Negative utilitarians are known to be notoriously bad at making sense of how humans (and other animals) behave in real life (e.g., most people are willing to endure the pain of walking over hot sand for the pleasure of swimming in the sea). And I suspect this extends to the behavior of negative utilitarians themselves.
And classical utilitarians are notoriously prone to making quick judgments when tradeoffs are concerned:)
Perhaps people walk over hot sand because they really want to go swimming in the sea and would suffer otherwise. If there was absolutely nothing that subjectively bothers you about the current state you’re in, you would not act at all, so it’s highly non-obvious that people are generally trading pleasure and suffering in their daily lives. Whenever we consciously make a trade involving pleasure, the counterfactual alternative always seems to include some suffering as well in the form of unfulfilled longings/cravings.
Having said that, you can always ask why suicide percentages are so low if negative utilitarian axiology is right, and that would be a good point. But there the negative utilitarians would reply that a massive life bias is to be expected for evolutionary reasons.
If there was absolutely nothing that subjectively bothers you about the current state you’re in, you would not act at all
Why not? The obvious reply is that, even if there is nothing that bothers you about your current state, you might still be motivated to act in order to move to an even better state. In any case, your attempt to make sense of the example from a negative utilitarian framework simply doesn’t do justice to what people take themselves to be doing in these situations. Just ask people around (not antecedently committed to a particular moral theory), and you’ll see.
Introspection is not particularly trustworthy. If you consciously (as opposed to acting on auto-pilot) decide to move to “an even better state”, you have in fact evaluated your current conscious state and concluded that it is not the one you want to be in, i.e. that something (at least the fact that you’d rather want to be in some other state) bothers you about it. And that—wanting to get out of your current conscious state (or not), or changing some aspect about it—is what constitutes suffering, or whatever (some) negative utilitarians consider to be morally relevant.
If you accept this (Buddhist) axiology, it becomes a conceptual truth that conscious welfare-tradeoffs always include counterfactual suffering. And there are good reasons to accept this view. For instance, it implies that there is nothing intrinsically bad about pain asymbolia, which makes sense because the alternative implies having to go to great lengths to help people who assert that they are not bothered by the “pain” at all. Additionally, this view on suffering isn’t vulnerable to an inverted qualia thought experiment applied to crosswiring pleasure and pain, where all the behavioral dispositions are left intact. Those who think there is an “intrinsic valence” to hedonic qualia, regardless of behavioral dispositions and other subjective attitudes, are faced with the inconvenient conclusion that you couldn’t reliably tell whether you’re undergoing agony or ecstacy.
My point was that your favorite theory cannot make sense of what people take themselves to be doing in situations such as those discussed above. You may argue that we shouldn’t trust these people because introspection is not trustworthy, but then you’d be effectively biting the bullet.
If you consciously (as opposed to acting on auto-pilot) decide to move to “an even better state”, you have in fact evaluated your current conscious state and concluded that it is not the one you want to be in, i.e. that something (at least the fact that you’d rather want to be in some other state) bothers you about it.
You may, of course, use the verb ‘to be bothered’ to mean ‘judging a state to be inferior to some alternative.’ However, I though you were using the verb to mean, instead, the experiencing of some negative hedonic state. I agree that there is something that “bothers you”, in the former sense, about the above situation, but I disagree that this must be so if the term is used in the latter sense—which is the sense relevant for discussions of negative utilitarianism.
However, I though you were using the verb to mean, instead, the experiencing of some negative hedonic state.
I think that wanting to change your current state is identical with what we generally mean by being in a negative hedonic state. For reasons outlined above, I suspect that qualia aren’t indepent of all the other stuff that is going on (attitudes, dispositions, memories etc.).
Studies by Kent Berridge have established that ‘wanting’ can be dissociated from ‘liking’. This research finding (among others; Guy Kahane discusses some of these) undermines the claim that affective qualia are intextricably linked to intentional attitudes, as you seem to suggest.
I’m aware of these findings, I think there are different forms of “wanting” and we might have semantical misunderstandings here. There is pleasure that causes immediate cravings if you were to stop it, and there is pleasure that does not. So pleasure would usually cause you to want it again, but not always. I would not say that only the former is “real” pleasure. Instead I’m arguing that a frustrated craving due to the absence of some desired pleasure constitutes suffering. I’m only committed to the claim that “disliking” implies (or means) “wanting to get out” of the current state. And I think this makes perfect sense given the arguments of inverted qualia / against epiphenomenalism and my intuitive response to the case of pain asymbolia.
Negative utilitarianism implies that these people are fundamentally mistaken.
I’m not sure of what this even means. Negative utilitarianism implies one set of preferences, which not everyone shares. People who have different preferences aren’t mistaken in any sense, they just want different things.
