There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience. It may be that max disutility is far greater.
quoted someone or other who claimed that the human condition is one of perpetual suffering, constantly seeking desires which, once fulfilled, are ephemeral and dissatisfying
That someone wouldn’t be Buddha, would it?
I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive
Most sentient creatures can commit suicide. The great majority don’t. You think they are all wrong?
Most sentient creatures can commit suicide. The great majority don’t. You think they are all wrong?
(I don’t think this is about right or wrong. But we can try to exchange arguments and intuition pumps and see if someone changes their mind.)
Imagine a scientist that engineered artificial beings destined to a life in constant misery but equipped with an overriding desire to stay alive and conscious. I find that such an endeavor would not only be weird or pointless, but something I’d strongly prefer not to happen. Maybe natural selection is quite like that scientist; it made sure organisms don’t kill themselves not by making it easy for everyone to be happy, but by installing instinctual drives for survival.
Further reasons (whether rational or not) to not commit suicide despite having low well-being include fear of consequences in an afterlife, impartial altruistic desires to do something good in the world, “existentialist” desires to not kill oneself without having lived a meaningful life, near-view altruistic desires to not burden one’s family or friends, fear of dying, etc. People often end up not doing things that would be good for them and their goals due to trivial inconveniences, and suicide seems more “inconvenient” than most things people get themselves to do in pursuit of their interests. Besides, depressed people are not exactly known for high willpower.
Biases with affective forecasting and distorted memories could also play a role. (My memories from high school are pretty good even though when you’d travel back and ask me how I’m doing, most of the time the reply would be something like “I’m soo tired and don’t want to be here!.”)
Then there’s influence from conformity: I saw a post recently about a guy in Japan who regularly goes to a suicide hotspot to prevent people from jumping. Is he doing good or being an asshole? Most people seem to have the mentality that suicide is usually (or always even) bad for the person who does it. While there are reasons to be very careful with irreversible decisions – and certainly many suicides are impulsive and therefore at high risk of bias – it seems like there is an unreasonably strong anti-suicide ideology. Not to mention the religious influences on the topic.
All things considered, it wouldn’t surprise me if some people also just talk themselves out of suicide with whatever they manage to come up with, whether that is rational given their reflective goals or not. Relatedly, another comment here advocates to try change what you care about in order to avoid being a Debbie Downer to yourself and others: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ovh/net_utility_and_planetary_biocide/dqub
Also relevant is whether, when evaluating the value of a person’s life, are we going with overall life satisfaction or the average momentary well-being? Becoming a mother expectedly helps with the former but is bad for the latter – tough choice.
Caring substantially about anything other than one’s own well-being makes suicide the opposite of a “convergent drive” – agents whose goals include facets of the outside world will want to avoid killing themselves at high costs, because that would prevent them from further pursuit of these goals. We should therefore distinguish between “Is a person’s life net positive according to the person’s goals?” and “Is a life net positive in terms of all the experience moments it adds to the universe’s playlist?” The latter is not an empirical question; it’s more of an aesthetic judgment relevant to those who want to pursue a notion of altruism that is different from just helping others go after their preferences, and instead includes concern for (a particular notion of) well-being.
This will inevitably lead to “paternalistic” judgments where you want the universe’s playlist to be a certain way, conflicting with another agent’s goals. Suppose my life is very happy but I don’t care much for staying alive – then some would claim I have an obligation to continue living, and I’d be doing harm to their preferences if I’m not sufficiently worried about personal x-risks. So the paternalism goes both ways; it’s not just something that suffering-focused views have to deal with.
Being cooperative in the pursuit of one’s goals gets rid of the bad connotations of paternalism. It is sensible to think that net utility is negative according to one’s preferences for the playlist of experience moments, while not concluding that this warrants strongly violating other people’s preferences.
Maybe natural selection is quite like that scientist
The survival instinct part, very probably, but the “constant misery” part doesn’t look likely.
Actually, I don’t understand where the “animals have negative utility” thing is coming from. Sure, let’s postulate that fish can feel pain. So what? How do you know that fish don’t experience intense pleasure from feeling water stream by their sides?
I just don’t see any reasonable basis for deciding what the utility balance for most animals looks like. And from the evolutionary standpoint the “constant misery” is nonsense—constant stress is not conducive to survival.
fear of consequences in an afterlife
Are we talking about humans now? I thought the OP considered humans to be more or less fine, it’s the animals that were the problem.
