Negative Utilitarianism Sunday, Mar 23 2008
philosophy 6:15 pm
The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.
Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity’s empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.
Hah! Now I’ll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don’t you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I’m not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.
If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
How is killing not harmful? It seems like the ultimate harm to me.
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 pm
“Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero.”
There are likely large numbers of other planets containing sentient life (a large fraction of which is probably low-level). Humans might be able to engage in a “cosmic rescue mission” to improve (or exterminate) those lives:
http://www.hedweb.com/object32.htm
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
David Pearce (hedonistic imperative) had a piece about this, “The pinprick argument”.
http://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html
“A counterintuitive consequence of negative utilitarianism (NU) is that it would seem to entail destroying the world rather than permitting its miseries to continue. If the destruction could be accomplished painlessly, then a negative utilitarian is logically compelled to accept this consequence.”
He argues against it:
“However, planning and implementing the extinction of all sentient life couldn’t be undertaken painlessly. Even contemplating such an enterprise would provoke distress.”
I think from my own perspective, being able to live a euphoric blissful existence is preferable to non-existence. I think we should do all we can to eliminate mental/physical human and animal (maybe even insect?) suffering. However, my own views may be a tad abnormal.
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Possible solution: Simply consider classical utilitarianism; do the most good for the greatest number, except give priority to those suffering first rather than those just not experiencing complete happiness. So this system would consider those experiencing the most negative qualia the top priority to treat, and subsequently those experiencing the least positive qualia. This philosophy would consider killing all humans a violation of its goals, because it may remove suffering, but would eliminate the possibility of positive qualia.
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Pearce’s argument is weak: while pain might be inflicted in the process of exterminating life, it can be made very brief, and easily result in a net reduction of pain.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
The premise is severely flawed. We have some idea of what “being tortured for a day” means, and can easily imagine it (not to mention we associate it with life long damage that has to be neglected for a fair utilitarian comparison), so it seems more visceral and more motivating by far than the entirely abstract “engage in your favorite activity for a day”. Change the latter to “a day of solid peak experience” and it’s still too vague. Humans saturate. We suffer from diminishing returns. We can’t even imagine a day of truly peak experience. OK then, lets lower the bar. Tortured for ten seconds or ten seconds of truly peak experience. Maybe an example, say ten seconds drinking water when you had been dying of thirst, ten seconds after discovering that your child actually survived the accident, or ten seconds during which the answer to some question you had been working on for years finally comes together. Hell, people go through weeks of mild torture, say, climbing Everest, for FAR less. There are jokes I have heard that I would unhesitatingly consider to be fair trades for a few seconds of torture.
Interestingly, smarter people seem more inclined than less smart people to over rate suffering relative to joy. I wonder why that is.
March 24th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Michael: Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?
I have one. I think that the best way to influence powerful, intelligent people into not executing the negative utilitarian program is to come up with a better philosophy of meaning and purpose in life; that is a better theory of ethics. This is something I’m working on.
This tactic also works to curb the world’s addiction to religion: a sensible realist theory of ethics would pull away the last reason intelligent people have to follow Christianity, Islam or any of the other silly religions that people use to make themselves feel better.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:51 am
One possible solution is to admit that what defines “utility” is absolutely arbitrary. Much of these discussions on utilitarianism seem to imply that there is a universal absolute “peak”. Remember — as touched on by Michael Vassar, we’re talking about qualia here.
That makes any and all discussion of the ‘best’ solution being the extermination of the race rather absolutely arbitrary. What if, for someone, the highest possible suffering would be non-existence? Extermination is then hardly a positive experience for such an individual. Extrapolate from that hyperbolistic hypothesis as you will.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:45 am
What Ben, Jake, and Vassar said.
Interestingly, smarter people seem more inclined than less smart people to over rate suffering relative to joy. I wonder why that is.
- Smarter people may suffer more, and so rationalize it more.
- Smarter people are just better at rationalizing.
- The image of the tortured artist/unhappy Socrates vs. happy pig is widely reinforced.
- Counterintuitive opinions signal intelligence.
