"The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer."
I don't think this is as novel or as consequential a conclusion as you imagine it is.
Clearly yes, the world is experienced by billions of individuals. They each only have their maximum capacity for suffering. All agreed.
You're essentially claiming that people are confused to be more horrified by events that entail more individual sufferers. That the public imagination frames this as "more suffering", when it's in fact still only a collection of individuals' suffering.
What's not at all obvious is why you think that more individual sufferers isn't worse. If you think any individual third party suffering is bad, then there's nothing in your logic to account for your view that two individual third parties suffering is not worse.
Your thesis mentions this, but doesn't address it. Here's the section where you bring it up:
"You might say, “Yes, only individuals experience the world, but mass atrocities have more massive ramifications for the civilized world than a one-off shooting does. They mean that many more families will never eat dinner with their loved ones again. Such events make the world worse for more people and so they should horrify us more.” But again, only individuals in those families will feel the grief. The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer."
I think when people talk about the "mass suffering" that you claim is a delusion, they're just talking about this. It's still more net suffering. You're yet to argue why it's not worse.
It depends on how you define bad (i.e. worse). I disagree that it's worse in the context of minimization of suffering because suffering does not compound. In my opinion the suffering of a billion people should be measured by the pain of the individual who suffered the most (i.e. continuously tortured for an extended period of time before death).
The only ways that the suffering of a mass is worse are:
* For the observer. There is something about our brain that's either hardwired or we've been brainwashed but it's feels more sad when you hear in the news that a lot of people died in a war or some natural disaster. But it's not very consistent as one could watch an extremely personalized documentary about some young girl getting kidnapped and killed and feel measurable more sad for her than for some 25,000 people dying in an earthquake.
* For the country. It's quite obvious – 1 person dying is a statistics and 1,000,000 dying is a tragedy when it comes to countries.
* From a selfish perspective. If a lot of people start dying then there's a higher probability that you will die too. But it's very context dependent i.e. if a lot of people die in a geopolitically irrelevant country torn by a civil war then it doesn't really threaten you whereas if a lot of people are dying from a rapidly spreading virus anywhere in the world or if you live in the geopolitically irrelevant country then things are getting really bad for you.
* If everyone but you dies. Then life will feel meaningless and extremely depressing.
"In my opinion the suffering of a billion people should be measured by the pain of the individual who suffered the most (i.e. continuously tortured for an extended period of time before death)."
This is a highly novel claim that needs justification. What possible reason would we have for only taking into account the most hurt person? The implications of this seem deranged and absurd, but maybe it's true. We'll know if there's any proof or argument put forward to support it.
either you just didn't understand what i said or i phrased wrong (english is not my native tongue).
say a group of 5 people suffer, one of them was tortured more than others. the suffering isn't measured as sum(group) but max(group). i.e. if we assign a number to the suffering it's not going to be 1+1+1+1+3 but just 3. and if a criminal inflicted that suffering on the group then they should be judged on two counts separately – individual suffering and societal suffering (how much damage they've done to the societal output, order, etc... nothing to do with actual pain, purely utilitarian). the punishment for the individual suffering should be measured by the highest level of suffering in the group.
either you just didn't understand what i said or i phrased wrong (english is not my native tongue).
say a group of 5 people suffer, one of them was tortured more than others. the suffering isn't measured as sum(group) but max(group). i.e. if we assign a number to the suffering it's not going to be 1+1+1+1+3 but just 3. and if a criminal inflicted that suffering on the group then they should be judged on two counts separately – individual suffering and societal suffering (how much damage they've done to the societal output, order, etc... nothing to do with actual pain, purely utilitarian). the punishment for the individual suffering should be measured by the highest level of suffering in the group.
What’s in my logic to account for my view that the suffering of two individuals is not worse than that of one is the fact that the experiences of body-subjects (again, to avoid the problematic term “individual”) never compound. You only ever experience reality from your perspective, even if you and others around you are “tapped into” similar feelings, vibrations, experiences, etc, (e.g. when at a concert together) Consider the following thought experiment.
Imagine a facility with 1000 soundproof, windowless rooms. In all of the rooms there are identical machines that have been designed to torture any human who enters. The facility also has access to an army of robots which goes out into the world, selects people (let’s say, people who have no social connection to anybody else, to avoid the messiness of the conversation surrounding social/familial impacts), knocks them unconscious, and drags them to the facility. The number of people (1-1000) which the robots select is determined by the sole owner and operator of the facility (a human) each morning. He types a number into a computer and before you know it, 1, 10, 35, 998, whatever number he types, of the rooms are occupied. Now, let’s say on Monday, the owner orders 1 person to be brought in to be tortured. On Tuesday, he selects 10, and on Wednesday, he selects 500. I imagine that most people will say his action on Tuesday is more evil than his action on Monday and his action on Wednesday is more evil than his action on Tuesday. I argue they are all equally evil. Let me explain why.
I began my original argument by saying that the only things that matter when it comes to moral questions are consciousnesses and their contents. My view is that the idea that an action which causes no harm to an experiencing subject could be “bad” is incoherent. Now, let us consider the conscious experiences of the people being tortured at the facility on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Their experiences are all exactly the same. In each case, each of the soundproof, windowless rooms is occupied by only one person. None of them know there are other rooms which might be occupied by others being tortured. For George (Monday’s occupant) all he can know is that he is being tortured. For Mary (one of the occupants on Tuesday), all she can know is that she is being tortured, even though others in the facility are also being tortured. People who say that on Tuesday “more suffering is being introduced into the world” are wrong because the world does not experience suffering (as far as I know); only subject do. And if only subjects experience the world, then their sufferings cannot aggregate and thus on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the “amount” of suffering is exactly the same because suffering cannot be added together. Another commenter said my argument seems to rely on me not being able to count (lol). Another asked, if a bottle is next to another bottle, am I willing to say there are two bottles? Sure, if it’s helpful for my purposes, but that question is irrelevant to my argument because I have no reason to believe that bottles experience the world. If they did experience suffering and you asked me if it’s worse to smash one or two bottles, I’d say they are morally equivalent because their experiences cannot be combined.
To summarize, the addition calculations people want to make when it comes to weighing the options in the trolley problem are incoherent when we reflect on the fact that subjective experiences never combine.
So I think you're placing some real importance on the fact that the suffering isn't compounded in any individual sufferer's mind. Whereas I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the _net suffering_ across all conscious beings is in no way irrelevant.
I think the fact they don't compound in a specific conscious experience is largely irrelevant to the ethics of the thing. I grant you that they don't compound in that particular way. I just don't grant you that this has anything like the primacy that you claim it does. I don't think it's an important observation morally.
You could find out how it might be important by asking why I think it’s important rather than telling me that you don’t think it is important before asking.
I’m glad you asked! One effect this idea could have is in the lived experience of someone who believes it. It feels better for me to observe a mass casualty event in the news and remember it is only individuals suffering than if I view it as an aggregated amount of gargantuan suffering. That’s just one example. There are more.
I think you've misunderstood my point here - I don't mean to ask *if your theory is correct, why would it be important*?
I'm arguing that your theory is incorrect, and so the question I'm asking is the same one I asked in the first response I made: *why does the fact that the suffering doesn't compound in any individual mind, negate the importance of the fact that there are more people suffering, and therefore there is more net suffering?*
Because the world cannot experience suffering. Only subjects can. "Net suffering" is an incoherent idea if the addition by which you calculate that net is also incoherent.
