Reading through the felicifia wiki, I've noticed that the common view here seems to be classical, total utilitarianism. I'm not convinced that total utilitarianism makes sense, I'd thus like to start a discussion about it here.

My main concern is that I don't see why one should be ethically obliged to put further beings (with lives worth living) into existence, meaning I don't see why existence would have intrinsic value. Happiness certainly is good for the happy being, but does that mean it's good impersonally too, compared to non-existence? There's no meaningful way to make the comparison, so bringing beings into existence imo should be seen as something neutral (intrinsically at least, practically there are also resource considerations and so on), IF it's a life worth living. Saying that non-existence is worse than a happy life would be an error of perspective, ALREADY thinking as if the happy being existed, wanting to live on happily.

If there are existing beings that suffer considerably now and then, but overall live a life just about worth living, how can the ethical obligation to create new beings with positive utility be equal to the obligation to ease the suffering of the already existing beings? Here we have a conflict, and even if there's something positive to be said about having trillions of blissed out beings in the world, I think the ethical imperative to end existing(!) suffering still trumps any obligation towards extra beings. Suffering definitely is bad when it exists, with happiness, the matter is much less clear (regarding impersonal 'goodness'). I think it also makes it easier to justify this view in meta-ethics, appealing to suffering as an intrinsic state of 'avoid this!' for all sentient beings.

You all are probably familiar with the Repugnant Conclusion, is there an answer to it that keeps total utilitarianism intact? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_conclusion
I'm not advocating average utilitarianism, there's a third option: prior-existence utilitarianism. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that this view only works if one values suffering (lack of it!) more than happiness, or else it would implicitly lead to total utilitarianism again. But one doesn't have to be a strict negative utilitarian (even going as far as the Pinprick Argument) in order to accept this view.

So what are your thoughts? I'm bringing this up mainly because, unlike the distinction preference vs hedonic utilitarianism, the total vs prior-existence distinction DOES have significant practical implications for a project such as the felicifia wiki. I for instance don't think that the question whether wild animals live lives worth living is very important, and if anything, we should reduce their numbers instead of creating more of them (or, as Pearce suggests, abolish their suffering).

And another question having to do with this, how should the felicifia wiki deal with such theoretical disagreements?

Edit: Just saw the following thread, I'll read it now and keep it in mind for my further posts here. Notice the difference between 'prior-existence' and 'average' though. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=28

The problem with prior-existence is that it violates the transitive property. If me being happy is equivalent to me being dead, and me being dead is equivalent to me being sad, then me being happy should be equivalent to me being sad.

Also, due to the butterfly effect, any action you take will change who will be born. If you can't compare existence to non-existence, it will never be possible to make a decision.

IF it's a life worth living.

What do you mean? A life worth living is one in which it's better to be alive than dead. If you don't believe in that comparison, what do you mean by this sentence?

You all are probably familiar with the Repugnant Conclusion, is there an answer to it that keeps total utilitarianism intact?

The only problem is that our intuition doesn't give consistent results. This is not unique to moral problems. It's how all paradoxes are. Paradoxes appear everywhere. We should not expect them to be absent in moral philosophy.

DanielLC wrote:[...]and me being dead is equivalent to me being sad, [...]

I didn't mean that, suffering is clearly worse than being dead. My phrase "there's no meaningful way to make a comparison" is somewhat misleading, I simply meant that there's no reason why a 'worth living' existence should be better than non-existence, or the other way around. With suffering, the matter is different, there's an assymmetry.

DanielLC wrote:What do you mean? A life worth living is one in which it's better to be alive than dead. If you don't believe in that comparison, what do you mean by this sentence?

It's better to be alive than dead from the perspective of an already existing being with a conscious desire to live. It doesn't necessarily follow that it would be better than never having been born in the first place. It might follow from this view that killing someone painlessly without causing suffering would be intrinsically neutral, not wrong. I would accept this conclusion, but it might be possible that phrasing the same thing in preference utilitarian terms could avoid it. Either way, given all the indirect consequences of killing self-aware beings, it wouldn't really make a noticeable practical difference.

DanielLC wrote:The only problem is that our intuition doesn't giveresults. This is not unique to moral problems. It's how all paradoxes are. Paradoxes appear everywhere. We consistent should not expect them to be absent in moral philosophy.

