"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.
I'd bite the bullet if we really stipulate away all of many reasons why this would be terrible on hedonistic utilitarianism (e.g. making pedophiles more likely to assault others in the future, creating a lucrative market for child abuse, etc).
But your argument relies crucially on deeply controversial claims about aggregation and sadistic pleasure. You could reject it by saying:
1) slight amounts of sadistic pleasure can't add up to being as bad as a torture. You might assert that extreme suffering can't be counterbalanced by any amounts of mild pleasure.
2) sadistic pleasure is good for a person but not morally good.
Crucially, unless you accept option 1, you have the opposite problem, where the pleasure to the pedophiles is worse than the abuse of the person. But the problem is there are just knockdown arguments against 1--see Norcross's paper headaches vs human lives.
So I think if we reject 1 then we'll think this intuition pump relies on a crucially flawed intuition--namely, that aggregationism is false. If we accept 1, then we don't have to bite the bullet.
I'm glad you admit that is a bullet you have to bite, but I just can't imagine a more clear and uncontroversial position than "No amount of joy from pedophiles would justify raping children and disseminating the footage." I just don't think there's any premise in support of utilitarianism that is more plausible than that.
I'm not sure what the point is you're missing with aggregationism. I think maybe there's a double negative I missed. You do believe that a certain amount of sadistic joy can override any amount of harm done to any person, right? That's what I'm rejecting. I understand there are issues with rejecting that within the context of utilitarianism and consequentialism more broadly, but that's why I would say that those are just bad frameworks.
Well, I explain in this article why I don't think these are the most reliable intuitions--they're tinged with emotional cofounders, for instance https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-argument-against-deontology. When I really concretely imagine it, and we stipulate that the joy is really greater, such that if you lived everyone's life and valued their interests equally, you'd give joy to the pedophiles, it stops seeming unintuitive. I think our intuitions about this case is little more than extrapolating the trend in ordinary cases "abuse of children for sexual pleasure is bad."
The point is that if you don't think that lots of small goods can't outweigh an evil, you can accept that sadistic pleasure is good and that it still can't justify torture.
I have an article where I defend the result that you find objectionable
I don't think "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" they mean bad as harm. They mean corrupting, it makes you a worse person, not a harmed person. Which is an empirical question
For clarity I will separate the statement into two interpretations, "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" can be read as "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you"(your interpretation) or "sadistic pleasure makes you a worse person"(my interpretation). If you dispute that "bad for you" can colloquially be read as "makes you a worse person" I will happily provide examples.
The *one* person colorably offering "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" as of writing this post is Vikram. Mathias agrees with you and Polenta is not offering an argument. However given their previous statement "If I took an act that caused -1 overall utility by taking away 2 utility from you and giving one to me, then it strikes..." their statement "continue doing your crimes, that is bad for you" read in context makes more sense with 'bad' read as 'makes you a worse person' not 'harm'.
They are clearly envisioning an act that, from an objective utilitarian standpoint, unambiguously benefits the perpetrator and harms the victim. Making it nonsensical to then claim the act is 'harmful' to the perpetrator.
If you misunderstood that comment as a person adhering to the "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" intuition I doubt your general claim that it is 'manifestly not what people mean'.
If my computer has not loaded comments or even if someone later comments something unambiguously arguing that "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" and you present it to me I will concede that it is a fairly common position.
I do not dispute an extreme minority of people may hold this position, particularly people with a religious understand of morality. However "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" is a profoundly silly statement and I would be inclined to understand the average person claiming "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" to be claiming it makes you a worse person
I think that the view that sadistic pleasure is harmful for you is a pretty widely believed view. It's believed by e.g. Richard Chappell, I think Playford was the guy's name who wrote a paper arguing for that, and a whole bunch of other people.
I find his definition of welfare to be extremely contrived but given the paper ends with "virtuous pleasure ... is intrinsically good. this distinguishes it from evil pleasure. Thus we can conclude the evil pleasure is not good for us" I concede the view is more wide spread than I initially imagined, although not as widespread as you seem to think. I don't know much about Playford but given he is a lecturer in religious studies I put him in the category of "people with a religious understand of morality" that I allowed for.