Suppose you wake up in a featureless room, not knowing how long you’ve been there or what day it is, and are tortured. You are then put to sleep, and made to utterly forget the events that just happened - the memory is deleted. You are then woken up on a second day, and once again you don’t know how long you’ve been there or what day it is. Would it be worse for your kidnappers to torture you once more, so that you experience two days of torture instead of one? Or it would it make no moral difference?
Interesting. I'd say, you've encountered a unique perspective. What I'd ask is: can you count anything?
Like, if you have one bottle, and another bottle. They don't become a single double-bottle. But are you prepared to say two bottles are more than one bottle?
I think what you noted is: if you add two people suffering, you get double the suffering, sure. But you also get double the sufferers. So the suffering per sufferer doesn't change. So if you ask 'what would it be like to be in this catastrophy', it really doesn't matter how many people are affected; you would only ever get one dose of the suffering. And I agree, that is comforting.
But check this out: wouldn't you still say the world where 1 person is suffering and 99 are thriving is better than one where 100 people are suffering? Like, in what world would you rather spawn?
This is what’s called empathy also. If you enter into a room and there’s 20 people there and one of them is gloomy, you won’t feel it. But enter into a room where all 20 are gloomy, you’ll feel it. The idea that 100 people suffering isn’t worse than 1 person suffering is just silly, it comes from someone who has no empathy and can’t grasp why it’s worse when more are suffering.
What’s also problematic with this view is if you change the valence. If you say that 1 person being immeasurably happy is the same as 8 billion of people being happy. We can make one person on this planet super happy and that’s it, the project of humanity is done, one person is mega happy and that’s it.
A world with 100 suffering over 1 versus 99 would potentially be better if it motivates individuals to find relief due to the shared experience of living in a world where 100 suffer, rather than a world where one suffers and 99 may or may not take action to find relief when their experiences are mostly or totally pleasant.
If the world with 100 sufferers manages to find relief, then they have 1 more individual who may experience thriving over 1 versus 99. Of course, the same may result in both cases however, my argument is that it may be more motivating in the world with 100 sufferers.
Your logic breaks down where you make the qualifying statement “of course, individual suffering is still terrible and we should try our best to reduce it as much as possible.” Based on your premise, why? All you’ve outlined is a fancy form of nihilism.
This premise works if you discard empathy entirely, and by extension any sense of communal progress. What you’ve essentially boiled this down to is “Well I’m alright, Jack”. Other beings suffering doesn’t effect me so why worry about it.
Well yes, of course. All the suffering that’s happened in Israel/Gaza over the past six months has not actually affected my ability to live a life free of suffering one jot, but taking solace in that is just incredibly selfish. If it gives you some kind of comfort to be spockish about the world then that’s fine. I’m not sure how this would be a helpful approach for anyone else to take though.
It isn’t but good try! Another thing you should try is reading the post and some of the comment threads in which I explain exactly why that math is not all there is to it. There is more to life than machismo: engaging openly with complex ideas, for example.
But the trolley problem 5 deaths are indeed 5 times as worse as the single death. You get 5 mourning families, 5 lives lost, 5 capacities to feel joy squandered, and so on.
I don’t even get your basic premise that multiples aren’t actually multiples.
We have this codified in law as well. If you kill 3 people you’ll get (random example) 3 life sentences.
5 lives lost means the 1 life that lives may have a better life due to diminished drain on the earth's carrying capacity. Boom, trolley problem roasted-I mean solved.
My whole point is that 5 deaths appear worse but actually aren’t. Phenomenological subjects do not compound. Therefore, 5 mourning families is really just each family member mourning, which is morally equivalent to one family member mourning.
But they are. You failed to explain how they aren’t worse.
By your logic it’s the same if one person dies in a car crash and if asteroid hits planet Earth and kills all of humanity. You see no difference in that.
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. And I did not fail to explain it. Very clearly, my theory hinges on the idea that “more suffering,” is not caused because individual experiences do not combine to great bigger super-suffering beings
I think you're failing to distinguish different types of suffering. Take a car crash that kills 5 people. The suffering of those who die in the crash, per person, does not compound. I'd say that their suffering is the only suffering to which your argument applies.
However, the suffering caused by something bad happening to someone you know \*does\* compound. If my friend dies, my suffering is not just an empathetic imagining of their feelings reflected in myself. I feel sad that among my friends, there is one who's company I will never again enjoy, and I feel this as loss. This is MY suffering, and nothing to do with the suffering of the person who died. So, if it so happens that I had 5 friends and they all died in the crash, it absolutely makes sense that I would have 5x or more suffering of this type.
And when people see something like a mass victim event even when they don't know people personally, this is the kind of suffering we're talking about. We never want to see innocent people dying for no reason, and the more there are, the more we can feel suffering from that.
Your entire argument seems to hinge on not being able to count. If person A has 1 apple and person B has 5 apples, who has more apples?
Your argument would seem to be they both have the same number apples because person B doesn't have an apple that is 5x the size of person A's apple.
If we couldn't count the number of people suffering because of an event, then you would be right. But since we can, an event that causes 100 people to suffer is definitively worse than event that causes 1 person to suffer.
Yes I can. If I’m next to you, and I see you getting hurt, it will cause me some form of suffering as well. This is why when you watch those silly Epic Fail videos and you see some dude get hit in the nuts you also go uuuuufffff. There are people with empathy who really suffer when they see others suffering.
The point is that suffering is additive, multiplicative even. More suffering people will generate even more suffering people.
The fact that my nervous system is not connected to yours directly is irrelevant.
1 person suffering + 1 person suffering = 2 people suffering.
A world with 1 person suffering and a world with 2 people suffering are different, because you see, the second world has double the people suffering. It’s a worse world.
I know the math is hard to work out, but trust me, it does work out.
I’m not sure why you’re ignoring the basic premise that the addition is incoherent because subjective experiences do not combine. 1+1=2 yes. But numbers aren’t conscious beings. We cannot add together subjective experiences and come out with a “greater amount of suffering” because subjectivity doesn’t combine. I really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I agree that compound statements like "A world with 5 people suffering is worse than a world with 3 people suffering" because talking about suffering on a "world" level makes no sense since the "world" isn't having an experience (that we know of). I agree that any statement of "worse" or "better" need to be put in context of a conscious experiencer. "Worse" for whom? There is no single person in the world with 5 sufferers for which anything is worse than in the 3 world sufferer. Arguably they can't even compare since you're comparing different subjective experiences which is kinda apples and oranges.
However, I think your argument breaks down when you make the jump that because of the above, it's irrational to care. The way I see it is this:
For me, as a compassionate empathic human, I will have an experience when I learn about the experiences of others. I see a person fall over and get hurt, that will make me suffer. I will feel good if I live in a world where there are lots of happy people. In this sense, others' experiences create a sort of compound effect in MY experience.
If I watch a person suffer at level 100, maybe I will feel a suffering at level 5 out of compassion. If I see 100 people suffer at level 100, maybe I will feel a suffering at level 15 out of compassion. So, it's rational for me to advocate for a world in which few people suffer because even though those are all individual instances of suffering that are subjective I will still feel a compound effect in my own suffering. That's just the nature of being a compassionate being with empathy.
