Print

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

[hops]

Either way, hedonistic utilitarianism is wrong for reasons I'm too lazy to write a text wall about because I'd probably explain it badly, so I suggest you people google them instead.

[Egan_BW]

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.

Yes, but doesn't that just make your philosophy "Good things are good, so make more good things, and bad things are bad, so make less bad things (but remember to do the math first in case that has unintended consequences (but actually that kind of math is more under the purview of economics than philosophy, so don't actually do the math.))"?

[Reelya]

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

The average person is average. More news at 11. But seriously, a concept like "how happy" people are is probably already calibrated around the population average, because that's how we define "normal" for an abstract trait in the first place.

Say there was an alternate world, where the average person was 10 times happier than they are in our world. Those people wouldn't call that "really happy", they'd call that "average happiness", with half of people seen as more happy and half of people seen as less happy.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Trekkin]

Say there was an alternate world, where the average person was 10 times happier than they are in our world. Those people wouldn't call that "really happy", they'd call that "average happiness", with half of people seen as more happy and half of people seen as less happy.

This is absolutely the case. In one sense, my life is absolutely paradisaical compared to many of my ancestors'; I can talk to friends and family around the world effortlessly, I can call up reams of data on anything known anywhere at any time by poking at a little box in my pocket, and we've never had better tools for dealing with the unfortunate stresses of my job. I still think of myself as only quite happy because of problems they never had the ability to imagine. It's all relative.

[Egan_BW]

I'll say it again, y'all seem to be omiting neurological disorders. Put in people that can't feel pain, lost a part of their brain, are clinical psyvhopaths or just in a coma... And all this "obvious" sense starts to crumble.

Intellectually we place things on a dichotomous scale: good/bad, suffering/pleasure, dark/bright. But all that sense is completly meaningless in the real world. Biochemically speaking, what causes happiness? Most will agree that endorphines and serotonine are responsible for that. But does that mean the more neurotransmitters the happier? Nope, saturate those two and you will just get sleepy.

Pain wasn't conceived to avoid suffering. It just happened to not be completly impractical, so it persisted.

Not being entirely impractical is a good place to start, when minimizing suffering.

[bloop_bleep]

I'll say it again, y'all seem to be omiting neurological disorders. Put in people that can't feel pain, lost a part of their brain, are clinical psyvhopaths or just in a coma... And all this "obvious" sense starts to crumble.

Intellectually we place things on a dichotomous scale: good/bad, suffering/pleasure, dark/bright. But all that sense is completly meaningless in the real world. Biochemically speaking, what causes happiness? Most will agree that endorphines and serotonine are responsible for that. But does that mean the more neurotransmitters the happier? Nope, saturate those two and you will just get sleepy.

Pain wasn't conceived to avoid suffering. It just happened to not be completly impractical, so it persisted.

Pain is an evolutionary device, and a *very* practical and useful one at that. When people do something that harms their body, they feel pain, their brains will be less likely to tell them to do that in the future, and so they will be more likely to survive long enough to reproduce and spread their pain genes to their offspring.

Though you're right that our pain system does not care to reduce further pain, but merely to reduce bodily harm. Organisms in pain are still likely to reproduce, except if the reproduction hurts them even further.

Also, suffering *is* indeed as important as happiness, at least from a practical perspective, since one teaches you to do certain stuff, and the other teaches you not to do certain stuff. Without either one of them, it is very possible that you would be compelled to do either no things or ALL THE THINGS.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Maximum Spin]

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".

Did I say anything about important lessons? Where did you get this idea of important lessons? Suffering is just as valuable as happiness as an end in itself. Lessons are a totally separate issue and I don't see any moral imperative to teach anybody any lessons.

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.

It's only flawed to you because you're starting from the assumption that immoral things can happen. If you relax that assumption — and I don't have it, I don't see any reason to label anything that happens as immoral — then it becomes perfectly conceivable that inevitable is synonymous with moral and anything that does happen should happen.

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.

I'd also like to add that I completely agree with this neo-stoic interpretation. Everything you feel is your own choice.

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.

I'm something distantly derived from a Buddhist; I do think suffering is a universal law of living things.

Basic utilitarianism here, guys.

I am not a utilitarian, and I think that utilitarianism is fundamentally immoral and also incoherent anyway.

And finally, pursuant to these last few posts, who got the idea that suffering is synonymous with pain? It clearly isn't.

[scourge728]

"I don't label things as immoral"
"utilitarianism is fundamentally immoral"

[Maximum Spin]

"I don't label things as immoral"
"utilitarianism is fundamentally immoral"

The problem is that the first quote isn't in anything I wrote.

It can simultaneously be true that events ("anything that happens") cannot be morally wrong, but a philosophy can be contrary to the correct (ie, my) morality.

(nb: It does mean, though, that I don't think that the event of people adopting utilitarianism is wrong. It's just what their faulty brains were inevitably going to do, and not my problem.)

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[SalmonGod]

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.

If I were to jump to extreme conclusions the way you did, I could imagine your outlook leading towards compulsory medication to ensure the maximization of chemicals that are biologically associated with happiness.  And I would bitterly fight such a motion.

Because happiness is not the same as fulfillment, and fulfillment is more important.  Happiness can be hollow. 

I love sitting around at home playing video games.  When I'm doing so, I am at least content, if not happy, the entire time, and not suffering.

I'm also about to go on my first serious vacation from work in over a year.  I'm not going to spend it sitting around playing video games.  I'm going to go kayaking/camping on a river for several days, where I will completely separate myself from the technology that I love, get sunburned, eaten up by bugs, physically exert myself, probably be really hungry at times but forced to ration food, etc.  I will not be maximizing the amount of happiness that I experience on my vacation by doing this.

But it will be many times more memorable than a vacation spent sitting around being blandly happy.

As much as I love sitting around playing video games as the most assured way for me to experience some happiness and minimize any suffering, those experiences are often the least memorable, adding the least enrichment to my life.  If that's all I did this week, I would be happy the whole time and go back to work much better rested.  But I would have added nothing to my life worth talking about.  When I reflect on my life, I would probably barely remember that the week ever happened.  Despite maximizing my moment-to-moment experience of happiness, it would contribute nothing to my personal story - that sense of fulfillment that comes from having a life full of moments worth reflecting on that are varied and interesting for your subconcious to digest and process into a great self-image, that build up the sophistication of your perspectives on yourself and the world, that increase the variety of experiences that enable you to connect with other human beings in meaningful ways. 

And while I absolutely do not want to glorify suffering, it's hardships and challenges that contribute the most to the sense of enrichment that builds up over the course of a lifetime, and there is unpleasantness involved.  If I just sat around playing video games forever, my life would be as if nothing ever happened.  A void.  And I would have no sense of identity, of accomplishment, of being capable or interesting in any way, of connection with and appreciation for the expansive nature of reality.  Even if I was happy the whole time.

[bloop_bleep]

It does mean, though, that I don't think that the event of people adopting utilitarianism is wrong. It's just what their faulty brains were inevitably going to do, and not my problem.

Ah, so you don't think people that adopt a certain ideology that you personally disagree with are morally wrong, you just think they're obviously idiotic sub-humans and should be ignored. Big improvement. Thanks a lot for clearing that up.

I don't fully agree with utilitarianism either, but this really makes my knee jerk.

[Maximum Spin]

Ah, so you don't think people that adopt a certain ideology that you personally disagree with are morally wrong, you just think they're obviously idiotic sub-humans and should be ignored. Big improvement. Thanks a lot for clearing that up.

I don't fully agree with utilitarianism either, but this really makes my knee jerk.

-_- "faulty brains" was a joke. I thought that was obvious. It should have been clear from, for example, earlier when I said that morality is subjective and (implicitly) you can't argue anyone into or out of a moral opinion by logos.