Having a clearer idea of what you are arguing against significantly improved my understanding of what your arguments were trying to show.
I'm not sure I share the intuition about the serial killer descending into their own thoughts. Suppose Todd's greatest desire in life is to sit alone in a dark room and burn himself with matches. It seems that even if he genuinely enjoys this activity, his friends and relatives would be justified in pitying him: he is clearly not living a flourishing life, regardless of how much he enjoys it. If Todd were to commit arson, and his punishment were simply to be left alone in this state, I would almost be inclined to view that as cruel.
"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."
Is there a missing hypothesis here? You seem to be saying that if a person gets a lot of a thing that is bad for him, 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.
Does any serious academic use this conception of retributive punishment? I am inclined to believe you're inventing a big strawman here.
> “the holocaust was in some way good,” as horrifying, even though they’re obviously true
If I took an act that caused -1 overall utility by taking away 2 utility from you and giving one to me, then it strikes me as dubious that one can say the act was in "some way good". That phrasing seems more to apply to actions that we very much don't know the good/bad of or which were good and bad in ways that cannot easily be compared. This is certainly not an "obviously" true statement.
What strawman am I inventing. Can you think of any other case where you experience an arbitrarily large amount of a bad thing for a finite crime and don't get what you deserve.
I've changed the wording of the second, though I'd dispute your claim, but no need to haggle over the semantics.
That is the intuition that I dispute in this article!
I also don't think most people think that allowing to continue crimes is bad for you. If you benefit from your crimes materially for instance, people think they're morally bad but good for you.
As usual the terms themselves fascinate me -- I'm not even sure that such a thing as sadistic pleasure actually exists. There are people in the world who, for instance, enjoy signaling that they enjoy eating animals that were tortured (in real life I've heard someone say this about eating dogs) but I'm not sure that these people actually derive pleasure from the acts themselves. They might claim they do, but must I believe them? I don't even believe ordinary surveys of subjective phenomena, and suspect most people are crassly dishonest with themselves and others.
On the flip side, most of what we call 'evil' in others is just in/out-group distinctions. Some evil out-group monster kills our in-group members because he is sadistic, our virtuous in-group members kill out-group monsters because they are heroes. It's a verb that conjugates.
This just seems like another example of a situation where you're trying to fit common-sense moral judgments into a utilitarian framework that they don't originate from. I doubt that most people who think sadistic joy is bad interpret that sentiment as meaning it's bad *for the person experiencing the sadistic joy.* They might think it is, in fact, bad for them too, but that's likely a derivative harm. Most importantly, it's just bad, period. You might have a moral framework that doesn't admit the concept of something being bad, period, but I would say most people self-evidently do and attempting to "translate" that sense of inherent badness into a statement about harm accruing to someone somewhere is always going to end up misrepresenting their sentiment.
Just personally, when I say that sadistic joy is bad, I mean something like: The fact that an agent will experience sadistic joy from some action counts *against* that action being performed, and any evaluation of a situation, act, or agent ought to be lessened by the presence of sadistic joy. I'm open to the idea that sadistic joy is inherently harmful even to the one who indulges it, but that's posterior to my view that sadistic joy is bad. It can be "good for" an individual, in the sense that it makes them happy, but it's not a good act, or something a good person does. So it's a bit of a mixture of 1 and 2 at the end.
A comparison might be: You could have an oak tree that's growing on a plain with some toxic sludge five feet below ground. An oak tree that grows on that plain will, as a matter of contingent fact, get some benefit for itself if its roots are stunted and only grow five feet deep, but that doesn't mean it has good roots or that a good oak tree will grow roots like that. In this case, the tree just "benefits" from growing badly; the bad roots are good "for the tree" but they aren't a good thing "for the tree to do." (Obviously we don't care about trees growing badly, so we might not care about this, but we do care about people acting badly, and the same sort of analysis applies.)
