In my first piece, I settled on conceiving of radical empathy as an object view. I highlight some other potential moral implications of object views:
More of what someone finds pleasant or is (knowingly or unknowingly) disposed to find pleasant is better for them, all else equal. Death can be bad for them if and because it deprives them of the objects of those preferences. Death can also be bad for them if and because they explicitly disprefer it or its consequences (more).
We should care about what animals care about, e.g. preventing their pain and keeping them close to those to which they’re attached (more).
Someone’s suffering might not necessarily always count against their life, in case it isn't about their life or aspects of it, e.g. grieving the loss of a loved one (more).
If there can be (chemically-induced) pleasures and displeasures that aren’t about anything at all, they would not guide action on their own, although attitudes about them could (more).
The concept of ‘welfare’ may need to be substantially revised or even abandoned as a foundational concept, given its common characterization as self-regarding and only affected during the subject’s life by events during their life (more).
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ariel Simnegar, Lukas Gloor, Justis Mills, Tori, JackM and Vasco Grilo for helpful feedback. All errors are my own.
The harm of death
It is worth remarking that the above asymmetry doesn’t mean it can’t be better to Alice to experience more pleasure or other positive attitudes or pro-attitudes in her life than otherwise if she will exist anyway. She may herself explicitly prefer to experience pleasure or other positive attitudes.
Or, perhaps, if she is disposed to enjoy skiing, say, then it’s better for her to ski more. She therefore has dispositional preferences for the things that would bring her pleasure, even things she doesn’t know or expect to enjoy. And similarly for other pro-attitudes. She can discover these unknown dispositional preferences of hers through experience.
In this case, it’s not (necessarily) the missing pleasure or other pro-attitudes themselves that make death bad, it’s just the lesser achievement of the objects of our dispositional pro-attitudes, to have less of the things we are disposed to have positive attitudes towards. This could ground a deprivationist account of the badness of death (Luper, 2021, Timmerman, 2016): death deprives us of the things we are disposed to enjoy, appreciate or otherwise take pro-attitudes towards, the objects of our dispositional pro-attitudes.
Of course, there are questions of how exactly we should count and weigh what we’re deprived of. I won’t address this here.
Furthermore, this doesn’t mean death can’t also be bad just because we disprefer it or because our ends are better achieved if we live, like categorical desire accounts of the badness of death.[1] Death can be bad (i.e. worse) for us for multiple reasons.
We should care about what animals care about
If an animal would find their own pain unpleasant or aversive, then that gives us reason to prevent it. If an animal would find something pleasurable, then that gives us reason to give it to them. If an animal prefers to be near another specific individual, that gives us reason to ensure they’re close. If an animal cares about the distress of their kin or companion, that gives us (more) reason to ensure the welfare of their kin or companion. And in general, if an animal cares about anything at all, then we should care about that on their behalf, too.
Someone’s suffering might not always count against their life
Even unpleasantness, aversion or suffering might not count against someone’s life. Suppose I’m grieving the death of a loved one. The object of my preference is my loved one, or the object of my suffering is their absence or death. Medicating away this grief, or making me forget them, or killing me would not be better for this preference or to me, unless I have a separate preference about my grief or other preferences that would benefit.
Or, if I see and am afraid of a nearby bear, the world would be better to me (in at least one way, for that preference) without that bear, or without that bear near me. But this fear is directed externally, not (necessarily) at myself or my own experiences.
And these verdicts seem intuitive to me, if and because they turn out to match what I actually care about in these cases.
However, Brody (2018, 2023) defines suffering so that an individual suffers when “she has an unpleasant or negative affective experience that she minds, where to mind some state is to have an occurrent desire that the experience not be occurring.” Unpleasantness and aversion aren’t enough: there must be aversion to the experience itself. Suffering, thus construed, would then count against someone’s life. Do grief and fear necessarily involve such aversion to the experience itself? Do they usually involve such aversion in practice? If they do, they would necessarily or usually count against the individual’s life.
It may be that when unpleasantness is sufficiently intense, we humans and many other animals will find the unpleasantness itself aversive. But this may not be the case for all possible beings capable of unpleasantness.
Caring, but not about anything in particular?
It seems that when we care, we usually care about something. We desire things. We approve of or disapprove of things. We prefer some things over others. We take pleasure in things, like sensations and events, including achievements and humour. Our mental states represent or otherwise track the things they're about, roughly and fallibly (Siewert, 2022, Jacob, 2023).