Sure, but there's nothing wrong with double-checking the axioms when they lead to highly counterintuitive conclusions. I don't find the conclusions of prior-existence negative utilitarianism to be very counterintuitive, maybe that's just because I'm used to it though. Anyway, I think one would have a very hard time taking anything but the notion that 'suffering ought to be avoided' as the main axiom for ethics. How would you convince me that (positive) existence per se matters, and in fact that it matters even more than (already existing) suffering?

Here by the way a paper that formally argues against anti-natalism (and Pinprick Argument) while still supporting a prior-existence approach emphasizing the assymmetry between suffering and happiness, maybe this helps illustrating my point more clearly: http://www.princeton.edu/~eharman/Benatar.pdf

ExtendedCircle: Great summary and clear defense of the prior-existence view. Personally, I favor a prior-existence approach over a total approach, but I am not 100% satisfied with prior-existence either.

DanielLC wrote:Also, due to the butterfly effect, any action you take will change who will be born. If you can't compare existence to non-existence, it will never be possible to make a decision.

In a prior-existence view, the goodness or badness of bringing new life into existence is measured by its impact on the welfare of prior-existent beings. (Although I believe a good caveat would be that bringing new life into existence is bad-in-itself if that new person won't have a life worth living.) So just bringing a new life into existence has no value or disvalue, but the effects of this on others can be good or bad.

*****

I have both intuitions about the question of whether there is any inherent value in creating new life. On the one hand, from a perspective of human population as a whole it doesn't seem to be the case that more people is morally better. It seems that efforts to reduce overpopulation are good, because even if overpopulation leads to more total welfare, it decreases average welfare. On the other hand, it does seem like something would be lost if the human race slowly went extinct because people stopped having children.

And then there is the question about what the prior existence view implies for the morality of having children, and whether having children is in fact immoral even if it reduces the welfare of prior-existent beings by reducing available resources, etc. (Not that it necessarily is bad for prior-existent beings. It may be good if it increases human capital, allows further division of labor, etc. I'm just not sure which effect wins out most of the time.) I'm not really sure what I think about that.

Finally, one thing I don't like about total utilitarianism is that it implies that existential risk is of utmost importance, because assuming that people on average have lives worth living and will on into the future, exterminating the human race results in a loss of thousands or more years of welfare lost. Next to this, what is hundreds of years of wellbeing for prior-existent people? I just think this focus is pretty weird - I feel like focusing in preserving the human race at all costs, instead of focusing on helping people here and now, loses the point of morality. In a prior-existence view, existential risk would still matter (an asteroid destroying the earth would be very bad for billions of prior-existent people), but other things would matter too - such as making life better for people here on earth now (and those prior-existent people who are not here yet).

Hello Lukas and others.

I think that I have a clear answer to this matter, which, I admit, took me lots of thinking and more than a year of occasional philosophizing, and now I'm satisfied with it and no longer think about this. I could tell you my answer, but wouldn't it be more rewarding for you to keep thinking hard and find it by yourselves?

I find that sometimes, by the way, discovering something by ourselves is the best way to really learn and understand something, better than having ready answers from books, for example.

So if you'd like to keep thinking on it for a while, you can check the answers with me later. Or I could take the fun out from the game now.

Brent wrote:It seems that efforts to reduce overpopulation are good, because even if overpopulation leads to more total welfare, it decreases average welfare.

It is not clear to me why we should assume overpopulation increases total welfare in practice. Adding more people can decrease everyone else's average wellbeing to such a degree that this loss outweighs the existence benefit of these additional people, even if all lives are assumed to be worth living.

ExtendedCircle wrote:It's better to be alive than dead from the perspective of an already existing being with a conscious desire to live. It doesn't necessarily follow that it would be better than never having been born in the first place. It might follow from this view that killing someone painlessly without causing suffering would be intrinsically neutral, not wrong.

I think it's problematic to outweigh severe suffering with pleasure at other times or for other beings (because the mental states are local and non-overlapping). But I don't see why we should pretend that the loss of good potential experiences is not an opportunity cost. Imagine Dr. Who visits you with his time machine and offers you to prevent your existence retroactively. Assuming you had a good life free from suffering, it seems absurd to me to assume this is a neutral decision. At least in my view, you would clearly suffer a real measurable loss by taking the offer.