//This just seems like another example of a situation where you're trying to fit common-sense moral judgments into a utilitarian framework that they don't originate from. I doubt that most people who think sadistic joy is bad interpret that sentiment as meaning it's/// bad *for the person experiencing the sadistic joy.* They might think it is, in fact, bad for them too, but that's likely a derivative harm.//
But that is literally all I was arguing against here. I was just arguing that it's good for the person. At no point did I argue that it's good overall in this essay.
Yeah, sorry, my reply was unclear - I guess what I'm trying to say is that "bad for the person" is an ambiguous statement depending on the larger moral framework you have. I think you're right that we shouldn't claim sadistic joy automatically harms the person enjoying it like they would be harmed by being hit by a car or something like that. But if you have a conception of ethics that has a broader set of concerns beyond just pleasure and pain, then presumably sadistic joy can be "bad for someone" in the sense that indulging that joy represents a failure to live like they ought to live or forecloses on some other valuable quality they'd be better by having. That's what I mean when I say "it's just bad, period" - not just that it's bad in some ultimate sense as a singular act, but also that it's the sort of thing someone's life is made worse by *as a life.*
Like, I might say that cheating in a game is bad "for a chess player." That assertion can be read as a claim that cheating in a game will actually, practically harm a chess player (which is not always true). It can also be read as a claim that the act of cheating is just inherently bad. But there's also a meaningful "middle ground" sense, imo, where you're saying that cheating in a game is a failure to do what a chess player ought to do - it's bad for the chess player *as* a chess player. And that sort of middle ground between a purely first-person and purely third-person account is what most consequentialist frameworks tend to miss, imo. But I do agree with you that if someone is literally asserting that sadistic joy is bad "for someone" in the way a stubbed toe is bad "for someone," then I agree.
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. [...]"
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree.
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.
I'd bite the bullet if we really stipulate away all of many reasons why this would be terrible on hedonistic utilitarianism (e.g. making pedophiles more likely to assault others in the future, creating a lucrative market for child abuse, etc).
But your argument relies crucially on deeply controversial claims about aggregation and sadistic pleasure. You could reject it by saying:
1) slight amounts of sadistic pleasure can't add up to being as bad as a torture. You might assert that extreme suffering can't be counterbalanced by any amounts of mild pleasure.
2) sadistic pleasure is good for a person but not morally good.
Crucially, unless you accept option 1, you have the opposite problem, where the pleasure to the pedophiles is worse than the abuse of the person. But the problem is there are just knockdown arguments against 1--see Norcross's paper headaches vs human lives.
So I think if we reject 1 then we'll think this intuition pump relies on a crucially flawed intuition--namely, that aggregationism is false. If we accept 1, then we don't have to bite the bullet.
I'm glad you admit that is a bullet you have to bite, but I just can't imagine a more clear and uncontroversial position than "No amount of joy from pedophiles would justify raping children and disseminating the footage." I just don't think there's any premise in support of utilitarianism that is more plausible than that.
I'm not sure what the point is you're missing with aggregationism. I think maybe there's a double negative I missed. You do believe that a certain amount of sadistic joy can override any amount of harm done to any person, right? That's what I'm rejecting. I understand there are issues with rejecting that within the context of utilitarianism and consequentialism more broadly, but that's why I would say that those are just bad frameworks.
Well, I explain in this article why I don't think these are the most reliable intuitions--they're tinged with emotional cofounders, for instance https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-argument-against-deontology. When I really concretely imagine it, and we stipulate that the joy is really greater, such that if you lived everyone's life and valued their interests equally, you'd give joy to the pedophiles, it stops seeming unintuitive. I think our intuitions about this case is little more than extrapolating the trend in ordinary cases "abuse of children for sexual pleasure is bad."
The point is that if you don't think that lots of small goods can't outweigh an evil, you can accept that sadistic pleasure is good and that it still can't justify torture.
I have an article where I defend the result that you find objectionable
https://benthams.substack.com/p/contra-huemer-on-utilitarianism-part-f5f
Also see the article I link to here in which I defend sadistic pleasure.
I don't think "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" they mean bad as harm. They mean corrupting, it makes you a worse person, not a harmed person. Which is an empirical question
That is manifestly not what many people mean, including several in this comment section.
