"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. [...]"
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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. [...]"
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.)