On suffering – part 2, antifrustrationism: positive vs. negative utilitarianism.

“Positive utilitarianism recommends the promotion or maximising of intrinsic value, negative utilitarianism recommends the reduction or minimising of intrinsic disvalue. At first sight, the negative kind may seem reasonable and more modest in what it recommends. But one way of ending human misery is by putting all human beings out of their misery. This course of action is usually considered unacceptable. This has led to a search for reformulations of negative utilitarianism, or to its rejection.”

https://www.utilitarianism.com/posutil.htm

A fatal flaw here is that most assume that the maximization of wellbeing and minimization of suffering are two different things, when in reality, pleasure is essentially just a relief sensation you get from resolving suffering, and if you take it away again, you suffer more.

Name a pleasure, most likely we will be able to name a form of suffering that it serves to alleviate. So very simple examples would be:

• eating food (pleasure) – hunger (suffering)
• drinking water (pleasure) – thirst (suffering)
• defecation (pleasure) – constipation (suffering)
• ejaculation (pleasure) – pressure (suffering)
• sleep (pleasure) – fatigue (suffering)

and so and so forth. If you maximized wellbeing by eating food, you just reduced the suffering of hunger, no way around it. We put a weight on you, then we take it off again, this is what a good feeling is, the alleviation of a pressure that has been put on you. Put knife in, take knife out, not being harmed is what feels good, but once all harm is taken away, there’s no more pleasure.

You can get a small relief from resolving a small suffering, or a greater relief from resolving a greater suffering, workouts would be another example, it can be stressing and painful at times, but it ameliorates another pain, another form of tension in you, so that then in the end one is more relaxed than before, otherwise you’d never feel pushed to work out anymore.

Once every torturous urge that could have pushed you to eat it is extracted from you, be it hunger, appetite or boredom, the food no longer tastes good, the good feeling is what happens when we’re extracting the minus points, there are no plus points.

You can only get your head up to the surface of the hole, but you cannot crawl out of it, you’re just struggling to crawl up to the surface of the hole. You’re always sinking, and then you have to pull yourself up again, in this process, you feel pleasure, but once we’re at neutral, pleasure will stop and you’ll start sinking deeper into the hole again.

Positive utilitarianism makes this assumption that somehow our goods in life are somehow unconditionally required and important, that it could be a good action to throw someone into the hole for the good of them then crawling up to the surface again.

It’s important to fulfill desire in the sense that it prevents unfulfilled desire, but in and of itself, there is no point to creating unfulfilled desire in order to then fulfill it, e.g. if you for some reason already have an urge to stare at a red painted wall, then I may do you a favor by painting walls red for you to stare at, but I am not doing you a favor if I could hypothetically give you a pill that made you crave staring at a red painted wall, just to then paint it red (unless of course, you already had a desire to have that desire, in which case giving you the desire has instrumental value to achieving the absence of your desire to have that desire, but that desire to have that desire would still be a problem).

This realization is sometimes also referred to antifrustrationism:

Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige,^[1] which states that “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”^[2] According to Fehige, “maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

If there is need, then it can be good to fulfill it, but there is no good in creating the need to begin with, just to then fulfill it, even if you fulfill it, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all, similar to if there is already a knife stuck in someone’s chest, then it can be good to pull it out, but there is no good to sticking the knife in someone’s chest to begin with, just to then pull it out again, even if you pull it again, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all.

Let’s say I have a car, I can make it into a sentient, suffering car that goes ”I NEED TO HAVE GASOLINE INSIDE ME, I WANT MORE MORE MORE, FUCK ME HARDER!” by snapping my fingers, can I improve this car by snapping my fingers?

I would argue no, because the only predictable good to come from that would be to afterwards make it content and unneeding of the gasoline by pouring gasoline into it again, to ameliorate its urge to have gasoline put into it, but it is already perfectly unneeding of the gasoline, so I can’t possibly make an improvement here by snapping my fingers and putting it into emotional distress over not having enough gasoline in it.

