Ethical egoism is irrational.

With the topic of utilitarianism (consequence-concerned ethic) vs. deontology (strict rule- concerned ethic), I think there are primarily two common flawed objections to utilitarianism.

One has more to do with false threat detection, i.e where someone believes in their particular moral rule, but they fail to see that they only believe in that rule, because there is already an underlying goal of wanting to achieve better consequences (i.e suffering reduction).

Our goal is always suffering avoidance, but they fail to detect that this is the underlying motivation of their action and believe there’s something else to life, e.g. the American flag causes a reduction of suffering from loneliness in someone, eliciting feelings of patriotism and group membership, rather than to acknowledge that the real good is the elevation of their sensation state, the person now comes to the conclusion that the American flag is the good.

Now, they get more upset about it being burned than they would get upset about a fully sentient chimpanzee being burned alive, this is delusional behavior, they fail to acknowledge the value is in elevation of their sensation, from one negative to less negative, not in the flag itself.

For example, a delusional religious terrorist might say he cares more about following god’s orders than reducing suffering, that’d be an example of deontological rule rather than consequentialism.

But the point is that if you dig deep enough, chances are you’ll find that he only cares about following god’s orders because he believes it’ll be conducive to reducing suffering, i.e if I do the terrorist attack, I’ll go to heaven, if I don’t kill the faggots, they’ll infest society with their AIDS and rape everyone, so he’s a not a real deontologist, there is no real deontologist, so to speak, we are always just trying to run away from suffering.

Authoritarians and libertarians both have the same goal I could argue, authoritarians believe that society must be ordered to not become too chaotic, then ultimately lead to more suffering, libertarians want to maximize freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, that’s the same goal, they just have different ideas about what will achieve that goal.

Even if they proclaim to know what they are supporting is not conducive to reducing suffering, but it feels ”just wrong” to not do x, then following their ethic is still an attempt of suffering avoidance, feeling ”just wrong” is in and of itself also a form of suffering, which they are trying to correct for by doing what intuitively feels ”just right”.

But then there’s also the more egotistical, though delusional type of argumentation.

This is when someone openly declares that they only care about themselves, suffering in others is irrelevant. What is vital here is to find out why they ultimately try to avoid suffering, and then you can demonstrate an inconsistency in that type of thought pattern.

If suffering were only a problem because it happened to you in particular, then obviously you would also try to avoid pleasure, like getting an orgasm, because it’s in the same category logically speaking, i.e ”things that happen to you”. So if suffering is only a problem by virtue of happening to you, pleasure is equally a problem, because it also happens to you.

The fact of the matter is, you put your experience of suffering into the category ”worth preventing” based on something innate to those sensations, it’s a negative sensation, it does not make you feel better, that is why you try to avoid it, not because it happens to you in particular, you don’t try to avoid orgasms just because they happen to you in particular, so obviously that indicates strongly that it is about something more than it just happening to you.

If:

P1 – Suffering is worth preventing for you because it feels bad.

P2 – Suffering in other organisms also feels bad.

C – Suffering in other organisms is just as worth preventing.

Whereas if:

P1 – Suffering is only worth preventing because it happens to you in particular.

P2 – Pleasure also happens to you in particular, e.g. orgasms.

C – Pleasure and suffering are both equally worth preventing.

You put suffering into the ”worth preventing” category because of something innate to suffering, i.e because it feels bad, if you just avoided it because it happened to you, you would try to avoid pleasurable sensations just as much.

If suffering in meat suit A is worth preventing because it feels bad, then so is suffering in meat suit B worth preventing because it also feels just as bad, if suffering in meat suit A is only worth preventing because it happens in meat suit A, then so is pleasure in meat suit A also worth preventing because it happens in meat suit A.

Here we can use many different metaphors to demonstrate this point, let’s use watering plants, bringing out the trash and cleaning toilets.

If water from water bucket A should be used to water plants because it’s water, then so is water from water bucket B fair to use for watering plants because it’s also water, if water from water bucket A should only be used to water plants because it’s in water bucket A, then so would you be obligated to use battery acid to water plants if it were in water bucket A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the water bucket, not in which water bucket it is located.

If trash in trashbin A should be disposed of because it’s trash, then so should trash in trashbin B be disposed of because it’s also trash, if trash from trashbin A should only be disposed of because it sits in trashbin A, then so would you dispose of gold if you found it in trashbin A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the trashbin, not the trashbin in which it is sitting on.

