If suffering has far greater dis-utility for you than happy living has utility, is it logical to conclude that it’d be a good thing if the universe ceased to exist, thereby preventing all future suffering at the cost of all future life?
You might want to look at the writings of David Benatar. He’s a professional philosopher who argues something similar in spirit. His position it that it would be better for there to not be (and never have been) any sentient life. He is not as crazy as this may sound; the problem is just that he has one premise that is totally intuitive to some people while others completely fail to see its appeal, and there’s no real reason for or against accepting it other than intuition. The shortest thing to read would be his paper “Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence”. He also has a book titled “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence”.
No. Not purely from that knowledge about your utility function, anyway.
Unless suffering has infinite disutility, then enough happiness would outweigh all the suffering in the world.
If we reach a Good Future, then it would be worth it even if the average modern human has negative utility—which seems far from obvious itself, even given the premise; most human lives could still experience sufficiently more happiness than suffering.
Well, that sounds obviously wrong—it would mean you could start with a universe you liked, scale up the population without changing average quality of life at all, and end up with a universe in which you want to destroy all life.
What makes this obviously wrong? I mean, aside from preferences, why would it not make sense to start with a universe in a current state you like and end up with a state you dislike?
I think you’re talking past each other. Rowan is assuming the amount of happiness and suffering to be distributed across several people, where adding another person with the same suffering/pleasure ratio shouldn’t change anything, and dunno is, I believe, talking about a single person’s perspective where, once you’ve reached a certain amount of suffering, it might be impossible to outweigh it.
In that case (which I believe is not true for almost any modern human, so this is a purely theoretical answer), it’s logical to conclude that it’d be good for you to cease to exist. In order to prefer that others so cease (assuming you’re a utilitiarian), you’d need to believe that every individual has a similar weighting.
If I ceased to exist there would still be people that suffered without a choice. Ceasing to exist wouldn’t change this while if everything ceased to exist, it’d change.
If suffering has far greater dis-utility for you than happy living has utility, is it logical to conclude that it’d be a good thing if the universe ceased to exist, thereby preventing all future suffering at the cost of all future life?
No, since there may be far more happy living than suffering. Not on its own, at least.
You might want to look at the writings of David Benatar. He’s a professional philosopher who argues something similar in spirit. His position it that it would be better for there to not be (and never have been) any sentient life. He is not as crazy as this may sound; the problem is just that he has one premise that is totally intuitive to some people while others completely fail to see its appeal, and there’s no real reason for or against accepting it other than intuition. The shortest thing to read would be his paper “Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence”. He also has a book titled “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence”.
No. Not purely from that knowledge about your utility function, anyway.
Unless suffering has infinite disutility, then enough happiness would outweigh all the suffering in the world.
If we reach a Good Future, then it would be worth it even if the average modern human has negative utility—which seems far from obvious itself, even given the premise; most human lives could still experience sufficiently more happiness than suffering.
Only if you also do not expect there to be enough happy living to outweigh the amount of suffering.
This just doesn’t seem right. Perhaps no amount of happy living outweighs suffering beyond a certain amount.
Well, that sounds obviously wrong—it would mean you could start with a universe you liked, scale up the population without changing average quality of life at all, and end up with a universe in which you want to destroy all life.
What makes this obviously wrong? I mean, aside from preferences, why would it not make sense to start with a universe in a current state you like and end up with a state you dislike?
The universe you dislike is in the same state as the one you like, there’s just more of it.
I think you’re talking past each other. Rowan is assuming the amount of happiness and suffering to be distributed across several people, where adding another person with the same suffering/pleasure ratio shouldn’t change anything, and dunno is, I believe, talking about a single person’s perspective where, once you’ve reached a certain amount of suffering, it might be impossible to outweigh it.
In that case (which I believe is not true for almost any modern human, so this is a purely theoretical answer), it’s logical to conclude that it’d be good for you to cease to exist. In order to prefer that others so cease (assuming you’re a utilitiarian), you’d need to believe that every individual has a similar weighting.
If I ceased to exist there would still be people that suffered without a choice. Ceasing to exist wouldn’t change this while if everything ceased to exist, it’d change.
All that implies is that we ought to tolerate suicide. Those with negative net value attached to living can reset it to zero pretty easily.