
Suffering, not just happiness, weighs in the utilitarian calculus - pepys
https://aeon.co/ideas/suffering-not-just-happiness-weighs-in-the-utilitarian-calculus
======
Bakary
The book Happiness by Design by the behavioral scientist Paul Dolan posits
that experiencing a feeling of purpose (not the outcomes or evaluations of
purposeful activities, but what they actually feel like in daily life) can be
equally as important as the experience of pleasure in determining behavior and
the quality of life. While different personalities can increasingly tilt
towards one or the other, a truly happy life requires a combination of
pleasure and purpose to take into account the diminishing marginal returns of
both states.

It seems as though Mill's idea of giving space to "higher" pursuits in the
utilitarian calculus is an earlier formulation of this idea. In a state where
pleasure was easily accessible to all, purpose a sense of narrative would be
hard to come by, hence the "No!" that he intuitively came up with.

~~~
Bartweiss
Thanks very much for the recommendation, I've been looking for a factual
treatment of something like this.

For a philosophical defense of something similar, you might be interested in
capabilitarianism. Crudely put, it's a version of utilitarianism which argues
utility arises not just from happiness and lack of pain, but from _capacity_
\- the ability to plan and act and change the world as we desire. Capability
and purpose aren't the same, of course, but it certainly looks like the first
is a condition of the second - without some amount of agency, purpose tends to
be nonexistent or painful unreachable.

The general idea that intent and action must be combined with happiness fits
my intuitions nicely, and provides an elegant answer to issues like
wireheading. Rather than adding some complex epicycle, we can simply observe
that maximizing happiness in that way surrenders too much purpose.

~~~
smallnamespace
This echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which can be viewed as people
intuitively focusing on longer and longer-term needs.

The bottom of the hierarchy, food and water, if not fulfilled, will kill in a
matter of days to weeks. Immediate physical safety follows, then social
belonging, then higher-order psychological needs (love, esteem) that promote
success over longer time scales.

Note that these needs aren't necessarily competing, but are ultimately
compatible: e.g. being in a position where you are loved and esteemed by your
community will ensure that your lower-order needs are likely to be fulfilled
indefinitely into the future.

In this context, a 'will to power' makes a lot of sense. Your mind
instinctually models that not only is it necessary to have your immediate
needs today fulfilled, but that you have a _guarantee_ that your immediate
needs can be fulfilled in the future. And the best way to guarantee that is to
have the personal ability to ensure that outcome, e.g. 'power' or 'capacity'.

If you drag this discussion out a bit further, one can immediately see the
limitations of a proposal like UBI, or the anger coming from largely right-
leaning communities hit by downsides of globalization. You can promise people
benefits (or tax transfers) and feed them today, but there is no psychological
sense of safety. If you know that ultimately you play no useful economic role
in your society, and are really living at the largesse of society of large,
what guarantee is there that that state of affairs will continue indefinitely?

------
woliveirajr
> There’s an immense mystery at the heart of being human: the paradox of
> opposing and accepting suffering.

And the whole next paragraph just lacked a point: on how so many people
extract pleasure from BDSM, where pain and pleasure (in many, many variants)
come together in some controlled environment.

~~~
protonfish
BDSM is about social hierarchy - dominance and submission. This is completely
different from non-social concept of accepting suffering in the short term for
a payoff later.

~~~
belenos46
Bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism is what that stands for. You've
correctly identified one facet of domination, for some folks.

There's a lot left there which your "BDSM is about social hierarchy" doesn't
even begin to address.

------
CuriouslyC
If utilitarianism wasn't practically difficult enough, human perception is
adaptable. We don't perceive stimuli in absolute terms, but rather relative to
whatever we've normalized. Thus the experience of suffering actually lets us
experience pleasure more readily (the reverse is also true).

Additionally, due to the quirks of memory, adding some pain to a pleasurable
experience at the right time will paradoxically cause people to remember it as
being more pleasurable. This is completely at odds with a simple moral
calculus.

It would be interesting to set a science fiction story in a world where an
accurate moral calculus had been developed.

~~~
lisper
> adding some pain to a pleasurable experience at the right time will
> paradoxically cause people to remember it as being more pleasurable

Even more paradoxical, some kinds of physical pain are actually remembered as
pleasurable in and of themselves, like eating spicy food, or running a
marathon.

~~~
kudokatz
> Even more paradoxical ... running a marathon

As a runner this feels like a statement that shows some (very reasonable)
ignorance of feelings and motivations. Achievement through empowerment of hard
work can be a very healthy way for a successful marathon to be pleasurable.

~~~
lisper
How is that different from what I said?

------
exratione
I think the basic premise is correct, that suffering is by far the most
important determinant in where utilitarianism takes us in the long term.
Adding the good has far fewer world-changing requirements and consequences
than removing the bad, which might say something about the raw deal that
evolution hands to all individual entities. A short sketch is here, the
pertinent part reproduced below:

[https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-
imperative-...](https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-
followed-to-the-ends-of-paradise-engineering/)

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved
continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was.
Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish
and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the
lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are
responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for
protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies
that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of
agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were
we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of
animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal
populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to
provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge
in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to
remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage
population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and
predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as
where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a
form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps?
Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required,
and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across
every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of
technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not
prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health
indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for
fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing
technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside
every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might
be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world
will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park,
creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed
in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to
turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the
terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed,
but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes
from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse
could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than
our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely
dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil
in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the
distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals
of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who
preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will
slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are
needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the
era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling
machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources
presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to
other projects.