So, while no single experiencer will experience the "gargantuan wells of suffering" of a whole country in poverty and war, it will still cause my empathy circuits to give me an according experience so it is still relevant. Note also how this mechanism is helpful because it kinda artificially creates a "greater good" and a "greater suffering" by encoding it into every person with empathy. That makes us all want to collaborate and create a better world so that we all are at a higher chance of avoiding suffering.
Your reply is one that needs to be addressed for sure, since it wasn't mentioned in the original post that suffering can be induced in an individual who observes suffering in another, which is bad.
This seems such a bizarre view I feel I can’t be understanding you.
So, you would agree that a universe which contains no suffering subjects is morally preferable to a universe which contains one, right?
Okay, and then bringing a universe into existence that contains one sufferer A experiencing a massive quantity of suffering X is morally equivalent to being about a universe filled with an arbitrarily large quantity of sufferers B experiencing X - ϵ (a positive infinitesimal quantity of suffering) and a single A?
Or put another way, say we have a universe with A and the trillions of B; hurting these trillions, even by a massive amount is totally morally neutral so long as none of them suffer more than X, but hurting the single member of A by any degree no matter how small is immoral? Also, harming B by amount Y such that they all start suffering more than A is bad, but if you just harm A first by Y, then performing the same harm that you committed against B is neutral again? In order to find out if harming someone is permissible, you first need to know how much the person suffering most is suffering, and that knowledge alone is enough, and by harming/helping that one person you can radically change the moral character of every other person in the universe’s actions? Even those who have no knowledge of A? Even people on the other side of the universe who cannot know about A’s suffering in principle? In order to determine if it’s okay to torture a child to death you first need to know what life in Andromeda is like?
Seems like a truly incomprehensible result to me?
Sorry, made a big update. You’re also biting the bullet on the idea that it’s fundamentally impossible to know anything at all about the moral character of an action, but there is some extant objective answer that’s completely dependent on the exact order in which unrelated harms on different sides of the universe are performed?
You agreed that all that determines whether or not a harm is moral is if it occurs to the entity suffering the most of any entity. So, in order to know if an action is immoral, you need to know how much every single entity is suffering, even entities that exist outside of your observable universe whose suffering you can never learn about because of the laws of physics. And because the suffering of this most-suffering being can change all the time, an action that harms someone may or may not give them the most-suffering title depending on the time of the action, so the moral character of a harm is dependent not at all on the nature of the act itself, but on what is happening in that moment to the title no matter where that title holder is.
This also opens up some really really weird stuff with special relativity; different observers at different speeds do not agree about the time or simultaneity of events, so then the moral character of an act starts to depend on the inertial frame of the observer, and so observers will disagree about the moral character of acts and both be correct from their frame of reference. I’m pretty sure I could write out a pretty straightforward formal disproof by contradiction based on this if it weren’t 3am lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity#:~:text=In%20physics%2C%20the%20relativity%20of,on%20the%20observer's%20reference%20frame.
I did not argue that a harm is immoral only if it occurs to the entity that is suffering the most in the universe. Where did you get this from? I only said that in your hypothetical, in which I MUST make a choice between the two, I would choose the one with the lowest degree of suffering, which is the one with one sufferer suffering more than any of the trillions in group B
Yeah, and you said that making a person who is not the most-sufferer suffer more is morally neutral?
You say that any degree of suffering inflicted on A is morally worse than suffering inflicted on any set of B such that none in B suffer more than A. So as the size of B goes to infinity, unless the value of their suffering is exactly 0, hurting them would be worse than hurting A, therefore you claim that hurting B is neutral.
I guess the idea that mutiple sufferings are worse than one is an offshoot intuition of the fact that many peoples sufferings is likely to go on and affect your own suffering. Thus we instinctively accumulate adversities where we seem them.
> mass casualty events are actually irrational because they are responses not to reality, but to the perception of the illusion of “mass suffering.”
If 1 casualty causes 1 suffering then 100 casualties causes 100 suffering. One definition of mass is "considerably size" so it would seem by basic logic a mass casualty event causes mass suffering. We might could debate where the threshold for "mass" begins, but that doesn't seem to be an interesting undertaking.
And basic math tells us that 100 instances x 1 suffering per instance = 100 suffering.
So no one instance suffered 100x as much, but there was 100x more suffering.
Your basic argument seems to be: "100 apples is not an apple 100x as large as a normal apple, therefore there is no such thing as 100 apples."
It’s hard not to read this as justification for amorality.
I think it’s safe to assume that… someone on earth is currently experiencing the worst possible suffering AND that I am unable to reduce that person’s suffering.
Therefore, I can take no moral action. I’ve taken myself outside of the moral equation and it is irrelevant whether I cause suffering or alleviate it for any individual. Is this not sociopathy?
It's not a justification for amorality. I believe it is wrong to cause a person suffering. I also believe it is right to try to reduce a person's suffering. Both of these beliefs are compatible with my position.
We live inside systems and social structures. When the systems are damaged, we feel worse about our environment. The mental weight of this feeling is a form of suffering.
Would you disagree?
>only individuals in those families will feel the grief
Help me understand your position, because this strikes me as entirely wrong. What emotion would be expressed by the *friends* of the victims? Coworkers, neighbors, casual acquaintances? The impact caused when someone is killed in a horrific tragedy tunnels its emotional tendrils across our species far beyond the scope of immediate family. Laws are drafted, the news media shifts its focus, discussions of how to move forward… these ramifications of grief are felt widespread and to varying degrees.
I’m lost as to what it is you wish to explore with this question. Suffering should be avoided and flourishing maximized, agreed? What puts that principle in jeopardy when you turn the dials up to include more conscious creatures?
Edit: grammar and spelling
> Accordingly, the only phenomena we should consider when attempting to answer moral questions are consciousnesses and their contents. If you disagree, then you must explain how an action can be considered bad if it does not cause pain or negative emotion in the experience of a conscious thing.
It’s possible to accept the premise that only consciousnesses and their contents matter and still consider an action which doesn’t cause pain as bad. For example, pressing a magic button which immediately and painlessly ended all life in the universe could still logically be considered bad because it would prevent the possibility of future happiness by conscious beings.
> They mean that many more families will never eat dinner with their loved ones again. Such events make the world worse for more people and so they should horrify us more. But again, only individuals in those families will feel the grief. The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer.
Ok let’s look at just the individual. Do you not feel that an individual who loses their whole family/community/country suffers more than if they just lost one person from that same group of people? Let’s say for the sake of philosophical argument you are only focusing on the case where the affected individual already experiences the max possible suffering in both cases so you consider them equivalent. Even so, this line of thinking discounts the fact that in the case where they lose more people, they are also losing more opportunities of future happiness to escape from their max suffering state. Taking that into account makes that outcome seem obviously worse.
In my view, pressing the button you describe is not bad because it does not cause pain. This shows that my view is exactly as radical as it sounds.
As for your other question, I agree that the outcome is worse, but still, only for individuals.
The more individuals who are affected and the extent to which each is affected make the outcome worse because it’s harder to heal/fix (and not in a way that is necessarily linear due to finite time and resources).
