I’ve been thinking more about asymmetries, and I want to try to get some clear definitions and claims, and start from claims that are as general as possible. What I focus on in this post is the following claim:
We accomplish no good by creating and then satisfying an interest, all else equal, because interests give us reasons for their satisfaction, not for their existence over their nonexistence.
This could be described as an "interest-affecting view", and the procreation asymmetry follows, because individuals who wouldn't otherwise exist have no interests. I think such an interest-affecting view accords best with our intuitions about personal tradeoffs.
I also defend Buddhist axiology or tranquilism to those who accept a hedonistic view of wellbeing based on this claim, although perhaps framed somewhat differently and I don't aim to defend a hedonistic view of wellbeing in the first place.
It therefore (in theory) allows individuals to make personal tradeoffs between experiences of pleasure and suffering as normally understood, unlike strong negative hedonistic utilitarianism, but it also doesn't give reasons to individuals who have no interest in wireheading, Nozick's experience machine or psychoactive drugs to subject themselves to these. Roughly, if you don't have an interest in pleasure for its own sake at a given moment, you are not mistaken about this, despite the claims of classical utilitarians. As such, while strong negative utilitarianism may, to some, be counterintuitive if it seems to override interests (see responses to this objection by Brian Tomasik and Simon Knutsson), classical utilitarianism does exactly the same, because it can prioritize the creation and satisfaction of new interests over the satisfaction of actual interests. So, if negative hedonistic utilitarianism (in any form) is wrong because it overrides individual interests, so is classical utilitarianism.
The claims (Only Actual Interests and Only Actually Conscious Interests) I discuss here are basically from Johann Frick’s paper and thesis. I recently made a similar post on the forum.
In the first two sections, I give definitions and state some claims, not all of which I defend, but also for illustration and to consider their implications. In the third section, I consider some implications. In the last section, I defend the claim, primarily through examples with our common sense understanding of interests.
Definitions
Outcome: The entire history of all that is ontological (universe, multiverse, possibly things beyond the physical), past, present and actual future.
Interest, interest holder: An interest is a value held by some holder, the interest holder, and that can be more or less satisfied (according to some total order) so that for the interest holder, it is better that it be more satisfied than less, all else equal. Note: a value could a priori be an interest with itself or the universe as its holder.
Actual interest: An interest is actual in a given outcome if it is held in that outcome.
Conscious interest: An interest is conscious if its satisfaction or unsatisfaction can be experienced consciously by the holder in some outcome.
Experiential interest: An interest is experiential if its degree of satisfaction is determined solely by the conscious experiences of the holder.
Actually conscious interest: An interest is actually conscious in a given outcome if its satisfaction or unsatisfaction is experienced consciously by the holder in that outcome. (Actually conscious interests are actual interests and conscious interests.)
Pleasure: A conscious experience is pleasurable if the experience comes with a conscious interest over its absence for its own sake, and this experience is experienced by the holder of the interest. Pleasure is the conscious experience and the conscious interest of the holder.
Suffering: A conscious experience involves suffering if the experience comes with a conscious interest in its absence over the experience itself, and this experience is experienced by the holder of the interest. Suffering is the conscious experience and the conscious interest of the holder.
Claims
This is just a set of claims of interest for this post. I am not actually making all of these claims here.
Only Interests: The only values that matter are interests.
Experientialism: The only interests that matter are the holders’ interests in their own conscious experiences.
Only Conscious Interests: The only interests that matter are conscious interests.
Hedonism: Experientialism and Only Conscious Interests are true, and specifically, pleasure and suffering are the only kinds of interests that matter.
Hedonism is one of the main claims of hedonistic utilitarianism, including classical utilitarianism.
Negative Hedonism: Experientialism (or Hedonism) and Only Conscious Interests are true, and specifically, suffering is the only kind of interest that matters.
Negative Hedonism is one of the main claims of negative hedonistic utilitarianism.
Only Actual Interests: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction, but not their existence over their nonexistence.
In particular, an interest is neither satisfied nor unsatisfied in an outcome if it does not occur in that outcome, and this outcome is not worse than one in which the interest occurs, all else equal. (I don't say that only actual interests matter, since that's either confusing or inaccurate.)
