Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hermitian909 | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt this line of argumentation makes a lot of unimaginative assumptions about the way in which we weight pleasure vs. displeasure. Take the example from the article:

> There is a large number of Nazis who would enjoy seeing an innocent Jewish

> person tortured – so many that their total pleasure would be greater than the

> victim’s suffering. Should you torture an innocent Jewish person so you can

> give pleasure to all these Nazis?

This makes sense if the weight of pleasure is uncapped, but imagine a utility function where lots of pleasure still only has a bit of utility (say 10) whereas very extreme displeasure could have much more negative or nearly uncapped negative utility (say, -(10^20) for torture). Then no number of Nazis that could ever physically exist would be able to cause this situation to have negative utility.

Thinking in those terms, I find the criticism weak.

View on HN

That conundrum is rather easily solved by noting that the "pleasure" a person gets from watching someone be tortured is clearly not the kind of pleasure we're talking about. Celebrating the torture of another human being is likely to lead to yet more torture, so whatever little "pleasure" a masochist might get from watching torture is quickly offset by increasing their desire to continue to torture. Clearly the universe which maximizes total pleasure is one in which the Jewish person goes untortured and the masochistic Nazis receive psychological help.

Just like most ethical conundrums, these basically all rely on carefully controlling the bounds of the hypothetical to be both short-sighted and unrealistic to the point of farcical. How does the sheriff know for certain there will be riots if he doesn't hang an innocent person? He doesn't. How will all those sports fans feel if they learn that an innocent man needlessly died to avoid interrupting their feed for 10 seconds? They would probably feel terrible. Are we really just going to accept these extremely unrealistic hypotheticals where the author assures us his two options and consequences are genuinely the only possibilities? How is the surgeon going to feel if he murders someone as part of his job? It wouldn't take long for him to burn out and commit suicide, adding another needless death and depriving the world of a presumably talented surgeon.

In general most of the examples seem to imply that a utilitarian would do the very short-sighted option that has the biggest immediate increase in pleasure, while completely ignoring all the other negative long-term effects of their decision.

Why should the negative weight of displeasure be uncapped but not the positive weight of pleasure? Having the capping symmetrical (either both capped or neither) would seem to be preferred by Occam's Razor.

"Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other." —Arthur Schopenhauer

This is comparing actual pleasure and pain with expected pleasure and pain. It says nothing about why actual pleasure should be capped but actual pain should not.

The first sentence of the quote does as you say. The second and third sentences make more general claims.

Even those sentences don't argue for a general cap on pleasure but not on pain. In fact, it's hard to come up with any general claim that they do amount to an argument for. The specific example given, one animal eating the other, is obviously asymmetrical, so of course we would expect the respective valences of pleasure and pain to be asymmetrical too. But that's a particular property of that specific example.

Well, I think you'd have to accept the Schopenhauerian worldview (or something similarly pessimistic) in toto, that sentient life involves a surfeit of suffering and conflicting desires that cannot possibly be reconciled, in order to accept the general asymmetry. A short quotation can, of course, only give a glimpse into that: it should be understood as rhetoric more than an analytical chain of reasoning. One animal eating another is absolutely central to the system of nature, since it's how the system sustains itself; the pain of one creature being hunted down and eaten is necessary for the other creature to survive, and yet the pain of dying is obviously greater than the satisfaction of eating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com