by Magnus Vinding. First published in 2020.
Summary
The purported value symmetry between suffering and happiness ought to be questioned and contrasted with alternative views. I here present two asymmetric pictures that collectively cover a broad range of axiological and ethical views. These pictures merit serious consideration.
Introduction
“Some views, most notably standard economic utilitarian views, encourage us to treat bads as negative goods. But with Karl Popper, I’m convinced that this is a very serious mistake.”
— Clark Wolf (Wolf, 2019)
“I believe that its insistence on the moral symmetry of happiness and suffering is one reason why many people find utilitarianism hard to take seriously. … this is a great pity [given the strong priority utilitarianism devotes to the reduction of suffering].”
— Jamie Mayerfeld (Mayerfeld, 1996, p. 335)
Our views of the relative moral significance of happiness and suffering matter greatly for our priorities, which renders it crucial that we scrutinize our immediate intuitions and assumptions on this issue. I have argued elsewhere that the notion that happiness can morally outweigh suffering stands in need of clarification and defense (Vinding, 2020b), and presented various arguments against a moral symmetry between happiness and suffering (Vinding, 2020a, part I; see also Ajantaival, 2021/2022).
My aim here is first to briefly review some of the arguments and views that reject a moral symmetry. These views then motivate the alternative pictures, i.e. actual visual models, that I shall propose as more plausible than the symmetric utilitarian picture.
The implications of symmetry
Karl Popper famously criticized the idea that we can treat suffering as “negative pleasure”, or pleasure as “negative pain”:
[A] criticism of the Utilitarian formula ‘Maximize pleasure’ is that it assumes, in principle, a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man’s pain by another man’s pleasure.
(Popper, 1945, ch. 9, note 2)
One may argue that an extrapolation of the implications of the supposed moral symmetry between happiness and suffering gives us reason to agree with Popper’s critique.
For example, such a symmetry would imply that it is just as morally important to cause an untroubled person to experience a state of intense happiness as it is to alleviate (similarly) intense suffering. Jamie Mayerfeld argues against this implication with the following thought experiment:
We give surgery patients anesthesia to avert the agony they would feel if they remained conscious. Suppose some drug became available that gave people a joy as intense as the pain averted by anesthesia, and suppose that there were no drawbacks in the consumption of this drug. It seems quite clear to me that the provision of this drug would be less important than the administration of anesthesia.
(Mayerfeld, 1999, p. 133)
One thing to note in this context is that it is not obvious what it means to talk about “similarly intense” states of happiness and suffering, respectively (Knutsson, 2016a). Yet, as Mayerfeld hints, even if we grant that we can meaningfully compare happiness and suffering in this way, the implication of symmetry outlined above still conflicts with the plausible moral intuition that the badness of suffering does not compare to the supposed badness of a neutral, untroubled state of consciousness that could have been more pleasurable (Anonymous, 2015, sec. 2.2.14).
Yet perhaps the most damning implication of symmetry is that it can be permissible — indeed obligatory — to impose extreme suffering on a given individual in order to raise the happiness of others, even when those others are already well-off (Vinding, 2020a, ch. 3).
Some have further argued that findings from psychology and neuroscience give us reason to be skeptical of the view that happiness and suffering are relevantly symmetric (Diener & Emmons, 1984; Baumeister et al., 2001, p. 331; Shriver, 2014). As Adam Shriver writes:
Recent results from the neurosciences demonstrate that pleasure and pain are not two symmetrical poles of a single scale of experience but in fact two different types of experiences altogether, with dramatically different contributions to well-being.
(Shriver, 2014, abstract)
Consequently, “ethicists cannot simply assume that what is said about pleasure has similar implications for pain, and vice versa” (Shriver, 2014, p. 13, draft version).
An asymmetry in urgency
A fundamental difference, one may argue, is that suffering is intrinsically problematic, and that it carries an inherent urgency — in the words of Thomas Metzinger, an “urgency of change” (Metzinger, 2017, “Option 4: eliminating the NV-condition”). A neutral state that could have been intensely happy, by contrast, is not problematic, and hence “raising” such unproblematic states toward pleasure carries no corresponding urgency.
Popper expressed a similar view:
suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.
(Popper, 1945, ch. 9, note 2)
Contentment and the avoidance of preference frustration
Another view that entails a moral asymmetry between happiness and suffering is the view that contentment — i.e. the absence of discomfort and frustrated desires — is what matters, not the intensity of our pleasures.
