Tranquilism Respects Individual Desires
[Originally written January 10, 2021]
[Brian Tomasik has written on this objection to negative utilitarianism as well, and also applies a perspective of considering different person-moments as different "people" in moral tradeoffs, but here I address a different problem with the objection. Further, I'd expect the biggest criticism of my argument here would be that preferences aren't the only thing that matters—hedonic experience is the main moral object. I'm sympathetic to this view, but my target audience here is people who consider respect for individual preferences to be the main virtue of a moral theory.]
The criticism
A common critique I encounter of negative utilitarianism and tranquilism—briefly, the idea that any experience without desire for change is perfect, and an absence of experiences is not an imperfection—is something like:
Look, I know what I prefer better than you do, and I prefer to experience small amounts of suffering in exchange for great happiness, independent of any confounding factors about effects on other people or fulfilling my desires about a life narrative. I would just prefer that sequence of experiences, over total neutrality. I've thought long and hard about this, and it's what I want. Who are you to say otherwise, and impose your weird conception of value upon me?
This is fair as far as the preferences we'd like ethics to respect are people's stated preferences over future world-states, in the abstract. Or people's retrospective judgment that some past bundle of experiences was worth it. But I don't think this is actually the right unit of "preference" to consider. From the NU FAQ:
My craving for the pizza is greater than my desire for eating potatoes, and it is probably accurate that the pizza-experience is of greater pleasure-intensity. However, if we are going to therefore conclude that what is more pleasurable is automatically better (and that the worse states are in need of improvement!), Buddhist intuitions will object: We have been looking at it from the wrong perspective! We have been comparing, from the outside, two different states and our current cravings for being in one or the other. Why not instead look at how the states are like from the inside?
This seems far more sensible to me. How I feel about a given sequence of experiences my future self might have, as a third party considering those experiences, isn't the final word. Sure, the best we can do to prevent bad futures is reflect on our memories of experiences, and use those to predict what we and others would like, but there are serious biases we need to account for in this process. And I think one of the strongest is this: we confuse how we feel about a given set of experiences when we're not experiencing them, with the nature of the set of experiences itself.
Suppose you say that you would rather, at the end of your life, 1) be uploaded to an experience machine in which you burn alive for 5 minutes but then experience 1 million years of pure unadulterated joy, than 2) die as normal. By hypothesis, since this is an experience machine, there are no effects on other people. This is purely a matter of the value of the experiences themselves. Whose preferences are you really honoring here by choosing (1)? It does honor your current self's preference-over-futures. It certainly doesn't respect the preferences-over-immediate-states of the moments of your future self that would be burning. Those moments of experience surely would extremely disprefer burning alive, wanting desperately for it to stop. If this discussion of moments of experience is puzzling, I recommend learning about the problems with the folk view of personal identity; here is an eloquent statement of an alternative view:
Thinking this way, I sometimes slip into thinking of myself as a “time-slice,” where the experiences of the time-slice have the special “I am there for it” property, but none of the experiences of any future people do; rather, future versions of myself are more like especially intimate friends, people who I love and support, towards whom I feel deep understanding and loyalty, but whose experiences fall on the other side of the same chasm that separates my experience from the experiences of other people around me. [emphasis mine]
Here, I don't mean the intellectual attitude you might have of believing, during the burning-alive moments, "Although this sucks right now, it will be worth it." That is a preference in some sense, a von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) utility theory "preference," but not the kind of basic preference—desire, or craving—that is clearly morally problematic to violate. A preference of the former sense can be attributed to a machine programmed to convert the galaxy into plastic. I see no reason to honor that preference in itself, independent of whether the plastic-maximizer has subjective experiences of dissatisfaction upon seeing how little plastic is in the universe, or any game-theoretic considerations. What really matters is any attitude of the form, "I (do not) want this current experience to change."
What about the preferences for joy?
Perhaps you think that while choosing (1) disrespects the preferences of the person-moments who burn, this is just outweighed by respecting the preferences of the far, far, far more numerous person-moments experiencing the joy. Far more and stronger desires, not mere plastic-maximizer preferences, are satisfied by (1), on this account.
The problem is that choosing (2) could not possibly violate the desires of the joyous person-moments in any consequential sense of the term "violate," because under that choice such moments don't exist. Again, we should not confuse "making a world that would be evaluated negatively according to some hypothetical utility function" with "making a world that is experienced as dispreferred." Why exactly should we think the former is a problem?