You could call this an "interest-affecting view", and this could be interpreted in a narrow or a wide way. Under a narrow view, we wouldn't compare the degree of satisfaction of different interests in different outcomes, only the degree of satisfaction of the same interests common to different outcomes. I'm not sure if such a view can be made transitive. Under a wide view, we might say that it's better for interest A to exist and be satisfied to degree x than for interest B to exist and be satisfied to degree y. See the nonidentity problem for some discussion of person-affecting views.
Only Actually Conscious Interests: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction when they are consciously experienced and through their conscious experience by their holders, but they don’t provide reasons for their existence over their nonexistence.
In particular, an interest is neither satisfied nor unsatisfied in an outcome if the interest (or its satisfaction/unsatisfaction) is not experienced, and this outcome is not worse than one in which the interest (or its satisfaction/unsatisfaction) is experienced, all else equal. As such, the holders of the interests may as well be the conscious experiences themselves. Or, the universe as a whole may be the holder of conscious interests, but the interests are (in practice, not a priori) localized: in locations where there are no conscious experiences, there are no conscious interests to be satisfied.
Implications of Only Actual Interests and Only Actually Conscious Interests
If we combine Only Actually Conscious Interests with Experientialism or even Hedonism, we don’t actually get Negative Hedonism (one of the main claims of negative hedonistic utilitarianism). Pleasure and suffering can both matter, and I am not claiming a conscious interest in further pleasure is necessarily an instance of suffering as I’ve defined these terms, but that the absence of this conscious interest is not problematic, while its unsatisfaction is. It’s not an asymmetry between pleasure and suffering, but it does imply the procreation asymmetry.
So, if someone has an unsatisfied interest in further pleasure, this is worse than not having this interest at all, even if they are happy overall.
What this looks is Buddhist axiology or tranquilism, which is, according to Lukas Gloor,
It has been suggested that we can group different experiences on a spectrum from bad (or unpleasant) to good (or pleasant), with a neutral part of the range in the middle. Let us call hedonism the view that such a spectrum represents the value of different experiences. According to hedonism, pleasurable experiences are valuable not because we desire them, but because they are good (and thus desirable).3
Proponents of tranquilism however reject this interpretation. While it is true that we can rank how much we do or do not desire to have different experiences, or rank experiences according to how pleasurable they are, it is non-obvious whether such a ranking accurately expresses the way we value different experiences. Tranquilism is based on an alternative conception of value, where what matters is not to maximize desirable experiences, but to reach a state absent of desire.
Instead of having a scale that goes from negative over neutral to positive, tranquilism’s value scale is homogenous, ranging from optimal states of consciousness to (increasingly more severe degrees of) non-optimal states. Tranquilism tracks the subjectively experienced need for change. If all is good in a moment, the experience is considered perfect. If instead, an experience comes with a craving for change, this is considered disvaluable and worth preventing.4 Absence of pleasure is not in itself deplorable according to tranquilism – it only constitutes a problem if there is an unmet need for pleasure.
In particular, if you’re a utilitarian who also accepts Only Actually Conscious Interests and Experientialism (or Hedonism), you’re basically a negative preference utilitarian who cares only about the conscious satisfaction/unsatisfaction of preferences about conscious experiences. This can include the conscious preference for more pleasure. Negative preference utilitarians count the unsatisfaction of a preferences worse than its nonexistence, and the complete satisfaction of a preference no better than its nonexistence. I claim that preferences are interests and with Only Actual Interests, only provide reasons for their satisfaction, not their existence.
Ethical implications of Only Actual Interests:
1. That I could induce a craving in someone and then satisfy it is not a reason for me to actually do so.
2. That I could satisfy an interest in further pleasure does not provide a reason to do so if there would be no such interest otherwise.
3. That someone would have their interests satisfied or be happy or have a good life is not a reason to bring them into existence, although there may be other reasons. That they will almost certainly have some unsatisfied interests is a reason to not bring them into existence, but the reasons to do so could be stronger in practice. This is the procreation asymmetry.
4. If someone has no interest in psychoactive substances (or, specifically, the resulting experiences), that they might enjoy them is not on its own a reason to try to convince them to take them.