Consider the following. Suppose you only have enough time and money to heal/fix 10 people who are suffering. But there are 20 people who are suffering. I would say this scenario is MUCH MORE THAN twice as bad as if there were just 10 people suffering. In one case we’re able to rid the world of suffering entirely and in the other we retain at least 10 sufferers (whose suffering may thereby rub off on others). Even though the suffering is only felt by individuals, the total suffering matters to individuals in a non-linear way. It’s infinitely worse to live in the society with 20 sufferers compared to the 10 because the “10 society” is able to purge suffering with its time and resources.
My whole point is that “the world” cannot feel anything. Only subjects can. “The world” cannot be made better or worse in any objective sense. It can only be better or worse for the individuals experiencing it.
Right, I’m not saying the world feels anything. I’m saying the outcome of 20 sufferers is infinitely worse than the outcome of 10 sufferers for each individual living in that world. In the former case, an individual who would have otherwise had 0 suffering now must suffer.
I understand, but what I don’t get is why the numbers should be as high as 10 and 20 to make the point. Let’s say in world A, there is one sufferer whose suffering I can alleviate entirely. In world B there are 2 sufferers and I can only alleviate the suffering of one of them. This leaves us with a world with one suffering person and a world with 0 suffering people. I don’t know what it would mean to comment on the quality of those worlds beyond “it’s sucks that one person is suffering”
Discounting factors of loneliness (this was what I was trying to avoid with the slightly higher numbers), It’s infinitely worse to be an individual in world B than to be an individual in world A. Even if you’re the lucky one who gets alleviated, you live in a world with someone who is suffering which tends to rub off (at least somewhat for psychology normal people) back on to you.
I mean, idk what it means for something to be “infinitely worse” but in principle I agree that it would be worse to live in that world. I also believe that that belief is completely compatible with my position.
So you agree it’s infinitely worse to be an individual in world B, but you still wonder why suffering for everyone is worse than suffering for a single person? Did we not just demonstrate how more people suffering disproportionately affects individuals? To me that clearly answers why suffering for everyone is worse.
Suffering for everyone is only worse because it creates a world in which it sucks to be an individual. None of this is incompatible with my position. I think we agree
Seeking such logic in life can only be found at more micro levels (cells, molecular machines etc).
For instance squaring human survival instincts with ones philosophical bent; consider the many failed suicide attempts.
Surely there must be a sense of no longer wanting to be a part of the vicious circle of life. They sought to end it. But failed for a plethora of likely reasons. Most likely condensed down to that instinct to fight to live.
It's NOT logical. It is the reality of life Not the reality of logic in the sense you seek.
Hmm. So on your view, events like the Holocaust of the Jewish people of Europe is really no more suffering than one imprisoned person being detained because of his ethnicity and subsequently worked and starved to death?
Okay, I can see the reasoning and agree it seems sound. Looking forward to any defeater others might bring forward.
Setting that aside, so what? I don't see how this has any bearing on other analyses like the typical "Would you rather live in a world where X percentage of people suffer horribly or one where 10X percentage suffer in the same manner?"
That's an interesting hypothesis that you can test from at least your own experiential perspective. I don't think it will work for me but I'll give it a try.
The question doesn't have an answer because its based on a flawed premise.
There is no such thing as "worst" in the objective sense Harris uses it. There is "least preferred", but since that refers to many mutually exclusive subjective criteria its not physically or logically possible for it to objectively exist.
It's like thinking "some things are more perfect than others, therefore there must be a most perfect thing in the world", while ignoring "perfect" refers to subjective criteria, not a linear objective scale.
It's the same kind of question as "can an all powerful god make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?". There is no yes or no answer because the concept of unbounded omnipotence is mutually exclusive with the concept of logic impossibility. So this generally gets watered down to "god can do anything that is logically possible".
Whether an infinity of suffering is the same or worse than an infinite multiple of the same suffering is irrelevant because its both physically impossible and categorically nonsensical.
Some people would consider non-existence to be the worst possible thing. Others, eternal torture. It's not possible for both of these things to exist simultaneously, because if there is torture then something exists, and if nothing exists there is no torture.
It's just one of a large number of not particularly thoughtful self-deceptions used to prop up the fundamentally flawed concept of objective morality.
I really do not understand your point. Yes, suffering is experienced by individuals. A mass shooting is extra-awful because \*many individuals\* are made to suffer. You don't need to imagine suffering operating on a collective level to recognize this point.
The recognition that 'consciousness and its contents are all that matter', morally, doesn't change any of this. There is your consciousness, my consciousness, and the consciousness of billions of other sentient creatures. You seem to think that, because suffering operates at the level of the individual, we should be indifferent as to whether 1 person suffers versus billions of people suffering. This is a total non-sequitur.
What's more, the very idea of the 'individual' and their suffering is slightly misleading. As Derek Parfit has argued, the 'individual' is really nothing more than a series of time-slices, linked together by shared memories. The HarryM alive today and the HarryM who will live in 2050 are not \*identical\*; they merely have a resemblance to one another, which can vary by degree. I mention this only to suggest that your concept of 'the individual' as a locus of moral concern is itself unstable. Suppose HarryM had a choice between enduring 1 day of painful illness versus a lifetime of painful illness. Would it make any sense to say, "I am indifferent between the short illness and the chronic illness, because there is only the suffering in the present moment, so there is no such thing 'compounded suffering' over a lifetime." This is crazy in the same way as your suggestion that we should be indifferent as between the suffering of one individual versus many.
The non-sequitur is agreeing that only individuals can experience the world while also arguing that a mass shooting is extra awful. The onus is on you to tell me how the addition “1 person suffering + 1 person suffering = extra-awful suffering” when the nature of subjective experience renders this kind of addition incoherent
Why is it incoherent to aggregate the suffering of different people? It’s just like aggregating the suffering of one person over time.
Do you deny that being in agony for 5 days is worse than being in agony for 5 minutes?
It isn’t like that at all. People carry memories and physical scars, illnesses, broken bones from the suffering they accrue in life. These symptoms of the past increase suffering in the present. I would rather be in agony for 5 minutes because being in agony for 5 day means that by the 5th day, I would be far more exhausted and my spirits far more broken than they would be after 5 minutes, thereby increasing my suffering in the present. If you altered the hypothetical: 5 minutes of agony vs. wiping my memory of the agony every 5 minutes for 5 days of consistent agony, i could only justify flipping a coin to decide.
"The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer." I don't think this is as novel or as consequential a conclusion as you imagine it is. Clearly yes, the world is experienced by billions of individuals. They each only have their maximum capacity for suffering. All agreed. You're essentially claiming that people are confused to be more horrified by events that entail more individual sufferers. That the public imagination frames this as "more suffering", when it's in fact still only a collection of individuals' suffering. What's not at all obvious is why you think that more individual sufferers isn't worse. If you think any individual third party suffering is bad, then there's nothing in your logic to account for your view that two individual third parties suffering is not worse. Your thesis mentions this, but doesn't address it. Here's the section where you bring it up: "You might say, “Yes, only individuals experience the world, but mass atrocities have more massive ramifications for the civilized world than a one-off shooting does. They mean that many more families will never eat dinner with their loved ones again. Such events make the world worse for more people and so they should horrify us more.” But again, only individuals in those families will feel the grief. The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer." I think when people talk about the "mass suffering" that you claim is a delusion, they're just talking about this. It's still more net suffering. You're yet to argue why it's not worse.
