Against Negative Utilitarianism

Hmm, this may be a case of divergent intuitions but to me it seems very obvious that if we could make it so that at the end of people's lives they have an experience of unfathomable bliss right before death, containing more well-being than the sum total of all positive experiences that humans have experienced so far, at the cost of one pinprick, it would be extremely good to do so.  In this case it avoids the objection that well-being is only desirable instrumentally, because this is a form of well-being that would have otherwise not been even been considered.  That seems far more obvious than any more specific claims about the amount of well-being needed to offset a unit of suffering, particularly because of the trickiness of intuitions dealing with very large numbers.  

You say "But I think this framing really favors views according to which pleasure can outweigh suffering, because most ethicists feel that pleasure can outweigh suffering within a given life, but many of them do not think it's right to harm one person for the greater benefit of another person."   I agree that this does favor positive utilitarianism, however, I spend quite a while justifying it in my second most recent ea forum post.  

Finally, you say "One possible resolution of our conflicting intuitions on these matters could be a quite suffering-focused version of weak NU."  I certainly update on the intuitions of negative utilitarians to place more weight on suffering avoidance than I otherwise would, however, even updating on that I still conclude that transhuman bliss could be good enough to offset torture.  The badness of torture seems to be a fact about how extreme the experience is as a result of evolution.  However, it seems possible to create more extreme positive experience in a transhumanist world, where we can design experiences to be as good as physics allows. Additionally, I'd probably be more sympathetic to suffering reducing than most positive utilitarians.  I do think that the expected amount of torture in the future is smaller than the expected amount of transhuman bliss largely for reasons laid out here.  

I'll first respond to the first article you linked.  The problem I see with this solution is it violates some combination of completeness and transitivity.  Vinding says that we can say that for this list (1 e′-object, 1 e-object, 2 e-objects, 3 e-objects) we can say that 3e-objects are categorically worse than any number of 1e' objects but that some number of 1e' objects can be worse than 1e-objects, which can be worse than 2 e-objects, and so on.  This runs into an issue.  

If we say that 1000 e' objects are worse than 1 e-object and 1000 e-objects are worse than 1 2 e-object, and 1000 2e-objects are worse than 1 3e-object than we get the following inequality 

1 trillion e' objects > 1 billion e - objects> 1 million 2e-objects>1000 3e-objects.  

The fifth example runs into a similar problem to the one addressed in this post.  We can just apply the calculation at the level of populations.  Surely inflicting 10000 units of pain on one person is less bad than inflicting 9999 units of pain on 10^100^100 people.  

The second article that you linked runs into a similar problem.  It says that what matters is the experience rather than the temperature--thus, it claims that steadily lowering the temperature and asking the NU at what point they'd pinpoint a firm threshold is misleading.  However, we can use units of pain rather than temperature.  While it's hard to precisely quantify units of pain, we have an intuitive grasp of very bad pain, and we can similarly grasp the pain being lessened slightly.  

Next, Vinding argues consent views avoid this problem.  Consent views run into several issues. 

1 Contrary to Vinding's indication, there is in fact a firm point at which people no longer consent.  For any people, if offered googolplex utils per second unit of torture, there is a firm point at which they would stop consenting.  The consent views would have to say that misery slightly above this threshold categorically outweighs misery slightly below this threshold.  

2 Consent views seem to argue that the badness of pain has to do with the weakness of will (or more specifically, the willingness of people to endure pain, independent of the badness of the pain).  For example, suppose we have a strict negative utilitarian who argues that no amount of pain is worth any amount of pleasure.  This person would never consent.  However, it seems bad to say that a pinprick for this person is considerably worse than a pinprick for someone else, who experience the same amount of pain.  

3 It seems we can at least imagine a type of pleasure which one would not consent to ceasing.  A person experiencing unfathomable joy might be willing to endure future torture for one more moment of bliss.  Thus, this view seems to imply caring about pleasure as well.  Love songs often contain sentiments relating to the singer being willing to endure anything for another moment of being with the object of the love song.  However, it seems strange to say that love is lexically better than all other goods.  