Finally, one thing I don't like about total utilitarianism is that it implies that existential risk is of utmost importance, because assuming that people on average have lives worth living and will on into the future, exterminating the human race results in a loss of thousands or more years of welfare lost. Next to this, what is hundreds of years of wellbeing for prior-existent people?

I agree, and in fact I do think it's far more important than the welfare of anyone existing currently. However, it is not self-evident that life in the future will necessarily be of net-positive value, and it is not clear you can predictably affect existential risks in an efficient way, compared to other actions.

Jonatas,
Now I'm curious! I am however quite convinced about my view, and I could imagine that it's similar to yours.

Hedonic Treader wrote:I think it's problematic to outweigh severe suffering with pleasure at other times or for other beings (because the mental states are local and non-overlapping). But I don't see why we should pretend that the loss of good potential experiences is not an opportunity cost. Imagine Dr. Who visits you with his time machine and offers you to prevent your existence retroactively. Assuming you had a good life free from suffering, it seems absurd to me to assume this is a neutral decision. At least in my view, you would clearly suffer a real measurable loss by taking the offer.

Look at the end result, how can "I" suffer a loss if I never even exist? That's exactly the perspective problem I'm talking about. It seems counterintuitive, but it would be neutral imo. This doesn't negate the fact that people even hearing of such offers, if they were feasible, would become scared, because their point of view is already assumed, and because they enjoy their life.

ExtendedCircle wrote:Look at the end result, how can "I" suffer a loss if I never even exist?

I should point out that I don't belive in a "real you" that has one consciousness into which pleasure and pain at different times are integrated. I don't believe in a personal soul - or natural equivalent thereof. It makes more sense to me to speak in terms of good or bad experiences, which are all local.

Suffering is bad because it feels bad, pleasure is good because it feels good. Not feeling good is bad, compared to feeling good. A world state with more good experiences in it is better than a world state with fewer good experiences in it. Eliminating or preventing them is a loss. It is destroyed value.

My phrase "there's no meaningful way to make a comparison" is somewhat misleading, I simply meant that there's no reason why a 'worth living' existence should be better than non-existence, or the other way around. With suffering, the matter is different, there's an assymmetry.

In a prior-existence view, the goodness or badness of bringing new life into existence is measured by its impact on the welfare of prior-existent beings.

So, does the suffering of the person brought in matter? I don't think I'm entirely clear on how this works.

DanielLC wrote:So, does the suffering of the person brought in matter? I don't think I'm entirely clear on how this works.

You quoted from two different people, but essentially I agree with the second quote. However, if the life brought into existence is 'not worth living', it's bad intrinsically, else, it's intrinsically neutral, meaning it depends on its effect on prior-existent sentience.

The newly created suffering definitely matters insofar as one would be ethically obliged to care for the new being to the best of one's abilities. But if the life contains some suffering but is still worth living, that suffering imo doesn't outweigh the happiness, despite the assymmmetry, for reasons elaborated in the paper I linked to above. So it wouldn't lead to accepting the Pinprick Argument's conclusion

Hedonic Treader wrote:I should point out that I don't belive in a "real you" that has one consciousness into which pleasure and pain at different times are integrated. I don't believe in a personal soul - or natural equivalent thereof. It makes more sense to me to speak in terms of good or bad experiences, which are all local.

Ok I get that part (but at least in cases with self-awareness, the illusion of 'unity' and 'continuity' seems to be so strong as to matter in some regard, but that's another subject). But

Hedonic Treader wrote:Not feeling good is bad, compared to feeling good.

is what I don't agree with. Were all the 13.7 billion years before my birth bad, because I hadn't then existed?

How would one prioritize? I really think neglecting existing suffering and focusing on creating more happiness is wrong, no matter how much constantly blissed out beings are created.

ExtendedCircle wrote:Were all the 13.7 billion years before my birth bad, because I hadn't then existed?

Hedonic Treader wrote:compared to feeling good

The last several hundred million years of the 13.7 billion years before your birth do in fact contain many experiences, both good and bad. But yes, there are gigantic quantities of space and time where no experiences of any affective valence exist. And yes, that is bad, compared to an alternative world state in which they are filled with good experiences. Of course, we cannot bring about such an alternative world state with regards to the past.

