Many of these were sent to me by my good friend Tom (Aussie Tom, not fish Tom).

From Magnus Vinding’s Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications:

“An adequate theory of value should be as true in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as in the philosopher’s study.” - David Pearce

On the comparison between acts of commission vs acts of omission:

“… our primary aim is to create ethically optimal outcomes rather than to gain approval from our peers…”

“… anti-hurt views consider most of the world to be perfect.”

This is an encouraging thought!

In the context of the Omelas story/thought experiment:

“… the creation of happiness is comparatively frivolous and unnecessary…”

“Thus, in the real world, any large amount of intense suffering is likely to also include unendurable suffering in particular, and therefore, regardless of whether we think some unendurable suffering is worse than any amount of endurable suffering, the only reasonable thing to do in practice is to avoid getting near the abyss altogether.”

This is it. A highly practical view.

“And while it is true that this principle has the implication that it would have been better if the world had never existed, I think the fault here is to be found in the world, not the principle.”

“Something that may help motivate us to take this principle seriously is to ask, quite simply, why we would suppose it to be otherwise. Why should we believe that the most extreme forms of suffering can somehow be outweighed or counterbalanced by something else?”

“… I think their truth can ultimately only be verified through direct experience. That is, the claims I am making here are really claims about the properties of conscious experience as felt directly, and such claims cannot be definitively confirmed in any other way than through direct conscious experience itself… The point is just that these arguments can never provide anything close to the forcibly compelling justification that direct experience can.”

On the question of whether the normative force applies to everyone, or only the person actually experiencing the intense suffering:

“One’s own epistemological limitations don’t deserve elevation into a metaphysical principle of Nature.” - David Pearce

Mic drop!!!

“… a moral hypothesis that seeks to track reality as accurately as possible with inescapably limited and imprecise concepts.”

“There is no single, simple answer to the question of how we can best reduce suffering.”

Including my hot takes! I enjoy the humility here.

From Tom

Speciesism (Movie) - 16:37

When you cut your finger and you feel that terrible, excruciating pain, the world disappears. The world is gone. You’ve only cut your little pinky, and its a tiny, tiny little cut that in a matter of moments will be done. But for the moment that you feel that pain, the world is gone. All you feel is that terrible, terrible pain. It’s the only universe, the only world you have, and it’s all yours, and you’re locked in, and everybody else is gone. The problem is when you feel that type of pain endlessly, and you can’t escape it. It begins to transform who you are. You begin to lose whatever special thing there is within us that makes life worth living.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyA_eF7W02s

Elizabeth Scarry: The Body in Pain

—

It is commonplace that at the moment when a dentist’s drill hits and holds an exposed nerve, a person sees stars. What is meant by “seeing stars” is that the contents of consciousness are, during those moments, obliterated, that the name of one’s child, the memory of a friend’s face, are all absent.

—

That pain is so frequently used as a symbolic substitute for death in the initiation rites of many tribes is surely attributable to an intuitive human recognition that pain is the equivalent in felt-experience of what is unfeelable in death. Each only happens because of the body. In each, the contents of consciousness are destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expressions of the anti-human, of annihilation, of total aversiveness, though one is an absence and the other a felt presence, one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other expressing itself in grotesque overload.

—

It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.

_— _

Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of “against,” of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as “not oneself,” “not me,” as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.

—

A seventh aspect of pain, built on the first six, is its totality. Pain begins by being “not oneself” and ends by having eliminated all that is “not itself.” At first occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, it eventually occupies the entire body and spills out into the realm beyond the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes the two obscenely indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language or world extension that is alien to itself

and threatening to its claims. Terrifying for its narrowness, it nevertheless exhausts and displaces all else Until it seems to become the single broad and omnipresent fact of existence. From no matter what perspective pain is approached, its totality is again and again faced.

Virginia Woolf

English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

Jean Amery: At The Mind’s Limits

The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may, according to inclination, call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints. That life is fragile is a truism he has always known—and that it can be ended, as Shakespeare says, “with a little pin.” But only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh…

_— _

Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality.

—

But only in torture does the transformation of the person into flesh become complete. Frail in the face of violence, yelling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance, the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that.

Karl Popper

suffering makes a direct moral appeal

In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.

C.S. Lewis

_There is no such thing as the sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-suffers adds no more pain. _

(Mayerfeld, p. 173) See also ‘Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture’.