In evolutionary and developmental history terms, we can see at the first quick glance that many (if not immediately all) of our other motivations interact with suffering, or have interacted with our suffering in the past (individually, neurally, culturally, evolutionarily). They serve functions of group cohesion, coping with stress, acquiring resources, intimacy, adaptive learning & growth, social deterrence, self-protection, understanding ourselves, and various other things we value & honor because they make life easier or interesting.
Seems like all of this could also be said of things like “preferences”, “enjoyment”, “satisfaction”, “feelings of correctness”, “attention”, “awareness”, “imagination”, “social modeling”, “surprise”, “planning”, “coordination”, “memory”, “variety”, “novelty”, and many other things.
“Preferences” in particular seems like an obvious candidate for ‘thing to reduce morality to’; what’s your argument for only basing our decisions on dispreference or displeasure and ignoring positive preferences or pleasure (except instrumentally)?
Neither NU nor other systems will honor all of our perceived wants as absolutes to maximize
I’m not sure I understand your argument here. Yes, values are complicated and can conflict with each other. But I’d rather try to find reasonable-though-imperfect approximations and tradeoffs, rather than pick a utility function I know doesn’t match human values and optimize it instead just because it’s uncomplicated and lets us off the hook for thinking about tradeoffs between things we ultimately care about.
E.g., I like pizza. You could say that it’s hard to list every possible flavor I enjoy in perfect detail and completeness, but I’m not thereby tempted to stop eating pizza, or to try to reduce my pizza desire to some other goal like ‘existential risk minimization’ or ‘suffering minimization’. Pizza is just one of the things I like.
To actually reject NU, you must explain what makes something (other than suffering) terminally valuable (or as I say, motivating) beyond its instrumental value for helping us prevent suffering in the total context
E.g.: I enjoy it. If my friends have more fun watching action movies than rom-coms, then I’ll happily say that that’s sufficient reason for them to watch more action movies, all on its own.
Enjoying action movies is less important than preventing someone from being tortured, and if someone talks too much about trivial sources of fun in the context of immense suffering, then it makes sense to worry that they’re a bad person (or not sufficiently in touch with their compassion).
But I understand your position to be not “torture matters more than action movies”, but “action movies would ideally have zero impact on our decision-making, except insofar as it bears on suffering”. I gather that from your perspective, this is just taking compassion to its logical conclusion; assigning some more value to saving horrifically suffering people than to enjoying a movie is compassionate, so assigning infinitely more value to the one than the other seems like it’s just dialing compassion up to 11.
One reason I find this uncompelling is that I don’t think the right way to do compassion is to ignore most of the things people care about. I think that helping people requires doing the hard work of figuring out everything they value, and helping them get all those things. That might reduce to “just help them suffer less” in nearly all real-world decisions nowadays, because there’s an awful lot of suffering today; but that’s a contingent strategy based on various organisms’ makeup and environment in 2019, not the final word on everything that’s worth doing in a life.
To reject NU, is there some value you want to maximize beyond self-compassion and its role for preventing suffering, at the risk of allowing extreme suffering? How will you tell this to someone undergoing extreme suffering?
I’ll tell them I care a great deal about suffering, but I don’t assign literally zero importance to everything else.
NU people I’ve talked to often worry about scenarios like torture vs. dust specks, and that if we don’t treat happiness as literally of zero value, then we might make the wrong tradeoff and cause immense harm.
The flip side is dilemmas like:
Suppose you have a chance to push a button that will annihilate all life in the universe forever. You know for a fact that if you don’t push it, then billions of people will experience billions upon billions of years of happy, fulfilling, suffering-free life, filled with richness, beauty, variety, and complexity; filled with the things that make life most worth living, and with relationships and life-projects that people find deeply meaningful and satisfying.
However, you also know for a fact that if you don’t push the button, you’ll experience a tiny, almost-unnoticeable itch on your left shoulder blade a few seconds later, which will be mildly unpleasant for a second or two before the Utopian Future begins. With this one exception, no suffering will ever again occur in the universe, regardless of whether you push the button. Do you push the button, because your momentary itch matters more than all of the potential life and happiness you’d be cutting out?