~~~
bitL
Utopia. Our own bodies have more bacteria than cells in a constant state of
symbiosis and infighting. It's seems like it's an optimization algorithm to
keep life going. Suffering as a needed reinforcement feedback is deeply woven
in the fabric of nature; without suffering living beings wouldn't survive a
day. We can dream of something better, isolate ourselves, but that won't
change the ongoing optimization algorithm that is deep inside us and nature.

------
Bartweiss
This is an interesting piece, but I can't shake the feeling that the author
needed to work harder on his claims. There are a string of mistakes and
misdirections that ultimately invalidate the piece as a whole.

> _What’s the 1755 Lisbon earthquake compared with Auschwitz? What’s a flu
> epidemic next to Hiroshima?_

The Lisbon earthquake was small compared to Auschwitz, but reaching back to
1755 is rather strange. (Portugal's total population was <3,000,000.) A better
and more timely reference might be the 1931 floods in China, which did in fact
kill several million people. High estimates for the death toll of Hiroshima
_and_ Nagasaki are <300,000. The Spanish Flu, only two decades earlier, killed
between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 people.

I don't think these are idle complaints about a section specifically devoted
to rejecting Mill's claim that chance and nature overmatch human evil.

> _When we see each other in terms of usefulness, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed
> long before Facebook and Twitter: ‘Hell is other people.’_

This is a particular frustration of mine, because everyone misinterprets this.
But a philosophy professor of all people ought to get it right. Sarte's
complaint is not at all about 'seeing each other in terms of usefulness'.
Rather the opposite - he acknowledges that we always use other people to shape
our identities, and so _specific_ other people can create hell for us!

Quoting Sarte himself: "'Hell is other people' has always been misunderstood.
It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with
other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations.
But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if
relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can
only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to
know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have.
We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for
judging ourselves."

[https://www.vox.com/2014/11/17/7229547/philosophy-quotes-
mis...](https://www.vox.com/2014/11/17/7229547/philosophy-quotes-
misunderstood-wittgenstein-sartre-descartes)

> _Even when things materially improve because of our commitment to
> utilitarian principles, our increased happiness often doesn’t register as
> meaningful._

This is perhaps the most fundamentally and damningly wrong claim in the whole
piece.

Bypassing the question of pre-agricultural life, what we see is absolutely
that utilitarian progress - social, economic, and technological development -
has created increased happiness on a massive scale. Disease is a major source
of suffering, and the oral polio vaccine prevented 1.1 million cases of
paralysis _in the US alone_. Life satisfaction polls overwhelmingly suggest
that economic and political progress make us happier. Over the last ~30 years,
happiness numbers have risen worldwide (despite the US case). Richer and more
equal countries are happier, and change over time suggests that causality
flows that direction. Countries which perform above their wealth on happiness,
like Costa Rica, are also countries which are lastingly free from armed
conflict, with quality healthcare, social services, and non-corrupt
government.

And all of this is people surveyed. A moment's thought on the sources of
sample bias in the survey suggests that many of the least happy people
surveyed are in fact those who would previously have been missed altogether -
people who would have been enslaved or confined, or killed by war or disease,
but who are now at least alive and accessible.

[http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/292865/C...](http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/292865/Cost-
effectiveness-case-studies.pdf)

[https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-
satisfaction](https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction)

> _Mill tries philosophically to resolve the paradox of suffering by arguing
> that higher goods such as love and literature are ultimately more satisfying
> than basic forms of pleasure. In some sense, that’s true. But the terms of
> this satisfaction are no longer utilitarian;_

And in his final accounting, Samuelson offers some bizarre reversal of the no
true Scotsman fallacy, rejecting as non-utilitarian any idea which he can't
easily rebut. Utilitarian thought is not incapable of handling suffering which
leads to greater happiness, or discussing the relative merits of different
forms of happiness. Far from it - hard questions like wireheading and the
repugnant conclusion are dealt with at enormous length in utilitarian thought.

Utilitarianism is simply a claim that the moral weight of actions is
determined by their impact on well-being. Capabilitarianism, negative
preference utilitarianism, and a dozen other developments have brought us past
the initial sketches of Bentham and Mill. These complexities are well worth
discussing, but they deserve better than Samuelson's blend of factual errors
and vague appeals to the nobility of suffering.

------
hnisgroupthink
Pursuing happiness is a fools errand. Happiness is an emotion. Emotional
states maximized are dulled. You get diminishing returns from eating cookies.

Pursuit of happiness is a propaganda creed that falls apart like sand when
examined.