I suppose fighting these ideas is one way to avoid someone mercy-killing humanity, but general strategies to prevent bad people from taking over the world are probably a better use of effort than anything specific to this scenario.
March 24th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Here is a nasty but relevant thought-experiment.
Let’s say I am promised aeons of superhappiness. The “only” price that must be paid is that you are to be tortured for 70 years.
If I were a classical utilitarian, then I should say yes. Compared to millions of years of pleasure beyond my wildest imagination, your comparatively short lifetime of torture is morally negligible.
I am a negative utilitarian; so I would say no. Am I being too morally squeamish? In declining the offer, am I overrating the moral significance of suffering compared to joy? One common reaction expressed by victims of extreme pain is to say they couldn’t conceive anything could be so bad. This response casts doubt on our intuition that we have any idea of what being tortured for even a day actually means. On the other hand, the classical utilitarian might reply that we can’t presently conceive how aeons of extreme bliss could feel so good. So inconceivability cuts both ways.
As it happens, I (tentatively) predict that aeons of superhappiness lie ahead for intelligent life in the universe - superhappiness far richer and far more extensive than the few hundred million years of Darwinian suffering which preceded it. [http://www.superhappiness.com]. But I don’t think, say, Auschwitz is a price morally worth paying for such posthuman paradise. So in one sense, I’d echo Benatar: i.e. Better Never To Have Been [ http://www.abolitionist.com/anti-natalism.html ]
The thought-experiment above sounds fanciful. But if you accept Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument [http://www.simulation-argument] - to be carefully distinguished from the Simulation Hypothesis - there is a non-negligible possibility that we are ourselves living in a Simulation. The motives of our hypothetical Simulators may be inscrutable to us. Yet in theory they might be classical utilitarians who find it’s computationally cheap to churn out legions of ancestor-simulations. If they are classical utilitarians who endorse the moral symmetry of pain and pleasure, then maybe they even feel morally obliged to proliferate ancestor-simulations - assuming billions of years of posthuman superhappiness is the ultimate outcome.
For technical reasons, I think we are living in basement reality. After we have got rid of suffering, I can’t imagine we will ever recreate it - whether in the guise of ancestor simulations or otherwise. As it stands here, however, this is just a statement of personal belief.
March 24th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Personally, I’ve never experienced any pleasure that would rival, second for second, ten seconds of really bad torture. Per second, my worst experiences have been far worse than my best experiences have been good. Differences in the duration of experience could make for this, but they would be pretty asymmetric: e.g., five minutes of absolutely peak experience to equal ten seconds of really bad torture.
March 24th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Compared to millions of years of pleasure beyond my wildest imagination, your comparatively short lifetime of torture is morally negligible.
I am a negative utilitarian; so I would say no. Am I being too morally squeamish? In declining the offer, am I overrating the moral significance of suffering compared to joy?
You could just be refusing to impose a severe harm on someone else to benefit yourself, which could very well make utilitarian sense in a realistic situation (because of not wanting to establish a precedent for torture, or just because you couldn’t live with yourself). A better question might be, would you accept 70 years of torture yourself, with the (extremely unrealistic) stipulation that you wouldn’t be permanently damaged, for a million years of bliss? I think I would.
If they are classical utilitarians who endorse the moral symmetry of pain and pleasure, then maybe they even feel morally obliged to proliferate ancestor-simulations - assuming billions of years of posthuman superhappiness is the ultimate outcome.
Even a classical utilitarian should find this inexcusable. Surely there are much better ways to produce superhappiness.
March 24th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I don’t think anyone would be surprised that *I* would think the project of fairly distributing power more evenly to people, and away from privileged minorities (or even majorities) jsut serves as the basis for progressive politics, even outside the context of emerging technologies.
What surprises me is how little this seems to be recognized by other considering emerging tech.
March 24th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
To answer the question, then yes! There are //all kinds// of progressive strategies for distributing power (but I repeat myself), improving accountability, equalizing and equitizing political power, wealth, education, etc.
You name it, creative people have things to suggest. Sometimes, they can be implemented, sometimes not so much. But they’re most definitely out there.
