[extropy-chat] Pleasure as ultimate measure of morality [Was: Pleasing Oneself]

[TheMan]

Jef writes:
>So if I'm to understand why you think pleasure is 
>the ultimate measure of morality, I need to 
>understand what you think pleasure is.  Of course, 
>if in your thinking there are many kinds of 
>pleasure, then we'll need to understand what they 
>all have in common before we can say that there is 
>something that is worthy of calling fundamental or 
>ultimate.  I don't need to do this because I 
>consider "pleasure" in all its manifestations to be 
>only indications from a subjective system reporting 
>that things are going well (whether those outside 
>the system would agree or not.)  To me, pleasure is 
>only the vector of the feedback loop, but says 
>nothing directly about the goodness of the output of 
>the system.
>
>This leads me to ask you where you moral theory 
>leads you in the case of someone in extreme pain 
>from a terminal disease.  Would it be morally better 
>for them to die in order to increase net pleasure in 
>the world, or do you see them as contributing some 
>small absolute amount of pleasure (despite their 
>pain) which would be lost if they died?

I think pleasure and suffering can weigh each other
out. If and only if there is more pleasure than
suffering in a person's life, that life is
intrinsically worth living (all other things equal).

But even if most of the human beings in the world
today would accept and - by changing the law - start
applying an ethics that says that all human beings,
who are expected to experience more suffering than
pleasure for the rest of their lives, should be
killed, that ethics might still upset so many people
that such a change in society might worsen the total
balance of pleasure/suffering in the world more than
it would improve it. Even most of the people who
suffer more than they experience pleasure, would
suffer from the knowledge that they might get killed
any day. They are driven by their instinctive wish to
"survive no matter what". That wish is their enemy,
they just don't know it; just like a retard may not
know it is bad for him to hit himself in the head with
a hammer all the time.

It may be that what many people prematurely believe to
be utilitarian (for example killing people who are
incurable ill, constantly suffer tremendously from
their illness and exhaust society's resources by
staying alive) might be utilitarianistically right
only if a sufficient number of people are okay with
it. How many would be a sufficient number, I don't
know, but I think it's far more than 50% of the
people. And since we are not there yet, your intuition
is totally right when it says to you not to accept
such an ethics that would shorten some people's lives
for the misguided sake of (what is, given the
circumstances today, wrongly perceived as) improving
the balance of pleasure/suffering in the universe,
even if it might at a first glance improve that
balance. 

So your objection is not an objection against a
"classical-hedonist-utilitarianistically
recommendable" practice, but an objection against what
you misguidedly perceive as being a
classical-hedonistic-utilitarianistically
recommendable practice. To start killing miserable
people today, just because they'd probably otherwise
be miserable for the rest of their lives, simply
probably wouldn't improve the balance of
pleasure/suffering in the world, even thought that
might seem to be the case at a first thought. One must
consider the side effects.

Jef writes:
>>> I understand you are claiming that morality is
>>> measured with respect to pleasure integrated over 
>>> all sentient beings, right? Do you also integrate 
>>> over all time? So that which provides the 
>>> greatest 
>>> pleasure for the greatest number for the greatest 
>>> time is the most moral?
>> 
>> Fundamentally, yes. However, this does not 
>> necessarily
>> imply that one must inexorably commit immoral acts
>> against other sentients in order to achieve this >>
goal.
>
>I understand that you claim that pleasure is the
>ultimate measure of morality, but your statement
>above seems to say that you think that there may be
>other measures of morality (possibly higher) that
>might come into conflict with increasing pleasure. 
>Doesn't your statement above seem to contradict your
>thesis?

This can be explained by what I wrote above.
Utilitarianism may, today, require the practical
appication of some "ethics" that may not seem purely
utilitarian at first sight. Today, people value their
free will so much that it would be
utilitarianistically wrong to even try to take their
free will away from them. It's much more feasable to
increase the pleasure within the limits that people's
request for free will set. Utilitarianism has to take
feasability into account too, among many other things.
And I also believe people's request for free will has
a positive intrumental utilitarian value in that it
guarantees great plurality in the thinking of mankind,
something that has proven to be good for mankind's
survival chances throughout history. And mankind's
survival is certainly a utilitarianistically good
thing. One thing that can combine plurarily in
mankind's thinking with increasing the pleasure and
decreasing the suffering in the world, though, is
voluntary giving to the needing. It spreads love, and
love is utilitarianistically good, whereas "forced
charity" probably has utilitarianistically more bad
than good consequences. This way of reasoning doesn't
require anything else than utilitarianism. It doesn't
require "respecting people's free will" to have any
_intrinsical_ value, although free will certainly has
critical _instrumental_ value.

>It almost seems as if you saying that the freedom to 
>choose is a greater moral good than actual pleasure 
>(which of course I would agree with).

See above. Its value is greater, but not
intrinsically, only instrumentally, and only for the
time being. That may change.

/Par


 
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