Next, the repugnant conclusions of positive utilitarianism are presented, including creating hell to please the blissful.  This is a bullet I'm very happy to bite.  Much like it would be reasonable to, from the perspective of a person, endure temporary misery for greater joy, on a population level, it would be reasonable to inflict misery for greater joy.  I perceive ethics as being about what an egoist would do if they experienced the sum total of human experience--from this perspective it does not seem particularly counterintuitive.  Additionally, as I argued in the article, we suck at multiplying.  Hypotheticals involving vast numbers melt our intuitions.  

Additionally, as I argue here, many of our intuitions that go against positive utilitarianism crumble upon reflection.  I'll try to argue against the creating hell objection.  Presumably a pinprick to please the blissful would be permissible, assuming enough blissful people.  As the argument I've presented shows, a lot of pinpricks are as bad as hell.  Thus, enough pleasure for the blissful is worth hell.  

I agree that we should be careful to consider the full implications of all else equal, however, I don't think that refutes any part of the argument I've presented.  When people experience joy, even when they're not suffering at all, they regard more joy as desirable.  

You argue for axiological monism, that seems fully consistent with utilitarianism.  Much like there are positive and negative numbers, there are positive and negative experiences.  It seems that we regard the positive experiences as good, much like how we regard the negative experiences as bad. 

It seems very strange for well-being to be morally neutral, but suffering to be morally bad.  If you were imagining a world without having had any experiences, it seems clear one would expect the enjoyable experiences to be good, and the unenjoyable experiences to be bad.  Evolutionarily, the reason we suffer is to deter actions, while the reason we feel pleasure is to encourage actions.  Whatever mechanism causes suffering to be bad, a similar explanation would seem to cause well-being to be good.  

Thanks for the comment, you've given me some interesting things to consider! 

And the suffering-focused perspective may simply add that this also holds for what we call positive experiences (quote from footnote 49 here)

Although this is an interesting argument, I think it fails against the most plausible versions of hedonistic utilitarianism. The reason I think pleasant experiences are intrinsically good is simply that I believe I can apprehend their goodness directly, by becoming immediately acquainted with how those experiences feel like. This is exactly the same mechanism that I think gives me access to the intrinsic badness of unpleasant experiences. I think it's much harder to debunk a belief in the intrinsic goodness of pleasantness rooted in this kind of immediate acquaintance, than it is to debunk beliefs about the value of other objects whose goodness cannot be directly introspected. But should I become persuaded that the debunking arguments could be extended to my beliefs about the goodness of pleasant experience, I would become persuaded that my beliefs about the badness of unpleasant experience are also debunkable. So the argument gives no dialectical advantage to the negative utilitarian vis-à-vis this type of hedonistic utilitarian.

I'm not sure I quite understand the theory.  Wouldn't global destruction be better than utopia if it were painless because there are no unmet preferences.  I also laid out some problems with preference utilitarianism in my other post arguing for utilitarianism.  

It seems clear intuitively that we can distinguish between different levels of well-being and different levels of suffering.  People get different amounts of enjoyment from reading different books for example.  Any view that doesn't put them on a precise cardinal scale is susceptible to Dutch Book arguments.  I don't have a super strong view on consciousness--I think it's real and probably irreducible.  To the extent that pain arose to deter actions and pleasure arose to encourage other actions, organisms would evolve to experience pain for when they do things  that decrease their fitness roughly proportional to how much they decrease their fitness.  Quantifications always seem arbitrary, but it's clear that there is some quantity involved-unfathomable bliss is far better than a cupcake- even if it's hard to quantify.  

I'm a moral realist, so I don't care only about what things people actually care about.  I care about what we would care about if we were perfectly rational.  I think the argument I presented provides a challenge for consistent lexical views.  I'm a hedonic utilitarian, not a preference utilitarian.  

On the first point, would you hold that a world with a billion people with experiences trillions of times better than the best current experience and one pinprick would be morally bad to create?

On the second point, I didn't realize the leveling down argument had an official name.  I'll fix the terminology issues now.  

I agree with both points and have adjusted them accordingly.  The reason I originally said that those views have gained a lot of popularity with ea's is that, in my experience, negative utilitarians are primarily effective altruists.  However, it's still a very minority view among effective altruists.