March 24th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Nato,
This is difficult because capitalism is more popular than socialism. People just don’t like having their wealth taken away from them and redistributed. We can distribute power somewhat evenly, but there is a limit.
Technologists and futurists aren’t going to wholeheartedly embrace socialism, ever. So we have to recognize that and work with it in mind.
I advocate improving accountability, equalizing and equitizing political power, wealth, education, etc., but realize there are limits to how much people want to be homogenized.
- Michael “center left according to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz” Anissimov
March 24th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Nick: “A better question might be, would you accept 70 years of torture yourself, with the (extremely unrealistic) stipulation that you wouldn’t be permanently damaged, for a million years of bliss? I think I would.”
I think it unlikely that anyone would make that decision given a real sampling of the two options.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
David Pearce’s comment is characteristically lucid and thought-provoking. It seems to me, however, that what he says rests on a conflation between suffering as such and particularly intense forms of it. At best, his argument would show that there is a moral asymmetry between intense suffering and other forms of experience. It wouldn’t vindicate the view that there is a fundamental moral difference between pleasure and pain, as he claims elsewhere.
Now it might be replied that this is, at most, a minor slip on Dave’s part, and that when confronted with this objection he could easily restate his views accordingly. “Fine, I don’t claim that suffering is always more evil that pleasure is good; I rather claim that this is true only for pains of certain intensities.” But I think that, as restated, the view is much less plausible, since it places the morally relevant boundary not at the natural point between pleasure and pain, but at some arbitrary point in the continuum of painful experience.
I Dave’s defense, though, I should say that his views reflect a purity of character that staunch classical utilitarians like me are to some extent devoid of. Yes, Dave is mistaken, whereas I am not: classical rather than negative utilitarianism is the true moral theory. But the reason I can believe the truth is that I lack the degree of empathy that has caused Dave to believe a falsehood.
March 25th, 2008 at 6:30 am
No Pablo. You are being too nice to Dave et al. I’m not convinced that classical utilitarianism is “true”, but it’s totally clear to me that it demonstrates more empathy than negative utilitarianism. What it doesn’t display is more risk aversion and preference for equality of the precise sort that we know ourselves to have evolved for perfectly predictable reasons. It also displays a framing effect. Phrase the question slightly differently, say in willingness to endure suffering to bring benefits to ones loved ones, and the apparent nobility goes away, as does the intuition favoring negative utilitarianism.
March 25th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Consider the pain specialist who has devoted his professional life to the relief of chronic physical pain.
How should he reply to someone who suggests that the most effective way to abolish his patients’ suffering would be to euthanize them? And how should he reply to the classical utilitarian who argues he should give equal moral weight to the promotion of bodily pleasures; and that by failing to use his formidable pharmacological skills, say, to help a greater number of sensualists to enjoy longer-lasting and richer sex lives, he is guilty of an arbitrary moral asymmetry.
Our pain specialist might respond that the treatment of his patients’ suffering has an overriding moral urgency. Sensual pleasures can be great fun, and tomorrow’s designer aphrodisiacs will make them more so; but their promotion isn’t morally urgent.
Should our pain-specialist empathize less with chronic pain patients and more with the world’s life-loving sensualists? Does his single-minded focus on the relief of suffering betray his limited empathy and imagination - as a critic of negative utilitarianism might claim?
March 25th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Yes. Or his evolved and culturally supported unethical moralism.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
It is not un-utilitarian to achieve maximum utility by relieving suffering first, and working upwards from there at achieving greater and greater “good”. At the very least, this form of negative utilitarianism is equal to classical utilitarianism. But if you consider that by its very nature, negative qualia is just that: negative, or that which is discontenting, it would not make sense to ignore it while pursuing greater pleasure for those already in the positive qualia range. By this logic negative utilitarianism is the preferred version.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:16 am
. I’m not convinced that classical utilitarianism is “true”, but it’s totally clear to me that it demonstrates more empathy than negative utilitarianism.