For clarity I will separate the statement into two interpretations, "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" can be read as "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you"(your interpretation) or "sadistic pleasure makes you a worse person"(my interpretation). If you dispute that "bad for you" can colloquially be read as "makes you a worse person" I will happily provide examples.
The *one* person colorably offering "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" as of writing this post is Vikram. Mathias agrees with you and Polenta is not offering an argument. However given their previous statement "If I took an act that caused -1 overall utility by taking away 2 utility from you and giving one to me, then it strikes..." their statement "continue doing your crimes, that is bad for you" read in context makes more sense with 'bad' read as 'makes you a worse person' not 'harm'.
They are clearly envisioning an act that, from an objective utilitarian standpoint, unambiguously benefits the perpetrator and harms the victim. Making it nonsensical to then claim the act is 'harmful' to the perpetrator.
If you misunderstood that comment as a person adhering to the "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" intuition I doubt your general claim that it is 'manifestly not what people mean'.
If my computer has not loaded comments or even if someone later comments something unambiguously arguing that "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" and you present it to me I will concede that it is a fairly common position.
I do not dispute an extreme minority of people may hold this position, particularly people with a religious understand of morality. However "sadistic pleasure is harmful to you" is a profoundly silly statement and I would be inclined to understand the average person claiming "sadistic pleasure is bad for you" to be claiming it makes you a worse person
I think that the view that sadistic pleasure is harmful for you is a pretty widely believed view. It's believed by e.g. Richard Chappell, I think Playford was the guy's name who wrote a paper arguing for that, and a whole bunch of other people.
Are you referring to this paper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329150907_No_It_Isn%27t_A_Response_to_Law_on_Evil_Pleasure?
I find his definition of welfare to be extremely contrived but given the paper ends with "virtuous pleasure ... is intrinsically good. this distinguishes it from evil pleasure. Thus we can conclude the evil pleasure is not good for us" I concede the view is more wide spread than I initially imagined, although not as widespread as you seem to think. I don't know much about Playford but given he is a lecturer in religious studies I put him in the category of "people with a religious understand of morality" that I allowed for.
Having a clearer idea of what you are arguing against significantly improved my understanding of what your arguments were trying to show.
I'm not sure I share the intuition about the serial killer descending into their own thoughts. Suppose Todd's greatest desire in life is to sit alone in a dark room and burn himself with matches. It seems that even if he genuinely enjoys this activity, his friends and relatives would be justified in pitying him: he is clearly not living a flourishing life, regardless of how much he enjoys it. If Todd were to commit arson, and his punishment were simply to be left alone in this state, I would almost be inclined to view that as cruel.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wdym descending into their own thoughts?
"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."
Is there a missing hypothesis here? You seem to be saying that if a person gets a lot of a thing that is bad for him, he gets what he deserves.
Yes, sorry, fixed
I think one should add: "Imagine that something is bad for a BAD person. ...".
Yes
> So if sadistic pleasure really is bad for a person, then that person getting lots of it would give them what they deserve.
Does any serious academic use this conception of retributive punishment? I am inclined to believe you're inventing a big strawman here.
> “the holocaust was in some way good,” as horrifying, even though they’re obviously true
If I took an act that caused -1 overall utility by taking away 2 utility from you and giving one to me, then it strikes me as dubious that one can say the act was in "some way good". That phrasing seems more to apply to actions that we very much don't know the good/bad of or which were good and bad in ways that cannot easily be compared. This is certainly not an "obviously" true statement.
What strawman am I inventing. Can you think of any other case where you experience an arbitrarily large amount of a bad thing for a finite crime and don't get what you deserve.
I've changed the wording of the second, though I'd dispute your claim, but no need to haggle over the semantics.
Certainly. If you are allowed to continue doing your crimes, that is bad for you and yet not what you deserve.
That is the intuition that I dispute in this article!
I also don't think most people think that allowing to continue crimes is bad for you. If you benefit from your crimes materially for instance, people think they're morally bad but good for you.