If you’re a toilet cleaner and shit in toilet A is worth flushing down because it’s shit, then so is shit in toilet B worth flushing down because it’s also shit, if shit in toilet A is only worth flushing down because it sits in toilet A, then so would you flush your credit card down toilet A if it were to fall into toilet A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the toilet, the shit, not the toilet in which it is sitting in.

So we can do the same thing here as with any other scenario where someone says they value their particular rule over suffering, e.g. if they say breaking the law is wrong, ask if breaking the law would be wrong if it only lead to better consequences and never caused any suffering, in order to demonstrate that it’s not the breaking of the law itself that is bad, but suffering.

Same can be done here, if the egotistical psychopath would propose the rule ”suffering is bad if it happened to me, that’s why suffering is worth avoiding”, ask if pleasure is also worth avoiding by virtue of happening to them, obviously they don’t avoid sensations just because they happen to them, there is a clear subliminal understanding on their part that it’s suffering that is worth preventing, not every sensation that they experience is equally deemed worth avoiding – you avoid suffering, you seek pleasure, the relief of your suffering.

You are just one of many sensation containing toilets, if suffering is worth being flushed out of you because it’s something innate to suffering, how it feels that makes it worth being flushed away, rather than the fact that it happens to you, then obviously it is just as worth flushing away for everyone else, just like it’s about the content of the toilet, the shit.

If you shit in your toilet, and you say that is worth flushing down because it’s shit, then yes, obviously the obligation is just as loud and clear when it comes to any other toilet, shit in a different toilet still is shit, so the right thing to do here is to push the button as well, even if it’s a little more work, this is the obligation that logically follows.

Otherwise, you’re being contradictory, i.e shit is worth flushing down because it’s shit, but not in this toilet, suffering is worth preventing because it’s suffering, but not in this meat suit. That’s the wrongness, the falseness in that behavior, the different treatment of the same property.

Of course you’re biased towards yourself, you cannot directly experience someone else’s experience, only improve in your understanding that it is not in any way substantially different from your’s.

Different objects may cause different sensation states in different subjects, but the sensation is the same ultimately, i.e in you negative sensation might be caused by almonds, if you have an almond allergy, but in someone else it might be caused by peanuts, if they have a peanut allergy, but is the feeling really different?

No, you simply are able to notice your experience of suffering much more than anyone other particular organism’s experience of suffering, but ultimately the sensations are the exact same, if I save a cockroach from being stepped on, that’s as good as preventing my finger from being stepped on, if I save someone else from drowning, that’s as good as saving myself from drowning.

Take an example you are more disconnected from to see the absurdity to see value in preventing only your suffering, not suffering in general.

Let’s say we have two bugs, bug A and bug B, one of the two has to be squashed in order to prevent the entirety of all other organisms on planet earth from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity, squash bug A or bug B, the harm experienced by either will be the exact same, they have the same suffering capacity.

Which should you squash and what would be the rationale for favoring one bug over the other? You could say if we squash bug A it’s different because bug A will personally feel it, but if we squash bug B then bug B will personally feel it. True, but the feeling is exactly the same, so all you can really do is flip a coin here.

Let’s make it even more similar, let’s say we make an exact clone of you, exactly the same appearance and thought patterns, and we have to sacrifice one to prevent us all from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity. What’s the right answer here, should we take the clone because otherwise you’ll personally feel the suffering? Great, but then the clone will personally feel the suffering, and the suffering is the same – so what’s the difference?

You put yourself into the category ”worthy of protection from chainsaw in my anus” based on the characteristic ”sentience/consciousness”, so if you discover the existence of other sentient organisms around you that are obviously also in the same category of being sentient/conscious, they have to be put into the same category of ”worthy of protection from chainsaw in anus”, otherwise there is an error happening, it is false, a correctly functioning machine would now try to prevent as many chainsaws from going into anuses as possible.

In general, some idiots seem to believe that these types of excuses of just saying ”I’m selfish” are somehow more consistent and rational, they think they can just say ”I don’t care” in any ethical debate, and that means they are not contradicting themselves.

”I don’t care” is still a non-consistent philosophy and way of viewing reality.

If someone told you they were going to break into your house and rape you at knifepoint later on, and you then called the police, and the person then said ”but, I don’t care”, would you then abstain from calling the police, because if the perpetrator doesn’t care, you somehow wouldn’t care either?