And if you say “I don’t push the button, but only because I want to cooperate with other moral theorists” or “I don’t push the button, but only because NU is very very likely true but I have nonzero moral uncertainty”: do you really think that’s the reason? Does that really sound like the prescription of the correct normative theory (modulo your own cognitive limitations and resultant moral uncertainty)? If the negotiation-between-moral-theories spat out a slightly different answer, would this actually be a good idea?
Seems like all of this could also be said of things like “preferences”, “enjoyment”, “satisfaction”, “feelings of correctness”, “attention”, “awareness”, “imagination”, “social modeling”, “surprise”, “planning”, “coordination”, “memory”, “variety”, “novelty”, and many other things.
“Preferences” in particular seems like an obvious candidate for ‘thing to reduce morality to’; what’s your argument for only basing our decisions on dispreference or displeasure and ignoring positive preferences or pleasure (except instrumentally)?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here. Yes, values are complicated and can conflict with each other. But I’d rather try to find reasonable-though-imperfect approximations and tradeoffs, rather than pick a utility function I know doesn’t match human values and optimize it instead just because it’s uncomplicated and lets us off the hook for thinking about tradeoffs between things we ultimately care about.
E.g., I like pizza. You could say that it’s hard to list every possible flavor I enjoy in perfect detail and completeness, but I’m not thereby tempted to stop eating pizza, or to try to reduce my pizza desire to some other goal like ‘existential risk minimization’ or ‘suffering minimization’. Pizza is just one of the things I like.
E.g.: I enjoy it. If my friends have more fun watching action movies than rom-coms, then I’ll happily say that that’s sufficient reason for them to watch more action movies, all on its own.
Enjoying action movies is less important than preventing someone from being tortured, and if someone talks too much about trivial sources of fun in the context of immense suffering, then it makes sense to worry that they’re a bad person (or not sufficiently in touch with their compassion).
But I understand your position to be not “torture matters more than action movies”, but “action movies would ideally have zero impact on our decision-making, except insofar as it bears on suffering”. I gather that from your perspective, this is just taking compassion to its logical conclusion; assigning some more value to saving horrifically suffering people than to enjoying a movie is compassionate, so assigning infinitely more value to the one than the other seems like it’s just dialing compassion up to 11.
One reason I find this uncompelling is that I don’t think the right way to do compassion is to ignore most of the things people care about. I think that helping people requires doing the hard work of figuring out everything they value, and helping them get all those things. That might reduce to “just help them suffer less” in nearly all real-world decisions nowadays, because there’s an awful lot of suffering today; but that’s a contingent strategy based on various organisms’ makeup and environment in 2019, not the final word on everything that’s worth doing in a life.
I’ll tell them I care a great deal about suffering, but I don’t assign literally zero importance to everything else.
NU people I’ve talked to often worry about scenarios like torture vs. dust specks, and that if we don’t treat happiness as literally of zero value, then we might make the wrong tradeoff and cause immense harm.
The flip side is dilemmas like:
Suppose you have a chance to push a button that will annihilate all life in the universe forever. You know for a fact that if you don’t push it, then billions of people will experience billions upon billions of years of happy, fulfilling, suffering-free life, filled with richness, beauty, variety, and complexity; filled with the things that make life most worth living, and with relationships and life-projects that people find deeply meaningful and satisfying.
However, you also know for a fact that if you don’t push the button, you’ll experience a tiny, almost-unnoticeable itch on your left shoulder blade a few seconds later, which will be mildly unpleasant for a second or two before the Utopian Future begins. With this one exception, no suffering will ever again occur in the universe, regardless of whether you push the button. Do you push the button, because your momentary itch matters more than all of the potential life and happiness you’d be cutting out?
And if you say “I don’t push the button, but only because I want to cooperate with other moral theorists” or “I don’t push the button, but only because NU is very very likely true but I have nonzero moral uncertainty”: do you really think that’s the reason? Does that really sound like the prescription of the correct normative theory (modulo your own cognitive limitations and resultant moral uncertainty)? If the negotiation-between-moral-theories spat out a slightly different answer, would this actually be a good idea?