As usual the terms themselves fascinate me -- I'm not even sure that such a thing as sadistic pleasure actually exists. There are people in the world who, for instance, enjoy signaling that they enjoy eating animals that were tortured (in real life I've heard someone say this about eating dogs) but I'm not sure that these people actually derive pleasure from the acts themselves. They might claim they do, but must I believe them? I don't even believe ordinary surveys of subjective phenomena, and suspect most people are crassly dishonest with themselves and others.
On the flip side, most of what we call 'evil' in others is just in/out-group distinctions. Some evil out-group monster kills our in-group members because he is sadistic, our virtuous in-group members kill out-group monsters because they are heroes. It's a verb that conjugates.
This just seems like another example of a situation where you're trying to fit common-sense moral judgments into a utilitarian framework that they don't originate from. I doubt that most people who think sadistic joy is bad interpret that sentiment as meaning it's bad *for the person experiencing the sadistic joy.* They might think it is, in fact, bad for them too, but that's likely a derivative harm. Most importantly, it's just bad, period. You might have a moral framework that doesn't admit the concept of something being bad, period, but I would say most people self-evidently do and attempting to "translate" that sense of inherent badness into a statement about harm accruing to someone somewhere is always going to end up misrepresenting their sentiment.
Just personally, when I say that sadistic joy is bad, I mean something like: The fact that an agent will experience sadistic joy from some action counts *against* that action being performed, and any evaluation of a situation, act, or agent ought to be lessened by the presence of sadistic joy. I'm open to the idea that sadistic joy is inherently harmful even to the one who indulges it, but that's posterior to my view that sadistic joy is bad. It can be "good for" an individual, in the sense that it makes them happy, but it's not a good act, or something a good person does. So it's a bit of a mixture of 1 and 2 at the end.
A comparison might be: You could have an oak tree that's growing on a plain with some toxic sludge five feet below ground. An oak tree that grows on that plain will, as a matter of contingent fact, get some benefit for itself if its roots are stunted and only grow five feet deep, but that doesn't mean it has good roots or that a good oak tree will grow roots like that. In this case, the tree just "benefits" from growing badly; the bad roots are good "for the tree" but they aren't a good thing "for the tree to do." (Obviously we don't care about trees growing badly, so we might not care about this, but we do care about people acting badly, and the same sort of analysis applies.)
//This just seems like another example of a situation where you're trying to fit common-sense moral judgments into a utilitarian framework that they don't originate from. I doubt that most people who think sadistic joy is bad interpret that sentiment as meaning it's/// bad *for the person experiencing the sadistic joy.* They might think it is, in fact, bad for them too, but that's likely a derivative harm.//
But that is literally all I was arguing against here. I was just arguing that it's good for the person. At no point did I argue that it's good overall in this essay.
Yeah, sorry, my reply was unclear - I guess what I'm trying to say is that "bad for the person" is an ambiguous statement depending on the larger moral framework you have. I think you're right that we shouldn't claim sadistic joy automatically harms the person enjoying it like they would be harmed by being hit by a car or something like that. But if you have a conception of ethics that has a broader set of concerns beyond just pleasure and pain, then presumably sadistic joy can be "bad for someone" in the sense that indulging that joy represents a failure to live like they ought to live or forecloses on some other valuable quality they'd be better by having. That's what I mean when I say "it's just bad, period" - not just that it's bad in some ultimate sense as a singular act, but also that it's the sort of thing someone's life is made worse by *as a life.*
Like, I might say that cheating in a game is bad "for a chess player." That assertion can be read as a claim that cheating in a game will actually, practically harm a chess player (which is not always true). It can also be read as a claim that the act of cheating is just inherently bad. But there's also a meaningful "middle ground" sense, imo, where you're saying that cheating in a game is a failure to do what a chess player ought to do - it's bad for the chess player *as* a chess player. And that sort of middle ground between a purely first-person and purely third-person account is what most consequentialist frameworks tend to miss, imo. But I do agree with you that if someone is literally asserting that sadistic joy is bad "for someone" in the way a stubbed toe is bad "for someone," then I agree.