It doesn’t matter if the perpetrator doesn’t care, their non-caring would still not deplete your caring about what will happen to you. So if you on the other hand, when you are in the position of the perpetrator, expect your victims to stop caring on the basis that you don’t care, you are contradicting yourself, because if you were in the position of the victim, the non-caring of the perpetrator would not deplete your caring either, you’d still want to be cared for even if no one else cared.

So if you say some stupid shit like ”pigs are gassed for bacon, whatever, I don’t care”, then you also have to accept being gassed for bacon as long as society said ”we don’t care”, but you wouldn’t, because again, deep down you recognize suffering itself to be the problem, deep down you argee that sentience/consciousness is the characteristic that demands care, if you can correct a negative condition, it’s good to do so, regardless of where it’s happening.

Saving your clone from being squashed is just as good as saving yourself from being squashed, and in terms of the property consciousness, we are all clones performing the same function, experiencing discomfort and comfort.

We all share the same motivation.

Something that inevitably comes up in most ethical discussions, especially when you point out to someone that they are supporting suffering, or that they are irrationally opposed to something that doesn’t result in suffering, is that they simply have a different ethic, so they can’t be criticized or held accountable for anything.

”But I simply value something other than suffering, so I don’t have to care about anything you say, everything is relative, everyone just has a different opinion, I don’t care about suffering, and I’m entitled to my opinion, so now I’m gonna gass some jews and you can’t stop me!”.

I think this intellectually lazy type of argumentation misses a very fundamental point about the behavior of sentient organisms – we all share the same goal of avoiding harm, pain, suffering, negative sensation and the rules we make are just extensions of that first fundamental interest in avoiding negative sensations.

A deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, who believes their particular moral rule/law to be conducive to the achievement of better consequences, i.e less suffering, if said deontologist did legitimately not believe the rule to be conducive to ultimately creating better consequences, they would not believe in their rule.

Take for example a religious terrorist, who believes he has to self-detonate in the middle of a gay pride parade, if you point out to someone like that that this is bad, because it will cause a lot of unnecessary (to prevent any greater sort of) suffering, he’ll likely say so what, suffering is not always bad or the main issue to be concerned with here, there are certain rules you just don’t break, and it’s simply against god’s rules to take a dick up your ass, full stop bro.

But that still doesn’t answer why he thinks he has to do the terrorist attack, a law/rule just doesn’t come out of nowhere, if you dig deep enough, chances are you’ll find that the terrorist is still motivated by a wrongly perceived threat of suffering.

He might think that if he doesn’t do the terrorist attack and eradicate the sinners, he’ll go to hell, which is a place of suffering, and if he does the terrorist attack, he’ll go to heaven, which is a place absent of all suffering. He might think that the sinners he’s about to attack are a threat of suffering, and if we accepted homosexuals, society would be infested with AIDS and rape.

So ultimately, he’s still acting based on (wrongly perceived) consequences, he’s not a real deontologist who believes in a moral rule for the sake of believing in said moral rule at all, he’s just a delusional consequentialist who made a false calculation about what will most efficiently eliminate suffering, because he believes in something unrealistic, a fable story with no evidence behind it and likely received wrong information about homosexuals his entire life.

Even if he would proclaim to be perfectly rational and wanting to kill the homosexuals because being gay is ”just wrong”, then he’s still motivated by suffering reduction, this feeling of ”just wrongness” is a form of suffering, and he tries to prevent it by doing what feels ”just right”.

Even if he’s just a sadistic sociopath who wants to cause suffering to others and uses his religion as an excuse for doing so, then he’s still motivated by the goal of suffering reduction, i.e he suffers from an urge to inflict suffering onto others for his pleasure, and the suffering of this urge is alleviated by inflicting suffering onto others, so then he’d still be motivated by the goal of reducing suffering, just also logically inconsistent in not thinking of suffering in the other organisms as just as worth preventing, because it’s the same thing – suffering.

It’d be like saying water from water bucket A should be used to water plants because it’s so perfectly wet and watery, but water from water bucket B should not be used to water plants, although it’s just as wet and watery. If suffering in meat suit A is worth preventing because it has the property ”it feels bad”, then so is suffering in meat suit B worth preventing, because it has the same property. If our terrorist thinks suffering is worth preventing when it happens to him because it feels bad, he should think the same way when it happens to everyone else, because it feels just as bad.

