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aelephant comments on CEV: a utilitarian critique - Less Wrong
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You could reduce human suffering to 0 by reducing the number of humans to 0, so there's got to be another value greater than reducing suffering.
It seems plausible to me that suffering could serve some useful purpose & eliminating it (or seeking to eliminate it) might have horrific consequences.
Almost all hedonistic utilitarians are concerned with maximizing happiness as well as minimizing suffering, including Brian. The reason that he talks about suffering so much is because, it is most people rank a unit of suffering as, say a -3 experience and a unit of suffering as, say, a -1 experience. And he thinks that there is much more suffering than happiness in the world and that it easier to prevent it.
(Sorry if I got any of this wrong Brian)
Thanks, Jabberslythe! You got it mostly correct. :)
The one thing I would add is that I personally think people don't usually take suffering seriously enough -- at least not really severe suffering like torture or being eaten alive. Indeed, many people may never have experienced something that bad. So I put high importance on preventing experiences like these relative to other things.
Why are you so certain that a population of 0 would be a problem? In fact, there'd be no one for whom it would (could!) be a problem; no one whose values could rate that state of affairs as bad. Would it be a problem if no form of consciousness had ever come into existence? Why would that be problematic?