How would one prioritize? I really think neglecting existing suffering and focusing on creating more happiness is wrong, no matter how much constantly blissed out beings are created.

Because the suffering and the happiness are local and non-overlapping, and therefore aggregation is wrong? Or because suffering has (negative) value, where happiness has neutral value, compared to non-existence? I agree that the former is a problem, but the latter is false in my view. I have a clear preference to experience good things over experiencing nothing.

To fix my first argument, if I consider between having a happy child, a neutral child, and no child, happy and none are equally good, and neutral and none are equally good, so happy and neutral must be equally good. Would you agree with that?

So it wouldn't lead to accepting the Pinprick Argument's conclusion

It still will, just not as strongly. The only way to be sure nobody will live a life not worth living is to keep them from living any life at all.

How would one prioritize? I really think neglecting existing suffering and focusing on creating more happiness is wrong, no matter how much constantly blissed out beings are created.

Would you think this if it was just you? If it was a given that your life was going to be worth living, and you had the option to work, which causes suffering, could they offer you enough happiness later on for it to be worth while? Now suppose you were going to be forced through a Star Trek-style teleporter, and you knew this. You'd be helping someone else exactly like you. Would that really change anything.

Another problem is this causes an asymmetry. The way I see it, suffering is just negative happiness. The more your preferences change to match the current situation, the happier you are. If they change towards it by a negative amount, then you're happy by a negative amount. If the suffering of future people is bad, then negative suffering of future people should have negative badness.

And yes, that is bad, compared to an alternative world state

I think it would be more clear if you say it's worse. It's not bad. It's just worse than a given alternative. It's also better than another alternative, in which you exist and live a horrible life.

DanielLC wrote:To fix my first argument, if I consider between having a happy child, a neutral child, and no child, happy and none are equally good, and neutral and none are equally good, so happy and neutral must be equally good. Would you agree with that?

You're obliged to care to the best of your ability for the child, so you don't have an option, you gotta take the best possible choice. If that in a given situation results in a life just about worth living, then so be it, intrinsically it would be a neutral act. If it results in a super-happy life, it too would be a neutral act. But I stress again that this neglects all the other consequences associated with it, happiness / suffering caused to other beings due to family ties, resource considerations, social interaction and so on.

DanielLC wrote:It still will, just not as strongly. The only way to be sure nobody will live a life not worth living is to keep them from living any life at all.

True, it would make the decision whether to have a child or not much more difficult and worth more consideration that most people currently attribute to it. But we're utilitarians, so what matters is expected outcome. We can't make sure that the life won't end up being not worth living, so that just factors into the equations probabilistically. Even if you create a life not worth living, that's 'bad', but if you thereby ease suffering of other, pre-existing beings in some way even more, then it's justified, that goes without saying.

DanielLC wrote:Would you think this if it was just you? If it was a given that your life was going to be worth living, and you had the option to work, which causes suffering, could they offer you enough happiness later on for it to be worth while? Now suppose you were going to be forced through a Star Trek-style teleporter, and you knew this. You'd be helping someone else exactly like you. Would that really change anything.

This example doesn't work with the point I made, in your example, the existence of the Star Trek 'me' is already specified, in my point, other beings wouldn't even exist if we don't decide to create them. But answering anyway, I don't think one can balance suffering with happiness! So no matter how much joy it gave the Romans to see a Christian being eaten by a tiger in the Colosseum, it wouldn't be justified, unless the Romans suffered(!) just as much, or more, if they would not torture the Christian. When one isn't maximally happy, there's always (very mild) 'suffering' in form of boredom, or longing for things to better, and that's how one should imo balance things. Normally this works out perfectly, in fact it even reflects how we'd balance these things intrapersonally. Surely we would not undergo one hour of utmost torture in order to be maximally happy for just one hour! To me, this view seems reasonable and consistent.

You're obliged to care to the best of your ability for the child, so you don't have an option

Once it's born you're obliged to care for it, but perhaps you do something else to hurt it, like spend it's college fund.

Suppose you decide to have a happy child. You then decide you'd prefer to not have a child. This is just as good as before. Now you decide you'd prefer to have a neutral child. Again, this is just as good as before. You never made a bad decision here, did you?