It’s bad when suffering is happening to you because suffering itself is bad, not because it’s happening to you in particular and you’re somehow more important than everyone else, if suffering were only bad when it happened to you, then so would pleasure be bad if it happened to you, because it’s in the same exact category – ”things that happen to you”.

If someone really believed that a rule had no utility, then they would not believe in said rule, we believe in rules because 1. they are or 2. we falsely believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way.

Pro-lifers, pro-choicers, authoritarians, libertarians, theists, antitheists all have the same goal, they all want to avoid suffering, it just happens to be the case that they all have different ideas about what will most efficiently achieve the goal of preventing more suffering in the grand scheme of things, authoritarians believe strict hierarchy will lead to a less chaotic society that will produce less suffering, libertarians believe in maximizing freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, the motivation is the same.

But once we’ve established that preventing suffering is the goal, it is possible to draw correct and incorrect conclusions about what will achieve the goal, and then we can definitively tell a pro-lifer that aborting a living, but non-sentient fetus doesn’t create any more suffering in the fetus than in living, but non-sentient vegetables when you chop them up and turn them into salad, their threat detection system is simply deficient, they just have to understand that if they were aborted, they would have never missed out on being alive from the unborn purgatory.

If I really abducted anyone of any religious or political orientation, locked them into my basement, tortured them for an extended period of time by putting their hands on the stove top until their hands are disfigured, beat them with a sledgehammer repeatedly, put nails up their asses, etc, and I made it crystal clear to them that this is for absolutely no compensation, no greater good or payment whatsoever for anyone at any point, they wouldn’t want that.

So to be clear, the game is not called ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for 5$ an hour to be donated to starving kids in Africa”, it’s just ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for no reason whatsoever”, they would universally try to escape, no doubt about it.

Unless they’re the one in a thousand extreme, Albert Fish-type masochists that get off on having nails shoved in their asses, in which case, there’d be a benefit and utility to be derived again – to reaching an orgasm, the relief of tension. So it’d still be an attempt to avoid suffering, no way around it.

So the point is, everyone acts based on suffering, we believe in rules because we believe these rules to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering, if we didn’t believe that to be the case, we wouldn’t believe in them anymore, rules are a mere result of consequences, an attempt at avoiding harms/pains/sufferings. No consequences – no need for rules.

And because thinking and calculating utility of actions requires more brain power than sticking to a simplistic, dogmatic rule, many stick to a dogmatic rule, going against the actual goal without noticing it in due time, e.g.

The pro-lifer may observe that generally taking human life results in suffering, so they’re against taking human life, even when it causes no suffering in a non-sentient fetus.

The jew-hider may observe that lying generally results in suffering, so they’re telling the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.

The conservative police officer may observe that breaking the law often results in suffering, so he thinks he’d doing something good by harassing someone for smoking marijuana, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.

It is delusional behavior. Imagine a hypothetical alien species that could also feel pain, and what they had to do in order to alleviate pain and achieve pleasure, relief, alleviation is wank their left tentacle, every action that they take could be boiled down to the masturbation of a left tentacle somewhere and somehow, or ultimately even, just the reduction of suffering as well of course, but let’s say jerking the left tentacle is instrumental to achieving that – without exception.

These aliens would also self-unawarely say things like:

”I don’t only want to jerk off my left tentacle, you think I’m a mere pain and pleasure vessel??? You vulgar idiot, I’m but a very sophisticated alien, I also value watching plasma TV, taking a great long walk on the beach and buying a great, high quality block of swiss cheese. I have civilization, I have class. You think I’m just some dumb animal!?”.

But then when you observe this creature, all that it is doing is wanking its left tentacle in front of the plasma TV, digging a hole at the beach to stick their left tentacle in, and the swiss cheese, it also just sticks its left tentacle in its holes to shoot its alien jizz inside it.

The conclusion is obvious – these aliens are completely deluded about what the underlying motivation of their actions is, they have deluded themselves into believing that all sorts of different things have value, when the only value is in the experience itself, they’re just trying to jerk off and overcomplicating it.

And this is exactly how humans behave, they’re for some reason desperate to believe they’re not just simplistic organisms feeling pain, trying to avoid feeling pain, they are somehow much more sophisticated for valuing all sorts of different non-sense that the other primitive animals can’t understand, when in reality, they only value it because it in some way helps or they believe that it helps to achieve the goal of reducing pain.

