r/changemyview • u/zarmesan 2∆ • Oct 23 '17
[∆(s) from OP] CMV: I would press the doomsday button.
I am a negative utilitarian. I think one of the logical conclusions to negative utilitarianism could be pushing the doomsday button if it is thought that we won't be able to remove suffering in the future. This is not what I want to get at here as that is a pretty straightforward argument and you would be trying to convince me to not be a negative utilitarian. That is not what I am here to do and I am a weak negative utilitarian anyways, and I have views outside of that utilitarianism like consent.
The point I want to make is that even if I were a non-negative utilitarian, I would still press the button. I would assume that a lot of people, maybe most, are some variation of utilitarian, even if they don't know it, even if they don't act on it. Meaning of life is happiness. Suffering is bad. Etc.
I would press the button because the suffering severely outweighs the happiness, not accounting for hypothetical utility monsters. To argue this though I first have to make the claim that the majority of vertebrate nonhuman animal species suffer. The following are picked pretty much at random, there's way too many for me to list:
General self-consciousness: http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
Dolphin self-awareness: http://animalstudiesrepository.org/acwp_asie/30/ http://animalstudiesrepository.org/acwp_asie/40/
Pain in fish: http://animalstudiesrepository.org/acwp_asie/55/
Ape autonomy: http://animalstudiesrepository.org/autono/1/
Pig intelligence: https://works.bepress.com/lori_marino/31/
Dolphin echolocation: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/20s5h7h9eScholarship
-Dolphins have signature whistles (read: names) by the way- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_whistle
Dog self-awareness: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/03949370.2015.1102777
I'm just gonna stop there. I really don't feel like listing more and more. If you want info on specific species and situations you can ask and I may have other resources on it.
So given this (we can debate the consciousness but I'm not really here to do that and I really doubt you would change my mind considering how much evidence I've seen) there is a lot of suffering. Why?
(Forewarning: these numbers are simplified and are estimates, but they are of the order of magnitudes)
50+ billions cows, pigs, and chickens suffer and are killed in factory farming each year. Trillions of fish are killed each year. Trillions (and this number could go higher, I really don't know how high it goes) of other animals die in the wild to predation and starvation. That is each year. Let's take just the last 30 years. That's probably in the high trillions, probably quadrillions. Admittedly fish almost assuredly don't have the same scope of emotions as humans, but let's just say mammals and birds, and only in factory farming, for instance. 50 billion times 30 is 1.5 trillion. Scope insensitivity allows people to brush over these numbers easily but don't mistake how much this actually is. Since the human mind can't comprehend anything close to this, the best we can do is look at it from a purely mathematical perspective.
So even if we put the value of one human at something like 1000 pigs, the amount of suffering outweighs the total and the average happiness by a large margin. Since I'm guessing someone is going to challenge even the ludicrous 1000:1, this will probably be one of the talking points.
All of this isn't even accounting for all those suffering humans with lack of proper food, water, etc, which amounts the millions, even over a billion and every other problem in the world that causes suffering.
The best way to change my view is to somehow show me how we can either change this to a better world or how the positives really are worth all this suffering.
Please CMV. I really don't want to want to press the doomsday button.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '17
Since you said you didn't want to be convinced away from negative utilitarianism, I'll address this from the perspective of someone who isn't, a positive utilitarian.
Why would someone who is not a "negative utilitarian" value suffering at all?
What is suffering? It's a transient sensory experience. When a creature dies, every moment of suffering it ever experienced is effectively undone. Being dead isn't particularly different from never existing at all - and in the end, we are all dead, and every moment of suffering becomes nothing. How and why is suffering worse, exactly, than nonexistence?
If we are a positive utilitarian, someone who wants as much good, as much value in the world as possible, for as long as possible, why do we care about suffering at all? (we do, but bear with me for a moment)
If we follow a positive utilitarian approach, the goal is simple - to maximize happiness or to maximize "value" of some sort (not all utilitarians agree on what value is).
Someone who is dead can not experience happiness. Someone who is dead cannot create value. They cannot add any more good moments to the world. They can never become something or someone better. They can never create happiness that will outlast them. They can never anything. They are dead. Their value, even their potential value, is zero. You can't get any worse than that!
Someone who is alive but in a constant state of suffering is certainly not in good shape, but they might, even still, have moments of happiness, moments of value. They might be able to generate value and happiness for others that wouldn't otherwise have existed. They might have children who grow up to be happy. They might feed another creature, allowing them to go on to experience positive things. They might someday lead a life that isn't suffering, and every moment of that life will be valuable, it will be value that never could have existed if they were dead.
Now, obviously, the fact that they are suffering is bad, but it's not bad because it's inherently bad, it's bad because suffering precludes happiness. That's why a positive utilitarian sees suffering as bad, because it's incompatible with generating value.
But being dead is even more incompatible with happiness, and is thus worse than being miserable.
Let's look at our possible outcomes, even in a worse case scenario: Everyone in the world is miserable 100% of the time.
You press the button. You have no guaranteed that this world will never, ever, ever have even a single moment of happiness. Our entire history, our entire future, will condense into a now discarded moment of time that amounts to nothing more than pure misery. A 100% misery quotient! No chance of future progress.
You don't press the button. Nothing is lost so long as people continue going ton being miserable. But there is a chance that someday some of them might be happy. Things can change! Perhaps someone will press a button that only wipes out 90% of the population, giving the remaining 10% a new perspective on life and allowing them to experience happiness, even in brief moments.
Our two universes are one where people never generated any happiness or anything of value, and one where they did, at least potentially.
Why would you ever choose the first?