One could agree entirely with your analysis of our knowledge of pain and still not agree that ethics should be centered on suffering. There are other possible criteria for ethics, and there are other possible criteria for even a pessimistic ethics. Your focus on pain enables you to display an axiomatic rigor in your arguments, but this will not necessarily be persuasive to those (even other pessimists) who think that other ethical criteria are important as well.
If someone says there is something that is ethically important independent of how it affects qualitative experiences, then, though they might say otherwise, the basis for their ethics would be what they desire. And desire is a feeling, the qualities of which can be compared to other feelings. If humans were soon going to die out, and some people thought it was ethically important to preserve some art to last for a lot longer than there would be humans, maybe it would in fact be ethically important to the extent that such a project affects how some humans feel while they exist, but if an unpredicted meteor destroyed the art shortly after human extinction, clearly there would be no value significance to the destruction.
Thoughts and feelings happen in human minds, yes, even when these thoughts and feelings are about events outside of anyone's mind. Your example is apparently meant to illustrate that states of affairs outside of the mind are ultimately irrelevant to ethical judgment as long as no one feels harm in his conscious experience.
If we evaluate situations entirely in terms of conscious experience, eliminating external referents of our thinking, then ethics could be about the one thing you wish it to be about, suffering. You don't even have to argue that concerns external to our minds should have no ethical weight except as they affect experience; you can just rule them out of bounds of your conception of ethics. This is motivated by a wish to leave pain-centered ethics with no rivals, I suspect, but even if my suspicion is untrue, I would like to bring up situations for which your ethics would be useless.
If an unconscious person is sexually molested by a psychopath who does not evaluate his actions as harmful, and the unconscious person has no physical injury or evidence or memory of it later, did anything unethical occur? I think by your ethics you would have to answer no. No harm was consciously experienced by anyone.
With technologies that are near fruition or already here, acts that most would now consider horrible could occur on a large scale without being judged unethical by your criteria. Conscious experience could be manipulated by electrical stimulation of the brain and by virtual reality technology. People could be completely controlled while having no awareness that they are being controlled (rendering lack of choice unharmful in your terms), and they could feel nothing but delight the whole time. All of this could be administered, and even originally set up, by computers. Is this unethical?
Brain-in-a-vat redescription of the experience of sentient beings in the world may seem useful to a pain-centered ethics, but such a redescription renders humans helpless in confronting near-future technologies.
If ethics only applies to matters of conscious experience, then what objection could there be to seeing ethics and rationality themselves as simply matters of conscious experience, experience that can be manipulated? If redescribing ethics and rationality in this way is an inaccurate description of judgment and thought, who cares? If no one cares in his conscious experience that ethics and rationality have been reduced to seeming, it doesn't matter. I don't think you intend to subjectivize ethics and rationality, but you have left yourself no ethical ground to object if ethics and rationality are manipulated into subjective seeming, or even if the very ideas of ethics and rationality are lost entirely, as long as no one feels harm.
Mystical approaches to theism are just as focused on careful discernment of qualities of experience as your ethic of suffering is. I'm not a mystical theist because I don't think internal states tell us much about the world. But all thinking about theism is not "arbitrarily imagined" or "without a rational reason to believe it."
There are explanations for how the experiences they call mystical happen that are more parsimonious than theistic explanations. I think the wide-spread difference in what people think about mystical claims about reality and schizophrenic claims about reality is because the people making mystical claims often function better socially. Do you apply agnostic reasoning to schizophrenics who claim that their experiences tell them about the existence of something specific outside of their experiences, for which there is no other evidence?
I agree that there are more parsimonious explanations for mystical experiences than theism.
The difference between, say, Plotinus, Eckhart, et al. and a schizophrenic, or someone with temporal-lobe epilepsy, involves more than better social functioning. They are also much better at reflecting on and describing their experiences and rationalizing and articulating their ideas in their writings.
What I am agnostic about is not specific theistic claims (which I don't believe) but the question of whether mystical experience and related speculation can ever reveal anything about reality. I doubt it, and it plays no part in my own thinking, but I don't think it is entirely a closed question.
So our reasons to be rational are dependent on the same thing your ethics is dependent on, and you carefully describe both in the same words: "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience." If such knowledge of qualities of conscious experience is the criterion by which we are to judge whether we are using our rationality reasonably, then you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.
You're conflating a means of doing something with a reason for doing something. Thinking rationally is a means of discovering what is true. The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality.
I am not conflating means of doing something with a reason for doing something; I am pointing out your conflation of rationality with ethical success. Thanks for stating it again! Your statements indicate that you judge actions as rational if they are in accordance with your ethical evaluation of experiential reality. It is an
ethical evaluation because it involves "discovering what is true" about qualitative experiences, by which you apparently mean seeing what is the proper value (good or bad) of those experiences. Your last sentence could be restated, "An action is rational if it is in accordance with proper good or bad valuations of experience." "Rational" here does not just apply to the means of discovery; it is an approbatory adjective you apply to the action. An action is rational if it is ethical in your judgment. This is why I said in an earlier post that you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.
