs. extrinsic value?
—
(For my own take, there’s e.g. the brief section on “self-contained versus relational flourishing”. Worth noting is also that a relational i.e. extrinsic notion of flourishing is perfectly compatible with minimalist theories of welfare, such as the Buddhism-inspired views of antifrustrationism by Fehige, 1998 and tranquilism by Gloor, 2017, which work without needing the assumption of intrinsic positive value at all.
They essentially say that, “all else equal”, we are just as well off by satisfying a desire or an unmet need as we would be by letting go of it. Yet a minimalist notion of flourishing would highlight the importance of seeking to satisfy [rather than letting go of] our desires whenever doing so is aligned with making an overall positive difference for others. This we cannot do in an experience machine — nor in population ethics — where such flourishing is impossible, but can do all the time in daily life where other things are never completely unaffected by our actions.)
a reason to focus more on these other important traits relative to IQ — at the level of what we seek to develop individually and incentivize collectively — is that many of these other traits and skills probably are more elastic and improvable than is IQ
+1. To the extent that IQ may be difficult to improve, it seems good to focus on improving the other important virtues. Yet perhaps people might (for some roles) select heavily for IQ precisely because it — unlike the more improvable virtues — can not so easily be improved after the selection.
(This might also in part explain how commenters might be sometimes talking of different things, i.e. “what to cultivate” versus “what to select for”.)
For this forum, I would agree that it seems best to present the original question in maximally neutral terms, and then separately post your own examples as separate answers, so that the answers can get their own votes and/or discussion threads.
Regarding CRS, we are actually in the process of registering in the US, have received more donations, and are open to applicants for remote roles.
This would be my practical question as well, for the following reasons.
I don’t see a way to ultimately resolve conflicts between an (infinite) optimizing (i.e., maximizing or minimizing) goal and other goals if they’re conceptualized as independent from the optimizing goal. Even if we consider the independent goals as something to only “satisfice” (i.e., take care of “well enough”) instead of optimize as much as possible, it’ll be the case that our optimizing goal, by its infinite nature, wants to negotiate to itself as much resources as possible, and its reasons for earning its living within me are independently convincing (that’s why it’s an infinite goal of mine in the first place).
So an infinite goal of preventing suffering wants to understand why my conflicting other goals require a certain amount of resources (time, attention, energy, money) for them to be satisficed, and in practice this feels to me like an irreconcilable conflict unless they can negotiate by speaking a common language, i.e., one which the infinite goal can understand.
In the case of my other goals wanting resources from an {infinite, universal, all-encompassing, impartial, uncompromising} compassion, my so-called other goals start to be conceptualized through the language of self-compassion, which the larger, universal compassion understands as a practical limitation worth spending resources on – not for the other goals’ independent sake, but because they play a necessary and valuable role in the context of self-compassion aligned with omnicompassion. In practice, it also feels most sustainable and long-term wise to usually if not always err on the side of self-compassion, and to only gradually attempt moving resources from self-compassionate sub-goals and mini-games towards the infinite goal. Eventually, omnicompassion may expect less and less attachment to the other goals as independent values, acknowledging only their relational value in terms of serving the infinite goal, but it is patient and understands human limitations and growing pains and the counterproductive nature of pushing its infinite agenda too much too quickly.
If others have found ways to reconcile infinite optimizing goals with satisficing goals without a common language to mediate negotiations between them, I’d be very interested in hearing about them, although this already works for me, and I’m working on becoming able to write more about this, because it has felt like an all-around unified “operating system”, replacing utilitarianism. :)
Thanks for the guidelines.
Is there any policy (or existing discussion) on commenting on old posts? Is anything relevant enough to be worth adding to posts that are years old, or do you prefer that replies (across years) become their own posts linking to the original ones?
Relevant recent posts:
https://www.simonknutsson.com/undisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/
https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/phenomenological-argument/
(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. 103–107), respectively.
In relation to purely suffering-focused views, I also argue here that people may sometimes jump to hasty conclusions about human extinction due to certain forms of misconceived (i.e. non-impartial) consequentialism, and argue (drawing on the linked resources) that an impartial approach would imply strong heuristics of cooperation and nonviolence.
Related:
Reply by Vinding (2022)
Perhaps see also:
A visualized comparison of repugnant conclusions between different views: “Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant”