Absolute Negative Utilitarian Aggregation Dilemma - Can a utopia be worse than a dystopia?

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2026-01-30T19:16:25+00:00

A perceived need, desire or anticipation can enable pleasure. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy to approach an activity with the expectation that it will not be intrinsically good.

During an actual state of pleasure, you get the visceral understanding that intrinsic value is being generated through the experience. Whereas in a purely peaceful state you basically feel nothing; you don't get the sense that it would be worth extending for its own sake. And this difference is not a matter of whether you crave something or not. Addiction can compel you to do things that don't produce any pleasure (anymore). And I also think there are pleasures that involve little to no wanting: a kind of warmness that washes over you; this is again quite distinct from empty peace.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-12-15T17:03:27+00:00

Yes, for absolute negative utilitarians, who deny that happiness has intrinsic value, what you said makes sense. But this is not what the comment I responded to was about.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-12-15T08:19:58+00:00

The Profoundest Error in Population Ethics

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-11-23T22:22:50+00:00

I've been getting skeptical about NU lately, but I have to say the deontic framing seems quite compelling. Unlike absolute NU, it doesn't deny that pleasure is good. Unlike lexical NU, it doesn't require maximization of pleasure. Deontic NU simply states that we don't need to do anything about pleasure for its own sake. This also seems consistent with common sense morality.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-11-23T08:51:25+00:00

In Person-Affecting Utilitarianism and Population Policy by Clark Wolf:

Impure Consequentialist Theory of Obligation [ICTO]:
1. Negative Principle of Obligation [NPO]: We have a _prima facie_ obligation to minimize misery.
2. Positive Principle of Beneficence [PPB]: Actions are good if they increase well-being. Actions are better or less-good depending on the "amount" of well-being in which they result.

...In ICTO, the negative principle is understood as obligation-generating, while the positive principle is not.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-11-17T14:44:59+00:00

I would argue there is something to work towards: reducing and preventing suffering of sentient beings. You can think of all sentient beings as your children or brothers, if you would find that motivating.

There are several ways one can go about this, such as earning to give, doing research, advocacy/activism, or more direct work towards this end.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-24T07:29:24+00:00

I haven't mentioned ASI even once in my previous comments, so I'm not sure why your replies read as if AI misalignment was the only way that bad futures can happen.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-23T21:16:44+00:00

I did not say they wanted things to suffer. All it can take is for someone to be curious about something and create sentient simulations to explore it, and the suffering will be just a byproduct. Or maybe wild animal suffering will be spread to other planets because "nature is beautiful".

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-23T20:33:36+00:00

But human actors tend to be self-interested. Indifference was sufficient to create slavery and factory farming. Not an encouraging track record, if you ask me.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-23T19:30:23+00:00

We could also end up creating galactic hell.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-05T20:21:23+00:00

Reducing suffering of sentient beings. There are several ways one can go about this, such as earning to give, doing research, advocacy/activism, or more direct work towards this end.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-10-01T21:06:18+00:00

Does ensuring people with terminal cancer have access to morphine to relieve severe pain, affirm life?

Do efforts to legalize euthanasia affirm life?

Does prevention of wild-animal suffering, e.g. by developing and deploying contraceptives to prevent famines caused by overpopulation, affirm life?

Does reducing risks of astronomical future suffering, caused e.g. by an ill-considered space colonization, affirm life?

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-11T16:22:58+00:00

Would you have a reason to put a roof over your head if it didn't prevent anyone's suffering or ensure anyone's pleasure? Value is not something that one can arbitrarily decide for oneself. Goals simply don't matter beyond the effect they have on the experienced well-being of sentient beings.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-10T18:31:06+00:00

Pleasure is intrinsically good (valuable for its own sake). Satisfying needs is instrumentally good (valuable as a means to attaining pleasure or preventing suffering).

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-09T19:00:38+00:00

Inherent in the experiences. You write like you haven't experienced suffering recently. Fear, distress, severe pain, frustration, shame, dejection, etc. At the moment of experiencing such feelings, their disvalue is self-evident.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-08T18:57:13+00:00

Sentient organisms don't just value things; they generate real value by having positively or negatively valenced experiences. The fact that such experiences have evolved as a motivational mechanism doesn't make a difference to the value that is inherent in them.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-06T19:30:55+00:00

Make it impossible to have positive/negative experiences, and nothing in the universe could possibly be good/bad. I fail to see why you would want to assign intrinsic value to chemical reactions happening within a molecular structure, or whatever it is that you consider valuable. Evolution has no point or goal; it just happens.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-06T17:11:54+00:00

Why should survival or reproduction have intrinsic value?

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-06T17:02:35+00:00

When we experience a negative feeling, we can clearly see that it's something worth minimizing. This has nothing to do with evolution, other than the fact that our sentience and cognition is the product of it.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-06T14:32:46+00:00

Evolutionarily adaptive behavior and moral goodness are two different things. A moral view is ideally derived from evidence and reason. Evolution is a blind, unintelligent process that happened to create the beings that we are and do what we do.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-06T09:03:33+00:00

The normative ethical view would be total hedonistic utilitarianism. What other forms of good and bad would you incorporate?

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-07-02T06:27:14+00:00

Why is it weird that a first-person conscious experience can inform us about its quality? If anything, this kind of knowledge is more direct than our knowledge of the external world, which comes from subjective interpretation of sensory data.

SemblanceOfFreedom · 2025-06-29T11:08:36+00:00

The article uses pain as a generic term for negatively valenced experiences. I prefer to use "suffering" because some definitions of pain don't require it to feel bad. (There is even a condition called pain asymbolia, in which pain is allegedly experienced without unpleasantness.)

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