A terrible argument for negative utilitarianism

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Overmuser claims to have a simple proof that classical hedonic utilitarianism is false,¹ because of a fundamental asymmetry between pleasure and suffering: you can always choose to forgo pleasure, but you cannot choose to endure sufficiently powerful suffering. Therefore, there is some amount of suffering which you can never trade for an arbitrary amount of pleasure. On the contrapositive of “ought implies can,” you therefore are not obligated to trade suffering for pleasure. Their conclusion is to endorse negative utilitarianism.

In this article, I demonstrate that this proof is quite terrible.

Overmuser begins by separating pain from suffering. This is a worthwhile move. People with pain asymbolia laugh when pricked, offer up their hands for more, and say things like “It hurts indeed, but I do not know what that really is.” Masochists enjoy pain. Dennett reports neutralizing pain by focusing attention on it very closely. These sensations are weird and unsettling, but they don’t seem to be self-evidently bad in the way ordinary pain experiences are. Some distinction is helpful.

Unfortunately, Overmuser’s definition is not very clear:

You can be in pain and ignore it. You can be in pain and push through it. You can even desire pain, if you are a masochist. But suffering you can’t ignore, let alone desire. … It’s a kind of overriding pain. … For now, let’s simply define suffering as the pain threshold (physical or psychological) at which it becomes impossible to ignore.

“Impossible to ignore” is frustratingly underspecified, and it becomes load-bearing for the argument. Consider Henri Alleg, a pro-Algerian journalist captured by the French. Alleg was electrocuted, waterboarded, burned, drugged, and hung. He was called a rat, a pig, and a “prize catch.” He was always tortured three stories belowground, or else others would be able to hear his screams. They threatened to do the same to his family. Alleg never gave up any information.

Did Henri Alleg suffer, or was he merely in pain? If Alleg did not suffer, then Overmuser’s version of negative utilitarianism does not say it was wrong to torture Alleg: “suffering is the only self-intimating disvalue, and alleviating suffering is necessarily the only distinctively moral obligation.” Thus, either it was morally permissible to torture Alleg, or negative utilitarianism is false.

Consequently, negative utilitarians must agree that what Alleg endured was suffering. However, Alleg’s case deflates Overmuser’s first assumption about suffering: “while you are experiencing it, the alleviation of suffering takes precedence over anything else”.

A person who suffers from extreme physical pain will be ready to end their own life to stop it, and likewise a person who suffers from extreme emotional pain, or chronic depression. They will not be able to ‘push through it,’ no matter how great the benefits. Their one and only, overarching priority will be to put an end to the suffering. [Therefore] the [hedonic] Utilitarian calculation described in the beginning of the present article is simply abolished. This is valid at the personal level.

From Alleg’s case, we can see this is false. Cases like Irena Sendler, tortured by the Gestapo for smuggling children out of the Ghetto, and Anne Askew, subjected to the rack for her unorthodox Protestantism, deliver the same verdict. Askew’s case is particularly damning. Though one could argue that Sendler and Alleg only acted to spare other people worse pain, Askew refused to lie and recant Protestantism, though this would inflict no further suffering on anybody. People can choose to ‘push through’ incredibly intense suffering.

Now on to the simple proof of Utilitarianism’s falsehood at the interpersonal level … Suppose a genie appeared and made you experience the worst conceivable pain to you. Suppose he then chose a random person and made them experience the most sublime conceivable pleasure to them. Suppose he then made your pain increase at an exponential rate. Finally, suppose he made the other person’s pleasure grow at a superexponential rate. The genie then says to you: “You can ask me to stop the exponentially growing pain that you are currently experiencing, but it will also prevent the other person from experiencing the superexponentially growing pleasure that they are having. You will both return to normal.”

The question is: do you have a moral obligation to refuse the genie’s offer?

The [hedonic] Utilitarian will say “yes: superexponential growth beats exponential growth”. However, it would be literally impossible for you to make such a decision. If ought implies can, then can’t implies there is no “ought”. You do not (you cannot) have a moral obligation to refuse the genie’s offer.

Notice that in the case of mere agonizing torture, of the kind Alleg, Sendler, and Askew endured, since they were able to push through the suffering, they might plausibly have a moral obligation to do so. There is no argument from ought implies can. The genie thought experiment therefore can’t establish that mere agonizing torture is bad, only (perhaps) that the worst concievable pain is bad.

To add insult to inconceivable injury, though, the genie example does not even support negative utilitarianism. Suppose that this “ought implies can” logic is valid. Then suppose that the genie inflicts exponential suffering on you, and superexponential suffering on the other person. The genie offers you the choice of alleviating your own pain or the other person’s pain. Are you morally obligated to alleviate the other person’s pain? According to negative utilitarianism, you do: superexponential growth of negative feeling beats exponential growth of negative feeling. However, it would be literally impossible for you to make such a decision. Consequently, you do not have a moral obligation to alleviate the other person’s pain. Therefore, negative utilitarianism is false.

Obviously, this is quite silly. No serious form of consequentialism says that, from the set of all actions, even physically impossible actions, we are obligated to take the action with the best consequence. Imagine this argument:

1. It is logically possible that there exist a button which instantly brings about extremely good consequences for ever and ever, better consequences than could be brought about by any other physically possible course of action.

