Tag: hypotheticals

The benevolent world destroyer objection to suffering-focused ethics.

A common objection to the view that we should put the elimination of harm/suffering above everything else in ethics is that if that’s the only thing that matters, there would be no problem with someone pushing a button that would painlessly kill all life in an instant, thus also taking away all happiness and good moments in life we could experience.

I would argue against that and say that ultimately the view that such a button shouldn’t be pressed is far more absurd, it depends on why we think life or happiness are important priorities in the first place. Is happiness really important if the possibility of unhappiness does not exist?

I think that as soon as sentient organisms exist, they are trapped in a system of having to constantly chase the next pleasure rush in order to avoid suffering, kind of imagining it as a treadmill with suffering always behind you and pleasure/relief in front of you. You have to keep running or you will be pulled into suffering by the treadmill, and in case you reach pleasure, you’ll also either be pulled back into suffering soon enough or the treadmill extends and now there’s pleasure in front of you again, while the pleasure you just obtained will soon crumble and convert into suffering.

This is a metaphor for sentient life at its core being a game of having to fulfill your needs/wants/desires or being tormented. Your neediness is always guaranteed, the fulfillment of your needs is not. We try to fulfill our needs our entire lives, and when we fulfill them, either new sets of needs pop up (like appetite after hunger having been satiated) or the old needs simply come back if you wait long enough (you’re hungry again).

If hypothetically I could push this button that would immediately just make everyone fall asleep forever or evaporate them painlessly in one second, of course all fulfillment would be gone…but all unfulfilled need would also be gone. So is it a problem for there to be no fulfillment of need when there is no need to fulfill?

If we had two planets, one filled with a population of miserable aliens and the other one is just empty of conscious life, and I could push a button that would give the miserable aliens the resources needed to satisfy them or I could push a button that puts a satisfied population (of more aliens than on the other planet) on planet B but leave the aliens on the other planet miserable and tormented, would it really be an important priority to create a new population of satisfied aliens over eradicating the already existing dissatisfaction on the other planet?

That is what sounds absurd to me much more than world destruction, caring about need fulfillment when there are no unfulfilled needs, that’s like caring about receiving a bandaid when you don’t even have a wound, as in, you don’t have the problem (suffering) but for some reason you claim you need the solution to it (pleasure).

  • Let’s say there were a pill that could make you both immune to cancer and chemotherapy, wouldn’t you take it?

This is another example of problem (cancer) and solution (chemotherapy). If cancer exists, of course it can be important to have the option of chemotherapy. But if you could hypothetically take a pill that made you completely immune to ever getting cancer, but it also made you immune to cancer treatment, would you not take this pill because it makes you immune to cancer treatment?

I think that would be absurd, just like caring about the existence of happiness on planet earth even if suffering didn’t exist anymore. Of course, as a sentient organism already trapped in a system of having to chase pleasure in order to avoid being subjected to torture, I think it’s very important that I obtain my pleasures, but I don’t look at a different planet like mars and bemoan that there are no martians having an orgasm.

  • Death is not a harm, it is the end of harm.

I think society has a false idea here of what death entails, they see it as a harm, when in reality, it is ultimately just putting a stop to the ability to be harmed. Of course, in the process of being killed, you can lose pleasure and thereby be pushed into the suffering area, but when you don’t exist, there is no suffering as a result of there being no pleasure, you just no longer have the ability to be harmed or pleasured anymore.

Death can only be extrinsically harmful, intrinsically it is harmless.

The ”act” of being dead is essentially exactly the same thing you have done for a great period of time before you existed, do you think of that as a horrific tragedy? You didn’t feel hunger or appetite in the year 1200 because you didn’t exist, so the fact that you didn’t enjoy your favorite foods wasn’t a problem, and once you’re dead, you also won’t feel hunger or appetite, so the fact that you won’t enjoy your favorite foods won’t be a problem.

When someone is killed, family members and friends might grieve, if we legalized this act, people would be scared about being killed before it happens to them, perhaps you prevent a productive person from preventing more suffering in others (like a scientist who is working on the cure for cancer for example), you might cause pain to the person in the process of killing them.

But in and of itself there is no harm, particularly not in the unrealistic world exploder/destroyer example, where it is specified that no one would feel any pain, and clearly if no sentient life exists after that, then there would be no one to grieve that we all just died, and there are no more problems to solve, so great activists and scientists to cure us of our ills would no longer be needed, all ills are already cured because we’re all dead.

Taking all of that into account, I’d say it’d be absurd to not press such a button, it’d be the perfect way to solve all problems, including the problem of even needing/wanting life and happiness. Every want problem, including the want to see life flourish in the future is a problem that is solved by simply not existing. We might be inclined to think it is a big deal, but we won’t when we don’t exist.

Of course, once you’re already here, the deal is clear, you’ll have to fulfill your needs or you’ll be tormented, so we tend to think that fulfillment is really important, that’s all we intuitively know to be true – get more pleasure out of life or suffer. So if we’re only able to imagine this state of having a constant wound (suffering/desire) to fix, we think that the absence of bandaids (pleasure/desire fulfillment) would be a problem, when in reality this is about taking both the wound and the bandaid away, not only the bandaid, leaving the wound.

It could be analogized to an addict who doesn’t understand the idea of treating their addiction anymore, they can only think of it as ”they want to take away my drugs and leave me tormented”, but even treating a drug addict’s craving is not as harmless as pressing the world exploder button, it is in fact much more harmful, because the addict can still have remaining cravings for the pleasure given by the drug after being treated, it’s still possible for some feelings of deprivation to remain.

When you push the ”kill everything” button on the other hand, you have truly killed all craving, you have extinguished all addiction, to be scared of that scenario is literally to be scared of nothing.

The pin prick objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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.