This example doesn't work with the point I made, in your example, the existence of the Star Trek 'me' is already specified, in my point, other beings wouldn't even exist if we don't decide to create them.

You're using counterfactuals?

Someone else will decide to force you to create the Star Trek 'you'. If the fact that it's chosen is what matters, then they're chosen. If that's not enough, it's going to be a slightly different Star Trek 'you' depending on what you're like when you go into the teleporter, which in turn depends on what you do now. Each possibility only will exist if you make a certain choice.

Hi. My approach is that conscious experience only is valuable. I don't introduce any assymetry by valuing suffering over happiness. Any conscious experience is valuable if it is preferred by its recipient.

Experience is valuable if you'd prefer to have experienced it. If you compare having a tooth pulled while conscious with having it done while anaesthetised, all other things being equal, you'd rather be unconscious. So it has negative value.

On the other hand, I'd rather not be anaesthetised when I eat a nice meal for example.

There's no assymetry. But I'm not completely deflationary about negative utilitarian accounts. If asked to compare a nice meal and a dental operation with neither, most favour neither. And they're right to. Because most suffering exceeds most happiness. Nor do I try to oppose the pinprick argument or the repugnant conclusion completely. They do tell us useful things about our consciousness and about our moral intuitions. I just keep a symmetrical view of conscious experience.

DanielLC, I think you're confusing intrinsic utility with utility when all things are considered. The decision itself will never be neutral in real life, because there one does have to consider external factors. So it's not a random 'now I want to, now I don't want to create sentience' kind of game.

Ryan, your anesthesia example seems to have little to do with the actual question, which is whether non-existence is bad (impersonally!). Earlier, someone said it's better to use 'worse' than 'bad', but that's again exactly my point, it's worse FOR the person that would otherwise have existed, but that's not the claim total utilitarianism needs. TU needs the claim "non-existence is impersonally bad". And that's not true. Imagine a universe without any sentience, nothing that would matter in any way. How could it be 'bad'? No obligation kicks in anywhere..

In the meal example, you're implicitly assuming that there's a pre-existing preference 'to go on living' already in play. That's not what the argument is about. The paper I linked to makes this point too.

Regarding the Repugnant Conclusion, TU justifies itself by claiming intuitions may be wrong. Fair enough. But then it's problematic to argue from intuitions about existence. Of course we care about it, evolution wants us to not commit suicide. But that doesn't decide the argument.

DanielLC, I think you're confusing intrinsic utility with utility when all things are considered. The decision itself will never be neutral in real life, because there one does have to consider external factors. So it's not a random 'now I want to, now I don't want to create sentience' kind of game.

Assuming no net external factors. Also, you can change it so instead of being neutral, external factors move it slightly in the direction I'm going. That way I have to decide to not have a kid over having a happy one, then I have to decide on having a neutral kid over not having one, then I have to decide to make the kid happy, etc.

If you have a reason to believe that it's completely impossible for these problems to occur in real life, I can see how you could consider it, although it's still not a very good sign.

To address the question directly, it seems that neither existence nor non-existence is intrinsically good. Existence is instrumentally good in so far as it involves pleasant experience, defined as any experience that we would prefer to have.

My overall point is that the total utilitaran doesn't have to compare anything to non-existence. they just compare experience with lack of experience, and the rest comes free. Unlike prior existence utilitarianism, there's no metaphysical baggage. Experience has value, that's all there is to it.

DanielLC wrote:To fix my first argument, if I consider between having a happy child, a neutral child, and no child, happy and none are equally good, and neutral and none are equally good, so happy and neutral must be equally good. Would you agree with that?

Hi DanielLC, that's a pretty interesting paradox. Here's how I understand it: In a prior-existence view, the happiness of a person only counts if that person exists or will exist. So if you have the options of no child and a neutral child, those options are (all things equal) equally good. If you have a choice between no child and a happy child, those options are also equall good; it is not the case that a child exists or will exist, so the potential happiness is not factored into the decision. If you have a choice between a neutral child and a happy child, it is the case that a child is going to exist (whatever your decision, a new child will come into existence). Therefore, his happiness does count.

Happy and neutral aren't equally good in the third choice, even though they are equal accross the first 2 choices, because in the third choice the situation is different: a child will exist regardless of your choice.