5. The point of a hedonium shockwave, if any, would be to eliminate otherwise unsatisfied interests, not to create happiness. The prevention of future interests by destruction could be a good thing, generally. However, both are wildly speculative, and there are good consequentialist and nonconsequentialist reasons to not pursue either, e.g. for consequentialist ones, moral cooperation and trade, given how much opposition there would be to both. Value may also be more complex than Hedonism allows.
Practical implications for EA:
1. The main one is that we should reject Bostrom's astronomical waste argument. That does not mean we have no reasons to care about the (far) future or prevent extinction, but that future humans who would not otherwise exist would be happy (rather than not exist, or fewer of them exist) is not a reason for intervention. This substantially reduces the value of working to prevent existential risks, although they may still be very important, if we think our continued existence would be helpful to, say, wild animals (if they would also continue to exist after our extinction), or aliens. If you don't think extinction is bad, you can see how 80,000 Hours' tool reranks the cause areas. Assuming you answer the previous questions in a way to not cause reranking (although you may very well disagree with the underlying assumptions), answering "(C) Not more than twice as bad" to question 4 reranks the list as follows:
Re-ranked list:
1. Global priorities research - 26
2. Promoting effective altruism - 25 ⇩ (-1 point)
3. Risks posed by artificial intelligence - 23.5 ⇩ (-3.5 points)
4. Factory farming - 23
5. Health in poor countries - 21
6. Reducing tobacco use in the developing world - 20
7. Nuclear security - 20 ⇩ (-3 points)
8. Land use reform - 20
9. Biosecurity - 20 ⇩ (-3 points)
10. Climate change (extreme risks) - 18 ⇩ (-2 points)
Question 4 is
Question 4: Here’s two scenarios:
A nuclear war kills 90% of the human population, but we rebuild and civilization eventually recovers.
A nuclear war kills 100% of the human population and no people live in the future.
How much worse is the second scenario?
If you want to avoid reranking before question 4, you should answer 1. (A), 2. (A) and 3. (B).
2. There's also a question of the degree to which death can be bad, and this might have an effect on the value of some, but not all global health and poverty interventions. If death is bad, I think its badness is unlikely to be roughly proportional to the number of years of life lost, since existing interests are likely to change for many people as they age, but GiveWell doesn't explicitly use such a measure anymore, anyway (see here and here), and I'm not sure to what degree analysts rely on such an intuition. Under Experientialism or Hedonism, death in itself is not bad, but the process of dying and the impacts on loved ones are of course often very bad. I don't think global health and poverty as a cause area would necessarily look worse since many of the best interventions do not derive most of their value from life extension. Family planning interventions might look better than otherwise, mainly due to the way we would now treat the interests of the children who would be born.
3. We should reject the logic of the larder. That is, if animals bred and used for human purposes would have good lives, this is not a reason to bring to breed and use them in the first place, and the fact that they will almost certainly have unsatisfied interests is a reason to not do so (under a wide view of interests or individuals). There could be other reasons for their breeding and use, but they need to be even stronger.
Why Only Actual Interests?
Hedonistic consequentialists defend something like Only Conscious Interests. If we can convince them of Only Actual Interests, then they should accept Only Actually Conscious Interests. Or, we can convince them directly of Only Actually Conscious Interests.
If, according to Only Conscious Interests, an interest matters only if it can be experienced consciously, why should it matter (i.e. detract from an outcome) when it is not experienced at all?
However, rather than just shifting the burden of proof, we can defend Only Actual Interests by analogy and generally, based on the examples Frick gives, and some others:
1. That you've made a promise to someone is a reason to keep the promise, but the fact that you could keep a promise is not in itself a reason to make it in the first place. Promises provide reasons to be kept, but not reasons to be made.
2. That you have the gear and other means necessary to climb mount Everest successfully doesn't give you a reason to actually do it; you must already (or either way, expect to) have an interest in doing it.
3. That I could induce someone to want and then buy a product (e.g. through marketing) is not a reason for me to actually do so.
I find it pretty obvious that this is how interests should work.
If a mind exists and suffers, we'd think it better had it not existed (by virtue of its interest in not suffering). And if a mind exists and experiences joy, we'd think it worse had it not existed (by virtue of its interest in experiencing joy). Prima facie this seem exactly symmetrical, at least as far as the principles laid out here are concerned.
