In this series of six essays, CRS researcher Teo Ajantaival explores minimalist views of wellbeing, value, and ethics (i.e. views that essentially say “the less this, the better”).
- Minimalist views of value (axiologies) are evaluative views that define betterness solely in terms of the absence or reduction of independent bads. For instance, they might roughly say, “the less suffering, violence, and violation, the better”. They reject the idea of weighing independent goods against these bads, as they deny that independent goods exist in the first place.
- Minimalist moral views are views about how to act and be that include a minimalist view of value, instead of an offsetting (‘good minus bad’) view of value. They reject the concept of independently positive moral value, such as positive virtue or pleasure that could independently counterbalance bads.
He also looks at reasons to be careful about the practical implications of abstract formalisms.
The essays complement each other, but can also be read independently.
They were revised in 2024, and the edited collection is now available as a book in physical and digital formats
Minimalist views of wellbeing
- Personal wellbeing is often defined as “the balance of that which is good for oneself over that which is bad for oneself”.
- We may be skeptical of such ‘good minus bad’ views of wellbeing due to the many reasons to doubt the offsetting premise — that is, the premise that independent bads can always be counterbalanced or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods.
- This premise is rejected by all minimalist views of wellbeing. These include experientialist views, where wellbeing is the degree to which we are free from experiential sources of illbeing (such as suffering, disturbance, or a visceral non-acceptance of our current experience), as well as extra-experientialist views, where wellbeing is also affected by preference frustrations, interest violations, or objective conditions.
Varieties of minimalist moral views: Against absurd acts
- Minimalist moral views are sometimes alleged — at least in their purely consequentialist versions — to recommend absurd acts in practice, such as murdering individuals or choosing not to save people’s lives so as to prevent their future suffering. Yet there are various reasons why the most plausible versions of minimalist moral views — including their purely consequentialist versions — do not recommend such acts.
- These acts would be opposed by minimalist versions of nonconsequentialist views, such as virtue ethics, deontology, social contract theory, and care ethics.
- Consequentialist reasons against such acts can be derived from extra-welfarist and extra-experientialist axiologies, which may consider violence or violation to be inherently bad, as well as from rule and multi-level consequentialism, which highlight the instrumental reasons for respecting autonomy, cooperation, and nonviolence.
Minimalist axiologies and positive lives
- Minimalist axiologies define betterness in entirely relational or ‘instrumental’ terms, namely in terms of the minimization of bads such as suffering.
- These views avoid many problems in population ethics, while retaining a plausible notion of relational positive value. Yet the minimalist notion of (relationally) positive value is entirely excluded by the standard, restrictive assumption of treating lives as isolated value-containers.
- Minimalist views become more intuitive when we adopt a relational view of the overall value of individual lives, that is, when we don’t track only the causally isolated “contents” of these lives, but also their (often far more significant) causal roles.
Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant
- It has been argued that certain “repugnant conclusions” are an inevitable feature of any plausible axiology.
- Yet at least some minimalist views avoid these repugnant conclusions. Moreover, based on a ‘side-by-side’ comparison of different views, a strong case can be made that offsetting views share all the most “repugnant” features of minimalist views while introducing additional sources of repugnance.
- The comparison suggests that the conclusions faced by minimalist views are the least repugnant and the most plausible overall.
Peacefulness, nonviolence, and experientialist minimalism
- For purely experience-focused and consequentialist versions of minimalist views, an ideal world would be any perfectly peaceful world, including an empty world.
- When it comes to theoretical implications about the cessation and replacement of worlds, one can reasonably argue that offsetting views have worse implications than do minimalist views.
- Zooming out from unrealistic thought experiments, it’s crucial to be mindful of the gap between theory and practice, of the pitfalls of misconceived consequentialism, and of how minimalist consequentialists have strong practical reasons to pursue a nonviolent approach and to cooperate with people who hold different values.
Positive roles of life and experience in suffering-focused ethics
- Even if we assume a purely suffering-focused view, it’s wise to recognize the highly positive and often necessary roles that various other things may have for the overall goal of reducing suffering.
- These include the positive roles of autonomy, cooperation, and nonviolence, as well as our personal wellbeing and valuable experiences.
- Suffering-focused moral views may value these things for different reasons, but not necessarily any less in practice, than do other moral views.
Please feel free to leave comments on the essays, or to contact us if you have any feedback or would like to discuss the series with Teo.