The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: A while ago, you told a person that they were inherently deserving of happiness. Especially considering how forcefully anon they were, why did you say that? What makes that a valid philosophy or line of thought?

I’m a utilitarian. I think that happiness and self-actualization and fulfillment are good, and that suffering is bad. One implication is that, other things equal, it is always better for someone to lead a happy and fulfilling life than for them not to do so. 

In the real world, if we said ‘you deserve to be happy no matter what so we won’t punish you if you hurt other people’, more people would hurt other people, and therefore there’d probably be less happiness, on net. The laws that preserve the best chance for people to lead fulfilling lives tend to be laws that act as if there’s some property of ‘deservingness’, where doing bad things makes you undeserving of happiness and deserving of punishment. Or where not having the skills to earn money makes you undeserving of the things that that money could buy.

This is a sad thing. It’s necessary sad thing, to some degree - I certainly do not want to abolish punishments for crimes that cause harm to others - but I do not believe that any criminals, no matter how evil, deserve to be punished (in the sense that a world where they suffer is morally better than a world where they’re happy, if other people aren’t affected). Retribution belongs in the justice system only insofar as it can be shown to deter people from harming others in the first place. (That is, only insofar as, on net, it increases the amount of happiness + capacity to lead fulfilling lives in the world). I don’t think that once someone is a ‘bad’ person, happiness experienced by them stops being a good thing.

It’s even more straightforward when it comes to the case of money. Every system we’ve ever tried that divorces ‘how much money people have’ from ‘how much value they’re creating’ tends to make it almost impossible to coordinate the doing of valuable activities, and the result is millions of people starving to death. That means that right now, deservingness is a necessary lie, a rule we have to follow to coordinate the doing of valuable activities. 

But just because I was born with an aptitude for programming (which is a highly paid activity) does not mean I am more deserving of money (and the happiness I can buy with it) than a person who doesn’t have an aptitude for programming. Hell, even ‘hard work’, which we really strongly associate with deservingness, doesn’t matter to me. If you’re capable of having experiences, I want them to be happy experiences, period.

It’s really hard to stop thinking about ethics in terms of deservingness. We’re accustomed to asking ‘are they working as hard as they can?’ before we decide whether to care about people who are suffering. We’re accustomed to relishing the thought of bad people suffering for the things they have done. But I believe that worlds with more suffering in them aren’t better, period.

Hitler killed half my family. If I could change nothing else about history but whether to make Hitler’s last moments protracted and painful, or full of happiness… I’d make him happy. Joy is good. Pain is bad.

• 9 April 2015
• #that said if I could kill hitler ten years earlier I unhesitatingly would#there are good gametheoretic reasons to hurt your enemies#hitler mention cw#Anonymous
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