Sure there is a small chance, but the question is: what can we do about it and will the opportunity cost be justifiable? And for the same reason that Pascal's Wager fails, we can't just arbitrarily say "doing this may reduce suffering" and think it justifies the action, since the reversal "doing this may increase suffering" plausibly offsets it.
The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it ignores reversed scenarios that would offset it: e.g. there could as well be a god that would punish you for believing in God without having good evidence.
I don't think this would be applicable to our scenario. Whether we choose to help the human or the animals, there will always be uncertainty about the (long-term) effects of our intervention, but the intervention would ideally be researched well enough for us to have confidence that its expected value is robustly positive.
Let's say you faced a situation where you could either (a) improve the welfare of 1 human, or (b) potentially improve (conditional on sentience), to the same extent as the human, the welfare of X animals which you currently believe are not sentient.
Does your epistemology imply that no matter how large X was, you would never choose (b) until you found a "rational reason to drop your views"? But you admit there is a possibility that you will find such a reason in the future, including the possibility that credences are a superior way of representing beliefs?
Consider trade-offs between suffering of medium and extreme severity, where medium severity could be described as hurtful or disabling. It seems hard to defend that no duration of medium suffering could ever outweigh a short duration of extreme suffering. This is not a matter of downplaying the extreme suffering for its short duration, but rather of appreciating the magnitude of an eternity of medium suffering. (I think the idea of eternity really helps in imagining what is at stake when one assumes lexicality.)
It also seems a priori implausible that having any particular experience could somehow reveal information about it being lexically superior to other experiences. Experiencing extreme suffering can tell us that its quality is extremely bad, but this insight is duration-insensitive. Filling the entire universe with people experiencing medium suffering forever seems to be decidedly worse than a single person experiencing extreme suffering for a few hours.
So if one deems medium suffering offsetable by pleasure, then extreme suffering will be offsetable as well, assuming transitivity.
We are mostly in agreement, though I don't quite understand what you meant by:
These seem to be examples where maximizing hedonistic utility functions leads to bad things happening, because they are.
If suffering and pleasure are incommensurable, in what way are such outcomes bad?
I would also be interested in your response to the argument that suffering is inherently urgent, while pleasure does not have this quality. Imagine you are incapable of suffering, and you are currently experiencing pleasure. One could say that you would be indifferent to the pleasure being taken away from you (or being increased to a higher level). Now imagine that you are instead incapable of experiencing pleasure, and you are currently suffering. In this case it would arguably be very clear to you that reducing suffering is important.
What I meant is that the disvalue of suffering becomes evident at the moment of experiencing it. Once you know what disvalue is, the next step is figuring out who can experience this disvalue. Given that you and I e.g. have a very similar nervous system, and that we behave similarly in response to noxious stimuli, my subjective probability that you are capable of suffering will be much higher than the probability that a rock can suffer.
I don't think I properly understand your position. You are not sure that you are currently having an experience? Because if you are having an experience, then the experience necessarily exists, otherwise you can't be having it.
When you say "what is good for us", could it be translated as "what we are attached to"? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.
In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I don't mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.
So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.
When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.
If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about. I could just go chop my arm off and it wouldn't matter. The fact that I wouldn't want to do this would be irrelevant, because the wanting wouldn't by itself translate into any value. "I" am just a flow or sequence of experiences, and wanting is just a kind of experience with no intrinsic value.
The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.
Sure there is a small chance, but the question is: what can we do about it and will the opportunity cost be justifiable? And for the same reason that Pascal's Wager fails, we can't just arbitrarily say "doing this may reduce suffering" and think it justifies the action, since the reversal "doing this may increase suffering" plausibly offsets it.
The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it ignores reversed scenarios that would offset it: e.g. there could as well be a god that would punish you for believing in God without having good evidence.
I don't think this would be applicable to our scenario. Whether we choose to help the human or the animals, there will always be uncertainty about the (long-term) effects of our intervention, but the intervention would ideally be researched well enough for us to have confidence that its expected value is robustly positive.
Let's say you faced a situation where you could either (a) improve the welfare of 1 human, or (b) potentially improve (conditional on sentience), to the same extent as the human, the welfare of X animals which you currently believe are not sentient.
Does your epistemology imply that no matter how large X was, you would never choose (b) until you found a "rational reason to drop your views"? But you admit there is a possibility that you will find such a reason in the future, including the possibility that credences are a superior way of representing beliefs?
Consider trade-offs between suffering of medium and extreme severity, where medium severity could be described as hurtful or disabling. It seems hard to defend that no duration of medium suffering could ever outweigh a short duration of extreme suffering. This is not a matter of downplaying the extreme suffering for its short duration, but rather of appreciating the magnitude of an eternity of medium suffering. (I think the idea of eternity really helps in imagining what is at stake when one assumes lexicality.)
It also seems a priori implausible that having any particular experience could somehow reveal information about it being lexically superior to other experiences. Experiencing extreme suffering can tell us that its quality is extremely bad, but this insight is duration-insensitive. Filling the entire universe with people experiencing medium suffering forever seems to be decidedly worse than a single person experiencing extreme suffering for a few hours.
So if one deems medium suffering offsetable by pleasure, then extreme suffering will be offsetable as well, assuming transitivity.
Sardines and anchovies seem to be high in PCBs. Did you come across any research that stated otherwise?
We are mostly in agreement, though I don't quite understand what you meant by:
If suffering and pleasure are incommensurable, in what way are such outcomes bad?
I would also be interested in your response to the argument that suffering is inherently urgent, while pleasure does not have this quality. Imagine you are incapable of suffering, and you are currently experiencing pleasure. One could say that you would be indifferent to the pleasure being taken away from you (or being increased to a higher level). Now imagine that you are instead incapable of experiencing pleasure, and you are currently suffering. In this case it would arguably be very clear to you that reducing suffering is important.
What I meant is that the disvalue of suffering becomes evident at the moment of experiencing it. Once you know what disvalue is, the next step is figuring out who can experience this disvalue. Given that you and I e.g. have a very similar nervous system, and that we behave similarly in response to noxious stimuli, my subjective probability that you are capable of suffering will be much higher than the probability that a rock can suffer.
I don't think I properly understand your position. You are not sure that you are currently having an experience? Because if you are having an experience, then the experience necessarily exists, otherwise you can't be having it.
When you say "what is good for us", could it be translated as "what we are attached to"? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.
In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I don't mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.
So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.
When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.
If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about. I could just go chop my arm off and it wouldn't matter. The fact that I wouldn't want to do this would be irrelevant, because the wanting wouldn't by itself translate into any value. "I" am just a flow or sequence of experiences, and wanting is just a kind of experience with no intrinsic value.
The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.