However, not all pleasures seem to be about anything. Pleasure can be caused directly chemically, by cannabinoid or opioid receptor activity, whether by endogenously (internally) produced compounds or drugs. When someone gets runner’s high, it’s not really any aspect of the experience of running itself they find pleasant; it’s just that running triggers the release of such compounds, which causes pleasure. The pleasure is not a response to a mental state that’s tracking features of the world. The cause of a pleasure need not be what the pleasure is about. That mental states can be about things is called intentionality (Jacob, 2023).
Similarly, someone might say they enjoy using euphoria-inducing drugs, but the drug-induced euphoria isn’t about those drugs; it’s just caused by them. Meditation and direct brain stimulation might also induce pleasant feelings that aren’t about anything.
So, pleasure that is about something is probably based on the recruitment of a general pleasure system that can generate pleasure without being about anything. What makes a pleasure about something is the broader integration into and co-activation with a system that's about something, with perceptions/sensations and beliefs being about things. But if we directly stimulate and activate the pleasure system, that pleasure is not about anything.
Maybe we can still interpret such directly chemically–induced pleasures as being about something. Maybe they’re about everything, or all your sensations or perceptions, or your mental state as a whole, or the things your mental state represents. They cause you to find more things or everything pleasant. This is unclear. Still, there may not even be an empirical fact of the matter here; it could be purely interpretive, and the choice of interpretation would be a normative choice.
If some pleasures aren’t about anything, object views would be at a loss on how to be guided directly by them. Objectless pleasures wouldn’t matter on object views. This might seem odd, but if this isn’t a way of caring about anything in particular, then it seems like it really doesn’t give us anything in particular to care about on its behalf.
Personally, I don’t find this counterintuitive in the case of pleasure. I’m not interested in pleasure for its own sake. If it seems to you that such objectless pleasure is good — personally or morally — or you desire pleasure in itself, then that in itself is an attitude about something, and so would count on the view I’m defending here. The pleasures as objects of your other attitudes would matter.
But maybe this isn’t a satisfying response for some people. What if a being experiences objectless pleasure and has no attitude towards the pleasure? Shouldn’t that matter on behalf of the being themself? However, if they could understand their situation, had beliefs that were appropriately sensitive to their attitudes and could report those beliefs, and you asked them directly, they would say that that objectless pleasure doesn’t matter to them, and nothing would matter to them through it. They don’t care about it, and they don’t care about anything through it. So, why exactly should I care about such a pleasure on their behalf?
Like drug-induced euphoria, there is also drug-induced dysphoria, unpleasantness. I might be more concerned about discounting objectless unpleasantness. However, I imagine that what makes intense suffering seem urgent is its effects on attention. What would intensesuffering be like if it resulted in no desires in the individual, didn’t draw their attention to anything and was easily ignored by them? This doesn’t make much sense to me, so it seems to me the effects on attention are crucial in how we understand suffering. These effects on attention are mediated by motivational salience, a mechanism responsible for drawing attention by desires (Berridge, 2018, Kim et al., 2021), and desires, motivational salience and attention do have objects. I discuss this a bit more in St. Jules, 2024.
So, whether or not objectless unpleasantness is possible, intense suffering would still probably generally involve objects, and probably generally be worth preventing, all else equal.
Welfare on object views
It’s plausible to me that radical empathy and object views as I conceive of them are incompatible with the concept of welfare as usually conceived. Welfare is often or usually conceived of as:
Directly only self-regarding or prudential, although good relationships, achievements like being a good parent and being virtuous can be indirectly other-regarding (e.g. Parfit, 1984),
Localized in and accrued over time in specific ways, e.g. only attitudes at some time T about things that obtain at the same time T count (Bykvist, 2024[2]),[3] and to the exclusion of valuing posthumous preference satisfaction.[4]
However, these can miss much of what we care about.
We want our loved ones and others to be better off. We don’t just care about what we personally accomplish for their benefit, or whether we’ve acted well towards them, or our relationships with them. We really genuinely want them to be better off, period.
Many people care about things that happen after their deaths, like the welfare of their loved ones or others, their legacies or projects. I’m also not convinced temporal considerations matter at all, or that it’s necessary to localize when something benefits someone, especially if the actual past, present and future turn out to be equally real, as in eternalism.