And the same reasoning consistently applies to a human or any other fetus, you cannot upgrade a non-conscious thing by turning it conscious, you can only degrade it by doing so, it’s a minus, not a plus. You create need/deficiency conditions, and then in the best case scenario you manage to erase all of them again, but chances are you’ll make more minuses than before.

A graphic demonstration that can be used to showcase this reality is also David Benatar’s axiological asymmetry from his book better never to have been:

If unfulfilled desire, suffering is the alternative, then fulfilled desire, pleasure, is important. But if there is no pain anymore, then there is no need for the pleasure anymore either, here one could use many different examples to demonstrate that point. This is another example from the book:

• X exists: forest fire.

Forest fire=bad.

Fire extinguisher=good, because there’s a forest fire.

• X doesn’t exist.

Preventing forest fire=continues to be good.

Preventing fire extinguisher=not bad, because there is no forest fire to extinguish.

• X exists: cancer.

Cancer tumor=bad.

Chemotherapy=good, because you have cancer.

• X doesn’t exist.

Preventing cancer tumor=continues to be good.

Preventing chemotherapy=not bad, because there is no cancer tumor to treat.

Preventing a harm is always good, but preventing a pleasure is only conditionally bad, i.e if someone is already in pain. There’s no problem with all chocolate being liquidated if no sentient organisms are left on planet earth, because no one who wants to eat it would suffer from its absence.

But by not creating the creatures that need the chocolate, we can still efficiently prevent their craving and addiction (suffering) for chocolate, just like if they were to actually exist and crave the chocolate, the chocolate would then be preventing their craving for chocolate. So the benefit of prevention is the same, you eliminated the craving for the chocolate either way.

If you prevent me from ejaculating, I’m suffering intensified pressure and tension as a result of that, but I’m not hurting my ejaculated sperm by flushing it down the toilet, refusing to turn it into a child that will one day be able to alleviate tension and pressure by ejaculating just like me, that can’t possibly be an issue for my sperm that I flushed down the toilet, and that’s the point.

When you bring a sentient being into existence, you just create suffering, a constant addiction to pleasure, which if not alleviated will result in intensified suffering, and even if you alleviate it, it’s still not better in the sense that it didn’t prevent suffering as efficiently as never creating it to begin with.

Saying the good in life justifies the bad is absurd because it’s just an alleviation of bad, it’s like saying it’s a good idea to stab people because then you can pull the knives out of them again and give them painkillers afterwards, some victims don’t get painkillers, but that’s justified because some of them do, the fulfilled desires justify the unfulfilled desires.

Supporters of positive utilitarianism think it can be good to create a new sentient organism, when in reality, it’s just the creation of a lifelong problem, a deficit bundle, a need and desire mechanism that constantly needs to be alleviated for it to not result in even more intense suffering than it started off with.

By gaining in pleasure you are relieving your suffering, it doesn’t get rid of suffering as efficiently as preventing it from existing in the first place though, a lifeless planet is the best (or least bad) planet by virtue of it containing zero suffering. It’s better for an already existing addict to get their next fix, but it’s even less bad if no suffering ever pushed them to chase the object of addiction in the first place.

This is a conclusion many find too repulsive to accept, so they point to supposed absurdities about the antifrustrationist view, which fall apart with the information that I just previously layed out and won’t seem quite as absurd, such as:

• The painless genocide/benevolent world exploder button.

If preventing suffering is the only thing that matters and you had a button you could push to painlessly end all sentient life in an instant, it would be the best thing to do, you’d have to take that option, all suffering ended forever.

This is supposed to make you feel instinctively repulsed and then say ”oh no how horrible, this is like Adolf Hitler!!!”, failing to take into account that they didn’t actually establish any kind of coherent argument against pressing such a button.

Of course, if every good in life is just the relief of suffering, which it is, then it is the best possible thing you could ever do to press this button, whether you like to admit that or not, that doesn’t change the facts of the reality and its value relations we occupy.