There are many variations of this view. One is the antifrustrationist view defended by Christoph Fehige, according to which “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.” (Fehige, 1998, p. 518).
On this view, pleasure is only good to the extent that it satisfies a frustrated preference, and hence the creation of pleasure is not valuable per se, and may indeed often have no value at all. Suffering, in contrast, does imply — and arguably constitutes — a frustrated preference, and its prevention will thus always be valuable on the antifrustrationist view.
Michael St. Jules expresses a similar view of the moral (un)importance of promoting pleasure for its own sake:
something only matters if it matters (or will matter) to someone, and an absence of pleasure doesn’t necessarily matter to someone who isn’t experiencing pleasure, and certainly doesn’t matter to someone who does not and will not exist, and so we have no inherent reason to promote pleasure. On the other hand, there’s no suffering unless someone is experiencing it, and according to some definitions of suffering, [the experience of suffering] necessarily matters to the sufferer.
(St. Jules, 2020)
This is related to the view that “a conscious state is only non-optimal or problematic if this is directly experienced, not if the state doesn’t match up in some comparison we make from the outside” (Anonymous, 2015, sec. 2.2.1; Vinding, 2020a, sec. 1.4).
Similar arguments have been made in defense of the Asymmetry in population ethics, which says that we have a moral obligation not to bring miserable lives into existence, yet no corresponding moral obligation to bring about happy lives (Benatar, 1997; 2006; St. Jules, 2019; Frick, 2020).
Another set of views that identify contentment rather than pleasure intensity as the seat of experiential value are various Epicurean and Buddhist views of well-being. These views hold that the most significant determinant of the value of our experiences is the degree to which they are absent of negative components, such as pain, fear, and boredom. Experiential states that are absent of such negative components are deemed optimal, and hence there is no additional value to adding intense pleasure to such an already, according to these views, optimal state (Schopenhauer, 1819, vol I, p. 319; 1851, pp. 41-43; Breyer, 2015; Gloor, 2017; Sherman, 2017; Knutsson, 2019).
In light of the preceding arguments and views, it seems natural to propose a picture according to which happiness and suffering are morally orthogonal — i.e. orthogonal in the notional space of moral importance.
Indeed, such an orthogonal picture captures the essence of most of the views presented above. For example, whether we think increasing pleasure carries a moral urgency and importance that is lexically inferior to the moral importance of reducing suffering (cf. Wolf, 1997, Knutsson, 2016c), or whether we think increasing pleasure carries no moral importance whatsoever, the resulting picture is practically the same: the moral importance of reducing suffering occupies a different, overriding moral dimension than does the moral (un)importance of increasing pleasure.
(For some of the views presented above, e.g. the Asymmetry, this picture may not apply in general, but it will still capture the essence of these views in the case of suffering versus pleasure for future beings who do not currently exist, which is arguably the most relevant case to consider in relation to our priorities.)
The picture we get is roughly the following:
The reduction of suffering is represented with a red arrow that urgently points away from the depths of misery, while the increase of happiness is symbolized with a green arrow that goes sideways: moving along this dimension is fine, but it carries no (comparable) moral urgency. This is the picture we get when we reject the notion that pleasure can morally outweigh suffering.
Alternative picture: “Craving pleasures” as subtly negative
Some views may insist on a more pessimistic representation of the value of pleasure, or at least of certain forms of pleasure.
For example, Simon Knutsson defends a view according to which some kinds of pleasure — so-called kinetic pleasures (pleasures involved in the active pursuit of something) — can have negative value. This stands in contrast to katastematic, or static pleasures, i.e. states of perfect calm and tranquility, which Knutsson contends have neutral value (Knutsson, 2019).
Knutsson follows (Cooper, 2012), who argues that (at least some) kinetic pleasures are “compromised by the stressful state of mind … associated with intense desires”; that such pleasures involve a “frustrated dissatisfaction”; or that they are “mixed with pain” (Cooper 2012, pp. 237-238, as quoted in Knutsson, 2019). These subtly negative components are what render (at least some) kinetic pleasures negative on Knutsson’s view.
(Relatedly, modern neuroscience draws a distinction between “wanting” and “liking”, and one could argue that the putatively negative components of kinetic pleasures roughly correspond to components of “wanting”, Berridge & Robinson, 2016; Tomasik, 2016. One may also relate these negative experiential components to the Buddhist concept of kama-tanha, which roughly means craving for pleasure.)