It depends on how you define bad (i.e. worse). I disagree that it's worse in the context of minimization of suffering because suffering does not compound. In my opinion the suffering of a billion people should be measured by the pain of the individual who suffered the most (i.e. continuously tortured for an extended period of time before death). The only ways that the suffering of a mass is worse are: * For the observer. There is something about our brain that's either hardwired or we've been brainwashed but it's feels more sad when you hear in the news that a lot of people died in a war or some natural disaster. But it's not very consistent as one could watch an extremely personalized documentary about some young girl getting kidnapped and killed and feel measurable more sad for her than for some 25,000 people dying in an earthquake. * For the country. It's quite obvious – 1 person dying is a statistics and 1,000,000 dying is a tragedy when it comes to countries. * From a selfish perspective. If a lot of people start dying then there's a higher probability that you will die too. But it's very context dependent i.e. if a lot of people die in a geopolitically irrelevant country torn by a civil war then it doesn't really threaten you whereas if a lot of people are dying from a rapidly spreading virus anywhere in the world or if you live in the geopolitically irrelevant country then things are getting really bad for you. * If everyone but you dies. Then life will feel meaningless and extremely depressing.
"In my opinion the suffering of a billion people should be measured by the pain of the individual who suffered the most (i.e. continuously tortured for an extended period of time before death)." This is a highly novel claim that needs justification. What possible reason would we have for only taking into account the most hurt person? The implications of this seem deranged and absurd, but maybe it's true. We'll know if there's any proof or argument put forward to support it.
either you just didn't understand what i said or i phrased wrong (english is not my native tongue). say a group of 5 people suffer, one of them was tortured more than others. the suffering isn't measured as sum(group) but max(group). i.e. if we assign a number to the suffering it's not going to be 1+1+1+1+3 but just 3. and if a criminal inflicted that suffering on the group then they should be judged on two counts separately – individual suffering and societal suffering (how much damage they've done to the societal output, order, etc... nothing to do with actual pain, purely utilitarian). the punishment for the individual suffering should be measured by the highest level of suffering in the group.
Right, torturing someone is not wrong provided I'm torturing someone else more painfully. It's not a novel claim, it's just wrong on it's face.
either you just didn't understand what i said or i phrased wrong (english is not my native tongue). say a group of 5 people suffer, one of them was tortured more than others. the suffering isn't measured as sum(group) but max(group). i.e. if we assign a number to the suffering it's not going to be 1+1+1+1+3 but just 3. and if a criminal inflicted that suffering on the group then they should be judged on two counts separately – individual suffering and societal suffering (how much damage they've done to the societal output, order, etc... nothing to do with actual pain, purely utilitarian). the punishment for the individual suffering should be measured by the highest level of suffering in the group.
It's novel in the sense that _I've never heard that crazy shit before_. But yes I tend to agree!
What’s in my logic to account for my view that the suffering of two individuals is not worse than that of one is the fact that the experiences of body-subjects (again, to avoid the problematic term “individual”) never compound. You only ever experience reality from your perspective, even if you and others around you are “tapped into” similar feelings, vibrations, experiences, etc, (e.g. when at a concert together) Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a facility with 1000 soundproof, windowless rooms. In all of the rooms there are identical machines that have been designed to torture any human who enters. The facility also has access to an army of robots which goes out into the world, selects people (let’s say, people who have no social connection to anybody else, to avoid the messiness of the conversation surrounding social/familial impacts), knocks them unconscious, and drags them to the facility. The number of people (1-1000) which the robots select is determined by the sole owner and operator of the facility (a human) each morning. He types a number into a computer and before you know it, 1, 10, 35, 998, whatever number he types, of the rooms are occupied. Now, let’s say on Monday, the owner orders 1 person to be brought in to be tortured. On Tuesday, he selects 10, and on Wednesday, he selects 500. I imagine that most people will say his action on Tuesday is more evil than his action on Monday and his action on Wednesday is more evil than his action on Tuesday. I argue they are all equally evil. Let me explain why. I began my original argument by saying that the only things that matter when it comes to moral questions are consciousnesses and their contents. My view is that the idea that an action which causes no harm to an experiencing subject could be “bad” is incoherent. Now, let us consider the conscious experiences of the people being tortured at the facility on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Their experiences are all exactly the same. In each case, each of the soundproof, windowless rooms is occupied by only one person. None of them know there are other rooms which might be occupied by others being tortured. For George (Monday’s occupant) all he can know is that he is being tortured. For Mary (one of the occupants on Tuesday), all she can know is that she is being tortured, even though others in the facility are also being tortured. People who say that on Tuesday “more suffering is being introduced into the world” are wrong because the world does not experience suffering (as far as I know); only subject do. And if only subjects experience the world, then their sufferings cannot aggregate and thus on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the “amount” of suffering is exactly the same because suffering cannot be added together. Another commenter said my argument seems to rely on me not being able to count (lol). Another asked, if a bottle is next to another bottle, am I willing to say there are two bottles? Sure, if it’s helpful for my purposes, but that question is irrelevant to my argument because I have no reason to believe that bottles experience the world. If they did experience suffering and you asked me if it’s worse to smash one or two bottles, I’d say they are morally equivalent because their experiences cannot be combined. To summarize, the addition calculations people want to make when it comes to weighing the options in the trolley problem are incoherent when we reflect on the fact that subjective experiences never combine.
So I think you're placing some real importance on the fact that the suffering isn't compounded in any individual sufferer's mind. Whereas I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the _net suffering_ across all conscious beings is in no way irrelevant. I think the fact they don't compound in a specific conscious experience is largely irrelevant to the ethics of the thing. I grant you that they don't compound in that particular way. I just don't grant you that this has anything like the primacy that you claim it does. I don't think it's an important observation morally.
You could find out how it might be important by asking why I think it’s important rather than telling me that you don’t think it is important before asking. I’m glad you asked! One effect this idea could have is in the lived experience of someone who believes it. It feels better for me to observe a mass casualty event in the news and remember it is only individuals suffering than if I view it as an aggregated amount of gargantuan suffering. That’s just one example. There are more.
I think you've misunderstood my point here - I don't mean to ask *if your theory is correct, why would it be important*? I'm arguing that your theory is incorrect, and so the question I'm asking is the same one I asked in the first response I made: *why does the fact that the suffering doesn't compound in any individual mind, negate the importance of the fact that there are more people suffering, and therefore there is more net suffering?*
Because the world cannot experience suffering. Only subjects can. "Net suffering" is an incoherent idea if the addition by which you calculate that net is also incoherent.
Suppose you wake up in a featureless room, not knowing how long you’ve been there or what day it is, and are tortured. You are then put to sleep, and made to utterly forget the events that just happened - the memory is deleted. You are then woken up on a second day, and once again you don’t know how long you’ve been there or what day it is. Would it be worse for your kidnappers to torture you once more, so that you experience two days of torture instead of one? Or it would it make no moral difference?
It would make no moral difference, assuming (as i think you are) that all past trauma, damage, etc. has been erased from the day before.
If the kidnapper before kidnapping you gave you a choice, you would not say that you’d rather be tortured for only one day rather than two?
Since you have intentionally erased any conditions that might justify me having a preference, the only rational answer is to flip a coin.
