negative utility

My position (a strong opinion weakly held) is that global utility is currently negative, and probably always has been. It's conceivable that it could become positive, but it's not clear that we're anywhere close.

The basic argument for this is that life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short. Our pain and pleasure system did not evolve to maximize utility; only to drive us to successful reproduction. There is no reason for pleasure to be more common than pain, and in fact the opposite may be true: to be an effective motivator, pleasure must be inherently fleeting, while pain from a physical or psychic injury may be with us consistently until death. Many animals are eaten alive, or endure gruesome injuries, or find death through starvation or disease. By sheer number and timescale, wild animals in nature might be the world's single greatest moral tragedy, dwarfing any painful experiences that humans might have had.

Yuval Harari convincingly presents the argument that for humans, the agricultural revolution made things worse. Most people would agree that it would suck to be a subsistence farmer in an ancient civilization. Things might be better now, but it's not clear that they're good. Even in the rich world, depression is common, many people hate their jobs and report feeling purposeless, alienation and loneliness are common, and so on. The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation (and our perceptions of this are highly biased because depressed people tend not to talk about their depression).

This is highly related to the antinatalism position of David Benatar and others. There is some room for differences in granularity: one can believe that total utility is currently negative while believing that a baby born in certain circumstances---with a loving family, in a rich country, etc.---may still in expectation live a positive-utility life. I admit that the latter is possible in principle, but I think the required set of circumstances are much more granular than we'd like to accept (e.g., being in a loving family, from a rich country, getting into good schools, etc. are not only not sufficient, they're barely correlated with positive utility). People with every advantage are still subject to universal suffering.

The cessation of suffering is ultimately possible (Buddhism is true), but this is not broadly appreciated, and getting there requires a lot of work. Rational persons generally won't devote time to this until they've first experienced enough suffering to make it very salient that something needs to be done.

By contrast negative utilitarianism in the philosophical community seems to be mostly a theoretical belief that a unit of suffering is more morally important than a unit of pleasure: they are not symmetric. Note that this says nothing directly about the empirical quantity of either on earth: the earth could have 1000 units of joy but only 1 unit of suffering, and one could still think the suffering is more important. Though it begins to be fuzzy if you start saying that the suffering 'outweighs' the pleasure: what units are we weighing in? If our original unit is not the relevant one for making moral decisions, we chose the wrong unit, and we should correct our original measurements. Nonetheless, the arguments for theoretical negative utilitarianism are made in the abstract (for example: 'the absence of pain is good, the absence of pleasure is bad only if there is someone to notice it') so they do not depend directly on the actual state of the world.

• I think my position is what Toby Ord calls "Strong Practically-negative utility": Classical Utilitarianism with the empirical belief that suffering outweighs happiness in all or most human lives.

An interesting question: how can I live my values in practice? Taken seriously, I should try to destroy the world. One reason not to is that this is a strong opinion weakly held; I maintain the humility to know that I might be wrong. Furthermore, under the practical form of NU, it's possible that pleasure might eventually outweigh suffering---perhaps we could tile our light-cone with ecstatic computronium---so that it's worth letting things continue.

In a smaller sense, I can live my values, though: I can adopt instead of bringing new children into the world. If I extend the argument to animals I might have to adopt vegetarianism, since I have to assume that even well-raised animals probably suffer. What about pets? I refuse to believe that a creature that is loved for its entire life can have an unworthy existence. This implies that a world full of human love could also be positive-utility.