To me, radical empathy is more fundamental and more important. So, if we aim for radical empathy, we could abandon the concept of welfare altogether, or revise it to align with radical empathy, although the latter might cause confusion.
To be clear, I’m not settled on whether we should care what was previously cared for on behalf of preferences that are no longer held. I have intuitions going each way. Even if, say, we shouldn’t care for them and the satisfaction view gets this right, I think it would do so for the wrong reasons and without being appropriately sensitive to Alice’s preferences about Bobby’s welfare. I’d instead look for different versions of or more modest modifications to object views to accommodate this. And if there turns out to be no such good way with object views, I may just accept that we should continue to care for what was previously cared for on behalf of preferences no longer held.
There have been various accounts of what categorical desires are and require. They could be, according to Bower and Fischer (2018):
1. “desire[(s)] that future desires of mine will be born and satisfied” (Williams, 1973 (pdf), pp. 86–87),
2. “desires for more life” (Belshaw, 2015, p.14), or
3. “desires for that which gives [the individual] reason to want more life” (Belshaw, 2015, p.14). These are desires that are not conditional on your survival, but can be further satisfied with your survival, like that your child has a good start in life (Luper, 2021, section 7.2).
According to a plausible interpretation of this constraint, a time T (towards which you have an attitude that does not change during T) is good for you only if T ‘resonates’ with you at T. As Bradley (2016, 7) puts it:’In order for something to go well for someone at a time, it must not only resonate with the person at the time – it must also obtain at that time’.
Here ‘T resonates’ means not being alienated from T, caring about T, and finding T (or some parts of it) ‘compelling, attractive, engaging’ (Railton 2002, 47). This is a plausible interpretation of the constraint, since after all, it would be odd to claim that a time in your life that will leave you completely cold when you lead it still resonates with you.
This means that T ‘resonates’ with you at T only if you have an T-located and T-directed favouring. For if it is not T-located it does not resonate with you at T, and if it is not T-directed, then T does not resonate with you. So, we can conclude that T is good for you only if you have an T-located and T-directed favouring. But this is exactly what diagonalism says. So, it captures the resonance constraint.
This could lead to reference frame-dependence in ethics, due to the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity in physics. Which of two events occurs first and whether or not they are simultaneous can depend on your velocity (speed and direction) relative to each. In some reference frames, an attitude can be held and satisfied (i.e. what it’s aimed at obtains) at the same time, and in others, the same attitude and its satisfaction won’t overlap in time.
One natural response would be to say that if someone desires x, they benefit from x obtaining if and only if x obtains while they desire x, from their own reference frame. After all, if we’re taking on their attitudes, we’re already taking on part of their perspective, so we might as well take on their reference frame on their behalf, too. This would of course mean using different reference frames for different individuals, but this doesn’t necessarily seem foundationally problematic to me. It might complicate things when we start colonizing space, and, for example, people who care for each other end up in different reference frames.
Bykvist (2024) summarizes alternatives, which may count posthumous desire satisfaction:
Without talking about the object-version or the attitude-version, Baber (2010) defends what Bradley (2016) calls ’the time of the object view’, which, like the object-version, states that you are benefited by the time at which the object of your attitude obtains. Bruckner (2013) and Dorsey (2013) defend what Bradley (2016) call ’the time of the attitude view’, which, like the attitude-version, states that you are benefited at the time at which you hold the attitude. See, Bradley (2016) for criticisms of Baber (2010), Bruckner (2013), and Dorsey (2013).
Summary
In my first piece, I settled on conceiving of radical empathy as an object view. I highlight some other potential moral implications of object views:
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ariel Simnegar, Lukas Gloor, Justis Mills, Tori, JackM and Vasco Grilo for helpful feedback. All errors are my own.
The harm of death
It is worth remarking that the above asymmetry doesn’t mean it can’t be better to Alice to experience more pleasure or other positive attitudes or pro-attitudes in her life than otherwise if she will exist anyway. She may herself explicitly prefer to experience pleasure or other positive attitudes.
Or, perhaps, if she is disposed to enjoy skiing, say, then it’s better for her to ski more. She therefore has dispositional preferences for the things that would bring her pleasure, even things she doesn’t know or expect to enjoy. And similarly for other pro-attitudes. She can discover these unknown dispositional preferences of hers through experience.