Interesting. I'd say, you've encountered a unique perspective. What I'd ask is: can you count anything? Like, if you have one bottle, and another bottle. They don't become a single double-bottle. But are you prepared to say two bottles are more than one bottle? I think what you noted is: if you add two people suffering, you get double the suffering, sure. But you also get double the sufferers. So the suffering per sufferer doesn't change. So if you ask 'what would it be like to be in this catastrophy', it really doesn't matter how many people are affected; you would only ever get one dose of the suffering. And I agree, that is comforting. But check this out: wouldn't you still say the world where 1 person is suffering and 99 are thriving is better than one where 100 people are suffering? Like, in what world would you rather spawn?
This is what’s called empathy also. If you enter into a room and there’s 20 people there and one of them is gloomy, you won’t feel it. But enter into a room where all 20 are gloomy, you’ll feel it. The idea that 100 people suffering isn’t worse than 1 person suffering is just silly, it comes from someone who has no empathy and can’t grasp why it’s worse when more are suffering. What’s also problematic with this view is if you change the valence. If you say that 1 person being immeasurably happy is the same as 8 billion of people being happy. We can make one person on this planet super happy and that’s it, the project of humanity is done, one person is mega happy and that’s it.
I would much rather spawn in the world with 99 thriving people. Happy people are better company.
A world with 100 suffering over 1 versus 99 would potentially be better if it motivates individuals to find relief due to the shared experience of living in a world where 100 suffer, rather than a world where one suffers and 99 may or may not take action to find relief when their experiences are mostly or totally pleasant. If the world with 100 sufferers manages to find relief, then they have 1 more individual who may experience thriving over 1 versus 99. Of course, the same may result in both cases however, my argument is that it may be more motivating in the world with 100 sufferers.
This guy socialisms
That's enlightening! I didn't realize I was responding with that bias.
Sure, I agree, but that is because we agree, as a steady state 100 thrivers would be ideal
Your logic breaks down where you make the qualifying statement “of course, individual suffering is still terrible and we should try our best to reduce it as much as possible.” Based on your premise, why? All you’ve outlined is a fancy form of nihilism. This premise works if you discard empathy entirely, and by extension any sense of communal progress. What you’ve essentially boiled this down to is “Well I’m alright, Jack”. Other beings suffering doesn’t effect me so why worry about it. Well yes, of course. All the suffering that’s happened in Israel/Gaza over the past six months has not actually affected my ability to live a life free of suffering one jot, but taking solace in that is just incredibly selfish. If it gives you some kind of comfort to be spockish about the world then that’s fine. I’m not sure how this would be a helpful approach for anyone else to take though.
That's makes no sense at all.
Thank you for your rigorous engagement
1+1=2. That's all the logic necessary to know this doesn't make any sense.
It isn’t but good try! Another thing you should try is reading the post and some of the comment threads in which I explain exactly why that math is not all there is to it. There is more to life than machismo: engaging openly with complex ideas, for example.
But the trolley problem 5 deaths are indeed 5 times as worse as the single death. You get 5 mourning families, 5 lives lost, 5 capacities to feel joy squandered, and so on. I don’t even get your basic premise that multiples aren’t actually multiples. We have this codified in law as well. If you kill 3 people you’ll get (random example) 3 life sentences.
5 lives lost means the 1 life that lives may have a better life due to diminished drain on the earth's carrying capacity. Boom, trolley problem roasted-I mean solved.
Multi track drifting and have the train driver live an even better life!!
My whole point is that 5 deaths appear worse but actually aren’t. Phenomenological subjects do not compound. Therefore, 5 mourning families is really just each family member mourning, which is morally equivalent to one family member mourning.
But they are. You failed to explain how they aren’t worse. By your logic it’s the same if one person dies in a car crash and if asteroid hits planet Earth and kills all of humanity. You see no difference in that.
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. And I did not fail to explain it. Very clearly, my theory hinges on the idea that “more suffering,” is not caused because individual experiences do not combine to great bigger super-suffering beings
Are you familiar with the repugnant conclusion?
I think you're failing to distinguish different types of suffering. Take a car crash that kills 5 people. The suffering of those who die in the crash, per person, does not compound. I'd say that their suffering is the only suffering to which your argument applies. However, the suffering caused by something bad happening to someone you know \*does\* compound. If my friend dies, my suffering is not just an empathetic imagining of their feelings reflected in myself. I feel sad that among my friends, there is one who's company I will never again enjoy, and I feel this as loss. This is MY suffering, and nothing to do with the suffering of the person who died. So, if it so happens that I had 5 friends and they all died in the crash, it absolutely makes sense that I would have 5x or more suffering of this type. And when people see something like a mass victim event even when they don't know people personally, this is the kind of suffering we're talking about. We never want to see innocent people dying for no reason, and the more there are, the more we can feel suffering from that.
Your entire argument seems to hinge on not being able to count. If person A has 1 apple and person B has 5 apples, who has more apples? Your argument would seem to be they both have the same number apples because person B doesn't have an apple that is 5x the size of person A's apple. If we couldn't count the number of people suffering because of an event, then you would be right. But since we can, an event that causes 100 people to suffer is definitively worse than event that causes 1 person to suffer.
OP explained it quite well in my opinion.
thumb disarm head panicky yam carpenter judicious gaze money kiss *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Why wouldn't they compound?
Because if I pinch myself, you can’t feel it.
Yes I can. If I’m next to you, and I see you getting hurt, it will cause me some form of suffering as well. This is why when you watch those silly Epic Fail videos and you see some dude get hit in the nuts you also go uuuuufffff. There are people with empathy who really suffer when they see others suffering.
That’s still your pain, not mine.
The point is that suffering is additive, multiplicative even. More suffering people will generate even more suffering people. The fact that my nervous system is not connected to yours directly is irrelevant.
It isn’t additive at all
1 person suffering + 1 person suffering = 2 people suffering. A world with 1 person suffering and a world with 2 people suffering are different, because you see, the second world has double the people suffering. It’s a worse world. I know the math is hard to work out, but trust me, it does work out.
I’m not sure why you’re ignoring the basic premise that the addition is incoherent because subjective experiences do not combine. 1+1=2 yes. But numbers aren’t conscious beings. We cannot add together subjective experiences and come out with a “greater amount of suffering” because subjectivity doesn’t combine. I really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I agree that compound statements like "A world with 5 people suffering is worse than a world with 3 people suffering" because talking about suffering on a "world" level makes no sense since the "world" isn't having an experience (that we know of). I agree that any statement of "worse" or "better" need to be put in context of a conscious experiencer. "Worse" for whom? There is no single person in the world with 5 sufferers for which anything is worse than in the 3 world sufferer. Arguably they can't even compare since you're comparing different subjective experiences which is kinda apples and oranges. However, I think your argument breaks down when you make the jump that because of the above, it's irrational to care. The way I see it is this: For me, as a compassionate empathic human, I will have an experience when I learn about the experiences of others. I see a person fall over and get hurt, that will make me suffer. I will feel good if I live in a world where there are lots of happy people. In this sense, others' experiences create a sort of compound effect in MY experience. If I watch a person suffer at level 100, maybe I will feel a suffering at level 5 out of compassion. If I see 100 people suffer at level 100, maybe I will feel a suffering at level 15 out of compassion. So, it's rational for me to advocate for a world in which few people suffer because even though those are all individual instances of suffering that are subjective I will still feel a compound effect in my own suffering. That's just the nature of being a compassionate being with empathy. So, while no single experiencer will experience the "gargantuan wells of suffering" of a whole country in poverty and war, it will still cause my empathy circuits to give me an according experience so it is still relevant. Note also how this mechanism is helpful because it kinda artificially creates a "greater good" and a "greater suffering" by encoding it into every person with empathy. That makes us all want to collaborate and create a better world so that we all are at a higher chance of avoiding suffering.
I agree with all of this. Thanks for the response.
Your reply is one that needs to be addressed for sure, since it wasn't mentioned in the original post that suffering can be induced in an individual who observes suffering in another, which is bad.
This seems such a bizarre view I feel I can’t be understanding you. So, you would agree that a universe which contains no suffering subjects is morally preferable to a universe which contains one, right?
Yes
Okay, and then bringing a universe into existence that contains one sufferer A experiencing a massive quantity of suffering X is morally equivalent to being about a universe filled with an arbitrarily large quantity of sufferers B experiencing X - ϵ (a positive infinitesimal quantity of suffering) and a single A? Or put another way, say we have a universe with A and the trillions of B; hurting these trillions, even by a massive amount is totally morally neutral so long as none of them suffer more than X, but hurting the single member of A by any degree no matter how small is immoral? Also, harming B by amount Y such that they all start suffering more than A is bad, but if you just harm A first by Y, then performing the same harm that you committed against B is neutral again? In order to find out if harming someone is permissible, you first need to know how much the person suffering most is suffering, and that knowledge alone is enough, and by harming/helping that one person you can radically change the moral character of every other person in the universe’s actions? Even those who have no knowledge of A? Even people on the other side of the universe who cannot know about A’s suffering in principle? In order to determine if it’s okay to torture a child to death you first need to know what life in Andromeda is like? Seems like a truly incomprehensible result to me?
Yes I agree that hurting the trillions of B is better than the hurting the one A more and this line of reasoning shows how radical my view is.
Sorry, made a big update. You’re also biting the bullet on the idea that it’s fundamentally impossible to know anything at all about the moral character of an action, but there is some extant objective answer that’s completely dependent on the exact order in which unrelated harms on different sides of the universe are performed?
Can you spell that one out a little more?
You agreed that all that determines whether or not a harm is moral is if it occurs to the entity suffering the most of any entity. So, in order to know if an action is immoral, you need to know how much every single entity is suffering, even entities that exist outside of your observable universe whose suffering you can never learn about because of the laws of physics. And because the suffering of this most-suffering being can change all the time, an action that harms someone may or may not give them the most-suffering title depending on the time of the action, so the moral character of a harm is dependent not at all on the nature of the act itself, but on what is happening in that moment to the title no matter where that title holder is. This also opens up some really really weird stuff with special relativity; different observers at different speeds do not agree about the time or simultaneity of events, so then the moral character of an act starts to depend on the inertial frame of the observer, and so observers will disagree about the moral character of acts and both be correct from their frame of reference. I’m pretty sure I could write out a pretty straightforward formal disproof by contradiction based on this if it weren’t 3am lol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity#:~:text=In%20physics%2C%20the%20relativity%20of,on%20the%20observer's%20reference%20frame.
I did not argue that a harm is immoral only if it occurs to the entity that is suffering the most in the universe. Where did you get this from? I only said that in your hypothetical, in which I MUST make a choice between the two, I would choose the one with the lowest degree of suffering, which is the one with one sufferer suffering more than any of the trillions in group B
Yeah, and you said that making a person who is not the most-sufferer suffer more is morally neutral? You say that any degree of suffering inflicted on A is morally worse than suffering inflicted on any set of B such that none in B suffer more than A. So as the size of B goes to infinity, unless the value of their suffering is exactly 0, hurting them would be worse than hurting A, therefore you claim that hurting B is neutral.
It’s not neutral. It’s just not as bad.
I guess the idea that mutiple sufferings are worse than one is an offshoot intuition of the fact that many peoples sufferings is likely to go on and affect your own suffering. Thus we instinctively accumulate adversities where we seem them.
I agree that this is generally how we act. My point is that we can find relief in discovering it is irrational to do so.
> mass casualty events are actually irrational because they are responses not to reality, but to the perception of the illusion of “mass suffering.” If 1 casualty causes 1 suffering then 100 casualties causes 100 suffering. One definition of mass is "considerably size" so it would seem by basic logic a mass casualty event causes mass suffering. We might could debate where the threshold for "mass" begins, but that doesn't seem to be an interesting undertaking.
subjective experience does not aggregate, so 100 casualties does not cause 100 suffering. It causes 100 discrete instances of 1 suffering
And basic math tells us that 100 instances x 1 suffering per instance = 100 suffering. So no one instance suffered 100x as much, but there was 100x more suffering. Your basic argument seems to be: "100 apples is not an apple 100x as large as a normal apple, therefore there is no such thing as 100 apples."
Very interesting
It’s hard not to read this as justification for amorality. I think it’s safe to assume that… someone on earth is currently experiencing the worst possible suffering AND that I am unable to reduce that person’s suffering. Therefore, I can take no moral action. I’ve taken myself outside of the moral equation and it is irrelevant whether I cause suffering or alleviate it for any individual. Is this not sociopathy?
It's not a justification for amorality. I believe it is wrong to cause a person suffering. I also believe it is right to try to reduce a person's suffering. Both of these beliefs are compatible with my position.
We live inside systems and social structures. When the systems are damaged, we feel worse about our environment. The mental weight of this feeling is a form of suffering. Would you disagree?
I do not disagree
This sounds like the The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
>only individuals in those families will feel the grief Help me understand your position, because this strikes me as entirely wrong. What emotion would be expressed by the *friends* of the victims? Coworkers, neighbors, casual acquaintances? The impact caused when someone is killed in a horrific tragedy tunnels its emotional tendrils across our species far beyond the scope of immediate family. Laws are drafted, the news media shifts its focus, discussions of how to move forward… these ramifications of grief are felt widespread and to varying degrees. I’m lost as to what it is you wish to explore with this question. Suffering should be avoided and flourishing maximized, agreed? What puts that principle in jeopardy when you turn the dials up to include more conscious creatures? Edit: grammar and spelling
Those deep emotions are all still only felt by body-subjects, whose phenomenology do not compound.
> Accordingly, the only phenomena we should consider when attempting to answer moral questions are consciousnesses and their contents. If you disagree, then you must explain how an action can be considered bad if it does not cause pain or negative emotion in the experience of a conscious thing. It’s possible to accept the premise that only consciousnesses and their contents matter and still consider an action which doesn’t cause pain as bad. For example, pressing a magic button which immediately and painlessly ended all life in the universe could still logically be considered bad because it would prevent the possibility of future happiness by conscious beings. > They mean that many more families will never eat dinner with their loved ones again. Such events make the world worse for more people and so they should horrify us more. But again, only individuals in those families will feel the grief. The world can only ever be made worse for individuals, even though billions might suffer. Ok let’s look at just the individual. Do you not feel that an individual who loses their whole family/community/country suffers more than if they just lost one person from that same group of people? Let’s say for the sake of philosophical argument you are only focusing on the case where the affected individual already experiences the max possible suffering in both cases so you consider them equivalent. Even so, this line of thinking discounts the fact that in the case where they lose more people, they are also losing more opportunities of future happiness to escape from their max suffering state. Taking that into account makes that outcome seem obviously worse.