If that doesn't explain it enough, consider these hypothetical situations: Imagine you have a machine that can make a child with the press of a button, and that you are the only being in existence. First, suppose there is only 1 button, and if you press it a neutral child will be created. If you think he will increase your welfare, you should press it; otherwise you shouldn't. In a second situation, suppose again that there is only 1 button, but this time if you press it a happy child will be created. Again, in the prior-existence view, you should press is if you think the child's creation will increase your welfare, and otherwise you shouldn't. Finally, suppose a third situation where there are two buttons, one which creates a neutral child and one which creates a happy one. Now, if you think the child will increase your welfare, you should press the button for the happy child. If not, you should not press either button.

RyanCarey wrote:To address the question directly, it seems that neither existence nor non-existence is intrinsically good. Existence is instrumentally good in so far as it involves pleasant experience, defined as any experience that we would prefer to have.

My overall point is that the total utilitaran doesn't have to compare anything to non-existence. they just compare experience with lack of experience, and the rest comes free. Unlike prior existence utilitarianism, there's no metaphysical baggage. Experience has value, that's all there is to it.

I think that's a coherent perspective, but it is one of the reasons I don't like total utilitarianism. I don't care about disembodied pleasant experience, I care about people, and I understand caring about people to mean caring about their welfare. And since we sometimes have to make trade-off in which some people's welfare is increased at the expense of the welfare of others, I decide that the best approach is to maximize welfare as a whole. But because what I care about first is people, I might modify this to maximizing welfare as a whole for prior-existant people. (I'm not definitely set on prior-existence utilitrianism, but I lean towards that over total utilitarianism.)

Brent wrote:Finally, suppose a third situation where there are two buttons, one which creates a neutral child and one which creates a happy one. Now, if you think the child will increase your welfare, you should press the button for the happy child. If not, you should not press either button.

It seems to me that this prior existence view cannot avoid making questionable assumptions about personal identity. After all, "your welfare" (as you're deciding whether to push the button) is not the same thing as "the welfare of the future versions of you who will or will not have pushed the button". There is, as you are still deciding, no prior existence of either of these future versions (you can prevent the existence of either one). Without a good case for something like an identity-bearing, consciousness-integrating personal soul, or natural equivalent thereof, the metaphysical foundation of this framework seems broken. Or am I missing something?

Brent,
Exactly, good explanation. If you have the choice between a neutral and a happy child, obviously one ought to opt for happy, or nothing at all. That's what it means to 'care for it to the best of one's abilities'. So the only way you can justify giving the child's college fund to something else is if that 'something else' ends more suffering.

HedonicTrader, one way to respond to your challenge would be to phrase everything in preference-terms. A new life would then be a 'preference-bundle', with the preference 'not to suffer', and if it's gonna be self-aware, with other preferences as well. There's a good argument to justifiy this view: Hedonic states aren't what matters to us, the objects of preferences (i.e. truth, happiness too but as a consequence of preference satisfaction) are what matters to us, and that is why they have a positive 'hedonic tone' associated with them. This would be something like prior-existence preference utilitarianism, or desire utilitarianism(?). Not my personal view, but the practical consequences of this view would be virtually indistinguishable from the prior-existence view I'm proposing, whereas total utilitarianism leads to some very different conclusions regarding certain issues.

My response is the following:
You write "(you can prevent the existence of either one)" -- yes, but that would involve causing suffering! Because people do have strong intuitions to think in terms of intentionality. And that's not something we, as utiltiarians, should discourage, it would be practically impossible to encourage people to give it up, so the practical conclusions will again be identical.

My point? (Existing) Suffering always trumps happiness, even 'interpersonally!'. If I choose to do unpleasant work in order to earn money, I can say I'm doing it in order to be happier later on. That's true, but I could just as well say I'm doing it in order not to suffer even more later on. Happiness is, at least to a large extent that is relevant here, the the absence of suffering in a conscious being. If you have a world with one being that lives a life a pinprick above worth living, and you have a choice of either creating ten blissful beings, or make the life of the already existing being better, it would be unethical to do the former. Because if you do the latter, the ten beings that would otherwise have been create do not suffer, nothing is 'bad' for them. The former leaves unnecessary suffering in the world.

