More active on the EA Forum, where I’m currently writing a series on minimalist axiologies.
Teo Ajantaival(Teo Ajantaival)
Karma: 72
[Question] Why do you reject negative utilitarianism?
[...] I think the “not-just-life-count” benefits generally look like they make “saving existing lives” a better idea than “enabling more future lives”. The question might then become “How much should one be preferred over the other? At what ratio?”
[...] then the question seems to me like “Is it better to save your children’s lives or enable future births? Ignore the grief, disruption, failed hopes, etc. that would make you prefer to save your children’s lives”—it’s assuming away what may be the whole point.
(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 and experiences.
After all, I would argue that our practical intuition is mostly tracking the positive roles of those things, which may in part explain our intuitive disagreement with thought experiments that attempt to draw sharp boundaries around the supposedly fundamental bits.
(I also explored this in the context of population ethics here. Those essays are framed in suffering-focused and minimalist terms respectively, but the main points seem applicable to all impartial consequentialist views, so perhaps people would find them useful more broadly.)
● 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 rid of the idea of terminal value(s) altogether, or could you explain how we can resolve conflicts between two terminal values, if terminal means irreducible?
(To the extent that I think in terminal and instrumental values, I claim to care terminally only about suffering. I also claim to not be mentally ill. A lot of Buddhists etc. might make similar claims, and I feel like the statement above quoted from the Conclusion without more context would label a lot of people either mentally ill or not human, while to me the process of healthy unification feels like precisely the process of becoming a terminal value monist. :-))
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).
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 perception, but so it is in real danger.) While those happened years ago, I’ve continued to reflect on them and feel like they’ve changed me, affecting my daily life and priorities since then. For a while, I felt grateful for getting my life back and considered devoting myself to treating acute pain. I since graduated Master’s in Psychology without clinical internship to focus more on research, feeling that my comparative advantage is in channeling compassion for more scalable, theoretical work.
I believe a possible mistake of depressed NUs is to focus on others’ suffering before taking care of themselves (by listening to the foundational motivation of self-compassion). Self-compassion is our value-grounding for extended self-compassion, which leads to universal compassion in the limit.
Nate Soares has a post about self-compassion as a key part of his wider, 40-post series, Replacing Guilt, both of which I universally recommend (also ePUB-compiled here).