Does anyone claim that the net utility of humanity is negative?
“Is a life net positive in terms of all the experience moments it adds to the universe’s playlist?”
I have no idea what this means.
not an empirical question; it’s more of an aesthetic judgment
Ah. Well then, let’s kill everyone who fails our aesthetic judgment..?
then some would claim I have an obligation … and I’d be doing harm to their preferences
That’s a very common attitude—see e.g. attitudes to abortion, to optional wars, etc. However “paternalistic” implies an imbalance of power—you can’t be paternalistic to an equal.
The survival instinct part, very probably, but the “constant misery” part doesn’t look likely.
Agree, I meant to use the analogy to argue for “Natural selection made sure that even those beings in constant misery may not necessarily exhibit suicidal behavior.” (I do hold the view that animals in nature suffer a lot more than they are happy, but that doesn’t follow from anything I wrote in the above post.)
Are we talking about humans now? I thought the OP considered humans to be more or less fine, it’s the animals that were the problem.
Right, but I thought your argument about sentient beings not committing suicide refers to humans primarily. At least with regard to humans, exploring why the appeal to low suicide rates may not show much seems more challenging. Animals not killing themselves could just be due to them lacking the relevant mental concepts.
I have no idea what this means.
It’s a metaphor. Views on population ethics reflect what we want the “playlist” of all the universe’s experience moments to be like, and there’s no objective sense of “net utility being positive” or not. Except when you question-beggingly define “net utility” in a way that implies a conclusion, but then anyone who disagrees will just say “I don’t think we should define utility that way” and you’re left arguing over the same differences. That’s why I called it “aesthetic” even though that feels like it doesn’t give the seriousness of our moral intuitions due justice.
Ah. Well then, let’s kill everyone who fails our aesthetic judgment..?
(And force everyone to live against their will if they do conform to it?) No; I specifically said not to do that. Viewing morality as subjective is supposed to make people more appreciative that they cannot go around completely violating the preferences of those they disagree with without the result being worse for everyone.
“Natural selection made sure that even those beings in constant misery may not necessarily exhibit suicidal behavior.”
Not sure this is the case. I would expect that natural selection made sure that no being is systematically in constant misery and so there is no need for the “but if you are in constant misery you can’t suicide anyways” part.
Views on population ethics
I still don’t understand what that means. Are you talking about believing that other people should have particular ethical views and it’s bad if they don’t?
No; I specifically said not to do that.
Well, the OP thinks it might be reasonable to kill everything with a nervous system because in his view all of them suffer too much. However if that is just an aesthetic judgement...
without the result being worse for everyone
Well, clearly not everyone since you will have winners and losers. And to evaluate this on the basis of some average/combined utility requires you to be a particular kind of utilitarian.
I still don’t understand what that means. Are you talking about believing that other people should have particular ethical views and it’s bad if they don’t?
I’m trying to say that other people are going to disagree with you or me about how to assess whether a given life is worth continuing or worth bringing into existence (big difference according to some views!), and on how to rank populations that differ in size and the quality of the lives in them. These are questions that the discipline of population ethics deals with, and my point is that there’s no right answer (and probably also no “safe” answer where you won’t end up disagreeing with others).
This^^ is all about a “morality as altruism” view, where you contemplate what it means to “make the world better for other beings.” I think this part is subjective.
There is also a very prominent “morality as cooperation/contract” view, where you contemplate the implications of decision algorithms correlating with each other, and notice that it might be a bad idea to adhere to principles that lead to outcomes worse for everyone in expectation provided that other people (in sufficiently similar situations) follow the same principles. This is where people start with whatever goals/preferences they have and derive reasons to be nice and civil to others (provided they are on an equal footing) from decision theory and stuff. I wholeheartedly agree with all of this and would even say it’s “objective” – but I would call it something like “pragmatics for civil society” or maybe “decision theoretic reasons for cooperation” and not “morality,” which is the term I reserve for (ways of) caring about the well-being of others.