In this case, it’s not (necessarily) the missing pleasure or other pro-attitudes themselves that make death bad, it’s just the lesser achievement of the objects of our dispositional pro-attitudes, to have less of the things we are disposed to have positive attitudes towards. This could ground a deprivationist account of the badness of death (Luper, 2021, Timmerman, 2016): death deprives us of the things we are disposed to enjoy, appreciate or otherwise take pro-attitudes towards, the objects of our dispositional pro-attitudes.
Of course, there are questions of how exactly we should count and weigh what we’re deprived of. I won’t address this here.
Furthermore, this doesn’t mean death can’t also be bad just because we disprefer it or because our ends are better achieved if we live, like categorical desire accounts of the badness of death.[1] Death can be bad (i.e. worse) for us for multiple reasons.
We should care about what animals care about
If an animal would find their own pain unpleasant or aversive, then that gives us reason to prevent it. If an animal would find something pleasurable, then that gives us reason to give it to them. If an animal prefers to be near another specific individual, that gives us reason to ensure they’re close. If an animal cares about the distress of their kin or companion, that gives us (more) reason to ensure the welfare of their kin or companion. And in general, if an animal cares about anything at all, then we should care about that on their behalf, too.
Someone’s suffering might not always count against their life
Even unpleasantness, aversion or suffering might not count against someone’s life. Suppose I’m grieving the death of a loved one. The object of my preference is my loved one, or the object of my suffering is their absence or death. Medicating away this grief, or making me forget them, or killing me would not be better for this preference or to me, unless I have a separate preference about my grief or other preferences that would benefit.
Or, if I see and am afraid of a nearby bear, the world would be better to me (in at least one way, for that preference) without that bear, or without that bear near me. But this fear is directed externally, not (necessarily) at myself or my own experiences.
And these verdicts seem intuitive to me, if and because they turn out to match what I actually care about in these cases.
However, Brody (2018, 2023) defines suffering so that an individual suffers when “she has an unpleasant or negative affective experience that she minds, where to mind some state is to have an occurrent desire that the experience not be occurring.” Unpleasantness and aversion aren’t enough: there must be aversion to the experience itself. Suffering, thus construed, would then count against someone’s life. Do grief and fear necessarily involve such aversion to the experience itself? Do they usually involve such aversion in practice? If they do, they would necessarily or usually count against the individual’s life.
It may be that when unpleasantness is sufficiently intense, we humans and many other animals will find the unpleasantness itself aversive. But this may not be the case for all possible beings capable of unpleasantness.
Caring, but not about anything in particular?
It seems that when we care, we usually care about something. We desire things. We approve of or disapprove of things. We prefer some things over others. We take pleasure in things, like sensations and events, including achievements and humour. Our mental states represent or otherwise track the things they're about, roughly and fallibly (Siewert, 2022, Jacob, 2023).
However, not all pleasures seem to be about anything. Pleasure can be caused directly chemically, by cannabinoid or opioid receptor activity, whether by endogenously (internally) produced compounds or drugs. When someone gets runner’s high, it’s not really any aspect of the experience of running itself they find pleasant; it’s just that running triggers the release of such compounds, which causes pleasure. The pleasure is not a response to a mental state that’s tracking features of the world. The cause of a pleasure need not be what the pleasure is about. That mental states can be about things is called intentionality (Jacob, 2023).
Similarly, someone might say they enjoy using euphoria-inducing drugs, but the drug-induced euphoria isn’t about those drugs; it’s just caused by them. Meditation and direct brain stimulation might also induce pleasant feelings that aren’t about anything.
So, pleasure that is about something is probably based on the recruitment of a general pleasure system that can generate pleasure without being about anything. What makes a pleasure about something is the broader integration into and co-activation with a system that's about something, with perceptions/sensations and beliefs being about things. But if we directly stimulate and activate the pleasure system, that pleasure is not about anything.
Maybe we can still interpret such directly chemically–induced pleasures as being about something. Maybe they’re about everything, or all your sensations or perceptions, or your mental state as a whole, or the things your mental state represents. They cause you to find more things or everything pleasant. This is unclear. Still, there may not even be an empirical fact of the matter here; it could be purely interpretive, and the choice of interpretation would be a normative choice.