Is happiness 'good' because it's a complete lack of suffering, or is it good because it's something else entirely? I don't think you can justify it being something else. Can you have happiness and suffering at the same time? Maybe to a small extent... but even that's doubtful, this shows that there's a huge assymmetry! It follows that non-existence and happiness are ethically equal. To the very least if there's a choice between pre-existing suffering or 'extra happiness' for beings that don't even exist yet.

ExtendedCircle wrote:You write "(you can prevent the existence of either one)" -- yes, but that would involve causing suffering!

Sorry for the confusion, my point was that you have to prevent at least one of them. You can, after all, not decide to both push the button and not push the button (unless many-worlds is true, in which case you have to do both). This means there is no prior existence of either one - neither will necessarily exist, so their positive welfare doesn't matter. Which would leave you undecided as to whether to push the button or not.

If I choose to do unpleasant work in order to earn money, I can say I'm doing it in order to be happier later on. That's true, but I could just as well say I'm doing it in order not to suffer even more later on.

That's not the same thing. Imagine you had a perfectly reliable painless suicide drug, no fear of death, and you knew solipsism was true (no other prior existing entities), and you can then decide either to take the drug or to work unpleasantly in order to generate later happiness in your solipsistic life. Avoidance of suffering would not be a reason to work (as you could just die fearlessly and painlessly). Desire for there to be happiness later on would be.

If you have a world with one being that lives a life a pinprick above worth living, and you have a choice of either creating ten blissful beings, or make the life of the already existing being better, it would be unethical to do the former. Because if you do the latter, the ten beings that would otherwise have been create do not suffer, nothing is 'bad' for them. The former leaves unnecessary suffering in the world.

Why? Did you mean a pinprick below worth living, or above? I can't see how your conclusion is valid from the way it was stated.

Is happiness 'good' because it's a complete lack of suffering, or is it good because it's something else entirely? I don't think you can justify it being something else.

I think I can: It doesn't just not feel bad, it actually feels good in its own right.

Can you have happiness and suffering at the same time? Maybe to a small extent... but even that's doubtful, this shows that there's a huge assymmetry!

It shows that aggregation of local non-overlapping mental states is a conceptual problem. It doesn't show happiness is not worth more than unconsciousness. Those are two different claims.

Now, if you think the child will increase your welfare, you should press the button for the happy child. If not, you should not press either button.

But what if a neutral child will increase your welfare, but a happy child will decrease it?

Does it still count as a given that you create a child if it's not the same child? If not, what constitutes the same child? If so, if there's one child vs. two children, which of the two children do you not count?

I don't care about disembodied pleasant experience...

You seem to care about disembodied unpleasant experience (or something like it enough to get the same conclusions). Why should pleasant experience be different?

Hedonic Treader wrote:That's not the same thing. Imagine you had a perfectly reliable painless suicide drug, no fear of death, and you knew solipsism was true (no other prior existing entities), and you can then decide either to take the drug or to work unpleasantly in order to generate later happiness in your solipsistic life. Avoidance of suffering would not be a reason to work (as you could just die fearlessly and painlessly). Desire for there to be happiness later on would be.

It would then be a neutral choice. If it doesn't seem like it to you, consider that you still have the human desire to 'keep living', which is tied to fear of death, and in order to accept the premise of the thought experiment, you'd have to lose it entirely, so you'd be indifferent about going on living or not. At least if the suffering will be balanced with enough happiness, if there's not even enough happiness later on, you'll kill yourself anyway.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Why? Did you mean a pinprick below worth living, or above? I can't see how your conclusion is valid from the way it was stated.

I meant 'above', but now that you asked, does it even make a difference? If there's one being in constant agony, yet the 'costs' of either killing it or making it happy were higher than the costs of brining a billion new constantly blissed out beings into existence, it would follow that we should leave the being suffering. And that seems highly problematic.

Even if the conclusion I arrive at isn't obvious, the opposite conclusion most certainly isn't either...

ExtendedCircle wrote:If there's one being in constant agony, yet the 'costs' of either killing it or making it happy were higher than the costs of brining a billion new constantly blissed out beings into existence, it would follow that we should leave the being suffering. And that seems highly problematic.