Depending on exactly how you make your view precise, I'd think that we'd either end up not caring at all about whether new minds exist (since if they didn't exist there'd be no relevant interests), or balancing the strength of those interests in some way to end up with a "zero" point where we are indifferent (since minds come with interests in both directions concerning their own existence). I don't yet see how you end up with the asymmetric view here.
(Note: My judgments between outcomes here should be qualified with "ignoring other reasons", specifically reasons that don't come from interests or their satisfaction for the existence of those interests or interest holders over their nonexistence.)
Ok, I think I first have to make my claim stronger (actually capturing the first part of its first statement in the intro):
Only Actual Interests: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction, but neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence.
It follows from this that a mind with no interests at all is no worse than a mind with interests, regardless of how satisfied its interests might have been. In particular, a joyless mind with no interest in joy is no worse than one with joy. A mind with no interests isn't much of a mind at all, so I would say that this effectively means it's no worse for the mind to not exist.
It would also follow that nonexistence of the mind is not worse, from the universal rejection of the Transfer Thesis (I was mistaken about its equivalence to Only Actual Interests). In my language:
No Transfer: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction, but neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest's holder over its nonexistence.
On suffering,
Only Actual Interests at least says it's no worse for a mind to not have an interest in the absence of suffering, and hence to not suffer than it is to suffer, because Suffering implies an interest in its absence, by my definition. Similarly, No Transfer would imply it's not worse for the mind to not exist.
There are a few ways to complete the argument that come to mind:
1. If a mind has a constant interest in not suffering which is satisfied to the degree it is not suffering, then not suffering at all would fully satisfy this interest, and not existing at all would be no worse, according to No Transfer.
2. If not, to start, we should assume that if a mind is suffering, if it were suffering less but still suffering (or another mind existed in its place and was suffering less), that would be better, because, e.g. its interest in not suffering would be more satisfied or its interest in not suffering would not be as strong. In particular, its interest in not suffering through its given experience would be completely unsatisfied in both cases, but stronger in the case of worse suffering.
Then, denote by A an outcome in which the mind is suffering, and by B the outcome in which the mind is not suffering (or does not exist). If we can use the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), transitivity, completeness, and claim the existence of a hypothetical outcome C in which the mind (or a replacement) would be suffering less, then we would get A≺B . To start by our choice of C, we have A≺C. Since C is suffering, we would get C⪯B by completeness, and then by transitivity and IIA, A≺B, so it would be better for the mind to not suffer (or not exist). Unfortunately, if there is a minimum amount of suffering in a suffering experience (over all hypothetical outcomes), this argument wouldn't apply to it.
If you make this argument that "it's no worse for the joyful mind to not exist," you can make an exactly symmetrical argument that "it's not better for the suffering mind to not exist." If there was a suffering mind they'd have an interest in not existing, and if there was a joyful mind they'd have an interest in existing.
In either case, if there is no mind then we have no reason to care about whether the mind exists, and if there is a mind then we have a reason to act---in one case we prefer the mind exist, and in the other case we prefer the mind not exist.
To carry your argument you need an extra principle along the lines of "the existence of unfulfilled interests is bad." Of course that's what's doing all the work of the asymmetry---if unfulfilled interests are bad and fulfilled interests are not good, then existence is bad. But this has nothing to do with actual interests, it's coming from very explicitly setting the zero point at the maximally fulfilled interest.
If I make these claims without argument, yes, but I am giving arguments for the first and against the second, based on a more general claim which is intuitively asymmetric and a few intuitive assumptions about the ordering of outcomes, which together imply "the existence of unfulfilled interests is bad", but not on their own.
The negation of "neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence" would mean pulling interests up by their bootstraps (for at least one specific interest):
"an interest or its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence". I think this is far less plausible, see my section "Why Only Actual Interests".
The symmetric claim also seems less plausible:
"neither an interest nor its unsatisfaction provides reasons for the nonexistence of that interest over its existence"
For example, the fact that you would fail to keep a promise is indeed a reason not to make it in the first place. Or, that fact that you would not climb mount Everest successfully is a reason to not try to do so in the first place.