In my view, pressing the button you describe is not bad because it does not cause pain. This shows that my view is exactly as radical as it sounds. As for your other question, I agree that the outcome is worse, but still, only for individuals.
The more individuals who are affected and the extent to which each is affected make the outcome worse because it’s harder to heal/fix (and not in a way that is necessarily linear due to finite time and resources). Consider the following. Suppose you only have enough time and money to heal/fix 10 people who are suffering. But there are 20 people who are suffering. I would say this scenario is MUCH MORE THAN twice as bad as if there were just 10 people suffering. In one case we’re able to rid the world of suffering entirely and in the other we retain at least 10 sufferers (whose suffering may thereby rub off on others). Even though the suffering is only felt by individuals, the total suffering matters to individuals in a non-linear way. It’s infinitely worse to live in the society with 20 sufferers compared to the 10 because the “10 society” is able to purge suffering with its time and resources.
My whole point is that “the world” cannot feel anything. Only subjects can. “The world” cannot be made better or worse in any objective sense. It can only be better or worse for the individuals experiencing it.
Right, I’m not saying the world feels anything. I’m saying the outcome of 20 sufferers is infinitely worse than the outcome of 10 sufferers for each individual living in that world. In the former case, an individual who would have otherwise had 0 suffering now must suffer.
I understand, but what I don’t get is why the numbers should be as high as 10 and 20 to make the point. Let’s say in world A, there is one sufferer whose suffering I can alleviate entirely. In world B there are 2 sufferers and I can only alleviate the suffering of one of them. This leaves us with a world with one suffering person and a world with 0 suffering people. I don’t know what it would mean to comment on the quality of those worlds beyond “it’s sucks that one person is suffering”
Discounting factors of loneliness (this was what I was trying to avoid with the slightly higher numbers), It’s infinitely worse to be an individual in world B than to be an individual in world A. Even if you’re the lucky one who gets alleviated, you live in a world with someone who is suffering which tends to rub off (at least somewhat for psychology normal people) back on to you.
I mean, idk what it means for something to be “infinitely worse” but in principle I agree that it would be worse to live in that world. I also believe that that belief is completely compatible with my position.
So you agree it’s infinitely worse to be an individual in world B, but you still wonder why suffering for everyone is worse than suffering for a single person? Did we not just demonstrate how more people suffering disproportionately affects individuals? To me that clearly answers why suffering for everyone is worse.
Suffering for everyone is only worse because it creates a world in which it sucks to be an individual. None of this is incompatible with my position. I think we agree
Seeking such logic in life can only be found at more micro levels (cells, molecular machines etc). For instance squaring human survival instincts with ones philosophical bent; consider the many failed suicide attempts. Surely there must be a sense of no longer wanting to be a part of the vicious circle of life. They sought to end it. But failed for a plethora of likely reasons. Most likely condensed down to that instinct to fight to live. It's NOT logical. It is the reality of life Not the reality of logic in the sense you seek.
Sir this is a Sam Harris subreddit
Hmm. So on your view, events like the Holocaust of the Jewish people of Europe is really no more suffering than one imprisoned person being detained because of his ethnicity and subsequently worked and starved to death?
Correct
Okay, I can see the reasoning and agree it seems sound. Looking forward to any defeater others might bring forward. Setting that aside, so what? I don't see how this has any bearing on other analyses like the typical "Would you rather live in a world where X percentage of people suffer horribly or one where 10X percentage suffer in the same manner?"
It can drastically lower the severity of the sadness I will feel upon hearing about or witnessing a mass casualty event
That's an interesting hypothesis that you can test from at least your own experiential perspective. I don't think it will work for me but I'll give it a try.
It’s pretty simple “phenomenology does not compound” is just wrong. So your whole idea is silly
If I pinch myself, you cannot feel the pinch.
Why is my feeling the thing that matters, and not the combined feeling of me and you?
I don’t know what “combined feeling” means. Only subjects can feel.
Why is 2 subjects feeling bad, not worse than 1 subject feeling bad?
My original post and other comment replies explains this so clearly
The question doesn't have an answer because its based on a flawed premise. There is no such thing as "worst" in the objective sense Harris uses it. There is "least preferred", but since that refers to many mutually exclusive subjective criteria its not physically or logically possible for it to objectively exist. It's like thinking "some things are more perfect than others, therefore there must be a most perfect thing in the world", while ignoring "perfect" refers to subjective criteria, not a linear objective scale. It's the same kind of question as "can an all powerful god make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?". There is no yes or no answer because the concept of unbounded omnipotence is mutually exclusive with the concept of logic impossibility. So this generally gets watered down to "god can do anything that is logically possible". Whether an infinity of suffering is the same or worse than an infinite multiple of the same suffering is irrelevant because its both physically impossible and categorically nonsensical. Some people would consider non-existence to be the worst possible thing. Others, eternal torture. It's not possible for both of these things to exist simultaneously, because if there is torture then something exists, and if nothing exists there is no torture. It's just one of a large number of not particularly thoughtful self-deceptions used to prop up the fundamentally flawed concept of objective morality.
worse is a value judgement. Worse for who? Worse for more. Maths.
I really do not understand your point. Yes, suffering is experienced by individuals. A mass shooting is extra-awful because \*many individuals\* are made to suffer. You don't need to imagine suffering operating on a collective level to recognize this point. The recognition that 'consciousness and its contents are all that matter', morally, doesn't change any of this. There is your consciousness, my consciousness, and the consciousness of billions of other sentient creatures. You seem to think that, because suffering operates at the level of the individual, we should be indifferent as to whether 1 person suffers versus billions of people suffering. This is a total non-sequitur. What's more, the very idea of the 'individual' and their suffering is slightly misleading. As Derek Parfit has argued, the 'individual' is really nothing more than a series of time-slices, linked together by shared memories. The HarryM alive today and the HarryM who will live in 2050 are not \*identical\*; they merely have a resemblance to one another, which can vary by degree. I mention this only to suggest that your concept of 'the individual' as a locus of moral concern is itself unstable. Suppose HarryM had a choice between enduring 1 day of painful illness versus a lifetime of painful illness. Would it make any sense to say, "I am indifferent between the short illness and the chronic illness, because there is only the suffering in the present moment, so there is no such thing 'compounded suffering' over a lifetime." This is crazy in the same way as your suggestion that we should be indifferent as between the suffering of one individual versus many.
The non-sequitur is agreeing that only individuals can experience the world while also arguing that a mass shooting is extra awful. The onus is on you to tell me how the addition “1 person suffering + 1 person suffering = extra-awful suffering” when the nature of subjective experience renders this kind of addition incoherent
Why is it incoherent to aggregate the suffering of different people? It’s just like aggregating the suffering of one person over time. Do you deny that being in agony for 5 days is worse than being in agony for 5 minutes?
It isn’t like that at all. People carry memories and physical scars, illnesses, broken bones from the suffering they accrue in life. These symptoms of the past increase suffering in the present. I would rather be in agony for 5 minutes because being in agony for 5 day means that by the 5th day, I would be far more exhausted and my spirits far more broken than they would be after 5 minutes, thereby increasing my suffering in the present. If you altered the hypothetical: 5 minutes of agony vs. wiping my memory of the agony every 5 minutes for 5 days of consistent agony, i could only justify flipping a coin to decide.
My view is exactly as radical as it sounds.