If I press this button, I will end all suffering, I will also end all pleasure, but that is completely irrelevant, because the pleasure is just a relief of the suffering, if I have already extinguished all hunger and starvation from this universe, then there by default can’t be any problem with there being no more food to enjoy either, the need for it no longer exists, but no one who has no access to food is starving either.

I solved all suffering, the lack of pleasure isn’t a problem, that’s called a win win situation, no way around it.

If anything, it’s absurd to be opposed to pushing such a button based on the fact that it will deplete future wellbeing, it would be like saying that it’s bad to push a button that destroys both cancer and chemotherapy, because then all chemotherapy is gone.

The reason why you want to go through chemotherapy is to get rid of the cancer, so if the chance of cancer is destroyed, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently. The reason why you chase satisfaction is because otherwise you would become dissatisfied, so if we push the big red button resulting in eradication of all dissatisfaction, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently, you don’t need to have a relief from suffering if suffering doesn’t even exist.

• Cancer tumor – unfulfilled desire.
• Chemotherapy – fulfillment of desire.
• Cancer tumor excision – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.

• Knife in chest – unfulfilled desire.
• Painkiller – fulfillment of desire.
• Pull knife out of chest – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.

This of course equally applies to the question of euthanizing others painlessly. If I still want to do x, and you euthanize me in my deep sleep painlessly, then I’m not going to wake up in the thereafter non-existence and still be left wanting x, but now I can’t obtain x because you just painlessly euthanized me, taking away my wanting.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm, i.e family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person, if we legalized this act, it would scare others they might be next, perhaps you prevented someone who was interested in reducing suffering in other sentient organisms from doing so.

But there is nothing inherently harmful about you simply not being there anymore, this might be offensive, but is true nonetheless, no matter how repulsive you find that fact.

• The pin prick of harm.

Let’s say there is a near utopian scenario where everyone’s needs are being perfectly satisfied. Perfect meals, perfect defecation, perfect sex, perfect sleep, etc, perfect eternal orgasm on morphine whilst eating chocolate cake or perfect whatever you want, but it satisfies everyone’s needs.

In order to get there though, we must give one person a tiny pin prick of harm, one needle prick in their little finger, if you don’t do this, everyone will be confined to a life of just eating old hard bread and potatoes with no seasoning, mediocre jerking off into a tissue at best, no morphine, no eternal chocolate cake.

If reducing suffering is the only thing that matters, then you shouldn’t be giving this one person a pin prick, right?

No, exactly wrong, because this misguided objection again completely fails to take into account that increasing wellbeing is directly entailed in reducing suffering in the organism, as pleasure is a relief of suffering, the increase in everyone’s pleasure is the same as a reduction in suffering. If you don’t give this person a pin prick, you will increase suffering of boredom, if you give this person a pin prick, you will greatly reduce boredom.

But this still doesn’t make life worth starting in the first place, and that’s the point this argument misses completely.

There is no unborn purgatory in which children that do not get to experience the pleasures of life are suffering from not experiencing the pleasures of life, so there’s still no life worth starting for future pleasure. Yes, if I am hungry for it, then I would take a pin prick for a 5 star gourmet dinner, but if I did not in any way need or desire it, then I would not take the pin prick for the 5 star gourmet dinner, and that’s the point.

Non-existence best describes the state of not needing the 5 star gourmet dinner, it is just nothingness, there can’t possibly any kind of problem with nothing, it’s nothing, there’s no nothingness chamber where a child is somehow tormented from not being a something.

The reduction of suffering is good, if you decrease suffering in the organism you increase wellbeing and if you decrease wellbeing in the organism you increase suffering, the only difference here is that positive utilitarians insist that pleasure must exist regardless of whether or not someone suffers from its absence, whereas I don’t see the absence of pleasure as tragic if no one is missing it, suffering from not having it.

Part 1: On suffering – part 1, value realism: utilitarianism vs. deontology.