Negative utilitarians are known to be notoriously bad at making sense of how humans (and other animals) behave in real life (e.g., most people are willing to endure the pain of walking over hot sand for the pleasure of swimming in the sea). And I suspect this extends to the behavior of negative utilitarians themselves.
And classical utilitarians are notoriously prone to making quick judgments when tradeoffs are concerned:)
Perhaps people walk over hot sand because they really want to go swimming in the sea and would suffer otherwise. If there was absolutely nothing that subjectively bothers you about the current state you’re in, you would not act at all, so it’s highly non-obvious that people are generally trading pleasure and suffering in their daily lives. Whenever we consciously make a trade involving pleasure, the counterfactual alternative always seems to include some suffering as well in the form of unfulfilled longings/cravings.
Having said that, you can always ask why suicide percentages are so low if negative utilitarian axiology is right, and that would be a good point. But there the negative utilitarians would reply that a massive life bias is to be expected for evolutionary reasons.
Why not? The obvious reply is that, even if there is nothing that bothers you about your current state, you might still be motivated to act in order to move to an even better state. In any case, your attempt to make sense of the example from a negative utilitarian framework simply doesn’t do justice to what people take themselves to be doing in these situations. Just ask people around (not antecedently committed to a particular moral theory), and you’ll see.
Introspection is not particularly trustworthy. If you consciously (as opposed to acting on auto-pilot) decide to move to “an even better state”, you have in fact evaluated your current conscious state and concluded that it is not the one you want to be in, i.e. that something (at least the fact that you’d rather want to be in some other state) bothers you about it. And that—wanting to get out of your current conscious state (or not), or changing some aspect about it—is what constitutes suffering, or whatever (some) negative utilitarians consider to be morally relevant.
If you accept this (Buddhist) axiology, it becomes a conceptual truth that conscious welfare-tradeoffs always include counterfactual suffering. And there are good reasons to accept this view. For instance, it implies that there is nothing intrinsically bad about pain asymbolia, which makes sense because the alternative implies having to go to great lengths to help people who assert that they are not bothered by the “pain” at all. Additionally, this view on suffering isn’t vulnerable to an inverted qualia thought experiment applied to crosswiring pleasure and pain, where all the behavioral dispositions are left intact. Those who think there is an “intrinsic valence” to hedonic qualia, regardless of behavioral dispositions and other subjective attitudes, are faced with the inconvenient conclusion that you couldn’t reliably tell whether you’re undergoing agony or ecstacy.
My point was that your favorite theory cannot make sense of what people take themselves to be doing in situations such as those discussed above. You may argue that we shouldn’t trust these people because introspection is not trustworthy, but then you’d be effectively biting the bullet.
You may, of course, use the verb ‘to be bothered’ to mean ‘judging a state to be inferior to some alternative.’ However, I though you were using the verb to mean, instead, the experiencing of some negative hedonic state. I agree that there is something that “bothers you”, in the former sense, about the above situation, but I disagree that this must be so if the term is used in the latter sense—which is the sense relevant for discussions of negative utilitarianism.
I think that wanting to change your current state is identical with what we generally mean by being in a negative hedonic state. For reasons outlined above, I suspect that qualia aren’t indepent of all the other stuff that is going on (attitudes, dispositions, memories etc.).
Studies by Kent Berridge have established that ‘wanting’ can be dissociated from ‘liking’. This research finding (among others; Guy Kahane discusses some of these) undermines the claim that affective qualia are intextricably linked to intentional attitudes, as you seem to suggest.
I’m aware of these findings, I think there are different forms of “wanting” and we might have semantical misunderstandings here. There is pleasure that causes immediate cravings if you were to stop it, and there is pleasure that does not. So pleasure would usually cause you to want it again, but not always. I would not say that only the former is “real” pleasure. Instead I’m arguing that a frustrated craving due to the absence of some desired pleasure constitutes suffering. I’m only committed to the claim that “disliking” implies (or means) “wanting to get out” of the current state. And I think this makes perfect sense given the arguments of inverted qualia / against epiphenomenalism and my intuitive response to the case of pain asymbolia.
Negative utilitarianism is a normative theory, not a descriptive one.
This is true. But some descriptive facts may provide evidence against a normative theory. The implicit argument was:
People often believe that they are justified in undergoing some pain in order to experience greater pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism implies that these people are fundamentally mistaken.
If (2), then this provides some reason to reject negative utilitarianism.
Of course, the argument is by no means decisive. In fact, I think there are much stronger objections to NU.
I’m not sure of what this even means. Negative utilitarianism implies one set of preferences, which not everyone shares. People who have different preferences aren’t mistaken in any sense, they just want different things.