Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

I seem to find it easier to avoid celebrity culture than most. I couldn't pick Justin Beiber out of a lineup, but every YouTube comment on every music video bashes him for being everywhere.

 

[gveranon]

Harm-based pessimism, as you depict it, seems so reductive as to be a misdescription of human life. The focus is on the primal level of qualities of experience, but this is not the conceptual level of typical human experience most of the time. Typical human experience isn't even conceptualized as experience most of the time (varieties of acting, goal-seeking, and reflecting are more frequent conceptualizations), and other valuations are often more relevant than whether it feels good or bad. For these reasons, I find approaches to pessimism pursued by Schopenhauer, Cioran, Zapffe, and Ligotti to be more compelling than harm-based pessimism. Those authors are keenly aware of qualities of experience, of course, but they are also concerned, however negatively, with conceptual realms of activity and meaning. If most humans don't usually experience life in terms of harm-based consequentialism, then harm-based consequentialism (a philosophy relentlessly focused on experience) doesn't speak accurately about human experience.

Consciously acting, goal-seeking, reflecting, and everything else that happens in consciousness is some combination of feeling and thought. Thought would be evaluatively irrelevant without connection to feelings.

Yes, but from this it does not follow that experience should be evaluated simply in terms of qualities of feeling. That isn't even what feeling feels like for sentient beings in the world! Feelings as they are experienced usually pertain to situations and objects, and if you simply evaluate the feelings qualitatively, without reference to the situations and objects, your evaluation is based on a misdescription of what it is actually like to feel those feelings in the circumstances in which they are felt. This problem of misdescription of actual experience is fatal to an ethics focused on qualities of experience.

This abstracted and one-dimensional account of experience would not be recognizable to most experiencers as an accurate account of experience. Just as much as feelings are what ethics are about, ethics are about the interests of those who feel. Such a mutilated account of experience effectively leaves experiencers out of the equation, because it leaves many of those experiencers' interests in their own experiences out of the equation. Experiencers have interest in more than a one-dimensional account that falsifies their actual experience. Whom is an ethic of experience on behalf of if not on behalf of experiencers? Experience is always the experience of an individual in a situation. All components of that are relevant to an ethical evaluation of the experience itself.

But the "rational" self-interest of an individual and the interests of others are often in conflict. And, at least in most situations, it is impossible to determine the interest of the whole, because individuals within the whole want and need different things.

Their reasons for wanting what they want and the costs in harms can be compared.

One would have to be omniscient to be in a position to adequately compare everyone's wants and needs. Accurately comparing the costs in harms would involve enormously sophisticated data modeling and an ability to predict the future. If you maintain that, generally, different types of wants and needs wouldn't be that hard to compare, and that merely probable harms could be predicted and meaningfully quantified... these claims would not only be fanciful but massively presumptuous. Making all of this easy enough to actually accomplish would entail giving up on both accuracy and justice. If you could administer some rough justice, it would be very rough justice indeed. If harm-based consequentialism were judged by its own terms (harms, consequences), it would be found badly wanting.