A similar view is the tranquilist position defended by Lukas Gloor, which holds that “a state of consciousness is negative or disvaluable if and only if it contains a craving for change” (Gloor, 2017, 2.2). On this view, any craving for pleasure is disvaluable, as is any state of pleasure that contains a craving for change.
These views may be represented in the following way:
Pleasures that contain any cravings or subtle frustrations can be thought of as occupying the yellow arrow: they are far from intensely painful, yet they are still mildly negative. Only fully tranquil states are optimal on these views.
Arthur Schopenhauer seemingly also viewed pleasure as something that corresponds to a move along the yellow arrow above:
[Happiness] is not a gratification which comes to us originally and of itself, but it must always be the satisfaction of a wish. For desire, that is to say, want, is the precedent condition of every pleasure; but with the satisfaction, the desire and therefore the pleasure cease; and so the satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a pain, from a want.
(Schopenhauer, 1819, vol I, p. 319)
Note how Schopenhauer argues that the pleasure itself ceases when satisfaction is attained, and how he appears to see pleasure as inextricably tied to desire (“with the satisfaction, the desire and therefore the pleasure cease”). Thus, one may argue that pleasure for Schopenhauer roughly amounts to a (suboptimal) kinetic pleasure in the framework defended by Knutsson.
Explaining the appearance of symmetry
The views outlined in the previous section may help explain why happiness and suffering are sometimes considered morally symmetric. On these views, increasing pleasure can appear the moral equivalent of reducing negative states because it in fact often is, or at least results in, the reduction of negative states. (And note in this context that words like “unhappy”, “unpleasant”, and “uncomfortable” invariably refer to states that are negative rather than neutral.)
On these views, what we usually consider a neutral state actually tends to contain bothersome components — worry, stress, boredom, etc. — yet we mostly fail to recognize these discomforts, partly because we are so used to them, and partly because they are shared by everyone (Benatar, 2006, p. 72). Thus, when we experience pleasure in what we naively imagine to be a neutral state, we are in fact, on these views, misinterpreting the relief from such negative components as the attainment of a truly positive state (Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.1). (I say more about this in my essay “A phenomenological argument against a positive counterpart to suffering”.)
Resistance to asymmetry due to a non sequitur?
One reason we may feel a pull to affirm a moral symmetry between happiness and suffering is the tacit assumption that the rejection of such a moral symmetry must necessarily be hostile to our continued existence. Yet this need not follow. After all, one can hold that other things besides suffering and happiness matter morally, such as accomplishing one’s life goals and living a virtuous life. Pluralist views of this kind are common among academic philosophers.
For example, Jamie Mayerfeld argues that death, for others and ourselves, is bad because
the successful completion of our projects depends on our staying alive. Other reasons can be added. Most people have a deeply rooted desire to go on living. A proper respect for their autonomy requires that we do not thwart their desire to live.
(Mayerfeld, 1999, p. 160; see also Mayerfeld, 1996, “Life and Death”; Wolf, 1997, sec. VIII; Benatar, 2006, pp. 211-219)
There are also strong instrumental reasons to favor continued existence, for oneself and others, even if one thinks suffering is the only thing that matters (Vinding, 2020a, sec. 8.1-8.2). For example, our continued existence is a precondition if we are to reduce suffering for others in effective ways, which means that the aim of reducing suffering strongly recommends that we secure our continued existence.
Additionally, it is worth noting that a moral symmetry between happiness and suffering seems to carry implausible implications when it comes to the ethics of death and continued existence, suggesting that such a moral symmetry is not in fact a satisfying foundation for our views on these matters.
For example, a purely welfarist view relying on such a moral symmetry would imply that it would be morally right to kill all existing beings in arbitrarily excruciating ways if we could in turn replace them with sufficiently many, sufficiently happy beings. This implication seems considerably more repugnant than the corresponding replacement implications entailed by purely suffering-focused views, as these views do not allow replacements that increase suffering. (For further discussion of these issues, see Knutsson, 2021; Ajantaival, 2022.)
Thus, valuing and preferring continued existence does not in itself constitute a strong reason to endorse a moral symmetry between happiness and suffering, as there are other, arguably more plausible views that can accommodate this intuition, and indeed accommodate it more robustly. And these alternative options are only rendered more plausible, comparatively speaking, by the many reasons reviewed here and elsewhere against the purported moral symmetry between happiness and suffering (see e.g. Mayerfeld, 1996; 1999; Vinding, 2020a, ch. 3).
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Tobias Baumann, Michael St. Jules, and Rupert McCallum for helpful comments.
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