Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.
No, no it doesn’t.
Consider the trolley problem, where you have to hurt 1 person to save 5. Does it work better if you feel all the pain of the one person being run over by a trolley? You might argue that feeling their pain still serves the purpose of making sure you think carefully before deciding that sacrificing the 1 person really is necessary, but the problem with that reasoning is that pain is not well calibrated for getting people to make subtle, situational, decisions. It’s just “I can’t stand this much pain, run from it”.
You might further try to save the idea by suggesting that that only fails because we can’t feel pain caused by inaction, but I can’t believe that it would be good to feel pain caused by inaction—everyone who doesn’t donate as much as he can afford to to save people (and not just 10%, either) would be feeling horrible pain all the time.
You also get problems with the pain equivalent of utility monsters (in this case, beings who feel exceptionally pained at slight injuries) and people who feel pain at good things (like a religious person who feels pain because heretics exist).
In most situations, even when there is a morally correct option, not choosing it does not make you evil. Perhaps it makes you a bad person (though then everyone is a bad person), but it doesn’t make you evil. Evil has a higher bar, where the effects are quite bad without an acceptable reason for doing them.
For those true acts of evil—things like murder or rape or genocide—I imagine that very few would happen if the actors really felt the pain that they were inflicting.
Pain monsters are a theoretical problem here, but I think the concept is still helpful.
Evil has a higher bar, where the effects are quite bad without an acceptable reason for doing them.
But the idea isn’t selective. You don’t get to say “selecting the one person in the trolley problem inflicts not-evil pain, so you don’t feel it”—you feel the pain you inflict, whether it’s evil-pain or not-evil pain.
Pain monsters are a theoretical problem here, but I think the concept is still helpful.
It’s more than a theoretical problem. It’s basically the same problem as standard utilitarianism has, except for “disutility” you substitute “pain”. Assuming it includes emotional pain, pretty much every real-life utility monster is a pain monster. If someone works themselves up into a frenzy such that they feel real pain by having to be around Trump supporters, you have to make sure that the Trump supporters are all gone (unless Trump supporters can work themselves up into a frenzy too, and then you just feel horrible pain whichever side you take).
It also has the blissful ignorance problem, only worse. Someone might want to know unpleasant truths rather than be lied to, but if telling them the unpleasant truth inflicts pain, you’re stuck lying to them.
No, no it doesn’t.
Consider the trolley problem, where you have to hurt 1 person to save 5. Does it work better if you feel all the pain of the one person being run over by a trolley? You might argue that feeling their pain still serves the purpose of making sure you think carefully before deciding that sacrificing the 1 person really is necessary, but the problem with that reasoning is that pain is not well calibrated for getting people to make subtle, situational, decisions. It’s just “I can’t stand this much pain, run from it”.
You might further try to save the idea by suggesting that that only fails because we can’t feel pain caused by inaction, but I can’t believe that it would be good to feel pain caused by inaction—everyone who doesn’t donate as much as he can afford to to save people (and not just 10%, either) would be feeling horrible pain all the time.
You also get problems with the pain equivalent of utility monsters (in this case, beings who feel exceptionally pained at slight injuries) and people who feel pain at good things (like a religious person who feels pain because heretics exist).
In most situations, even when there is a morally correct option, not choosing it does not make you evil. Perhaps it makes you a bad person (though then everyone is a bad person), but it doesn’t make you evil. Evil has a higher bar, where the effects are quite bad without an acceptable reason for doing them.
For those true acts of evil—things like murder or rape or genocide—I imagine that very few would happen if the actors really felt the pain that they were inflicting.
Pain monsters are a theoretical problem here, but I think the concept is still helpful.
But the idea isn’t selective. You don’t get to say “selecting the one person in the trolley problem inflicts not-evil pain, so you don’t feel it”—you feel the pain you inflict, whether it’s evil-pain or not-evil pain.
It’s more than a theoretical problem. It’s basically the same problem as standard utilitarianism has, except for “disutility” you substitute “pain”. Assuming it includes emotional pain, pretty much every real-life utility monster is a pain monster. If someone works themselves up into a frenzy such that they feel real pain by having to be around Trump supporters, you have to make sure that the Trump supporters are all gone (unless Trump supporters can work themselves up into a frenzy too, and then you just feel horrible pain whichever side you take).
It also has the blissful ignorance problem, only worse. Someone might want to know unpleasant truths rather than be lied to, but if telling them the unpleasant truth inflicts pain, you’re stuck lying to them.