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?".
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 ...
I've started listening to the audiobook of Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World, which is both highly recommended and very unsettling. The essays on non-human animals, for example, made me realize for the first time that it may well be possible that the net utility on Earth over all conscious creatures is massively negative.
Naturally, this led me to wonder whether, after all, efforts to eradicate all consciousness on Earth - human and non-human - may be ethically endorsable.This, in turn, reminded me of a recent post on LW asking whether the possibility of parallelized torture of future uploads justifies killing as many people as possible today.
I had responded to that post by mentioning that parallelizing euphoria was also possible, so this should cancel things out. This seemed at the time like a refutation, but I realized later I had made the error of equating the two, utility and disutility, as part of the same smooth continuum, like [-100, 100] ∈ R. 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. I really don't know, and I don't think introspection is as useful in answering this question as it seems intuitively to be, but it seems quite plausible for this to be the case.
As these thoughts were emerging, Singer, as if hearing my concerns, 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, and therefore it is a morally tragic outcome for any of us to have emerged into existence.
Of course these are shoddy arguments in support of Mass Planetary Biocide, even supposing the hypothesis that the Earth (universe?) has net negative utility is true. For one, we can engineer minds somewhere in a better neighborhood of mindspace, where utility is everywhere positive. Or maybe it's impossible even in theory to treat utility and disutility like real-valued functions of physical systems over time (though I'm betting it is). Or maybe the universe is canonically infinite, so even if 99% of conscious experiences in the universe have disutility, there are infinite quantities of both utility and disutility and so nothing we do matters, as Bostrom wrote about. (Although this is actually not an argument against MPB, just not one for it). And anyway, the state of net utility today is not nearly as important as the state of net utility could potentially be in the future. And perhaps utilitarianism is a naive and incorrect ethical framework.
Still, I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive, so the realization that this need not be so is causing me significant disutility.