What is value without suffering even supposed to mean?

What is ”I value x” even supposed to mean? When I say, ”I value eating potatoes” for example, all that that really means is that for some reason, eating potatoes reduces some sort of condition of suffering in me, maybe it is hunger, maybe it is appetite out of boredom, and eating the potato is conducive to reducing this condition of suffering, but obviously the potato itself is not valuable, the potato cannot create value as it simply doesn’t have a brain that can produce a sentient experience like I do, the good is the reduction of my suffering, not the potato itself.

I value the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I need/want/desire the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I have a personal preference for the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

The objects themselves have no value, so to speak. An almong is neither good or bad, it might produce negative sensations in someone with an almond allergy, and in someone without an almond allergy but with a peanut allergy, almonds might cause pleasure, relief of suffering, whereas peanuts would cause the negative sensations, but the negative sensation is the same, it’s negative. So these objects, almonds and peanuts are neither good or bad, they only have extrinsic value to something else, i.e our experience, our experience is the only real value event happening.

The potato has no real value.
The almond has no real value.
The garbage truck has no real value.
The lamborghini has no real value.
The money has no real value.
Gold has no real value.
Platinum has no real value.

They only have extrinsic value to your experience, no real value. So if someone says something like ”you might value reducing animal suffering, but I value eating bacon much more!” – we can analyze and point out their mistake.

They only value eating bacon because eating bacon reduces the suffering of an urge to eat bacon inside them, the bacon itself is not a good because it doesn’t have a brain that can produce sensations with labels like good and bad, it’s the reduction of their suffering from an urge to eat it that is the real good, but if the reduction of the suffering itself is the good, and buying bacon obviously causes more suffering to pigs than it causes reduction in suffering in yourself, then obviously the better option for you would be to stop buying it to reduce even more suffering.

In conclusion, as stated before, a deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, no one acts based on rules alone, rules are a result of the existence of consequences, if the problem of suffering did not exist, we wouldn’t have to make rules to mitigate against it and prevent it from happening.

If you have some kind of strict moral rule, like ”never fuck a corpse”, chances are you only believe in that rule because you believe the fucking of corpses to result in harm somewhere along the way, imagining someone fucking your dead mother right in front of you or something, then feeling offended by witnessing that incident, you don’t just believe it to be ”just wrong” without perceiving a threat to welfare first to motivate this feeling of ”just-wrongness”.

Things can be ethically wrong only according to a certain set of rules, and the only reason why rules are made is because there are consequences – suffering, and that is why we use the rules as a tool to try to avoid it, if the rule doesn’t serve that purpose anymore, then the rule is wrong, it fails to achieve the only pre-established purpose that it could possibly ever have.

That’s why it’s absurd when someone uses whatever right or rule they established as an excuse to not care about the harm they cause to others – ”it’s legal to rape my wife so it’s no problem”.

The reason why we crave laws in the first place is because suffering exists, so we make laws to protect ourselves and mitigate against it, if the law does not even achieve that goal though, then it’s essentially worthless, it doesn’t achieve the only goal that a sentient organism is even capable of having anymore.

Non-sentient bacteria have no laws but that is also completely irrelevant, because bacteria is not sentient, so the absence of laws and rights in a culture of bacteria not to be cannibalized by another bacteria is not a problem. The reduction of suffering is good, not the law itself.

Suffering, badness itself is the only bad thing in the universe, sentient experience is the only value creating thing in the entire universe, the objects, rights and entitlements on a piece of paper by themselves have no value, you eat the chocolate cake because it reduces your suffering, your urge to eat it, not because the chocolate cake itself is somehow a good, because it doesn’t have a brain.

If all sentient organisms went extinct tomorrow, chocolate cake would have absolutely zero (extrinsic) value, all chocolate cake can be liquidated forever, it would not matter, thinking otherwise would be completely delusional.

There is no goal for any sentient organism on this planet except to avoid harm, and if it no longer wants to avoid harm, it is no longer a sentient organism. You don’t have a different opinion at the core than any other organism, the nature of our disagreement lies in having different strategies to go on about our established goal of preventing suffering, and in this game, it is possible to judge your actions as correct or incorrect, you are bound by it, there is no way for you to escape the game.

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.

