A common argument against negative utilitarianism/suffering-focused ethics/antifrustrationism, i.e the ethical theory that we should eradicate suffering/unfulfilled desire rather than to maximize pleasure/create as many fulfilled desires as possible, is that you would have to forego an extreme amount of pleasure, in case that that pleasure can only be created by also creating a rather small amount of suffering, like a little pin prick with a needle, just once.
You have the option to create a much better world, go from a state where everyone is only eating unseasoned potatoes and old hard bread, mediocre jerking off into a tissue to having a perfect virtual reality scenario where you can always have whatever appetite satisfaction and perfect orgasm that you want, but you have to give one person a little pin prick with a needle in their finger just once, otherwise you can’t push the button to create the virtual reality scenario.
- So if you’re a true suffering-eliminationist, you shouldn’t give that one person the pin prick, right? It would cause suffering.
Wrong, this is either a really badly thought-through or dishonest point against the elimination of suffering. People fail to comprehend that increasing pleasure in an organism is the same thing as reducing suffering in an organism, and reducing suffering in an organism is the same as increasing pleasure in that organism. If you feel better, you feel less bad, if you feel worse, you feel less good.
If a suffering-eliminationist failed to give this one person a pin prick with a needle, they would cause much worse suffering to be generated by keeping us all trapped in a boring condition of life where we can only eat potatoes and jerk off into a tissue, so not giving this person a pin prick would be actually be the pro-suffering stance to take.
- The point is that the need for the pleasure should not exist in the first place.
Of course, once a sentient organism is unfortunate enough to already exist, they will have to obtain pleasure/relief in order to avoid being subjected to suffering.
- You must eat or you get hungry, so you eat.
- You must drink or you get thirsty, so you drink.
- You must defecate or you constipate, so you defecate.
- You must jerk off or you get tense, so you jerk off.
- You must socialize or you get lonely, so you socialize.
Use whatever example you want, you must obtain pleasure or you are subjected to suffering. Once you’re here (as a conscious organism), you are trapped on a treadmill with suffering on one side and relief on the other, and it works in such a way that suffering is always the direction that you’re being pulled into, so you always have to keep running towards pleasure in order to avoid the unpleasant fate of falling into the meatgrinder.
Once you are on this treadmill, i.e forced into existence by your procreators, of course any negative utilitarian/antifrustrationist/suffering-eliminationist would claim that it’s less bad for you to be as close to the relief area as possible, but that doesn’t mean that being in the relief area is less bad than not being trapped on the treadmill that constantly pulls you into the direction of suffering in the first place, having to chase pleasure in order to avoid suffering is quite a burden to impose on someone.
Of course, if I throw a child into the ocean, they might be less bad off keeping their head above water than to painfully drown, but that doesn’t mean they’re less bad off than not being thrown into the ocean in the first place. If I throw you into a hole filled with horse shit, you might be less bad off being able to climb to the surface of the hole to get a breath of fresh air than to sit in horse shit, but that doesn’t mean you’re less bad off than not being thrown into the hole in the first place.
- Pleasure can still be instrumentally valuable under suffering-focused ethics, it’s just that non-existent people or animals don’t need it.
I reject all kinds of authoritarian ideas that prevent pleasure, because they thereby cause suffering, because again, taking away pleasure from a sentient organism means that they will suffer.
I don’t support cutting off children’s foreskins if the supposed problems that foreskin poses like a lack of hygiene or STDs can also be otherwise solved by other means like soap and contraception, because having a foreskin might give them increased ability to feel sexual pleasure (keeping the glans from keratinizing and less sensitive to touch), and not having more sexual pleasure in your life means being more sexually frustrated, which is suffering again.
I don’t think it’s fair to ban drugs and prostitution just because bad things sometimes come from it (or rather are associated with it), because denying someone those freedoms causes a great decrease pleasure, which means that it’ll cause a great increase in suffering again, not being allowed to take drugs to deal with reality or being forced into sexlessless can be quite tormenting.
What makes idea of creating a new child so that that child can experience life’s pleasures so ridiculous though is the fact that if someone who will experience pleasure is never created in the first place, they won’t be trapped in some other place where they are missing that pleasure, they don’t exist, so who cares? Why should any risk be taken if the absence of that pleasure is not currently bothering the non-exister? They don’t exist, so who cares.
- So let’s pick a slightly different scenario.
Let’s say it’s not giving one person a pin prick in order to create a perfect world for people that already exist, let’s say I only have the perfect utopian equipment and technology at my disposal to cause pleasure on mars, but I still need to create an alien species to benefit from it.
In order to do that though, I’ll have to torture someone to death, then I can push the button to create the species that will then be put into the virtual reality scenario where they’ll be greatly pleasured.
At that point, I’d say it’s wrong, there’d be a disagreement between suffering minimizers and pleasure maximizers. In that scenario, there is no need for the pleasure, no one is suffering as a result of it not existing, because the creatures that will crave it don’t exist yet.
The aliens that currently don’t exist are not trapped in some kind of unborn purgatory, writhing in agony over not being put into meatsuits and then connected to the endless orgasm machine, so why torture someone, or even just give someone a pin prick with a needle to create those aliens in order to then connect them to the endless orgasm machine to give them pleasure they didn’t need?
They did not feel deprived of pleasure, so you’d be torturing someone to prevent no greater bad, all I’d be doing is torturing someone to create a problem, which is the need/want/desire for pleasure these aliens will be tormented by once they exist, it’s not like causing pain to heal an already existing problem like in the scenario where you have to give one person a pin prick to create a perfect utopian reality which will help already existing people escape boredom.
- Or just take a scenario where it’s also possible to have a ”kill everyone in an instant painlessly” button.
Give one person a pin prick to create a utopia for everyone, or just push a button that immediately painlessly kills everyone, then I’d also say push the ”kill everyone” button and there’d be a disagreement between suffering minimizers and pleasure maximizers.
Of course, if I push the button, we avoid the uncomfortable pin prick, we also don’t get the perfect utopia land, but that’ll be irrelevant because no one will exist to lament that they feel bored without the perfect utopia land, so win win situation.
It would be like giving one person a stabwound to give 100 people with cancer chemotherapy vs. pushing a button that will make these people’s cancer go away and make them immune to ever getting it again at any point.
Once the cancer is gone, the reason why anyone pursued chemotherapy is gone, so why stab this unfortunate person to give 100 people chemotherapy when I could just make them all immune to cancer by pushing a button?
Why give one person a pin prick to create a utopia which they only chase after because the alternative is suffering, when I could just push a button to kill everything and thereby extinguish the chance of any suffering ever happening again?
So in conclusion, under suffering-focused ethics, pleasure can still play a role as an instrument to the underlying goal of eradicating suffering. Taking away pleasure when it will result in suffering can in fact be a great problem, but what I’m saying is that there are no unborn children in an unborn purgatory suffering as a result of not receiving pleasure, and that there are likewise no dead people invisibly floating around as ghosts, horribly distressed about not experiencing pleasure.
Counterintuitive conclusions 