didn’t downvote, but do disagree. Suffering is unpleasant, but not the primary driver of purpose. Maximizing joy or meaning, or perhaps maximizing some net metric like sum(log(joy) - log(suffering)) seem more likely to be workable goals.
There is nothing in morality that forces you to try to be happier—that is not its role, and if there was no suffering, morality would have no role at all. Both suffering and pleasure do provide us with purpose though, because one drives us to reduce it and the other drives us to increase it.
Having said that though, morality does say that if you have the means to give someone an opportunity to increase their happiness at no cost to you or anyone else, you should give it to them, though this can also be viewed as something that would generate harm if they found out that you didn’t offer it to them.
Clearly there is some amount of pleasure that outweighs some amount of suffering and makes it worth suffering in order to access pleasure, but that applies in cases where the sufferer also gains the pleasure, or an exchange takes place such that it works out that way on average for all the players. Where moral judgements have to give greater weight to suffering is where one person suffers to enable another person to access pleasure and where there’s insufficient balancing of that by reversed situations.
It’s really hard to turn morality into a clear rule, but it is possible to produce a method to derive it—you simply imagine yourself as being all the players in a situation and then try to make the decisions that give you the best time as all those people. So long as you weigh up all the harm and pleasure correctly, you will make moral decisions (although the “situation” actually has to involve the entire lifetimes of all the players, because if the same person always comes off worst, it won’t be fair, and that’s where the vast bulk of complexity comes in to make moral computations hard—you can’t always crunch all the data, and the decision that looks best may change repeatedly the longer you go on crunching data).
Having said that though, morality does say that if you have the means to give someone an opportunity to increase their happiness at no cost to you or anyone else, you should give it to them, though this can also be viewed as something that would generate harm if they found out that you didn’t offer it to them.
These aren’t equivalent. If I discover that you threw away a cancer cure, my unhappiness at this discovery won’t be equivalent to dying of cancer.
Won’t it? If you’re dying of cancer and find out that I threw away the cure, that’s the difference between survival and death, and it will likely feel even worse for knowing that a cure was possible.
The dying-of-cancer-level harm is independent of whether I find out that you didn’t offer me the opportunity. The sadness at knowing that I could have not been dying-of-cancer is not equivalent to the harm of dying-of-cancer.
It is equivalent to it. (1) dying of cancer --> big negative. (2) cure available --> negative cancelled. (3) denied access to cure --> big negative restored, and increased. That denial of access to a cure actively becomes the cause of death. It is no longer simply death by cancer, but death by denial of access to available cure for cancer.
didn’t downvote, but do disagree. Suffering is unpleasant, but not the primary driver of purpose. Maximizing joy or meaning, or perhaps maximizing some net metric like sum(log(joy) - log(suffering)) seem more likely to be workable goals.
There is nothing in morality that forces you to try to be happier—that is not its role, and if there was no suffering, morality would have no role at all. Both suffering and pleasure do provide us with purpose though, because one drives us to reduce it and the other drives us to increase it.
Having said that though, morality does say that if you have the means to give someone an opportunity to increase their happiness at no cost to you or anyone else, you should give it to them, though this can also be viewed as something that would generate harm if they found out that you didn’t offer it to them.
Clearly there is some amount of pleasure that outweighs some amount of suffering and makes it worth suffering in order to access pleasure, but that applies in cases where the sufferer also gains the pleasure, or an exchange takes place such that it works out that way on average for all the players. Where moral judgements have to give greater weight to suffering is where one person suffers to enable another person to access pleasure and where there’s insufficient balancing of that by reversed situations.
It’s really hard to turn morality into a clear rule, but it is possible to produce a method to derive it—you simply imagine yourself as being all the players in a situation and then try to make the decisions that give you the best time as all those people. So long as you weigh up all the harm and pleasure correctly, you will make moral decisions (although the “situation” actually has to involve the entire lifetimes of all the players, because if the same person always comes off worst, it won’t be fair, and that’s where the vast bulk of complexity comes in to make moral computations hard—you can’t always crunch all the data, and the decision that looks best may change repeatedly the longer you go on crunching data).
These aren’t equivalent. If I discover that you threw away a cancer cure, my unhappiness at this discovery won’t be equivalent to dying of cancer.
Won’t it? If you’re dying of cancer and find out that I threw away the cure, that’s the difference between survival and death, and it will likely feel even worse for knowing that a cure was possible.
The dying-of-cancer-level harm is independent of whether I find out that you didn’t offer me the opportunity. The sadness at knowing that I could have not been dying-of-cancer is not equivalent to the harm of dying-of-cancer.
It is equivalent to it. (1) dying of cancer --> big negative. (2) cure available --> negative cancelled. (3) denied access to cure --> big negative restored, and increased. That denial of access to a cure actively becomes the cause of death. It is no longer simply death by cancer, but death by denial of access to available cure for cancer.