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

Utilitarianism:

Utilitarianism is a family of consequentialist ethical theories that promotes actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the majority of a population.^[1] Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is to in some sense maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Deontology:

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, “obligation, duty”) is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action.^[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

I would argue all deontology is ultimately a waste of time because if you keep questioning long enough, the motivation for the deontology/rights based position is always of an inherently consequentialist nature to begin with.

No deontologist can explain why they ultimately care about upholding any rule without having to appeal to the sensations guiding our behavior: suffering and pleasure.

Don’t murder, murder is bad!

Ok, why is murder bad?

Because it’s against the law!

Ok, and why is that bad?

Because it destabilizes our society!

Ok, and why is that bad?

At some point, you’ll have to admit:

because it simply results in suffering – negative sensation.

There is no other way to explain why something is bad. What is bad is simply bad sensation itself, there’s no great way to describe it any other way, if something is bad, then it’s better for it not to exist, unless it prevents an even more intense bad.

We value different things and ideas, but only because they are or we believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way. If you’re sentient, you try to avoid bad, if you don’t avoid bad anymore, you’re no longer sentient.

You value the chocolate cake you say. Fine, but why? Would you still value the chocolate cake if whenever you ate it, you would feel like someone just stuck a knife in your eye?

We make rules to avoid suffering, we don’t avoid suffering to avoid breaking rules.

If consequences didn’t exist, we wouldn’t make rules to mitigate against them, the reason why some rules are then good is simply because they have utility, if they are no longer useful, the rules become worthless, rules are a result of the existence of consequences. There are no real deontologists, just delusional consequentialists.

Suffering is always bad and the core motivator of all our actions, it’s universally the goal of every sentient organism to avoid suffering.

Sometimes, you may be forced to decide between a lesser suffering and a greater suffering, but that doesn’t make the experience desirable, e.g. the vaccination is painful, but dying of a disease is worse, so you get the injection even if the needle hurts. This doesn’t mean suffering can be good, just that it is the lesser of two sufferings, two evils in this case. If you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves intentionally aren’t enjoying pain, they are just using the pain to eliminate a greater pain. A masochist is already sexually frustrated when inflicting pain on himself, a depressed person is already in emotional turmoil when cutting their arm, if suffering didn’t motivate them, they wouldn’t hurt themselves to blend it out with another suffering.

If I were a magician and could make it so that someone who has absolutely zero masochistic desires right now won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out, they wouldn’t want me to do that (unless they already had a desire to obtain such a desire they had to fulfill to avoid more suffering, of course), you’d rather be able to get an orgasm without having to inflict intense, excruciating pain onto yourself.

Badness really exists, it’s a sensation and not only up to one’s personal interpretation, if a gang rape is taking place in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it still generates badness in the rape victim, no one has to point their finger at it and deem it bad first for negative sensations to start being generated in the rape victim, likewise, the negative sensations do not become positive by you randomly walking by, deeming it a good event and starting to jerk off to it.

That is what badness is, it is produced in a brain, and that brain is real, and the sensation is really being generated by it, and that is not just in someone’s opinion. You may not be able to put the badness in a petri dish and analyze it in a laboratory, but it can be experienced.

It may be produced by different objects in different subjects, but the sensation is the same, i.e the almond itself isn’t good or bad, it generates negative or positive sensation in the subject, in someone with an almond allergy, it generates a negative reaction, but the sensation itself is of negative quality, and in someone else with a peanut allergy it’s caused by peanuts, but the experience is equally bad, and the peanut, just like the almond, is neither good or bad by itself.

With that knowledge, we can in theory basically determine what the best and worst outcome would be in all situations objectively. I cannot necessarily compel someone to stop doing something bad, but it remains a fact that what they are doing leads to the production of badness, and that is not just so in my opinion.

”Anally raping an infant with a jackhammer results in badness” is an objectively correct statement to make.

It may also be a correct statement that stopping said rapist from engaging in this activity of anally raping infants with jackhammers will generate negative sensations in him too, sexual frustration, but if it’s a simple either or question, then chances are very likely that not raping is a better option than raping, being forced to not rape an infant with a jackhammer very likely causes less suffering than being raped.

Or, the infant rapist could demonstrate evidence to the contrary, let’s say hypothetically satan existed and said that if our infant rapist in question doesn’t rape this one infant with a jackhammer, then 10.000 other infants will get raped with a jackhammer in hell and there is absolutely no other way to prevent it, then in that case anally raping one infant with a jackhammer would lead to the better outcome indeed.

