I must say I am very impressed by this kind of negative-utilitarian reasoning, as it has captured a concern of mine that I once naively assumed to be unquantifiable by utilitarian ethics
Do you mean that given certain comparisons of outcomes A and B, you agree with its ranking? Or that it captures your reasons? The latter seems dubious, unless you mean you buy negative utilitarianism wholesale.
If you don’t care about anything good, then you don’t have to worry about accepting smaller bads to achieve larger goods, but that goes far beyond “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Toby Ord gives some of the usual counterexamples.
If you’re concerned about deontological tradeoffs as in those stories, a negative utilitarian of that stripe would eagerly torture any finite number of people if that would kill a sufficiently larger population that suffers even occasional minor pains in lives that are overall quite good.
This seems to presuppose “good” being synonymous with “pleasurable conscious states”. Referring to broader (and less question-begging) definitions for “good” like e.g. “whatever states of the world I want to bring about” or “whatever is in accordance with other-regarding reasons for actions”, negative utilitarians would simply deny that pleasurable consciousness-states fulfill the criterion (or that they fulfill it better than non-existence or hedonically neutral flow-states).
Ord concludes that negative utilitarianism leads to outcomes where “everyone is worse off”, but this of course also presupposes an axiology that negative utilitarians would reject. Likewise, it wouldn’t be a fair criticism of classical utilitarianism to say that the very repugnant conclusion leaves everyone worse off (even though from a negative or prior-existence kind of perspective it seems like it), because at least according to the classical utilitarians themselves, existing slightly above “worth living” is judged better than non-existence.
Do you mean that given certain comparisons of outcomes A and B, you agree with its ranking? Or that it captures your reasons? The latter seems dubious, unless you mean you buy negative utilitarianism wholesale.
If you don’t care about anything good, then you don’t have to worry about accepting smaller bads to achieve larger goods, but that goes far beyond “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Toby Ord gives some of the usual counterexamples.
If you’re concerned about deontological tradeoffs as in those stories, a negative utilitarian of that stripe would eagerly torture any finite number of people if that would kill a sufficiently larger population that suffers even occasional minor pains in lives that are overall quite good.
This seems to presuppose “good” being synonymous with “pleasurable conscious states”. Referring to broader (and less question-begging) definitions for “good” like e.g. “whatever states of the world I want to bring about” or “whatever is in accordance with other-regarding reasons for actions”, negative utilitarians would simply deny that pleasurable consciousness-states fulfill the criterion (or that they fulfill it better than non-existence or hedonically neutral flow-states).
Ord concludes that negative utilitarianism leads to outcomes where “everyone is worse off”, but this of course also presupposes an axiology that negative utilitarians would reject. Likewise, it wouldn’t be a fair criticism of classical utilitarianism to say that the very repugnant conclusion leaves everyone worse off (even though from a negative or prior-existence kind of perspective it seems like it), because at least according to the classical utilitarians themselves, existing slightly above “worth living” is judged better than non-existence.