Notice the genuine asymmetry here. Choosing (2) does not instantiate any person-moments whose craving for the many joyous moments is denied. But choosing (1) does instantiate some person-moments whose craving to not burn alive is denied, and flagrantly so. A common misconception is that by rejecting the goodness of eventual preference satisfaction for currently nonexistent beings (or experience moments), one necessarily has to reject the badness of eventual preference dissatisfaction for currently nonexistent beings. I might agree with this claim if the preferences in question were third-person VNM preferences over futures, the sorts of preferences that I argued above weren't really relevant moral objects. But that's not what we're considering here. The asymmetry lies in this: the alternative to creating those joyous person-moments, in this thought experiment, is not the creation of person-moments with a frustrated desire for joy. (If it were, a negative utilitarian would object to that just as the critic would.) It is simply no creation at all. But the alternative to no creation is to create person-moments that do obviously experience a severely frustrated desire, by virtue of burning.
I must stress that by affirming this asymmetry, I am not asserting some special metaphysical status of "persons," or badness-for-someone. The point is not that you can't harm a being who doesn't exist yet. Such a view would be subject to the non-identity problem, and the absurd implication that a prospective parent should be indifferent between having a child with chronic pain and one without. Quite the opposite. By considering the moments of experience that might result from each option in our dilemma, we see how cruel it is to subject some of them to torture, however relatively brief, without relieving any greater harm.
It seems more paternalistic, in the relevantly problematic sense, to insist to those moments of oneself that will suffer, "Your sacrifice, which I impose on you, is for the greater good. You wouldn't want to violate the preferences of your past self, who decided that you should go through this, would you? Don't be so authoritarian!" To insist this would be to attribute desire frustration to imaginary beings, moments that would not have existed in the alternative option.
Another advantage of this approach is that we don't need to apply ad hoc patches to the problems arising from uninformed preferences. The typical solution is to "idealize" preferences, considering what they would be if the subject were fully informed and reflected for a long time. I have never found this approach satisfactory, especially because it proves too much. "Idealized" preferences are super underdetermined, and in practice seem to reduce to whichever preferences best accord with valence utilitarianism (or immediately experienced desires) anyway. It's more appropriate and parsimonious, I think, to assess the moment-to-moment preferences about their respective momentary experiences. These are surely as informed as they reasonably can be, because they are in the midst of the experience itself. So when, for example, a doctor gives a painful vaccination to a child, what makes this acceptable is not that the child's preference against the shot is uninformed—surely that preference counts for something in its own right. Rather, it's that the child will predictably disprefer the experience of the corresponding illness.
Other statements of the objection
Some other (anonymized) quotes on this point, and my response from this perspective:
I maintain that people are the final arbiters of what is good for them.
Discord user
This is probably roughly right, but only when such people are assessing "what is good for them" while they're experiencing it. It makes no sense to say that I, currently, am the final arbiter of whether it would be good for my future experience-moments to have my consciousness extended after death in the experience machine described above. Who am I to impose that terrible fate on a person who isn't my current self, who just happens to share memories with me? I almost certainly know better than someone else whether those future experience-moments would regret the whole sequence at the end of it, or consider it worthwhile—and this is exactly why paternalism is generally dangerous. But this doesn't mean I "know" that the pleasure of the many outweighs the agony of the few, even if the many wouldn't miss it.
If I found out [someone] had tried to prevent my birth (convince my parents not to have me, for example) in order to “save” me from suffering, I’d be really mad at them.
Comment on "Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017"
Mad on whose behalf? Your actual, born self? Clearly not, since you're alive. This purported wrong didn't happen to you. Your hypothetical non-born self? How would they be wronged? They had no preferences that would be violated by refraining from creating them. If you'd be really mad in this case, it seems you'd have to be really mad at everyone who is in the financial position to have another child with a decently high standard of living, but doesn't do so.
"Preferences" in particular seems like an obvious candidate for 'thing to reduce morality to'; what's your argument for only basing our decisions on dispreference or displeasure and ignoring positive preferences or pleasure (except instrumentally)?
I suppose that by "positive preference" he means a preference of the form, "I do not want this experience to change." If so, there is no problem posed by not having that preference. What is the point in putting yourself in a state of wanting something to continue, given the risk that it may not continue, rather than simply avoiding the want in the first place? It's perfectly good to not want.
Concluding thoughts
I've frequently seen symmetric utilitarians assert that negative utilitarianism is based on an arbitrary asymmetry, as if we treated all negative numbers as infinitely greater in absolute value than positive numbers. But not only does that rely on the controversial stipulation that happiness and suffering are opposites of the same currency, it doesn't account for the independent arguments for the asymmetry, one of which I've presented here.
It's not just that NUs have the intuition that the procreation asymmetry is true, that the Very Repugnant Conclusion is extremely unpalatable, that Omelas is an unjust civilization and Ivan Karamazov is right to return his ticket, that the Logic of the Larder is wrong even if we very implausibly grant that farmed animals have more happiness than suffering in their lives, etc.—not just that we have inferred from these intuitions the fundamental frivolity of pleasure in comparison with misery. Rather, the asymmetry is inherent to the structure of the preferences of sentient beings.