I haven’t seriously evaluated the arguments, but my intuition is that suffering and happiness are opposite sides of the same scale, not separate values. Utility is the measure of how good or bad something is, and happiness and suffering correspond to positive and negative values of utility.
terminal value monism (suffering is the only thing that motivates us “by itself”)
So I’d say that I value only utility.
it is a straw man argument that NUs don’t value life or positive states, because NUs value them instrumentally
Again, not having thought too much about it, I find that my intuition better matches a system that cares about positive utility even when it doesn’t avert negative utility. E.g., I want paradise forever, not mild pleasantness forever.
I haven’t seriously evaluated the arguments, but my intuition is that suffering and happiness are opposite sides of the same scale, not separate values. Utility is the measure of how good or bad something is, and happiness and suffering correspond to positive and negative values of utility.
So I’d say that I value only utility.
Again, not having thought too much about it, I find that my intuition better matches a system that cares about positive utility even when it doesn’t avert negative utility. E.g., I want paradise forever, not mild pleasantness forever.
Is there a good reason to suspect this is wrong?