Yes, but the problem here seems to be aggregation, not prior-existence. Compare an alternative scenario: You have a billion prior-existing people with neutral-value lives that you can shift to blissful, or alternatively prevent one potential being from suffering constantly. If I understand it correctly, prior-existence would now care about the billion, whereas in your example it wouldn't. But the problematic nature of the scenario - at least in my view - seems to come from accepting the suffering of one to shift others from neutral to blissful, not from the aspect of prior existence.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Yes, but the problem here seems to be aggregation, not prior-existence. Compare an alternative scenario: You have a billion prior-existing people with neutral-value lives that you can shift to blissful, or alternatively prevent one potential being from suffering constantly. If I understand it correctly, prior-existence would now care about the billion, whereas in your example it wouldn't. But the problematic nature of the scenario - at least in my view - seems to come from accepting the suffering of one to shift others from neutral to blissful, not from the aspect of prior existence.

I see what you mean, but that's exactly where my point about happiness being the absence (or flipside) of suffering comes in. We must ask, 'what exactly is a neutral-value life?' I think a neutral life does involve suffering. If the experiences are heterogenous, then the happiness will have to just balance the suffering. If the experience is homogenous, then there'll be a 'neutral' state, which is worth living but lacks certain things that would produce even more happiness. I'd imagine it like 'mild boredom', or 'eating an edible meal that makes one full but doesn't taste good (but also doesn't taste particularly bad). It's that kind of already existing 'suffering' (the word is too strong here, maybe 'inconveniences' or 'constraints on perfection') that can be aggregated, and given enough beings, this will at some point weigh more than the agony experienced by the one miserable being.

So while pre-existing being would have a small but discernible amount of suffering in their lives, non-existing beings do not.

David Chalmers summarises on pp51-52 of this essay what I think is the only empirical conclusion about personal identity - that it's a complete fiction.

If you accept that claim, then, while TU basically retains its shape, 'prior existence' becomes a very weird beast, that raises questions every unit of Planck time, and says nothing fundamentally different about having a baby vs failing to kill yourself.

Arepo wrote:If you accept that claim, then, while TU basically retains its shape, 'prior existence' becomes a very weird beast, that raises questions every unit of Planck time, and says nothing fundamentally different about having a baby vs failing to kill yourself.

Functionalists reject qualia altogether, and still they aren't indifferent to suffering. So even suffering itself may be an 'illusion', still, what matters is how it's experienced. And that's where heterophenomenological accounts can tell us more than theoretical philosophy of mind.

But suppose I accept that personal identity is a complete fiction in a sense relevant to ethics. My point would still be that happiness is not intrinsically valuable in the way suffering is bad. So prior-existence still follows, but with a stronger focus on suffering because it couldn't, not even in self-aware beings, be balanced with later happiness. Radical negative utilitarianism would be the outcome, which has very similar practical implications to the view I'd been suggesting all along. (See Pearce's Hedweb for negative utilitarianism).

Let me pick up on two claims that seem problematic:

Brent wrote:I don't care about disembodied pleasant experience, I care about people

Extended Circle wrote:Suffering always trumps happiness, even interpersonally!

To the first: why would you think that there is some such thing as a person that deserves moral significance?
There's no soul. The materials that we're made of are being cycled all the time. We can submit our sense of touch and the location of our body to illusions. We split someone's psychological sense of self into two by cutting the connection between our left and right brain. People can lose their sense of self in depression, or in abuse. People can lose their sense of self by taking psychadelics. Can we really feel comfortable making the claim that it's people that matter, not their experiences?
If we know anything about personal experience, then surely it is by:
1. experiencing it: "suffering is bad for reasons that everyone understands when they experience it" and/or
2. preferring it "suffering is bad because I don't like it".
Now for whatever reason we decide that personal suffering is bad, surely this must equally apply to impersonal, disembodied suffering?

The same criticism applies to the second: How do we distinguish happiness from the absence of suffering? It must be from our experience or our preferences. But the range of experience between happiness and suffering seems continuous. There's no non-arbitrary point that distinguishes happiness from suffering. And our preferences don't permit any asymmetry at all. I like happiness. But I like not suffering too. So where is this distinction coming from? It seems like it's just come from thin air. I mean, for what it's worth, thought experiments can and are devised to align our intuitions with negative utilitarianism. But our intuitions can be made to favour any of the claims in all science and philosophy that we know are wrong.

Basically, I don't see any way I could feel metaethically comfortable as a negative or prior-existence utilitarian.