I think different people have different levels of willingness to commit to these ideas. I think most people should think more critically about what career they pursue. I think some people should base their entire careers around doing the most good.
I think that, if you believe that suffering is bad for you, it’s not a stretch to think suffering is bad for others so you should seek to eliminate it as you would eliminate your own.
I strongly agree.
That’s intense. Thanks!
I find it pretty funny that I’m optimist here, when my post is literally arguing that our world contains hell.
I totally get your perspective though. I’d have to look into this a lot more.
I haven’t looked into it too much, but, generally, I would guess that a hunter gatherer human had a net positive life since their life involved lots of positive things (eating food, seeing the beautiful world, having time for relaxation, making music, spending time with loved ones, etc.) This would make me think that it’s plausible that there’s lots of positive aspects of other animal’s lives. They may enjoy eating food, being around animals of the same species, or engaging in play.
When I go out into nature, it also seems like animals are having a good time. I don’t feel like I almost ever see animals that look underfed, diseased, or injured. And, I would expect that their deaths at the hands of predators are relatively short.
That said, I completely understand your perspective. If I learned that most animals are constantly hungry or suffering from serious disease or parasites, that would change my perspective a bit.
Overall, it seems like we need just a lot more data to have any strong conclusions.
I recently asked a philosopher of welfare biology if he thought that nature was net negative for animals, and he said he was unsure. Also, from what I’ve read, humans generally consider their lives to be net-positive. And, factory farming does seem quite net negative. So, overall, I think it’s hard to say.
Thanks for sharing!
I think it’s very hard to acknowledge them because they produce too much sorrow and imply too much of a demand of us.
Ah, thanks for letting me know! I’ll have to look into the numbers more. I probably wouldn’t discount fish as much as you so that’s where we’d likely disagree.
I think we can make our best guesses about how to add them up, especially if we assume that most humans have roughly the same welfare range, which I think we have good evolutionary reasons to believe.
When I refer to happiness, joy, and welfare, I’m referring to positively valenced affective states in general.
Thanks for your thoughts!
I think that, at least, in my experience, the idea that happiness is good seems to be an essential feature of the experience itself.
What I’m alluding to here is that I think we should trust our moral intuitions about our feelings being good or bad, but that we shouldn’t trust our moral intuitions about our external environment and hypothetical situations.
I am agnostic about the mind-body problem so I am not committed to physicalism.
Exogenous rewards are seemingly what cause all motivations so I don’t understand why one should ignore them, unless they want no motivation.
Yeah, I pretty much agree.
Yeah, I agree. I’ve changed my view since posting this.
As such, I don’t think that people’s preferences or moral intuitions about the external world should guide what their philosophy. Instead, I think they should rely on their moral intuition that suffering is bad since it seems bad, and then come to classical utilitarianism from there.
It can both be true that the correct moral philosophy is extraordinarily demanding and that the best way to follow it is the follow a moral philosophy that is less demanding.
I think you need to justify why your preference for those things over being super happy should be considered rational.
In regards to the circular reasoning thing, I agree.
On reflection, now, I think that we should only trust moral intuitions about our own experience.
As such, I think that suffering seems bad, so we should minimize suffering.
And, I don’t think we should add additional modifications to this view.
That’s why I argue that, if you’re unwilling to help any children if there’s an infinite amount of them, you should just act as though there is a limited number of children needing help. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything different about these cases that should suggest different behavior so you should just act as though it’s the first case if that’s what’s psychologically important to you.