If some pleasures aren’t about anything, object views would be at a loss on how to be guided directly by them. Objectless pleasures wouldn’t matter on object views. This might seem odd, but if this isn’t a way of caring about anything in particular, then it seems like it really doesn’t give us anything in particular to care about on its behalf.
Personally, I don’t find this counterintuitive in the case of pleasure. I’m not interested in pleasure for its own sake. If it seems to you that such objectless pleasure is good — personally or morally — or you desire pleasure in itself, then that in itself is an attitude about something, and so would count on the view I’m defending here. The pleasures as objects of your other attitudes would matter.
But maybe this isn’t a satisfying response for some people. What if a being experiences objectless pleasure and has no attitude towards the pleasure? Shouldn’t that matter on behalf of the being themself? However, if they could understand their situation, had beliefs that were appropriately sensitive to their attitudes and could report those beliefs, and you asked them directly, they would say that that objectless pleasure doesn’t matter to them, and nothing would matter to them through it. They don’t care about it, and they don’t care about anything through it. So, why exactly should I care about such a pleasure on their behalf?
Like drug-induced euphoria, there is also drug-induced dysphoria, unpleasantness. I might be more concerned about discounting objectless unpleasantness. However, I imagine that what makes intense suffering seem urgent is its effects on attention. What would intense suffering be like if it resulted in no desires in the individual, didn’t draw their attention to anything and was easily ignored by them? This doesn’t make much sense to me, so it seems to me the effects on attention are crucial in how we understand suffering. These effects on attention are mediated by motivational salience, a mechanism responsible for drawing attention by desires (Berridge, 2018, Kim et al., 2021), and desires, motivational salience and attention do have objects. I discuss this a bit more in St. Jules, 2024.
So, whether or not objectless unpleasantness is possible, intense suffering would still probably generally involve objects, and probably generally be worth preventing, all else equal.
Welfare on object views
It’s plausible to me that radical empathy and object views as I conceive of them are incompatible with the concept of welfare as usually conceived. Welfare is often or usually conceived of as:
Localized in and accrued over time in specific ways, e.g. only attitudes at some time T about things that obtain at the same time T count (Bykvist, 2024[2]),[3] and to the exclusion of valuing posthumous preference satisfaction.[4]
However, these can miss much of what we care about.
To me, radical empathy is more fundamental and more important. So, if we aim for radical empathy, we could abandon the concept of welfare altogether, or revise it to align with radical empathy, although the latter might cause confusion.
To be clear, I’m not settled on whether we should care what was previously cared for on behalf of preferences that are no longer held. I have intuitions going each way. Even if, say, we shouldn’t care for them and the satisfaction view gets this right, I think it would do so for the wrong reasons and without being appropriately sensitive to Alice’s preferences about Bobby’s welfare. I’d instead look for different versions of or more modest modifications to object views to accommodate this. And if there turns out to be no such good way with object views, I may just accept that we should continue to care for what was previously cared for on behalf of preferences no longer held.
There have been various accounts of what categorical desires are and require. They could be, according to Bower and Fischer (2018):
1. “desire[(s)] that future desires of mine will be born and satisfied” (Williams, 1973 (pdf), pp. 86–87),
2. “desires for more life” (Belshaw, 2015, p.14), or
3. “desires for that which gives [the individual] reason to want more life” (Belshaw, 2015, p.14). These are desires that are not conditional on your survival, but can be further satisfied with your survival, like that your child has a good start in life (Luper, 2021, section 7.2).
Bykvist (2024) writes in defense:
This could lead to reference frame-dependence in ethics, due to the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity in physics. Which of two events occurs first and whether or not they are simultaneous can depend on your velocity (speed and direction) relative to each. In some reference frames, an attitude can be held and satisfied (i.e. what it’s aimed at obtains) at the same time, and in others, the same attitude and its satisfaction won’t overlap in time.
One natural response would be to say that if someone desires x, they benefit from x obtaining if and only if x obtains while they desire x, from their own reference frame. After all, if we’re taking on their attitudes, we’re already taking on part of their perspective, so we might as well take on their reference frame on their behalf, too. This would of course mean using different reference frames for different individuals, but this doesn’t necessarily seem foundationally problematic to me. It might complicate things when we start colonizing space, and, for example, people who care for each other end up in different reference frames.
Bykvist (2024) summarizes alternatives, which may count posthumous desire satisfaction: