Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 39: Sadistic Pleasure Is Good Actually!

At least, intrinsically

People often reject hedonism on the basis that hedonism says (falsely, according to critics) that pleasure is good even when derived from a sadistic source (torture say). However, hedonism is able to accommodate the intuition against bad pleasures.  Every pleasure that we think of as a bad pleasure is not conducive to hedonic value generally.  Sadistically torturing people does not generally maximize hedonic value.  

Additionally, this principle has compelling counter-examples.  We can consider a man called Tim.  Tim derives immense satisfaction from watching scenes that appear to depict torture.  Tim would never torture anyone and abhors violence.  In fact, he sometimes feels guilty about his strange desires and donates vast amounts of money to charities.  Tim also makes sure that the content that he watches that depicts people being tortured does not actually involve people being tortured.  Tim spends hours searching for content that looks like people being tortured but has no actual people being tortured.  Additionally, we can suppose that this is the highlight of Tim’s life.  He enjoys it so much that, without it, his life would be miserable.  Despite suffering from clinical depression, Tim finds the experiences so enjoyable that he regards his life as generally good.  It seems in this case, Tim is truly made better off by the joy he derives from this sadistic content.  

However, suppose additionally that, despite Tim’s incredibly careful selection process, Tim is deceived by an evil demon, who manipulates the laws of physics to make people actually be brutally tortured, despite any reasonable observer concluding that no one was truly being tortured. It seems that in this case, while the person who is tortured is made worse off by the torture, Tim is made better off by it.  All else equal, it seems that making Tim enjoy viewing the torture less (assuming he’d view the same amount of torture) is bad.  

Imagine another case of an alien civilization that views the suffering of humans.  This alien civilization starts in a state of vast agony, yet becomes less miserable each time they watch a human suffer.  If they view all human suffering their overall hedonic state drops to zero when it starts off significantly worse than being boiled alive.  Again, it seems like the aliens' sadism is not a bad thing.  

If we think that enjoying the suffering of others is actively bad, independent of the suffering of others, then it would be morally good to make the aliens unable to see suffering.  This is deeply implausible.  

Additionally, if we think that sadistic pleasure is morally bad then if there were 100^100 aliens who derived immense sadistic pleasure from viewing the holocaust, we would have to say that the primary harms of the holocaust came from them bringing the aliens pleasure.  This is implausible.  If this were true then if one could either shut off the screens to make the aliens unable to view the holocaust and derive sadistic pleasure from it or could directly end the holocaust, it would be better to shut off the aliens' screens, letting the holocaust continue.  This is implausible.  

One might object that deriving pleasure from sadism is morally neutral, neither good nor bad.  However, in the scenarios both posited, it seems obvious that the world is better because the aliens enjoy suffering enough to not be as miserable as beings being boiled alive.  If the only way for the aliens to relieve their unfathomable agony was to torture one person this seems justified.  

We can imagine another case of a person, Wyatt, who takes immense satisfaction in eating meat because he knows that the animal suffered.  He feels deeply guilty about this fact, but cannot enjoy eating meat unless he knows that the animal suffered.  Wyatt continues to eat meat, but donates to charities that help animals because he feels guilty.  In this case, it seems that Wyatt enjoying the meat, assuming it won’t cause him to eat any more meat, is not a bad thing.  To the extent that Wyatt enjoys meat because he knows about the suffering, and others enjoy meat that causes enormous suffering, but don’t care whether or not they know about the suffering, it’s hard to see how Wyatt’s meat enjoyment is any worse than any of ours.  Much like there seems to be no morally relevant difference between a person who tortures other because they like when others suffer and one who likes the taste of people after they’ve been tortured, there’s no difference between one who enjoys the suffering of animals that they eat and one who merely enjoys the taste of the animals.  

If Wyatt is morally no different from the rest of people when he eats meat, then either Wyatt’s sadistic meat eating is morally good or the joy that most people get from eating meat is morally neutral.  However, this is deeply implausible.  If meat tasted less good, but people ate the same amount of meat, that would be a worse world.  If sadistic pleasure can be good, then enough sadistic pleasure can outweigh the badness of torture.  

Additionally, there are many cases where people enjoy the suffering of others, which are not found objectionable.  If the parents of a murder victim derive satisfaction from knowing that the murderer is rotting in prison, it wouldn’t be desirable to deprive them of that satisfaction.  

Additionally, we can imagine a world exactly like our own, except humans would never be happy in their lives unless they, upon their sixth birthday, slap someone in the face and revel in the enjoyment.  In this case, all of their enjoyment is coming from the fact that they slapped someone, but it wouldn't be good to condemn everyone to never being happy.  

Additionally, we can imagine a scenario where every person will be given an extra year of happy life by torturing one person.  In this case, their happy life is only existing because of the torture, but this case seems clearly justified.  

There’s the additional problem of determining which pleasures are sadistic. One might conclude that pleasure is vicious if one derives pleasure from the knowledge that some act is immoral.  However, this seems to run into counterexamples.  

 Consider the following cases.  

1. A utilitarian beats up someone who has sexually abused their child--despite believing that doing so is morally wrong.  They derive schadenfreude from doing so.  Part of the schadenfreude they get comes from knowing that they’re doing something morally wrong--treating someone badly the way the person treated their child badly.  

2. A person derives no pleasure from knowing that purchasing child pornography is morally wrong.  They would prefer it if it weren’t morally wrong.  Despite that, they derive pleasure from child pornography.  

This account would seem to say that the first form of pleasure is vicious while the second one is not.  This is implausible.  

One might say that a pleasure is vicious if one derives it from some immoral activity that they know to be immoral.  However, this runs into issues of its own.  For one it is circular.  Suppose that some immoral act like torture gives lots of happiness to lots of people, such that the overall hedonic value in the world increases.  Whether that pleasure is vicious will depend on whether that act is immoral, yet whether the act is immoral will depend on whether the pleasure is vicious.  Thus, this is circular.  Additionally, it can’t account for lots of cases.  

1. Suppose that one derives pleasure from eating meat, but they think eating meat is morally wrong.  This account would say that this pleasure is vicious, and it would be better if they didn’t like eating meat.  This is not plausible.  

2. This also gets the wrong result about the Schadenfreude case given above.  

3. Suppose that one is a utilitarian.  They think it would be morally wrong to go on a vacation instead of donating to charity.  This account would hold that their happiness on the trip would be vicious and either not good or bad.  

4. This would also hold that a person who is employed by some immoral industry (E.G. weapons manufacturing) would have all of their pleasure experienced while on the job be vicious, and thus not good for the world.  

5. Suppose someone steals a pain killer from someone else who they know needs it a bit more.  On this account, unless there’s a strange asymmetry between sadistic pleasure and sadistic pain avoidance, the world would be better if they don’t get much relief from the painkillers.  

This account also runs into problems based on the time in which people find out that particular acts are immoral.  Suppose that someone purchases meat despite knowing it to be immoral, or that one is a kleptomaniac and steals something.  They then become convinced that the act of acquiring the goods -- either the stolen product or the meat -- was immoral.  However, they can’t return them so they decide to use the product or eat the food.  This account would seem to say that their happiness is vicious.  This is implausible.  

Additionally, cases of sadism seem to create an incentive for ignorance.  If an instance of pleasure is only vicious if the people experiencing it derive pleasure from knowing that their acts are bad, that makes them morally better if they know fewer things.  This is implausible--the true morality should not punish knowledge and reward ignorance of the wrongness of one's actions.  

What if one purchases meat and then becomes convinced that the act is immoral.  Would that retroactively make the pleasure they get from the meat vicious--such that it doesn’t make the world better?  

Our anti-sadism intuition comes from the fact that sadism is not conducive to hedonic value.  However, if it were conducive to hedonic value, it would be justified.  In the cases like Schadenfreude, where we derive joy from the suffering of others in ways that make things go best, we don’t find it counterintuitive.  

Additionally, it’s hard to give an account of why sadistic pleasure doesn’t make a person better off.  Positing it just as a brute fact is not satisfactory.  Yet it’s unclear why the causal origin of a pleasure determines whether it benefits someone.  One account may be that it’s bad to derive benefit from something bad.  However, this is clearly false.  If I study the holocaust and use my knowledge of the holocaust to learn important lessons which make both my life and the world better, this clearly wouldn’t be a bad thing.  Thus, the challenge is to provide an account of why sadistic pleasure is bad that doesn’t spill over to other things that are clearly not bad.  

Fletcher (2008, p.467-470) provides a counterexample to the claim that sadistic pleasures are not good.  Suppose that a person derives sadistic pleasure from a pain that is necessary.  For example, suppose that a dentist gives someone a painful surgery that really benefits them, and then gets pleasure from it.  That doesn’t seem objectionable, though it is sadistic.  

We also have a plausible psychological debunking argument of the belief that sadistic pleasure is not good.  As has been noted by many, including Shivers (1998) and Rowley, & Ramasamy (2016) there’s a psychological phenomena known as the horn effect, whereby people tend to group negative traits together.  For example, they assume that because someone is mean to animals, they must be mean to humans as well.  

Given that there’s a psychological bias to hold that negative traits cluster together, even when they don’t really cluster together, even were sadistic pleasures intrinsically good we’d expect to have the belief that they weren’t intrinsically good.  Thus, the fact that sadistic pleasures appear bad is not good evidence that they’re not good, because it’s roughly equally likely on each hypothesis.  

Thus, we have a decisive defeater of the sadistic pleasure’s not being good (or even being bad!) view.  It is both subject to an extremely forceful debunking argument, and it is undercut by many more overlapping, far more forceful intuitions.  It is additionally not possible to give a coherent account of what a sadistic pleasure is, or even why it’s not good.