EA - Linkpost for various recent essays on suffering-focused ethics, priorities, and more by Magnus Vinding

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Linkpost for various recent essays on suffering-focused ethics, priorities, and more, published by Magnus Vinding on September 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The following are (links to) various essays that I have published over the last few months. Some of the essays have been published on the website of the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS), and some of them have been published on my own blog. CRS essays A phenomenological argument against a positive counterpart to suffering Various views deny that suffering has a positive counterpart. Proponents of such views often pursue a line of argument that focuses on the prevalence of subtle frustrations and bothersome sensations. That is, when we typically think that we are in a neutral state, and we claim that some pleasure takes us above that neutral state, what we are experiencing is really a subtly bothered and unsatisfied state that becomes (somewhat) relieved of its commonly overlooked unpleasant features (see e.g. Sherman, 2017, pp. 103-107; Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.1; Knutsson, 2022, sec. 6). This essay will pursue a different line of argument. Rather than focusing on unpleasant states, and arguing for their subtle omnipresence, my aim here is instead to zoom in on the purportedly positive side. I will argue that purportedly positive experiences do not possess any property that renders them genuine opposites of painful and uncomfortable experiences, neither in phenomenological nor axiological terms. Reply to the “evolutionary asymmetry objection” against suffering-focused ethics An objection that is sometimes raised against suffering-focused ethics is that our intuitions about the relative value of suffering and happiness are skewed toward the negative for evolutionary reasons, and hence we cannot trust our intuition that says that the reduction of suffering is more valuable and more morally important than the creation of happiness. My aim in this post is to reply to this objection. Reply to the scope neglect objection against value lexicality Some views hold that no amount of mild discomfort can be worse than a single instance of extreme suffering (i.e. they endorse value lexicality between extreme suffering and mild discomfort). An objection to such views is that they are biased by scope neglect — our tendency to disregard the number of affected beings in our evaluations of a problem. Since we cannot comprehend the badness of a vast amount of mild discomfort, the objection goes, we cannot trust our intuitive assessment that extreme suffering is worse than any amount of mild discomfort. My aim in this brief post is to reply to this objection. Comments on Mogensen’s “The weight of suffering” Andreas Mogensen’s paper “The weight of suffering” presents an interesting argument in favor of the axiological position that “there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being” — a position he calls “LTNU” (Mogensen, 2022, abstract). Mogensen then proceeds to explore how one might respond to that argument and thereby reject LTNU. My aim in this post is to raise some critical points in response to this paper. As a preliminary note, I should say that I commend Mogensen for taking up this crucial issue regarding the weight of suffering, and for exploring it in an open-ended manner. Reply to Chappell’s “Rethinking the Asymmetry” My aim in this post is to respond to the arguments presented in Richard Yetter Chappell’s “Rethinking the Asymmetry”. Chappell argues against the Asymmetry in population ethics, which roughly holds that the addition of bad lives makes the world worse, whereas the addition of good lives does not make the world better (other things being equal). A thought experiment that questions the moral importance of creating happy lives Many people have the intuition...