Sadistic Pleasure Is Good For You!
Add it to your daily routine!
Suppose that a person takes pleasure from a very bad source—for example, watching a kitten be stepped on or reading a book by Kant. (Note, watching a kitten read a book by Kant would not be a sadistic pleasure and would instead be very cute). Is this good for them? Lots of people think that the answer is no. They think that pleasure derived from a bad source—sadistic pleasure—is not good for the person who experiences it. If a person experiences sadistic pleasure, not only is that not good morally speaking—it doesn’t even seem good for the person.
I’m inclined to reject this assumption, for reasons I lay out here. I go further and say that not only is sadistic pleasure good for the person who experiences it, it’s good all things considered, at least intrinsically. Of course, sadistic pleasure will often be instrumentally bad—if a person derives pleasure from harming others they will be more likely to harm others in the future. But I’m inclined to think that, if we consider two otherwise identical worlds, physically the same down to the atom, but in one some horrible person derived enjoyment from viewing kitten torture, that would be a better world. But I think there are pretty compelling arguments for sadistic pleasure being good for a person, even if you think it makes a world worse.
The way to see this is the following: imagine that something is bad for a person. Well then, if that person gets a lot of that thing, he gets what he deserves assuming he is sufficiently bad. If Hitler had been tortured for 1 billion years, it would be reasonable to say he got what he deserved. Even those who don’t believe in desert should think that if there is such thing as desert, when really terrible things happen to a person, he gets what he deserves.
So if sadistic pleasure really is bad for a person, then that person getting lots of it would give them what they deserve. But this is obviously not the case. To see this, let’s imagine that Lucy Letby, psychopathic British serial killer of innocent babies, derives lots of sadistic pleasure from her grisly crimes. Suppose that for hours every day, Letby imagines in detail killing people brutally and derives great joy from that. Would anyone say she’d gotten what she deserves?
No, of course not. Getting pleasure from your crimes doesn’t give you what you deserve. But from this we can conclude that sadistic pleasure isn’t bad for a person, or otherwise it could give what they deserve. If someone has horrible things inflicted on them in response to their crimes, it’s fair to say they get what they deserve.
I also just don’t even think our ordinary intuitions are that sadistic pleasure is good. When we think of some psychopath torturing others for his own pleasure, our judgment is not so much that he’s mistaken about what’s good for him. It’s that he’s putting his own interests before others—in egregious ways.
Instead, I think that people who believe sadistic pleasure doesn’t better the world should accommodate it in one of the following ways:
They should say that sadistic pleasure is good for the person who experiences it but is not good for the world. Believers in desert think that there are lots of things like this—Hitler being happy is good for him but bad for the world.
Accept that sadistic pleasure is good for a person, but accommodate the intuition by saying that the people who get sadistic pleasure are bad people. On account of this, they don’t deserve to be made better off. We should oppose Ted Bundy getting sadistic pleasure just as much as we’d oppose his pleasure from enjoying an ice cream cone right after murdering several people.
Of course, I find the notion that things can be good for people without being good to be unintuitive, and reject that there is such thing as desert, for reasons I’ve described at great length. But these are probably the best ways to go for those opposed to desert.
The sadistic pleasure intuition also seems like a good target for debunking. Psychologically, we are reticent to say that bad things are in some way good. Our linguistic intuitions regard sentences like “the holocaust caused some good,” as horrifying, even though they’re obviously true (the holocaust caused new people to be born by changing when people had sex, which led to some new people who had good lives, so t caused at least some good thing, even though it was, of course, all things considered deeply horrible!). Given that, it’s no surprise that we are hesitant to label horrible things like the torture of other people as having good effects, because it seems like focusing on the slight upsides neglects the horrible extent of the tragedy. And our desert intuitions also no doubt affect our sadistic pleasure intuitions.
So three cheers for sadistic pleasure!
Good post!
"I’m inclined to think that, if we consider two otherwise identical worlds, physically the same down to the atom, but in one some horrible person derived enjoyment from viewing kitten torture, that would be a better world. "
I totally agree. I have also tried to argue for this point in another context. Perhaps you will find my strategy worth considering. I quote below the relevant passage from my manuscript.
Excerpt from my manuscript:
" [...] The Pleased Rapist:
Imagine two hypothetical worlds w1 and w2 that are identical in all respects except that…
in w1, a person, say, Pete, rapes an innocent child and takes pleasure in doing so, while
in w2, Pete rapes that child without taking pleasure in doing so.
Our everyday intuition strongly suggests that w2 is the ‘better’ world, it is more desirable than w1. After all, raping is a moral monstrosity; nobody who performs such an action should be ‘rewarded’ by it in any sense.
But again, I think that from an impartial, objective point of view, focussing solely on the fact that in w1, P takes pleasure in raping the child, while in w2, the person does not, we should concede that w1 is more desirable than w2, even though there is a sense in which it is manifestly unjust that someone should suffer to the benefit of a rapist. Let us imagine that either w1 or w2 is the actual world, there is no third possibility. Thus, let us imagine that it is inevitable that this act of rape takes place. Again, all other things unconsidered, I think it would be desirable that w1 turns out to be the actual world. For in a world in which such things inevitably happen without anyone ‘benefitting’ from it, the victims, as it were, suffer entirely in vain.
We are more prepared to accept this line of reasoning in cases that appear less extreme, although they are, in my view, perfectly analogous in every relevant respect. Imagine a pig was slaughtered especially for me so I could have a delicious meal, and suppose that the slaughter involved much suffering for the pig. All other things unconsidered, should I refrain from eating that meal because of the suffering that was involved in the slaughter? I suppose that in such a case, many people would be prepared to say that this would not be the right thing to do; indeed, I think that most of them would even be willing to say – rightly, in my view – that eating that meal and enjoying it as much as possible is the more desirable option, all other things unconsidered.
However, if you are convinced in this case, then, I believe, you should also be convinced in the case of the Pleased Rapist. For I think that these two cases are similar in every relevant respect. [...]"
It just seems too implausible to me. Imagine that someone makes child pornography and uploads it. The child is very upset by people watching her exploitation, but millions of pedophiles experience pleasure watching it. Your analysis seems to suggest the world in which the CP remains up is actually better than the world in which it is taken down, because the combined joy of all the pedophiles outweighs the distress of one child, all else being equal. That's just too much of a bullet to bite and makes me disbelieve utilitarianism. Of course, the utilitarian can just say that it's bad because it has the consequence of encouraging more pedophilia, or upsetting other people, but it seems to me that that is not why it's bad. You could come up with a situation where those consequences are not likely or possible and it would still seem obviously wrong to me.