Additionally, the Sadistic Conclusion seems at least as bad as the Repugnant Conclusion, so comparatively, total utilitarianism is worse.
I think you intend to say that "comparatively, average utilitarianism is worse" :)
Terminal value monism is possible with impersonal compassion as the common motivation to resolve all conflicts. This means that every thus aligned small self lives primarily to prevent hellish states wherever they may arise, and that personal euthanasia is never a primary option, especially considering that survivors of suffering may later be in a good position to understand and help it in others (as well as contributing themselves as examples for our collective wisdom of life narratives that do/don't get stuck in hellish ways).
● Humans do not have one terminal value (unless they are mentally ill).
Why though?
I don't see any other way to (ultimate) alignment/harmony/unification between (nor within) minds than to use a single terminal value-grounded currency for resolving all conflicts.
For as soon as we weigh two terminal values against each other, we are evaluating them through a shared dimension (e.g., force or mass in the case of a literal scale as the comparator), and are thus logically forced to accept that either one of the terminal values (or its motivating power) could be translated into the other, or that there was this third terminal {value/motivation/tension} for which the others are tools.
Do you suggest getting... (read more)
Did you make any update regarding the simplicity / complexity of value?
Yes, in terms of how others may explicitly defend the terminal value of even preferences (tastes, hobbies), instead of defending only terminal virtues (health, friendship), or core building blocks of experience (pleasure, beauty).
No, in terms of assigning anything {independent positive value}.
I experience all of the things quoted in Complexity of value,
"Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods... (read 566 more words →)
Thanks for the replies, everyone!
I don’t have the time to reply back individually, but I read them all and believe these to be pretty representative of the wider community’s reasons to reject NU as well.
I can’t speak for those who identify strictly as NU, but while I currently share many of NU’s answers to theoretical outweighing scenarios, I do find it difficult to unpack all the nuance it would take to reconcile “NU as CEV” with our everyday experience.
Therefore, I’ll likely update further away from
{attempting to salvage NU’s reputation by bridging it with compassion, motivation theory, and secular Buddhism}
towards
{integrating these independent of NU, seeing if this would result in a more relatable language, or if my preferred kind of theoretical unity (without pluralist outweighing) would still have the cost of its sounding absurd and extreme on its face}
Thanks for the perspective.
I agree that even NU may imply rejecting NU in its present form, because it does not feel like a psychologically realistic theory to constantly apply in everyday life; we are more motivated to move towards goals and subgoals that do not carry explicit reminders of extreme suffering on the flip side.
I do feel that I am very close to NU whenever I consider theoretical problems and edge-cases that would outweigh extreme suffering with anything else than preventing more extreme suffering. In practice, it may be more applicable (and ironically, more useful according to NU) to replace NU with asymptotically approaching uncompromising compassion, or an equivalent positive-language narrative, while... (read more)
Yes, I am making the (AFAICT, in your perspective) “incredibly, amazingly strong claim” that in a unified theory, only suffering ultimately matters. In other words, impartial compassion is the ultimate scale (comparator) to decide conflicts between expected suffering vs. other values (whose common basis for this comparison derives from their complete, often context-dependent relationship to expected suffering, including accounting for the wider incentives & long-term consequences from breaking rules that are practically always honored).
I find negative utilitarianism unappealing for roughly the same reason I'd find "we should only care about disgust" or "we should only care about the taste of bananas" unappealing.
Roughly? Suffering is not an arbitrary foundation for unification (for a... (read 1007 more words →)
If you flip the Rachels-Temkin spectrum argument (philpapers.org/archive/NEBTGT.pdf), then some tradeoff between happiness and suffering is needed to keep transitive preferences, which is necessary to avoid weird conclusions like accepting suffering to avoid happiness. As long as you don't think theres some suffering threshold where 1 more util of suffering is infinitely worse than anything else, then this makes sense.
Can you give a practical example of a situation where I would be hereby forced to admit that happiness has terminal value above its instrumental value for my preventing as many suffering moments as I can?
I don’t see why {resolving conflicts by weighing everything (ultimately) in suffering} would ever lead me to {“accept... (read 352 more words →)
No, I’m not depressed, and I believe I never have been. I understand and appreciate the question if what you describe is your prior experience of people who identify as negative utilitarians. I may identify as NU for discussion’s sake, but my underlying identification is with the motivation of impartial compassion. I would go as far as to say that I am happy in all areas of my personal life, being driven towards unification by my terminal concern for the expected suffering of others.
I have had brief experiences of medical emergencies that gave me new perspectives into suffering from the inside. (In hindsight, much of it was generated by fear and escalating... (read more)
Note (2022-03-15): For a recent defense of similar axiological views, see my series on minimalist axiologies.
(Crossposted on the EA Forum)
Absolute negative utilitarianism (ANU) is a minority view despite the theoretical advantages of terminal value monism (suffering is the only thing that motivates us “by itself”) over pluralism (there are many such things). Notably, ANU doesn’t require solving value incommensurability, because all other values can be instrumentally evaluated by their relationship to the suffering of sentient beings, using only one terminal value-grounded common currency for everything.
Therefore, it is a straw man argument that NUs don’t value life or positive states, because NUs value them instrumentally, which may translate into substantial practical efforts to... (read more)
(Agreed!) I find it very counterintuitive how the standard framework of population ethics recommends that we ignore all the instrumental (or extrinsic / relational / non-independent) value of various lives... (read more)