Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Trekkin]

It is probably worth pointing out that the utility of pain as a signal varies wildly. It is worth knowing urgently that you're being physically damaged, and nociception is appropriately alarming; there is somewhat less urgency in knowing that one is still chronically ill in some unmanageable way, and yet the pain persists.

[Rowanas]

Verily.

Maximum Spin, stay the hell away from me. You have the mentality of a villain there. "Suffering is just as valuable as happiness, and it can teach us important lessons" sounds a lot like "Why not torture the shit out of someone if I think it teaches them some important lesson in my twisted little brain".

Inevitable as moral is also incomprehensibly flawed. Technically all things are inevitable, because everything is the product of everything that has gone before - that doesn't make everything a morally acceptable action or consequence.

[Trekkin]

Inevitable as moral is also incomprehensibly flawed. Technically all things are inevitable, because everything is the product of everything that has gone before - that doesn't make everything a morally acceptable action or consequence.

If anything, the inevitable is amoral, but that just encourages people not to look too hard for alternatives to whatever awful thing they want to justify.

[Rowanas]

Inevitable as moral is also incomprehensibly flawed. Technically all things are inevitable, because everything is the product of everything that has gone before - that doesn't make everything a morally acceptable action or consequence.

If anything, the inevitable is amoral, but that just encourages people not to look too hard for alternatives to whatever awful thing they want to justify.

I personally consider that nothing is truly inevitable (outside of the purely mechanical manner in which all things are predetermined by physical laws), which sidesteps the evil-justification thing.  Suffering of some sort may happen, is likely to happen, but no instance of it is inevitable as we understand inevitability.

[Trekkin]

I personally consider that nothing is truly inevitable (outside of the purely mechanical manner in which all things are predetermined by physical laws), which sidesteps the evil-justification thing.  Suffering of some sort may happen, is likely to happen, but no instance of it is inevitable as we understand inevitability.

That is ambitious of you. As a practical matter, many undesirable things are quite beyond our present capacity to change, among them things like chronic incurable diseases. Certainly they need not always be so, but at the present moment it is hard to see how they are not inevitable.

[TD1]

It was inevitable.

[Kagus]

It was inevitable.

In this economy?

[JoshuaFH]

Verily.

Maximum Spin, stay the hell away from me. You have the mentality of a villain there. "Suffering is just as valuable as happiness, and it can teach us important lessons" sounds a lot like "Why not torture the shit out of someone if I think it teaches them some important lesson in my twisted little brain".

This is a misunderstanding. Viktor Frankl probably said it best in his book "A Man's Search for Meaning" that suffering is one of the paths towards finding meaning in life. Suffering is not objective, it's subjective, it's open to interpretation, and your mind always has conscious control of interpretation. Just because you suffer doesn't mean you're a slave to that suffering, you always have control over your own reactions to things that are happening to you, and in this way suffering is actually empowering. In other words, suffering is the reminder that you always have freedom, the true freedom inside your mind, and that can never be taken away from you by anything, not even by the harshest suffering of a concentration camp like Viktor experienced.

[Egan_BW]

If it's not a universal law, there's a way to move it. We're creatures pretty well adapted to finding ways. And if we can't find the way, we can always try finding new ways to find new ways to find ways to move things.

[TD1]

It has always struck me as disturbing when religions promise an end to suffering.

[Rowanas]

Whereas to me, happiness and contentment are Good (capital G intended) and suffering is Bad.  Any conscious action taken by a moral actor to increase suffering or reduce happiness is Evil, and so too is any action to increase happiness or reduce suffering a Good one.  An action taken which results in one or the other without the intent to do so is consequentially good or evil, but not necessarily morally good or evil. Basic utilitarianism here, guys.

[hops]

The problem about staying holed up on Earth is that it's putting all our eggs in one basket. Something that destroys Earth would wipe out humanity entirely. If we become a spacefaring race, our chance of surviving increases exponentially, and this buys us more time to Fix Everything. Assuming that the Good and Bad generally break even in a human's life, maximizing humanity's survival should not have any net negative impact on happiness. With creative enough interpretation of Happiness, all human beings can be regarded to be Happy up to the point that they want to die. It might not be the hedonistic euphoria you expect, but I find that having a meaningful existence is a Happy existence, even as you suffer for it.

Trying to prevent humanity from becoming spacefarers would be akin to involuntary euthanasia.

[KittyTac]

It's not euthanasia. It's prolonged mass suicide.

[Egan_BW]

Whereas to me, happiness and contentment are Good (capital G intended) and suffering is Bad.  Any conscious action taken by a moral actor to increase suffering or reduce happiness is Evil, and so too is any action to increase happiness or reduce suffering a Good one.  An action taken which results in one or the other without the intent to do so is consequentially good or evil, but not necessarily morally good or evil. Basic utilitarianism here, guys.

Sometimes pain is necessary to avoid injury, and I'd rather endure the pain of singed hands for a few days than be permanently crippled by fire.
So, it would not be moral to try to reduce suffering by dulling everyone's senses, because that lack of suffering will lead to damages, and then more suffering, or possibly the complete sensation of all positive or negative sensation.

Also actually managing to change the world in order to spread happiness will most likely require an understanding of the world, and the process of gaining that experience and knowledge might be painful in itself.

[Rowanas]

I've just gone and had a look at the findings of the 2018 happiness report. apparently we are, on average, neither happy not unhappy, but of the people polled, they tended to be happy rather than unhappy. Of course, that doesn't allow us to check people who were unable to reply, or those who have already removed themselves from the polls, but I'll stand by the data and retract my point.

Egan, foreseeable happiness and suffering are factored in, in a full consideration of utilitarianism, as well as the distribution and weighting of happiness and suffering.