It’s pretty clearly apparent that “killing everyone on earth” is not in most people’s interest, and I appreciate that people are pointing this out to the OP. However, I think what the replies are missing is that there is a second dimension, namely whether we should be morally glad about the world as it currently exists, and whether e.g. we should make more worlds that are exactly like ours, for the sake of the not-yet-born inhabitants of these new worlds. This is what I compared to voting on what the universe’s playlist of experience moments should be like.
But I’m starting to dislike the analogy. Let’s say that existing people have aesthetic preferences about how to allocate resources (this includes things like wanting to rebuild galaxies into a huge replica of Simpsons characters because it’s cool), and of these, a subset are simultaneously also moral preferences in that they are motivated by a desire to do good for others, and these moral preferences can differ in whether they count it as important to bring about new happy beings or not, or how much extra happiness is needed to altruistically “compensate” (if that’s even possible) for the harm of a given amount of suffering, etc. And the domain where people compare each others’ moral preferences and try to see if they can get more convergence through arguments and intuition pumps, in the same sense as someone might start to appreciate Mozart more after studying music theory or whatever, is population ethics (or “moral axiology”).
These are questions that the discipline of population ethics deals with
So is this discipline basically about ethics of imposing particular choices on other people (aka the “population”)? That makes it basically the ethics of power or ethics of the ruler(s).
You also call it “morality as altruism”, but I think there is a great deal of difference between having power to impose your own perceptions of “better” (“it’s for your own good”) and not having such power, being limited to offering suggestions and accepting that some/most will be rejected.
“morality as cooperation/contract” view
What happens with this view if you accept that diversity will exist and at least some other people will NOT follow the same principles? Simple game theory analyses in a monoculture environment are easy to do, but have very little relationship to real life.
whether we should be morally glad about the world as it currently exists
That looks to me like a continuous (and probably multidimensional) value. All moralities operate in terms of “should” an none find the world as it is to be perfect. This means that all contemplate the gap between “is” and “should be” and this gap can be seen as great or as not that significant.
whether e.g. we should make more worlds that are exactly like ours
So is this discipline basically about ethics of imposing particular choices on other people (aka the “population”)? That makes it basically the ethics of power or ethics of the ruler(s).
That’s an interesting way to view it, but it seems accurate. Say God created the world, then contractualist ethics or ethics of cooperation didn’t apply to him, but we’d get a sense of what his population ethical stance must have been. No one ever gets asked whether they want to be born. This is one of the issues where there is no such thing as “not taking a stance;” how we act in our lifetimes is going to affect what sort of minds there will or won’t be in the far future. We can discuss suggestions and try to come to a consensus of those currently in power, but future generations are indeed in a powerless position.
how we act in our lifetimes is going to affect what sort of minds there will or won’t be in the far future
Sure, but so what? Your power to deliberately and purposefully affect these things is limited by your ability to understand and model the development of the world sufficiently well to know which levers to pull. I would like to suggest that for “far future” that power is indistinguishable from zero.
Obligatory xkcd.
That someone wouldn’t be Buddha, would it?
Most sentient creatures can commit suicide. The great majority don’t. You think they are all wrong?
(I don’t think this is about right or wrong. But we can try to exchange arguments and intuition pumps and see if someone changes their mind.)
Imagine a scientist that engineered artificial beings destined to a life in constant misery but equipped with an overriding desire to stay alive and conscious. I find that such an endeavor would not only be weird or pointless, but something I’d strongly prefer not to happen. Maybe natural selection is quite like that scientist; it made sure organisms don’t kill themselves not by making it easy for everyone to be happy, but by installing instinctual drives for survival.
Further reasons (whether rational or not) to not commit suicide despite having low well-being include fear of consequences in an afterlife, impartial altruistic desires to do something good in the world, “existentialist” desires to not kill oneself without having lived a meaningful life, near-view altruistic desires to not burden one’s family or friends, fear of dying, etc. People often end up not doing things that would be good for them and their goals due to trivial inconveniences, and suicide seems more “inconvenient” than most things people get themselves to do in pursuit of their interests. Besides, depressed people are not exactly known for high willpower.
Biases with affective forecasting and distorted memories could also play a role. (My memories from high school are pretty good even though when you’d travel back and ask me how I’m doing, most of the time the reply would be something like “I’m soo tired and don’t want to be here!.”)