Humans have plethora of false beliefs about where badness is located and where badness is not located, that is what essentially makes up all deontology, but that is all it is, a false belief about where badness is manifested, because it’s obviously easier to just think one holy moral standard saves everything than to painfully evaluate the utility of each action in each situation, it requires more analytical thought processes.

All sentient organisms share the same goal, it is universal that they try to avoid badness. There is no difference of opinion, they simply all tend to have various false beliefs about where it is and where it is not. We are all enslaved, getting whipped, punished with suffering, it’s just that sometimes different tasks have to be done to avoid suffering, and then we often generalize and falsely to come to the conclusion that it’s only one specific moral standard, that’s the deontologist mindset.

We believe in things because they either help us to reduce our suffering, or we’re under the delusion that they do, as in, a religious person believes in following god because they believe we’ll go to heaven for it which liberates them from all suffering or be rewarded for it in some other way, libertarians want freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, authoritarians want the law to never be broken because they believe it’ll result in a chaotic society with more suffering.

A girl got raped by a man in a position of authority over her once, now she associates authority with suffering, and abolition of authority with abolition of suffering, even when she sees a consensual relationship between two people where one has more power than the other, she falsely assumes a brutal rape is taking place.

Her little brother saw the police arrest the rapist, so now he associates law with reduction of suffering, becomes a police officer and violently harasses people for minor crimes that don’t really harm anyone like smoking a joint and pissing against a tree in public because law=always good! Law saved my sister after all!

They all believe in their specific rules because they believe it is conducive to the goal of reducing suffering in some way, but if I told anyone that I’m just going to push their hand onto the stove top for an extended period of time for no financial or other benefit of their’s or anyone else’s, they wouldn’t want that, unless they’re the unfortunate ones in a 1000 that can only have an orgasm if they burn their hand on the stove top, in which case there’d be a benefit again, the orgasm.

The avoidance of the suffering is ultimately the only goal, it’s just that because it’s simple, sometimes humans make strict rules out of intellectual laziness to not have to evaluate the utility of every action in each situation, like ”don’t lie” and then wrongly believe they did something good when they told the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement.

Even if in a situation where you’d have to lie to save us all from going to hell for all eternity, and you didn’t lie, you’d still be acting as a consequentialist. For some reason, lying makes you hugely uncomfortable, so by resorting to your ”never lie” deontology, you are preventing your discomfort of coming to terms with a utilitarian solution.

Deontology is an intuitive, rather than strictly analytical way of processing the situation. Take the typical trolley problem for instance, two individuals tied to the left track, one to the right, the trolley is rolling down the left track, you can pull a lever to switch to the right track and hit the one instead of the two.

Because generally you learned that taking away someone’s right to life will result in suffering, you may shudder at the thought and say it’s bad to pull the lever, but the only reason why taking someone’s right to life away could be bad is obviously because it could result in suffering, badness, otherwise it couldn’t possibly be it.

No one gives a shit about the absence of a right to life in a culture of bacteria because bacteria has no suffering-capacity, so unless you’re actually psychotic enough to think bacteria is sentient, you wouldn’t worry about a bacteria being eaten by another, having its life destroyed.

In this situation, not taking the person’s right to life away will result in more suffering though, so obviously it’s better to do it, less badness is better than more badness.

It doesn’t take as much cognitive effort as to evaluate in detail to adhere to a strict law based, dogmatic morality, that’s all, but with deontology you end up with wrong calculations about how to avoid the greatest amount of harm all the time.

Sometimes, you may be offended by the utilitarian calculation, but that does not prove it to be wrong. For example, it’s a fact that some rapes in theory do not cause harm, we could hypothetically make up a case where a rape is not bad.

Let’s say:

The person consented to being anesthethized and sedated before a surgery.

They are sufficiently unconscious.

The doctor performing the rape has a micropenis.

We are not talking about the act of legalizing this act of rape, just the act itself.

This doctor is not some psychopath who would rape anyone that could notice it.

Then in that case, that rape is pretty much harmless, it doesn’t produce any badness.

You might be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful, but are you by being offended by the fact that that rape is harmless proving it to be harmful?

No, you are not, you are just proving yourself to be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful. That is all, doesn’t mean that the calculation ”this rape does not generate harm in the raped person” is somehow incorrect, just that you are offended by this fact.

