If you are not Scott, remember “the purpose of a system is what it does”. Someone may not say outright “I want you to feel pain”, yet may still treat people’s pain as very unimportant when implementing policy.
I won’t discuss tpoasiwid here, but I note that your claim is completely different from alleging that (1) there is a cult of pain that (2) is rooted in ethics that developed in malthusian times and (3) now drives policy choices. If everything that is relevant is tpoasiwid, then we do not need to claim anything about motivations driving policies.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” doesn’t mean that motivations don’t exist. It does mean that motivations are often illegible. If people behave as if they think suffering is important, and they say things that are roughly along those lines, looking for a smoking gun where someone actually goes on record as saying that in a precise way isn’t going to be very useful.
If you are not Scott, remember “the purpose of a system is what it does”. Someone may not say outright “I want you to feel pain”, yet may still treat people’s pain as very unimportant when implementing policy.
I won’t discuss tpoasiwid here, but I note that your claim is completely different from alleging that (1) there is a cult of pain that (2) is rooted in ethics that developed in malthusian times and (3) now drives policy choices. If everything that is relevant is tpoasiwid, then we do not need to claim anything about motivations driving policies.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” doesn’t mean that motivations don’t exist. It does mean that motivations are often illegible. If people behave as if they think suffering is important, and they say things that are roughly along those lines, looking for a smoking gun where someone actually goes on record as saying that in a precise way isn’t going to be very useful.