Fehige defends the asymmetry between preference satisfaction and frustration on rationality grounds. This is my take:
Let's consider a given preference from the point of view of a given outcome after choosing it, in which the preference either exists or does not:
1. The preference exists:
a. If there's an outcome in which the preference exists and is more satisfied, and all else is equal, it would have been irrational to have chosen this one (over it, and at all).
b. If there's an outcome in which the preference exists and is less satisfied, and all else is equal, it would have been irrational to have chosen the other outcome (over this one, and at all).
c. If there's an outcome in which the preference does not exist, and all else is equal, the preference itself does not tell us if either would be irrational to have chosen.
2. The preference doesn't exist:
a. If there's an outcome in which the preference exists, regardless of its degree of satisfaction, and all else equal, the preference itself does not tell us if either would have been irrational to have chosen.
So, all else equal besides the existence or degree of satisfaction of the given preference, it's always rational to choose an outcome in which the preference does not exist, but it's irrational to choose an outcome in which the preference exists but is less satisfied than in another outcome.
(I made the same argument here, but this is a cleaner statement.)
Michael wrote this:
And you write:
A question here is whether "interests to not suffer" are analogous to "interests in experiencing joy." I believe that Michael's point is that, while we cannot imagine suffering without some kind of interest to have it stop (at least in the moment itself), we can imagine a mind that does not care for further joy.
So maybe we could sum up the claim that there's an asymmetry in this way: More suffering is always worse; more happiness isn't always better.
Let's say I see a cute squirrel and it makes me happy. Is it bad that I'm not in virtual reality experiencing the greatest joys imagineable? Maybe it would be bad, if I was the sort of person who had the life goal to experience as much pleasure as possible. But what if I just enjoy going for walks in the real world and occasionally encountering a squirrel? For whom, and why exactly, is it bad that I'm "only" glad and excited to see the squirrel, as opposed to being blissed out of my mind in virtual reality?
The relevant comparison, I think, is between (1) someone who experiences suffering and wants this suffering to stop and (2) someone who experiences happiness and wants this happiness not to stop. It seems that you and Michael think that one can plausibly deny only (2), but I just don't see why that is so, especially if one focuses on comparisons where the positive and negative experiences are of the same intensity. Like Paul, I think the two scenarios are symmetrical.
[EDIT: I hadn't seen Paul's reply when I first posted my comment.]
Some sleeping pills can give you a positive feeling of intense comfort. And yet people fall asleep on them rather than fighting their tiredness in order to enjoy the feeling a bit longer. I suppose you can point out an analogous-seeming case with depressed people who lack the willpower to improve anything about their low mood. But in the case of depression, there's clearly something broken about the system. Depression does not feel reflectively stable to depressed people (at least absent unfortunate beliefs like "I'm bad and I deserve this"). In the case of me going to sleep rather than staying up, I can be totally reflectively comfortable with going to sleep. Is this example confounded? It seems to me that in order to decide that it's confounded, you have to import some additional intuition(s) which I simply don't share with you. (The same might be true for arguing that it's not confounded, but I always point out that people with different foundational intuitions may not necessarily end up in ethical agreement.)
Interesting example. I have never taken such pills, but if they simply intensify the ordinary experience of sleepiness, I'd say that the reason I (as a CU) don't try to stay awake is that I can't dissociate the pleasantness of falling asleep from actually falling asleep: if I were to try to stay awake, I would also cease to have a pleasant experience. (If anyone knows of an effective dissociative technique, please send it over to Harri Besceli, who once famously remarked that "falling asleep is the highlight of my day.")
More generally, I think cases of this sort have rough counterparts for negative experience, e.g. the act of scratching an itch, or of playing with a loose tooth, despite the concomitant pain induced by those activities. I think such cases are sufficiently marginal, and susceptible to alternative explanations, that they do not pose a serious problem to either (1) or (2).
That makes sense. But do you think that the impulse to prolong the pleasant feeling (as opposed to just enjoying it and "laying back in the cockpit") is a component of the pleasure-feeling itself? To me, they seem distinct! I readily admit that we often want to do things to prolong pleasures or go out of our way to seek particularly rewarding pleasures. But I don't regard that as a pure feature of what pleasure feels like. Rather, it's the result of an interaction between what pleasure feels like and a bunch of other things that come in degrees, and can be on or off.
Let's say I found a technique to prolong the pleasure. Assuming it does take a small bit of effort to use it, it seems that whether I'm in fact going to use it depends on features such as which options I make salient to myself, whether I might develop fear of missing out, whether pleasure pursuit is part of my self-concept, the degree to which I might have cravings or the degree to which I have personality traits related to constantly optimizing things about my personal life, etc.
