One woman is entirely insensitive to physical pain and has no palpable negative emotions.
Joanne Cameron experiences suffering mostly as “an abstract thing.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
Categoría: Understanding Sentience
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What does «more suffering than happiness» means?
In Magnus Vinding‘s [1] words [2]:
I think there is a problem with underspecified [in expressions] like “more suffering than happiness” […] For example, talking about “whether suffering or enjoyment is more common” (in this piece [3]) sounds rather descriptive, whereas saying that, or whether, “suffering predominates” (ibid.) will often have evaluative and/or moral connotations. The same is true of a term like welfare: it often has an evaluative/axiological meaning as opposed to a purely descriptive one (see e.g. sec. 1.1.1 here: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92027/3/Mathison_Eric_201811_PhD_thesis.pdf [4]).
Indeed, the question as to “whether suffering predominates” can mean at least three very different things […]
For one, it may refer to a purely descriptive statement: there is a greater quantity of happiness than suffering, by some given measure. (And this, in turn, implies further questions concerning how one indeed measures happiness and suffering, in particular how one measures them against each other, and whether they are even commensurable, not just evaluatively but also in purely descriptive terms, cf. https://foundational-research.org/measuring-happiness-and-suffering/ [5] and https://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss7/18/ [6])
Second, it may mean something along evaluative lines such as “there is more positive value than negative value” in the existing happiness and suffering respectively. And this is a very different claim in that one can claim there is far more happiness than suffering in the world, by some given measure, yet still maintain that the disvalue of the suffering is far greater than the value of the happiness. Indeed, quite a number of philosophers and traditions in the East (cf. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2015/12/Breyer-Axiology-final.pdf [7]) and the West (including Epicurus and Schopenhauer) have defended views according to which the disvalue of suffering dominates that of happiness entirely; for recent defenses of such views, see Gloor: https://foundational-research.org/tranquilism/ [8] and Wolf: https://jwcwolf.public.iastate.edu/Papers/JUPE.HTM [9].
Third, one can think there is far more happiness than suffering in the world, even in evaluative terms, yet still think the suffering carries much greater moral/deontic significance; asymmetries of this kind have in fact been defended by quite a few prominent philosophers, including W. D Ross, cf. sec. 2.5 here: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92027/3/Mathison_Eric_201811_PhD_thesis.pdf [10]
Beyond that, there are also issues concerning intra and inter-personal trade-offs: even if most lives in nature contain far more happiness than suffering (by some assumed measure), this would not mean that the happiness of some beings can ever outweigh the suffering of others, either in evaluative terms or deontic terms. Many ethicists accept intra-personal trade-offs while rejecting inter-personal ones (for instance Richard Ryder and Stevan Harnad, and to some extent Jamie Mayerfeld).
The perhaps most important question to ponder deeply, in my view, is whether we think any amount of happiness can morally outweigh the very worst of suffering. I have argued in the negative: https://magnusvinding.com/2018/09/03/the-principle-of-sympathy-for-intense-suffering/ [11] and so have philosophers Jamie Mayerfeld, Joseph Mendola, Ingemar Hedenius, and Ragnar Ohlsson, among others.
Just thought this was worth pointing out. Notions of “net negative” and “net positive” lives — as pertaining both to single individuals and (especially) to groups — require serious unpacking in terms of their meaning and assumed evaluative and moral implications.
Links and references
[1] https://magnusvinding.com/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/suffering.in.nature/permalink/2727855270577587/
[3] http://www.zachgroff.com/2019/06/how-much-do-wild-animals-suffer.html
[4] https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92027/3/Mathison_Eric_201811_PhD_thesis.pdf
[5] https://foundational-research.org/measuring-happiness-and-suffering/
[6] https://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss7/18/
[7] http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2015/12/Breyer-Axiology-final.pdf
[8] https://foundational-research.org/tranquilism/
[9] https://jwcwolf.public.iastate.edu/Papers/JUPE.HTM
[10] https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92027/3/Mathison_Eric_201811_PhD_thesis.pdf
[11] https://magnusvinding.com/2018/09/03/the-principle-of-sympathy-for-intense-suffering/
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The case of Dax Cowart
«I was burned so severely and in so much pain that I did not want to live even in the early moments following the explosion. A man who heard my shouts for help came running down the road, I asked him for a gun. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see I am a dead man? I am going to die anyway. I need to put myself out of this misery.’ In a very kind and compassionate caring way, he said, ‘I can’t do that.’»
«We might give more weight to the judgments of those who have already been tortured, since their evaluations of the experiences are presumably more accurate. Unfortunately, here too people may forget the severity of their past suffering. This empathy gap often happens to me when I think back on my own past experiences of intense suffering, unable to conjure up feelings of how awful I felt at the time.» (Brian Tomasik)
«Sometimes people who suffer enormously do look back and judge that their suffering wasn’t worth it. Consider the case of Dax Cowart, who suffered so badly that he wished he had been killed, even in retrospect.»
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How to address the problem of sentience?
In the field of philosophical ideas we can not (easily) make predictions, but we can prove and demand that philosophical hypotheses should have:
- Regarding the proposed subject:
- Clarity
- Internal coherence
- Compatibility with the evidence (observations, experiences)
- Explanatory capacity
- Parsimony, in the sense of leaving out accessory or arbitrary elements
- Regarding the author, the creation process, and its context:
- Honesty
- Impartiality
- Skepticism
- Recognize the intention
- Recognize the motivation
- Regarding the proposed subject:
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Asymmetries and compensations between pleasure and pain
There are two very related questions: “Is there a symmetry between suffering and enjoyment?” and “Can suffering be compensated with enjoyment?”
Investigating the way in which we respond to these questions is very relevant, since we may have biases or blindness that are encouraging to make bad decisions, such as the survivorship bias. By better understanding and evaluating suffering and enjoyment we can more easily minimize suffering and maximize enjoyment, as well as compensate for bad experiences, if such a thing were possible.
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Why Does Very Hot Water Sometimes Feel Cold?
Cold receptors primarily react to temperatures ranging from 68 to 86˚F, while warm receptors are activated between 86˚F and 104˚F. At extreme temperatures—below 60˚F and beyond 113˚F—the temperature signal is accompanied by a sensation of pain. Weirdly, researchers have discovered that at temperatures greater than 113˚F, some cold receptors can also fire.
The majority of scientists support the theory that paradoxical cold is a malfunction of the thermoreceptor system. Evidence suggests that pain receptors that respond to potentially harmful heat levels coexist on the same sensory fibers as cold thermoreceptors, says Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist at MIT. So when the nerve fiber sends a signal to the brain, it can sometimes be misinterpreted as a sensation of extreme cold. Paradoxical cold is the “strange operation of a system under unusual stimulation conditions,” she says… Read more