2. Therefore, consequentialism says you ought to press this button.

3. However, it is impossible for anyone to press this button, since it does not exist.

4. Since ought implies can, consequentialism is false.

But no consequentialist believes in premise #2. Consequentialists only argue that, of the actions that are possible for you to take, you ought to take the one which will lead to the best consequences. “Ought implies can” is irrelevant here, since consequentialists must restrict their normativity to possible actions anyway.

So much for a moral proof. Overmuser does raise a suggestive naturalistic point, though:

People have the ability to postpone pleasure indefinitely. This is even a predictor of how successful they will be in life. The marshmallow experiment is so famous that it has become an element of pop culture. People can even consciously decide to stop experiencing pleasure while they are experiencing it, because they have something more important to do. This fact alone should be a very strong indicator that pleasure does not have the kind of self-intimating, foundational value that [hedonic] Utilitarians think it has. On the other hand, people do not have the ability to postpone the alleviation of suffering (provided it is intense enough). Suffering has an additional feature: absolute urgency. Absolute priority.

This is insufficient to establish the claim Overmuser wants, that “suffering is the only self-intimating disvalue.” But it does suggest an interesting asymmetry between pain and pleasure, which might question the foundation of hedonic utilitarianism if true.

Notice, however, that the asymmetry is qualified: people cannot postpone the alleviation of suffering “provided it is intense enough.” People might still might trade merely agonizing pain for much greater amounts of pleasure; the two are not necessarily incommensurable. Taken naïvely, this might suggest a kind of loss aversion curve, where one unit of pain is disvalued more heavily than one unit of pleasure. The problem with this is that the units of pleasure and pain are arbitrary; they are both scalar quantities. You can simply define one “dolor” to be the maximal amount one is willing to suffer for one “hedon.”² The only fundamental asymmetry rests in the claim that:

1. There is some level of pain where it is impossible to choose anything other than its alleviation.

2. For any level of pleasure, it is possible to choose something that will stop the pleasure.

#1 seems plausible; our brains might just shut down at a certain level of agony. Is #2 plausible? The ordinary cases that Overmuser suggests (orgasms, tasty dinners, marshmallows) are pretty easy to refrain from. But maybe we’re just not thinking about the right kind of pleasures.

There are certainly cases where reward-seeking overrides some pretty awful experiences:

• Given a limited window to either eat or self-stimulate reward circuits, rats will starve themselves to near death. (The researchers cut off the experiment before any of them died.)

• A human patient with a neural implant reported erotic sensation whenever she self-stimulated. She continued doing this even as her stress hormones lose and she began to lose her sensory and verbal capabilities.

• Rats will self-administer cocaine even as their health collapses, to the point of death.

However, these are far from conclusive. Just like pain, pleasure can dissociate. There’s the “wanting” (pursuit of reward) and the “liking” (how nice it feels). Block dopamine release in rats, and they won’t be motivated to seek sugar, but they will show signs of enjoyment if it’s fed to them direction. This is liking, but no wanting. Conversely, you can give rats a lever with an absolutely disgusting concentration of salt, and sure enough, they learn to avoid it. But when you deplete the rats’ sodium for the first time in their lives, they race to the pull the lever, without having ever had a good salt taste experience. This is wanting, but no liking. However, contra Scott Alexander₂₀₁₀, it’s a lot harder to demonstrate this in humans, and human drug addiction is a pretty weird phenomenon we still don’t get yet.

My first conclusion is that it’s a pretty mixed bag at this point, and I would not be confident in saying that for any level of pain, there is no level of pleasure that would outweigh it. That’s going to depend on some pretty complex neuroscience we don’t yet have.

But my second conclusion is that I’m not sure how much “you cannot choose otherwise” matters at all. Suppose there were a chip implanted in our brains, such that whenever we experienced sufficiently intense suffering, we “froze,” unable to do anything to alleviate it. Would that make the suffering any less bad? I don’t think so. Similarly, imagine that we juiced up our prefrontal cortices to give us massively increased inhibitory powers over our motor reactions, and were able to (behaviorally) ignore the maximum amount of suffering we can experience. Again, would that make the experience itself any less bad? I don’t think materialists should think so, and phenomenal realists (which includes Overmuser) really shouldn’t think so. I’m just not convinced that what we can in practice choose says that much about what we value.

In conclusion, I think Overmuser’s “disproof” is pretty terrible and rests on a basic confusion about what most normative theories imply, while the remarks on pain/pleasure asymmetry are interesting but inconclusive. I think we are nowhere near having decisive, or even strong, reasons for negative utilitarianism.

1. For some reason, they just say “Utilitarianism,” despite promoting negative utilitarianism. This is like saying consequentialism is false, and only rule consequentialism is true. Rule consequentialism is a form of consequentialism, and negative utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism. To avoid confusion, I will say hedonic utilitarianism to refer to the target of Overmuser’s post, and clarify other forms of utilitarianism by name.

2. Who is willing? According to what preferences and what standard of rationality? Problems like these are part of why I am a preference utilitarian, not a hedonic utilitarian. Unfortunately, this is not an option that Overmuser considers