I agree that, in once sense, classical utilitarianism shows more empathy than negative utilitarianism does. The former, but not the latter, assigns moral weight both to negative and positive features of experience. But this sense of empathy has no implications for the feelings of particular moral agents; classical utilitarianism is more empathetic than other moral theories only in the way that, say, certain policies show more empathy for people than others. It is an open question whether those who promote such theories or policies are themselves more empathetic. And I claim that utilitarians, though they promote the moral theory that shows the greatest amount of empathy, are themselves in fact less empathetic than non-utilitarians. Such people come to believe in utilitarianism not because they have a greater capacity to empathize with the pleasures and pains of others, but because they can think more systematically about the foundations of morality. Since thinking systematically about something requires not to be swayed by emotions, including emotions of empathy, such people are, on average, likely to be less empathetic than, say, deontologists or virtue theorists. Dave is a very systematic, but also very empathetic, person; and his negative utilitarianism is an attempt to strike a balance between these two tendencies. The systematic part of his mind lead him to utilitarianism; but his emotions lead him away from the most systematic form of that theory: classical utilitarianism.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Should our pain-specialist empathize less with chronic pain patients and more with the world’s life-loving sensualists? Does his single-minded focus on the relief of suffering betray his limited empathy and imagination - as a critic of negative utilitarianism might claim?
I think our intuitions to this example are likely to reflect an intuitive moral difference, not between pleasure and pain, but between well-being and ill-being. (There is an additional distorting effect caused by the fact that the person whose moral obligations we are enquiring about occupies a special position, with special duties attached to it. It is therefore helpful to assume that the moral agent is not a surgeon, whom we generally expect to relieve pain rather than produce pleasure, but an ordinary human being, for whom we have no such expectations.) We do indeed believe, at the intuitive level, that relieving intense pain is morally more urgent than producing comparably intense pleasure. But even those who are not hedonists–those who deny that pleasure and pain are the only features that make people’s lives go better or worse–have a parallel belief about the asymmetrical value of removing whatever makes people worse off vis-à-vis producing whatever makes people better off. So these cases cannot be used to adjudicate between classical and negative utilitarianism.
(I have assumed throughout that intuitions have epistemic worth—that a more intuitive theory is, other things equal, more likely to be true. Although I myself deny this methodology, my point is that even those who subscribe to it have no reasons to prefer negative rather than classical utilitarianism from the cases discussed by Dave.)
April 1st, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Is the negative utilitarian really any less systematic than the classical utilitarian? Or is there a fundamental asymmetry between suffering and happiness?
The experience of suffering has, by its very nature, an intrinsic urgency - it is self-intimatingly terrible. By contrast, there is nothing self-intimatingly wrong with, say, a dreamless sleep or (mere) contended happiness even if the alternative forgone is a blissful peak experience. Now the classical utilitarian might reply: so much the worse for our moral intuitions. Our lack of any sense of moral urgency in such cases is simply a reflection of our moral psychology. I’d share Pablo’s scepticism that intuitions stemming from our moral psychology have any epistemic worth. The problem is that it’s debatable whether utilitarians of any stripe can really dispense with moral intuition altogether. Instead, we systematically subordinate all our other moral intuitions to a single master intuition [crudely: Minimise Net Suffering! in the case of negative utilitarian; and Maximise Net Happiness! in the case of the classical utilitarian] Granted these differing master intuitions, the policy implications of the systematic application of a classical utilitarian ethic are normally reckoned less bizarrely counter-intuitive than the systematic application of an ethic of negative utilitarianism. But is this so? For example, classical utilitarianism mandates the creation of another Auschwitz if the suffering caused thereby were to be “outweighed” by a sufficient gain in happiness elsewhere. By contrast, the negative utilitarian claims that literally no amount of superhappiness using any kind of weighting scale could justify such an abomination. By way of defence, the classical utilitarian might protest that the “compensating” gain in happiness would need to be truly astronomical; and therefore the example is fanciful. But the example isn’t fanciful, or at least not obviously so, since some very well respected thinkers predict that our descendants will run realistic ancestor-simulations on their supercomputers - thereby recreating Auschwitz in the process. Indeed if it’s computationally cheap for them to run an abundance of such ancestor-simulations, then perhaps it is statistically likely we are one of them. No, I don’t buy this; but I’m not persuaded by classical utilitarianism either.
