But most utilitarians I talk to believe that suffering is bad per se, even if it doesn’t have long term consequences.
per se means that they are not really consequentialists, but likely [closet] deontologists.
Personally, I am not convinced that human intuition is reliable when facing hypothetical situations like you describe, so pure deontology (“one oughtn’t be inflicting pain”) is likely a wrong approach.
per se means that they are not really consequentialists
No, recursion has to end somewhere. You can’t just say “something bad is something that leads to bad consequences” and stop there, or you’ll have infinite recursion.
Consequentialism needs a few “terminal values”, a few things which are bad or good “per-se”, usually an utility function (and suffering is very likely a term in computing the utility function itself). Then you judge acts on how they increase or decrease this utility function.
per se means that they are not really consequentialists, but likely [closet] deontologists.
Personally, I am not convinced that human intuition is reliable when facing hypothetical situations like you describe, so pure deontology (“one oughtn’t be inflicting pain”) is likely a wrong approach.
No, recursion has to end somewhere. You can’t just say “something bad is something that leads to bad consequences” and stop there, or you’ll have infinite recursion.
Consequentialism needs a few “terminal values”, a few things which are bad or good “per-se”, usually an utility function (and suffering is very likely a term in computing the utility function itself). Then you judge acts on how they increase or decrease this utility function.
Deontology is (bounded) consequentialism in the limit where your search depth goes to zero.