Then there’s influence from conformity: I saw a post recently about a guy in Japan who regularly goes to a suicide hotspot to prevent people from jumping. Is he doing good or being an asshole? Most people seem to have the mentality that suicide is usually (or always even) bad for the person who does it. While there are reasons to be very careful with irreversible decisions – and certainly many suicides are impulsive and therefore at high risk of bias – it seems like there is an unreasonably strong anti-suicide ideology. Not to mention the religious influences on the topic.
All things considered, it wouldn’t surprise me if some people also just talk themselves out of suicide with whatever they manage to come up with, whether that is rational given their reflective goals or not. Relatedly, another comment here advocates to try change what you care about in order to avoid being a Debbie Downer to yourself and others: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ovh/net_utility_and_planetary_biocide/dqub
Also relevant is whether, when evaluating the value of a person’s life, are we going with overall life satisfaction or the average momentary well-being? Becoming a mother expectedly helps with the former but is bad for the latter – tough choice.
Caring substantially about anything other than one’s own well-being makes suicide the opposite of a “convergent drive” – agents whose goals include facets of the outside world will want to avoid killing themselves at high costs, because that would prevent them from further pursuit of these goals. We should therefore distinguish between “Is a person’s life net positive according to the person’s goals?” and “Is a life net positive in terms of all the experience moments it adds to the universe’s playlist?” The latter is not an empirical question; it’s more of an aesthetic judgment relevant to those who want to pursue a notion of altruism that is different from just helping others go after their preferences, and instead includes concern for (a particular notion of) well-being.
This will inevitably lead to “paternalistic” judgments where you want the universe’s playlist to be a certain way, conflicting with another agent’s goals. Suppose my life is very happy but I don’t care much for staying alive – then some would claim I have an obligation to continue living, and I’d be doing harm to their preferences if I’m not sufficiently worried about personal x-risks. So the paternalism goes both ways; it’s not just something that suffering-focused views have to deal with.
Being cooperative in the pursuit of one’s goals gets rid of the bad connotations of paternalism. It is sensible to think that net utility is negative according to one’s preferences for the playlist of experience moments, while not concluding that this warrants strongly violating other people’s preferences.
Also relevant: SSC’s “How Bad Are Things?”.
The survival instinct part, very probably, but the “constant misery” part doesn’t look likely.
Actually, I don’t understand where the “animals have negative utility” thing is coming from. Sure, let’s postulate that fish can feel pain. So what? How do you know that fish don’t experience intense pleasure from feeling water stream by their sides?
I just don’t see any reasonable basis for deciding what the utility balance for most animals looks like. And from the evolutionary standpoint the “constant misery” is nonsense—constant stress is not conducive to survival.
Are we talking about humans now? I thought the OP considered humans to be more or less fine, it’s the animals that were the problem.
Does anyone claim that the net utility of humanity is negative?
I have no idea what this means.
Ah. Well then, let’s kill everyone who fails our aesthetic judgment..?
That’s a very common attitude—see e.g. attitudes to abortion, to optional wars, etc. However “paternalistic” implies an imbalance of power—you can’t be paternalistic to an equal.
Agree, I meant to use the analogy to argue for “Natural selection made sure that even those beings in constant misery may not necessarily exhibit suicidal behavior.” (I do hold the view that animals in nature suffer a lot more than they are happy, but that doesn’t follow from anything I wrote in the above post.)
Right, but I thought your argument about sentient beings not committing suicide refers to humans primarily. At least with regard to humans, exploring why the appeal to low suicide rates may not show much seems more challenging. Animals not killing themselves could just be due to them lacking the relevant mental concepts.
It’s a metaphor. Views on population ethics reflect what we want the “playlist” of all the universe’s experience moments to be like, and there’s no objective sense of “net utility being positive” or not. Except when you question-beggingly define “net utility” in a way that implies a conclusion, but then anyone who disagrees will just say “I don’t think we should define utility that way” and you’re left arguing over the same differences. That’s why I called it “aesthetic” even though that feels like it doesn’t give the seriousness of our moral intuitions due justice.
(And force everyone to live against their will if they do conform to it?) No; I specifically said not to do that. Viewing morality as subjective is supposed to make people more appreciative that they cannot go around completely violating the preferences of those they disagree with without the result being worse for everyone.
Lukas, I wish you had a bigger role in this community.
