Suffering, not just happiness, weighs in the utilitarian calculus

The book Happiness by Design by the behavioral scientist Paul Dolan posits that experiencing a feeling of purpose (not the outcomes or evaluations of purposeful activities, but what they actually feel like in daily life) can be equally as important as the experience of pleasure in determining behavior and the quality of life. While different personalities can increasingly tilt towards one or the other, a truly happy life requires a combination of pleasure and purpose to take into account the diminishing marginal returns of both states.

It seems as though Mill's idea of giving space to "higher" pursuits in the utilitarian calculus is an earlier formulation of this idea. In a state where pleasure was easily accessible to all, purpose a sense of narrative would be hard to come by, hence the "No!" that he intuitively came up with.

> There’s an immense mystery at the heart of being human: the paradox of opposing and accepting suffering.

And the whole next paragraph just lacked a point: on how so many people extract pleasure from BDSM, where pain and pleasure (in many, many variants) come together in some controlled environment.

If utilitarianism wasn't practically difficult enough, human perception is adaptable. We don't perceive stimuli in absolute terms, but rather relative to whatever we've normalized. Thus the experience of suffering actually lets us experience pleasure more readily (the reverse is also true).

Additionally, due to the quirks of memory, adding some pain to a pleasurable experience at the right time will paradoxically cause people to remember it as being more pleasurable. This is completely at odds with a simple moral calculus.

It would be interesting to set a science fiction story in a world where an accurate moral calculus had been developed.

I think the basic premise is correct, that suffering is by far the most important determinant in where utilitarianism takes us in the long term. Adding the good has far fewer world-changing requirements and consequences than removing the bad, which might say something about the raw deal that evolution hands to all individual entities. A short sketch is here, the pertinent part reproduced below:

https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.

This is an interesting piece, but I can't shake the feeling that the author needed to work harder on his claims. There are a string of mistakes and misdirections that ultimately invalidate the piece as a whole.

> What’s the 1755 Lisbon earthquake compared with Auschwitz? What’s a flu epidemic next to Hiroshima?

The Lisbon earthquake was small compared to Auschwitz, but reaching back to 1755 is rather strange. (Portugal's total population was <3,000,000.) A better and more timely reference might be the 1931 floods in China, which did in fact kill several million people. High estimates for the death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are <300,000. The Spanish Flu, only two decades earlier, killed between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 people.

I don't think these are idle complaints about a section specifically devoted to rejecting Mill's claim that chance and nature overmatch human evil.

> When we see each other in terms of usefulness, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed long before Facebook and Twitter: ‘Hell is other people.’

This is a particular frustration of mine, because everyone misinterprets this. But a philosophy professor of all people ought to get it right. Sarte's complaint is not at all about 'seeing each other in terms of usefulness'. Rather the opposite - he acknowledges that we always use other people to shape our identities, and so specific other people can create hell for us!

Quoting Sarte himself: "'Hell is other people' has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves."

https://www.vox.com/2014/11/17/7229547/philosophy-quotes-mis...

> Even when things materially improve because of our commitment to utilitarian principles, our increased happiness often doesn’t register as meaningful.

This is perhaps the most fundamentally and damningly wrong claim in the whole piece.

Bypassing the question of pre-agricultural life, what we see is absolutely that utilitarian progress - social, economic, and technological development - has created increased happiness on a massive scale. Disease is a major source of suffering, and the oral polio vaccine prevented 1.1 million cases of paralysis in the US alone. Life satisfaction polls overwhelmingly suggest that economic and political progress make us happier. Over the last ~30 years, happiness numbers have risen worldwide (despite the US case). Richer and more equal countries are happier, and change over time suggests that causality flows that direction. Countries which perform above their wealth on happiness, like Costa Rica, are also countries which are lastingly free from armed conflict, with quality healthcare, social services, and non-corrupt government.

And all of this is people surveyed. A moment's thought on the sources of sample bias in the survey suggests that many of the least happy people surveyed are in fact those who would previously have been missed altogether - people who would have been enslaved or confined, or killed by war or disease, but who are now at least alive and accessible.

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/292865/C...

https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction

> Mill tries philosophically to resolve the paradox of suffering by arguing that higher goods such as love and literature are ultimately more satisfying than basic forms of pleasure. In some sense, that’s true. But the terms of this satisfaction are no longer utilitarian;

And in his final accounting, Samuelson offers some bizarre reversal of the no true Scotsman fallacy, rejecting as non-utilitarian any idea which he can't easily rebut. Utilitarian thought is not incapable of handling suffering which leads to greater happiness, or discussing the relative merits of different forms of happiness. Far from it - hard questions like wireheading and the repugnant conclusion are dealt with at enormous length in utilitarian thought.

Utilitarianism is simply a claim that the moral weight of actions is determined by their impact on well-being. Capabilitarianism, negative preference utilitarianism, and a dozen other developments have brought us past the initial sketches of Bentham and Mill. These complexities are well worth discussing, but they deserve better than Samuelson's blend of factual errors and vague appeals to the nobility of suffering.

Pursuing happiness is a fools errand. Happiness is an emotion. Emotional states maximized are dulled. You get diminishing returns from eating cookies.

Pursuit of happiness is a propaganda creed that falls apart like sand when examined.