What you describe is similar to my own position. I made a short note of it in the “closet survey” thread: I don’t think any life has inherent value. However, there’s another problem with morality I want to draw attention to, and that’s the idea that people could somehow straightforwardly accumulate value by increasing virtue or reducing vice.
I find utilitarian ethical notions such as “alleviating suffering”, “increasing happiness” and even “increasing rationality” incoherent. These aren’t things you can pour into a bucket. Pain and happiness are not cumulative. Experiencing 40 years of uninterrupted happiness will not lead to Nirvana and will most likely not be particularly different, at the end of the 40 years, from having experienced a mixed life. (The degree to which suffering does have a lasting effect is probably due to long-term consequences to health and behavior rather than the accumulation of the negative experiences themselves.)
To me, what is accumulated has to be a something that is genuinely cumulative, which I believe can only be the gross empirical knowledge of human society as a whole (I think it can be argued that science is the only truly cumulative human activity; everything else is fad). Everybody who is contributing to the advancement of knowledge, whether directly or indirectly, has value. Their value would be a function of how important they are to a society focused on the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Everybody else has negative value. (I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral; human beings require a lot of resources to merely exist.)
I don’t find your agreement reassuring. Imagine a world controlled by a singleton with those values.
But your comment about pain and happiness not being additive is right. Or, rather, happiness is not a linear function of good things in your life. It’s more like the derivative of good things in your life.
What you describe is similar to my own position. I made a short note of it in the “closet survey” thread: I don’t think any life has inherent value. However, there’s another problem with morality I want to draw attention to, and that’s the idea that people could somehow straightforwardly accumulate value by increasing virtue or reducing vice.
I find utilitarian ethical notions such as “alleviating suffering”, “increasing happiness” and even “increasing rationality” incoherent. These aren’t things you can pour into a bucket. Pain and happiness are not cumulative. Experiencing 40 years of uninterrupted happiness will not lead to Nirvana and will most likely not be particularly different, at the end of the 40 years, from having experienced a mixed life. (The degree to which suffering does have a lasting effect is probably due to long-term consequences to health and behavior rather than the accumulation of the negative experiences themselves.)
To me, what is accumulated has to be a something that is genuinely cumulative, which I believe can only be the gross empirical knowledge of human society as a whole (I think it can be argued that science is the only truly cumulative human activity; everything else is fad). Everybody who is contributing to the advancement of knowledge, whether directly or indirectly, has value. Their value would be a function of how important they are to a society focused on the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Everybody else has negative value. (I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral; human beings require a lot of resources to merely exist.)
I don’t find your agreement reassuring. Imagine a world controlled by a singleton with those values.
But your comment about pain and happiness not being additive is right. Or, rather, happiness is not a linear function of good things in your life. It’s more like the derivative of good things in your life.