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wedrifid comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Nothing, iif that happens to be be what your actual preferences are. If your preferences did not happen to be as you describe but instead you are confused by an inconsistency in your intuitions then you will make incorrect decisions.
The challenge is not to construct a utility function such that you can justify it to others in the face of opposition. The challenge is to work out what your actual preferences are and implement them.
Ayup. Also, it may be worth saying explicitly that a lot of the difficulty comes in working out a model of my actual preferences that is internally consistent and can be extended to apply to novel situations. If I give up those constraints, it's easier to come up with propositions that seem to model my preferences, because they approximate particular aspects of my preferences well enough that in certain situations I can't tell the difference. And if I don't ever try to make decisions outside of that narrow band of situations, that can be enough to satisfy me.
[Edited to separate from quote] But doesn't that beg the question? Don't you have to ask a the meta question "what kinds of preferences are reasonable to have?" Why should we shape ethics the way evolution happened to set up our values? That's why I favor hedonistic utiltiarianism that is about actual states of the world that can in itself be bad (--> suffering).
Note that markup requires a blank line between your quote and the rest of the topic.
It does beg a question: specifically, the question of whether I ought to implement my preferences (or some approximation of them) in the first place. If, for example, my preferences are instead irrelevant to what I ought to do, then time spent working out my preferences is time that could better have been spent doing something else.
All of that said, it sounds like you're suggesting that suffering is somehow unrelated to the way evolution set up our values. If that is what you're suggesting, then I'm completely at a loss to understand either your model of what suffering is, or how evolution works.
The fact that suffering feels awful is about the very thing, and nothing else. There's no valuing required, no being ask itself "should I dislike this experience" when it is in suffering. It wouldn't be suffering otherwise.
My position implies that in a world without suffering (or happiness, if I were not a negative utiltiarian), nothing would matter.