If you haven’t seen it already, you might find The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics of interest. Like your article, it collects various intuitions that many people have that might push them toward a view that puts special priority to the prevention of suffering over the creation of pleasure. Your examples remind me a bit of the “Two planets” thought experiment listed on that page (though their focus is slightly different):
Two planets
Imagine two planets, one empty and one inhabited by 1,000 beings suffering a miserable existence. Flying to the empty planet, you could bring 1,000,000 beings into existence that will live a happy life. Flying to the inhabited planet instead, you could help the 1,000 miserable beings and give them the means to live happily. If there is time to do both, where would you go first? If there is only time to fly to one planet, which one should it be?
Even though one could bring about 1,000 times as many happy beings as there are existing unhappy ones, many people’s moral intuition would have us help the unhappy beings instead. To those holding this intuition, taking care of suffering appears to be of greater moral importance than creating new, happy beings.
It’s worth distinguishing between negative utilitarianism and merely having suffering-focused ethics. NU is an special case of SFE, where “suffering-focused ethics is an umbrella term for moral views that place primary or particular importance on the prevention of suffering”. So it sounds to me like a reasonable claim that
And though most cannot be described as actually following any particular named ethical theory, I think a reasonable approximation for many people’s ethical view is that they:
Have a (non-normative) preference to personally feel happy/have positive experiences
Have a (non-normative) preference for others to feel happy/have positive experiences, usually centered on their family, close friends, and other personal acquaintances
Believe it’s immoral to cause harm/pain/suffering to others, where the more suffering, the worse the sin
That is, their moral beliefs (rather than their personal preferences) mostly relate to reducing the negative rather than increasing the positive.
But I think it’s not very productive to describe this as something like “NU, just not taken to extreme lengths such as destroying the worlds”. The defining feature of NU is that it puts zero intrinsic weight on positive experiences. If you have a theory that does include a preference for people to experience positive experiences, but just puts a higher weight on preventing suffering than it does on making people have positive experiences, then that theory is something different than negative utilitarianism. So it’d be clearer to call it something like a “suffering-focused” theory instead.
The defining feature of NU is that it puts zero intrinsic weight on positive experiences. If you have a theory that does include a preference for people to experience positive experiences, but just puts a higher weight on preventing suffering than it does on making people have positive experiences, then that theory is something different than negative utilitarianism. So it’d be clearer to call it something like a “suffering-focused” theory instead.
I think various people define NU differently.
Quoting Wikipedia: The term “negative utilitarianism” is used by some authors to denote the theory that reducing negative well-being is the only thing that ultimately matters morally. Others distinguish between “strong” and “weak” versions of negative utilitarianism, where strong versions are only concerned with reducing negative well-being, and weak versions say that both positive and negative well-being matter but that negative well-being matters more.
If you haven’t seen it already, you might find The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics of interest. Like your article, it collects various intuitions that many people have that might push them toward a view that puts special priority to the prevention of suffering over the creation of pleasure. Your examples remind me a bit of the “Two planets” thought experiment listed on that page (though their focus is slightly different):
It’s worth distinguishing between negative utilitarianism and merely having suffering-focused ethics. NU is an special case of SFE, where “suffering-focused ethics is an umbrella term for moral views that place primary or particular importance on the prevention of suffering”. So it sounds to me like a reasonable claim that
But I think it’s not very productive to describe this as something like “NU, just not taken to extreme lengths such as destroying the worlds”. The defining feature of NU is that it puts zero intrinsic weight on positive experiences. If you have a theory that does include a preference for people to experience positive experiences, but just puts a higher weight on preventing suffering than it does on making people have positive experiences, then that theory is something different than negative utilitarianism. So it’d be clearer to call it something like a “suffering-focused” theory instead.
I think various people define NU differently.
Quoting Wikipedia: The term “negative utilitarianism” is used by some authors to denote the theory that reducing negative well-being is the only thing that ultimately matters morally. Others distinguish between “strong” and “weak” versions of negative utilitarianism, where strong versions are only concerned with reducing negative well-being, and weak versions say that both positive and negative well-being matter but that negative well-being matters more.
Fair enough, I hadn’t heard of the “weak NU” framing before. I’d still avoid it myself, though.