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:23 am
As a preliminary remark, I should point out that, for Dave, the relevant moral asymmetry appears to be intense suffering versus both mild suffering and pleasure, rather than all suffering versus all pleasure, as negative utilitarianism (NU) has it. But as I pointed out in my earlier comment, such a moral view is less plausible, because it locates the relevant borderline at an arbitrary point in the continuum of painful experience, rather than at the natural “hedonistic zero” (to use Sidgwick’s phrase) between pleasure and pain. Let us call this view, for simplicity, ‘critical level utilitarianism’ (CLU).
I’d share Pablo’s scepticism that intuitions stemming from our moral psychology have any epistemic worth. The problem is that it’s debatable whether utilitarians of any stripe can really dispense with moral intuition altogether.
My own view is that we can know the intrinsic value of certain qualities of phenomenal experience by becoming immediately acquainted with how they feel like. I know that it is intrinsically bad, not just for me, but in itself, that at least some intense pains are experienced. And I know this, not by relying on “intuition”, but by undergoing the relevant experience. There is something it’s like to have intrinsic value.
The knowledge thus acquired may not be enough to ground a full-fledged moral theory. I don’t claim to know that we ought to maximise net pleasure. What I do know is that pleasure is intrinsically good, that pain intrinsically bad, and that the more of the former and the less of the latter an outcome contains, the better it is.
For example, classical utilitarianism mandates the creation of another Auschwitz if the suffering caused thereby were to be “outweighed” by a sufficient gain in happiness elsewhere. By contrast, the negative utilitarian claims that literally no amount of superhappiness using any kind of weighting scale could justify such an abomination.
Both a negative and a critical level utilitarian must permit and even require the infliction of intense amounts of suffering when doing so is necessary to prevent even more intense, or equally intense but longer, episodes of suffering from being experienced. So CLU and NU cannot be used to accommodate the “intuition” that we are never permitted to cause certain particularly ugly forms of suffering.
Here’s a final thought. Suppose that, for a critical level utilitarian, the relevant moral distinction is located at pains of intensity 100 (in arbitrary units). So any pain whose intensity is equal to, or above, 100 counts as infinitely worse than any pain of an intensity below it. (I’m here ignoring the difficulties related to postulating a precise cut-off point; the argument works equally well if we assume fuzzy borderline areas, and even higher orders of vagueness.) For someone committed to this view, it seems natural also to recognize that, as pains above 100 get more and more intense, a second morally significant level will eventually be reached, so that all pains above that level will be, to pains below it, what pains above the 100 level are to pains below it. And, of course, the argument can be repeated, indefinitely. So the rationale for endorsing CLU leads to a much more complex theory with indefinitely many critical levels.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
If we are to find a morality arising out of nature’s laws which can be studied scientifically, then we must not think within anthropocentric boundaries. Many of the examples presented here use humans as sample cases and create the intuition problem discussed above. This way of thinking also causes us to avoid larger issues of morality and questions of the pain/pleasure axis. For example, what exactly is the “molecular signature” (or mathematical description) of the qualia which we refer to when speaking about pain and pleasure? If we were to imagine a universe without human or animal life, would it be possible to somehow use other structures to instantiate the qualia which we find valuable? If this were the case, what can we imagine to be the preferable moral system?
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Pablo raises several important points. I don’t have knock-down rebuttals to any of them. But first some clarifications. It’s not that negative utilitarians are dismissive of “mild” suffering. Rather, the experience of, say, suicidal despair, bereavement, prolonged torture, or the loss of a child are so much more devastating than, say, a toothache that it is morally appropriate to focus on the relief of such horrors rather than on everyday cases of “mild” distress. This focus doesn’t mean that “mild” suffering is of no account. A toothache matters a lot. But compared to the worst forms of suffering, its significance is morally negligible. Hence the appearance of additional asymmetry in NU ethics over-and-above the fundamental moral asymmetry of pain and pleasure.
Second, it’s not the case that a NU ethic never mandates the infliction of suffering, even terrible suffering. NU merely dictates that suffering should never be inflicted simply to create pleasure de novo or to maximise the pleasures of the already happy.