And it's not only "whether I'm in fact going to use the technique" that depends on those additional aspects of the situation. I'd argue that even "whether I feel like wanting to use the technique" depends on those additional, contingent factors!
If the additional factors are just right, I can simply loose myself in the positive feeling, "laying back in the cockpit." That's why the experience is a positive one, why it lets me lay back. Losing myself in the pleasant sensation means I'm not worrying about the future and whether the feeling will continue. If pleasure was intrinsically about wanting a sensation to continue, it would kind of suck because I'd have to start doing things to make that happen.
My brain doesn't like to have do things.
(This could be a fundamental feature of personality where there are large interpersonal differences. I have heard that some people always feel a bit restless and as though they need to do stuff to accomplish something or make stuff better. I don't have that, my "settings" are different. This would explain why many people seem to have troubles understanding the intuitive appeal tranquilism has for some people.)
Anyway, the main point is that "laying back in the cockpit" is something one cannot do when suffering. (Or it's what experienced meditators can maybe do – and then it's not suffering anymore.) And the perspective where laying back in the cockpit is actually appealing for myself as a sentient being, rather than some kind of "failure of not being agenty enough," is what fuels my stance that suffering and happiness are very, very different from one another. The hedonist view that "more happiness is always better" means that, in order to be a good egoist, one needs to constantly be in the cockpit to maximize one's long-term pleasure maximization. That's way too demanding for a theory that's supposed to help me do what is best for me.
Insofar as someone's hedonism is justified solely via introspection about the nature of conscious experience, I believe that it's getting something wrong. I'd say that hedonists of this specific type reify intuitions they have about pleasure (specifically, an interrelated cluster of intuitions about more pleasure always being better, that pleasure is better than non-consciousness, that pleasure involves wanting the experience to continue, etc.) as intrinsic components to pleasure. They treat their intuitions as the way things are while shrugging off the "contentment can be perfect" perspective as biased by idiosyncratic intuitions. However, both intuitions are secondary evaluative judgments we ascribe to these positive feelings. Different underlying stances produce different interpretations.
(And I feel like there's a sense in which the tranquilism perspective is simpler and more elegant. But at this point I'd already be happy if more people started to grant that hedonism is making just as much of a judgment call based on a different foundational intuition.)
Finally, I don't think all of ethics should be about the value of different experiences. When I think about "Lukas, the sentient being," then I care primarily about the "laying back in the cockpit" perspective. When I think about "Lukas, the person," then I care about my life goals. The perspectives cannot be summed into one thing because they are in conflict (except if one's life goals aren't perfectly selfish). If people have personal hedonism as one of their life goals, I care about them experiencing posthuman bliss out of my regard for the person's life goals, but not out of regard of this being the optimal altruistic action regardless of their life goals.
Anecdatally, I've taken medication for insomnia before and ended up trying to stay awake for longer because I was enjoying the sensation of sleepiness. Unfortunately fighting to stay awake was kind of unpleasant, and negated the enjoyment.
>>> I suppose you can point out an analogous-seeming case with depressed people who lack the willpower to improve anything about their low mood.
This reminds me of the 'Penfield mood organ' in Philip K. Dick's 'Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?'
>>> From the bedroom Iran's voice came. "I can't stand TV before breakfast." "Dial 888," Rick said as the set warmed. "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it." "I don't feel like dialing anything at all now," Iran said. "Then dial 3," he said. "I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor."
(though this description is of someone who stays in a bad mood because they don't have a desire to change it rather than lacking the willpower to)
I don't think that's the relevant analogy though. We should be comparing "Can we imagine suffering without an interest in not having suffered?" to "Can we imagine joy without an interest in having experienced joy?"
I can imagine saying "no" here, but if I do then I'd also say it's not good that you are not in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering. If you were in a virtual reality experiencing great joy it would be against your interests to prevent that joy, and if you were in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering it would be in your interests to prevent that suffering.
You could say: the actually existing person has an interest in preventing future suffering, while they may have no interest in experiencing future joy. But now the asymmetry is just coming from the actual person's current interests in joy and suffering, so we didn't need to bring in all of this other machinery, we can just directly appeal to the claimed asymmetry in interests.