If we could identify people who are likely to suffer high amounts of suffering, then should we put in sentience throttling so that they don’t feel it?
For a long time I thought that even mild painkillers like paracetamol made me feel dull-witted and slow, which was reason for me not to use them. When I had an accident and was prescribed ibuprofen against the pain I refused to take it on the same grounds. I’ve changed my mind on this now though, and I feel that I caused needless suffering to myself in the past. It’s fine to take painkillers and maybe feel a bit slower if it has such an effect on my subjective experience of pain.
The same could be applied here. I think forcefeeding people ibuprofen is immoral and wrong, but giving them the choice of taking it when they have pain is good. So too for sentience throttling. If I could choose to take a sentience throttling pill for during tedious monotonous work, I might be up for that, and I would probably wish that option to be available for others. (There is also a parallel to sleeping pills, or maybe sleeping pills are actually literally sentience throttling pills)
A counterpoint would be that diminishing human sentience, even just temporarily, is immoral in and of itself. I don’t have an answer to that charge, other than that I feel we already do this to the extend that painkillers and sleeping pills can already be called sentience throttlers, and I myself at least don’t think anymore that those are problematic.
For a long time I thought that even mild painkillers like paracetamol made me feel dull-witted and slow, which was reason for me not to use them. When I had an accident and was prescribed ibuprofen against the pain I refused to take it on the same grounds. I’ve changed my mind on this now though, and I feel that I caused needless suffering to myself in the past. It’s fine to take painkillers and maybe feel a bit slower if it has such an effect on my subjective experience of pain.
The same could be applied here. I think forcefeeding people ibuprofen is immoral and wrong, but giving them the choice of taking it when they have pain is good. So too for sentience throttling. If I could choose to take a sentience throttling pill for during tedious monotonous work, I might be up for that, and I would probably wish that option to be available for others. (There is also a parallel to sleeping pills, or maybe sleeping pills are actually literally sentience throttling pills)
A counterpoint would be that diminishing human sentience, even just temporarily, is immoral in and of itself. I don’t have an answer to that charge, other than that I feel we already do this to the extend that painkillers and sleeping pills can already be called sentience throttlers, and I myself at least don’t think anymore that those are problematic.