This doesn’t address any of the strong objections to Utilitarianism (around whether and how individual values get aggregated).
No conscious being can deny that suffering is real.
I deny that “real” is a well-defined word in this sentence. I experience suffering (and joy and other psychological states), but I can’t measure them very well, and I can’t compare those experiences to what (if anything) any other cluster of spacetime experiences. I’m willing to stipulate that such things are, in fact, common. But I don’t stipulate that they aggregate in any useful way, nor that they’re important to anything except themselves.
This doesn’t address any of the strong objections to Utilitarianism (around whether and how individual values get aggregated).
I deny that “real” is a well-defined word in this sentence. I experience suffering (and joy and other psychological states), but I can’t measure them very well, and I can’t compare those experiences to what (if anything) any other cluster of spacetime experiences. I’m willing to stipulate that such things are, in fact, common. But I don’t stipulate that they aggregate in any useful way, nor that they’re important to anything except themselves.