Not sure this is the case. I would expect that natural selection made sure that no being is systematically in constant misery and so there is no need for the “but if you are in constant misery you can’t suicide anyways” part.
I still don’t understand what that means. Are you talking about believing that other people should have particular ethical views and it’s bad if they don’t?
Well, the OP thinks it might be reasonable to kill everything with a nervous system because in his view all of them suffer too much. However if that is just an aesthetic judgement...
Well, clearly not everyone since you will have winners and losers. And to evaluate this on the basis of some average/combined utility requires you to be a particular kind of utilitarian.
I’m trying to say that other people are going to disagree with you or me about how to assess whether a given life is worth continuing or worth bringing into existence (big difference according to some views!), and on how to rank populations that differ in size and the quality of the lives in them. These are questions that the discipline of population ethics deals with, and my point is that there’s no right answer (and probably also no “safe” answer where you won’t end up disagreeing with others).
This^^ is all about a “morality as altruism” view, where you contemplate what it means to “make the world better for other beings.” I think this part is subjective.
There is also a very prominent “morality as cooperation/contract” view, where you contemplate the implications of decision algorithms correlating with each other, and notice that it might be a bad idea to adhere to principles that lead to outcomes worse for everyone in expectation provided that other people (in sufficiently similar situations) follow the same principles. This is where people start with whatever goals/preferences they have and derive reasons to be nice and civil to others (provided they are on an equal footing) from decision theory and stuff. I wholeheartedly agree with all of this and would even say it’s “objective” – but I would call it something like “pragmatics for civil society” or maybe “decision theoretic reasons for cooperation” and not “morality,” which is the term I reserve for (ways of) caring about the well-being of others.
It’s pretty clearly apparent that “killing everyone on earth” is not in most people’s interest, and I appreciate that people are pointing this out to the OP. However, I think what the replies are missing is that there is a second dimension, namely whether we should be morally glad about the world as it currently exists, and whether e.g. we should make more worlds that are exactly like ours, for the sake of the not-yet-born inhabitants of these new worlds. This is what I compared to voting on what the universe’s playlist of experience moments should be like.
But I’m starting to dislike the analogy. Let’s say that existing people have aesthetic preferences about how to allocate resources (this includes things like wanting to rebuild galaxies into a huge replica of Simpsons characters because it’s cool), and of these, a subset are simultaneously also moral preferences in that they are motivated by a desire to do good for others, and these moral preferences can differ in whether they count it as important to bring about new happy beings or not, or how much extra happiness is needed to altruistically “compensate” (if that’s even possible) for the harm of a given amount of suffering, etc. And the domain where people compare each others’ moral preferences and try to see if they can get more convergence through arguments and intuition pumps, in the same sense as someone might start to appreciate Mozart more after studying music theory or whatever, is population ethics (or “moral axiology”).
Of course, that’s a given.
So is this discipline basically about ethics of imposing particular choices on other people (aka the “population”)? That makes it basically the ethics of power or ethics of the ruler(s).
You also call it “morality as altruism”, but I think there is a great deal of difference between having power to impose your own perceptions of “better” (“it’s for your own good”) and not having such power, being limited to offering suggestions and accepting that some/most will be rejected.
What happens with this view if you accept that diversity will exist and at least some other people will NOT follow the same principles? Simple game theory analyses in a monoculture environment are easy to do, but have very little relationship to real life.
That looks to me like a continuous (and probably multidimensional) value. All moralities operate in terms of “should” an none find the world as it is to be perfect. This means that all contemplate the gap between “is” and “should be” and this gap can be seen as great or as not that significant.
Ask me when you acquire the capability :-)
That’s an interesting way to view it, but it seems accurate. Say God created the world, then contractualist ethics or ethics of cooperation didn’t apply to him, but we’d get a sense of what his population ethical stance must have been.
No one ever gets asked whether they want to be born. This is one of the issues where there is no such thing as “not taking a stance;” how we act in our lifetimes is going to affect what sort of minds there will or won’t be in the far future. We can discuss suggestions and try to come to a consensus of those currently in power, but future generations are indeed in a powerless position.
Sure, but so what? Your power to deliberately and purposefully affect these things is limited by your ability to understand and model the development of the world sufficiently well to know which levers to pull. I would like to suggest that for “far future” that power is indistinguishable from zero.