Third, how viable is the modified NU which Pablo aptly dubs “critical level utilitarianism”(CLU)? Must the location of the relevant moral borderline be “arbitrary”, or at least conventional? No, I don’t think so. More specifically, there are forms of suffering so atrocious that anyone in their grip would willingly bring the whole world to an end to stop them. Suffering that equals or surpasses this horrific threshold literally compels assent to NU. This biologically inescapable consensus holds whether the subject has previously professed to be a classical utilitarian, a preference utilitarian, a deontologist, a virtue ethicist, a theist, or anything else. Does the victim of such suffering somehow overestimate its awfulness? Maybe so; but such a claim is hard to substantiate since it depends on an absence of direct acquaintance with the monstrous type of state in question. Worse, suffering no less terrible is occurring in the world right now. Perhaps one believes that suffering of such enormity is a price worth paying for the blessings of sentient existence elsewhere, notably one’s own. Yet this judgement is feasible only because the suffering is borne by others rather than oneself - a weak basis for moral argument. Either way, a “critical level utilitarian” will clearly locate the moral borderline no higher than the unbearable suffering alluded to above. Moreover this consensus “break point” needn’t be stipulated by a priori philosophizing. On the contrary, the boundary can in principle be discovered empirically with the aid of neuroscanning technology. In principle, we can identify the necessary and sufficient biomolecular substrates where the cut-off threshold occurs. Such experimentation would certainly be gruesome and unethical. But since this conjecture is scientifically testable, I don’t think the charge that CLU is inherently arbitrary can be sustained.
However, Pablo’s point against pure negative utilitarianism still stands. Any departure from the natural “hedonistic zero” undercuts pure NU - at least in its original formulation. Perhaps the NU purist might try to draw a distinction between “mere” pain and outright suffering - with its concomitant baggage of emotional distress. Thus the terminal cancer patient administered morphine doesn’t say that the pain has gone away. Instead, s/he says it’s still there, but it doesn’t seem to matter any more. The pain is no longer distressing: s/he is no longer suffering. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this line of argument works. Certainly the NU purist has a lot of work to do here. But this sort of quandary isn’t peculiar to NU. Presumably there are modes of experience so sublime that a “positive” utilitarian would sacrifice literally any number of trivial pleasures to access such states. And in turn, an unlimited abundance of such “sublime” experiences may in future be accounted trivial relative to the super-sublime experiences of our posthuman descendants - raising the spectre of multiple critical thresholds that Pablo conjures up for modified NU. Either way, the charge that endorsing CLU leads to a more complex moral theory with indefinitely many critical levels is (I think) potentially a problem for classical and negative utilitarians alike.
I’ve highlighted the theoretical differences between classical and negative utilitarianism. Thankfully, I think their contemporary policy implications converge. Thus for NU, the best way to eradicate any form of suffering is (I argue) to abolish its biological substrates via genetic engineering and replace them with information-bearing gradients of well-being. [By contrast, idle talk of “destroying the world” is counterproductive and self-defeating, hence morally prohibited by NU; and Benatar’s compassionate plea for human self-extinction via global celibacy is undercut by the argument from selection pressure. Benatar’s proposal also neglects the fate of the rest of the animal kingdom] By the same token, the contemporary classical utilitarian is implicitly committed to promoting adaptive gradients of bliss as above; but ultimately his moral commitments extend beyond a cruelty-free world to maximising bliss across the accessible universe. As it happens, I cautiously predict we will do so - probably in the guise of superintelligent bliss rather than cosmic orgasms. Yet are we morally _obliged_ to convert, say, asteroids into pleasure centres as soon as nanotech allows? It’s cool idea; but I can’t see how it’s a moral obligation. Intuitively at any rate, there’s nothing wrong with being a rock. Does “obliged” here really carry the same meaning as our self-intimating obligation to abolish suffering? Or are we instead conflating two different phenomena, one morally urgent, the other motivationally inert? Either way, this (admirable!) blog is perhaps not the best place for a treatise on the semantics of moral discourse.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
There’s a newer, more moderate version of this. One that doesn’t require killing the entire populaton to prevent a pinprick.