I would argue it cannot even be called rape anymore, just giving it the benefit of the doubt. This is because rape implies a violation of desire not to engage in the proposed sex act, if that desire is in that moment not even being generated by a consciousness by a brain, then it cannot be violated because it is not currently even being generated anymore. If rape is just defined as absence of consent rather than direct violation of consent, it would also be rape to fuck a sex doll.

So whenever the calculation makes you uncomfortable like that, you may feel the urge to resort to deontology again and say:

”But it’s still bad to rape in that case because you shouldn’t exploit someone for your own selfish pleasure!”

But then inevitably, if I ask you again why it is bad to exploit someone for your pleasure, you will either be able to demonstrate that it generates bad sensations in the person or you will not be able to do so, and if you are not able to do so, then it is objectively incorrect to claim that it is inherently bad to rape them.

Rape, like anything, is bad because it causes suffering. If rape were something that did not cause suffering, then rape would not be a problem. Reality and its value facts exist regardless of your opinion on it, if something does not cause suffering, badness, is therefore not bad, and you say:

”To me it’s still bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still doesn’t generate negative sensations where you located them (only in you, because your threat detection is working wrongly). And likewise if something does cause suffering, badness, is therefore bad, and you say:

”To me personally it’s not bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still generates negative sensations in the victim of the act we are discussing.

”But what if I think suffering is only bad if it happens to me but I don’t care about the suffering of others?”

Then you are being irrational, suffering is not only bad when it happens to you, if negative sensations were only negative because they happen to you, then it would also be bad if pleasure happened to you, by virtue of it happening to you.

You try to avoid it because it’s bad, that is what qualifies it as worth preventing, so if harm happens to someone else, you are logically inconsistent in not thinking of it as just as worth preventing, if you only thought it is worth preventing because harm is happening to you, you’d try to avoid the pleasant orgasm as well, because it’s in the same category – ”things that happen to you”.

Suffering in meat suit A is bad and so is suffering in meat suit b, just like trash in trashbin A is trashy and so is trash in trashbin B.

It’s like you’re a toilet cleaner and the argument is that when you see excrement in toilet A, you flush it down because it is so shitty, so you press the button. If that is the reason why it’s worthy of being flushed down the toilet though, why shit is being put into the category ”worthy of being flushed down”, then obviously it’s just as worthy of being flushed down when you see excrement in toilet B, because it is also shitty – same category.

If you see excrement in toilet B and suddenly say ”no, that isn’t real shit, or even if, somehow I shouldn’t flush it down like in toilet A, I should just let it sit there”, you’re irrational.

If you want to say that excrement in toilet A is only worthy of being flushed down because it sits in toilet A (the ”suffering only matters because it happens to me”– approach), then you would flush down your credit card, one billion dollar lottery ticket and jewelry if it fell into toilet A too, but you’re saying it’s worthy flushing shit down toilet A because it is shit, so if shit is in toilet B, it is just as worthy of being flushed down. It’s about the content of the toilet, not about in which toilet it’s sitting in.

”You” are just one of many qualia containing toilets, the product, which is suffering, is the same. If suffering is worthy of prevention when it happens because it feels bad, then it’s just as worthy of prevention when it happens to anyone else, because it feels the same way, i.e bad.

When suffering is in a different vessel, it is bad for the exact same reason why it is bad when it happens in the ”you” vessel, the sensation itself is negative, so it’s going to be negative regardless of where we put it in. To explain why exactly this bad sensation is created we’d have to go deeper into biology, but the quality of the sensation simply remains negative and you cannot change it, whether it happens in vessel A or vessel B is irrelevant to that fact.

Take an example you are more disconnected from to see the absurdity to see value in preventing only your suffering, not suffering in general.

Let’s say we have two bugs, bug A and bug B, one of the two has to be squashed in order to prevent the entirety of all other organisms on planet earth from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity, squash bug A or bug B, the harm experienced by either will be roughly the same, they have the same suffering capacity.

Which should you squash and what would be the rationale for favoring one bug over the other? You could say if we squash bug A it’s different because bug A will personally feel it, but if we squash bug B then bug B will personally feel it, but the feeling it the same, so what’s the difference? All you can really do is flip a coin here.

A negative sensation is negative no matter where it is manifested and the motivator of all our actions, we make rules because they help us to or we believe they’ll help us to reduce our suffering, and if we label the sensation as worth preventing when it happens to us because it’s bad, then it’s logically inconsistent to not see it as just as worth preventing when it happens to anyone else.

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