The title of the post says negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than we think, but the body of the post says the intuitions behind negative utilitarianism make sense.
There is a critical distinction between these two claims. Indeed, the whole point of the seemingly endless philosophical debates over the fundamental nature of ethics[1] is that you can start with seemingly reasonable assumptions, but reach crazy conclusions. And you can also start with different, but just-as-reasonable assumptions[2] and reach completely contrary conclusions.
The resolution to this seeming paradox is that our intuitive sense of “reasonableness” contains fundamental, irresolvable contradictions inside of it. Contradictions that[3] do not matter too much in mundane/prosaic areas we’re familiar with, but which get amplified when the tails come apart and stuff like uploading, mass population increases, etc, become available. There is some connection to the notion of “philosophical crazyism” mentioned in this comment by Carl Feynman.
In math and logic, there is something known as the principle of explosion. It says that as long as you have at least one contradiction between your axioms, you can apply rules of inference to prove all statements inside your system are both true and false. Even the slightest problem can get amplified and break the whole edifice down. Something analogous seems likely to happen to our ability to handle the moral conundrums around us, if stuff gets wild sometime in the future.
I have written more about these kinds of topics here.
The title of the post says negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than we think, but the body of the post says the intuitions behind negative utilitarianism make sense.
Fair
Perhaps I should have clarified more that the post is trying to argue that NU is closer to many people’s natural intuitions than one may naively expect, rather than to say NU is more justified than one may naively expect. I don’t think NU is correct or justified.
The title of the post says negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than we think, but the body of the post says the intuitions behind negative utilitarianism make sense.
There is a critical distinction between these two claims. Indeed, the whole point of the seemingly endless philosophical debates over the fundamental nature of ethics[1] is that you can start with seemingly reasonable assumptions, but reach crazy conclusions. And you can also start with different, but just-as-reasonable assumptions[2] and reach completely contrary conclusions.
The resolution to this seeming paradox is that our intuitive sense of “reasonableness” contains fundamental, irresolvable contradictions inside of it. Contradictions that[3] do not matter too much in mundane/prosaic areas we’re familiar with, but which get amplified when the tails come apart and stuff like uploading, mass population increases, etc, become available. There is some connection to the notion of “philosophical crazyism” mentioned in this comment by Carl Feynman.
In math and logic, there is something known as the principle of explosion. It says that as long as you have at least one contradiction between your axioms, you can apply rules of inference to prove all statements inside your system are both true and false. Even the slightest problem can get amplified and break the whole edifice down. Something analogous seems likely to happen to our ability to handle the moral conundrums around us, if stuff gets wild sometime in the future.
I have written more about these kinds of topics here.
Or, frankly, most philosophical debates, regardless of topic
Stuff like “increasing the total amount of happiness in the world is good, all else equal” or “making people happier is good, all else equal”
As basic evo-psych would predict
Fair
Perhaps I should have clarified more that the post is trying to argue that NU is closer to many people’s natural intuitions than one may naively expect, rather than to say NU is more justified than one may naively expect. I don’t think NU is correct or justified.