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I don't well-being is as important as Sam Harris, Dawkins, and other prominent Atheist speakers make it out to be. I do think it's important to morality, but I think well-being is only valuable if it does not detract from functionality.

I think about it in this way: I wouldn't sacrifice my hands and feet to be free of extreme pain. Even one hand might be too much of a sacrifice. Likewise, I'd find a blissful (that is to say I'd be rendered incapable of emotional or physical suffering) existence as a sentient potato horrifying in comparison to living a near-normal life where I only had to have my skin peeled off and regrown every day I lived.

In his book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris represents his choice of well-being as a moral foundation with three imagined universes: the first is a universe where conscious beings exist in a state of constant extreme suffering, the second is a universe of non-sentient rocks, and the third is a universe where conscious beings exist and are all free from suffering. He ranks these universes in this order as clearly following from least desirable to most desirable.

As far as I understand his reasoning, I do not agree with his assessment. If these conscious beings do or will have any opportunity of functionality in their respective universes, then I would rate the first as being higher in desirability than the second. The first universe would still be definitively lesser than the third universe, as extreme suffering is an undesirable thing. Furthermore, I'd rank the third universe as very close to the second if the beings there had no functionality, as well-being is meaningless without functionality. In this way a version of the first universe could be more desirable than a version of the third, if the beings of the first had functionality while the beings of the third had none.

My thoughts on this are not complete, and I am no great scholar of ethics, so I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Sheitelhau 5 Apr 26
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4 comments

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I think maybe well-being is being conflated with a lack of pain? Or pain with suffering? If you don’t have hands, your well-being would also diminish. Your assessment of pain being preferable to not having hands seems to me to be an assessment of the value your hands have to...your well-being, functionality being important to it, which it is for all people. I think, if I’m understanding your position, my response would be that functionality is integral to well-being, so they can’t really be pitted against each other.

I see where he’s setting himself up to be misunderstood with some things because he is in some instances conflating those things as well, and I guess it comes down to what your values and abilities are and I also would consider Bright Tyger’s argument as well. I’ve been in some pretty extreme amounts of pain, and at least for me, I’d rather be non-functioning.

But if you feel you could handle the pain, then you would simply be deriving your well-being from your functionality despite your suffering. Well-being, I think, is a pretty solid way of defining what we aim at with our morals though our assessments are sometimes way off.

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Here's my take on your first point, as a nurse. You don't really know what you'd do if you were in extreme pain. You might think you understand but few people have the correct perspective to actually know. I deal with diabetics who have been chronically sick for years. I've seen dozens and dozens of limbs get amputated d/t wounds and poor healing. I've probably watched about half of those people become resistant to the thought of losing a limb initially but I've never watched one patient when confronted with their own mortality choose to keep the limb and die. As we age we will lose functionality. It's inevitable.

I have been thinking about it, and it does seem unreasonable to assume that a person could function to any great extent under a great enough pain.

However, insofar as the choice between loosing a limb or dying, I don't think my presented reasoning lead to losing the limb. Dying would be the ultimate loss of functionality, so losing the limb would be minor in comparison. In a relative sense, loosing the limb would be to choose suffering, while keeping it would be to choose loss of functionality through death.

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Without expanding on what you mean by functionality, I can’t see why the 3rd and 2nd would be so close. Why is functionality so important?

Also, I think you mistyped here:

“I would rate the first as being higher in desirability than the second.”

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I think you misunderstand SH’s arguments. His position is that at some point enough suffering makes life not worth living regardless of functionality or purpose. I can accept this view because it’s a given that suffering at some point is totally disabling and “functionality-destroying.” If you accept this, you must then go on to accept that the main purpose of life is to preserve itself in such a way that it can formulate and pursue other “functionalities and purposes.” While you agree that functionality or purpose is the highest value, unlike SH you don’t state what that means. Again, SH seems to say that there is a purpose, and this purpose is to foster conditions under which other purposes can be formulated and accomplished. This is a necessary condition to being able to do anything else. Pain is bad. I’m not talking about workout pain, which is beneficial. I’m saying that mind-numbing, excruciating pain such as torture is without baby question bad, and I can’t think of any circumstances under which such pain may be good.

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