Suffering is not just an intellectual game
Links in the text are the original.
In general, the prospective horror of suffering toward the end of life due to any number of medical complications, culminating in the process of dying, has haunted me ever since I watched videos about it in high school, though usually I put it at the back of my mind. Unlike more speculative fears, pain near the end of life has probability near 1, so I can’t just brush it off as irrational.
When I get older, I plan to research how to minimize pain during surgery, what options for euthanasia I can pursue, and so, but there’s also the unavoidable risk of some accident or illness happening in the near term, putting me in a situation of immense pain and needing to make medical choices before I’ve done my homework. Or, worse, being incapacitated and unable to make such choices—and given the pro-life and suffering-isn’t-so-bad impulses of most people, this possibility is truly frightening.
Most people ignore worries about medical pain because it’s far away[🡕]. Several of my friends think I’m weird to be so parochial about reducing suffering and not take a more far-sighted view of my idealized moral values. They tend to shrug off pain, saying it’s not so bad. They think it’s extremely peculiar that I don’t want to be open to changing my moral perspective and coming to realize that suffering isn’t so important and that other things matter comparably.
Perhaps others don’t understand what it’s like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems comely[🡕] and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. Sure, I enjoy intellectual debates, interesting ideas, and harmonious resolutions of conflicting intuitions, and I realize that if you’re serious about reducing suffering, you do need to get into a lot of deep, recondite topics. But fundamentally it has to come back to suffering or else it’s just brain masturbation while others are being tortured. Of course, I’m guilty of plenty of that, and to some extent it’s necessary for sustainability. (Rob Wiblin said something like, “Altruism is a marathon, not a sprint[🡕].”) But basing your whole moral outlook on pleasant abstractions does not seem tenable to a brain wired the way mine is.
In a Facebook comment[🡕], I said:
I take a hard line because concern for suffering is just one of many causes a person can be entrained by. It’s easy for organisms to let their value systems shift around until what was yesterday’s overriding principle is today’s lost cause. Consider an example that was floated around recently—live sushi in Japan[🡕]. That people can take delight in a dining fad without giving a second thought to the (potential) massive suffering they’re causing illustrates the wide range of potential human motivational impulses. It’s easy for us, in our comfortable houses and with full stomachs, to muse about various moral abstractions that catch our interest.
I say no. When you let other things displace the importance of suffering, that’s not an improvement but a failure of goal preservation. That future self would be failing to live up to what I care about now, and I don’t want that to happen. It’s the feeling other altruists would have if they started using all their money to buy expensive cars and mansions.
Now, there are plenty of fuzzy moral sub-questions when defining what “reducing as much expected suffering as possible” looks like: What computations are conscious? Do you weight by brain size? How do you handle infinities? Etc. These questions have to be answered to make the suffering-reduction program specific. But they don’t involve trading suffering reduction against some other value that tempts euthymic minds, like complexity or knowledge or life or whatever else.
Matt Ball is someone else who understands my perspective[🡕]:
The single most important lesson I’ve learned in the past 20 years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. Back then, although I was sure I knew everything, I really didn’t know anything about suffering. Since then, though, I’ve developed a chronic disease, and experienced times when I thought I was going to die, times when I wished I would die. Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation, etc. I didn’t take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem – well, to put it kindly, ridiculous.
One person[🡕] suggests that past experience with suffering is “a reason to avoid fighting suffering. Your own experiences have biased you about how bad suffering is. It’s like someone who keeps a year of food in his basement because he had to go without food at times when he was a kid, or checking where your keys are 20 times a day because you once forgot your keys.” I replied: “Some of the life experiences that make us unique we choose to keep as intrinsic moral values, while others we disregard. If we didn’t keep any of the ’biases’ that our development instilled in us, we might be paperclip maximizers instead. My moral biases are what make me me.”