huruma

[huruma]

The triune justification for pan-hedonism (epistemology and arbitrariness / ambiguity and pan-hedonism revisited)

As I argued in my previous blog, the inter-connected three in one justification for pan-hedonism (the view that every possible being's happiness and emotional distress would be inherently good and bad and only happiness and emotional distress is inherently good and bad) is a) the nature of happiness and pain, b) epistemic solipsism or introspective direct experience and c) anti-arbitrariness / ambiguity.

If one accepts their own experience of happiness and pain as the justification for pan-hedonism (which can be counter intuitive because it requires 'abstracting' the feelings of goodness and badness from the specific cognitive and sensory objects that we have positive and negative emotional responses to) then they're taking for granted that a) introspection is a source of knowledge about happiness and pain and b) that introspection is the only source of knowledge about the nature of happiness and pain (I can imagine someone possibly arguing that introspection might be the only source of knowledge about mental states but we can acquire knowledge about other things through other means but I think this would be a blatant double standard that might stem from a refusal to accept that we just can't know about some things. Whether or not X justifies a belief isn't circumstantial, if X ever justifies belief it always justifies belief and X alone can justify belief. I don't want to go over an argument that would be related to one I've made in the past, that the nature of X is what makes it X so two fundamentally different things with different natures, being fundamentally different things, can't both be X by nature. I could imprecisely say something like 'pan-hedonism is an inherently egalitarian view,' you can't be a pan-hedonist and not believe that everyone's happiness has equal value; once you account for intensity and duration, and there are non-hedonistic egalitarian theories but hedonism is an assessment of the nature of happiness-pain, so it is egalitarian like other positions but I don't think it's a thing with a distinct nature). The defense for hedonism requires that introspection is a valid justification for viewing happiness and pain as inherently good and bad and that only introspection could justify viewing or not viewing happiness and pain as inherently good and bad.

An experience may or may not accurately simulate something other than itself but it, by definition, must be what it appears to be. If happiness feels good (ie. if we experience happiness as inherently good) then denying that happiness is inherently good is effectively denying that there is or could be a such thing as happiness. If happiness and pain are real, they can't be something other than what they appear to be (someone might counter that this implies that our perception of water is itself wet, but our experience of sensory perception of water appears to be simulatory. A physical world might not exist, subjective experience has to exist, and regardless of whether or not a physical world is real, the fact that we can be justifiably certain about one but not the other demonstrates that they are in fact different things, first person subjective experience is self-evidently not the brain activity it might correspond with or even be caused by, as inconceivable as most modern secular philosophers might find the idea of brain activity causing a fundamentally different kind of reality. Emergent dualism and idealism are both positions I'm open to but materialism and neutral monism must be false).

Introspection as a guaranteed source of knowledge has been challenged by some people and there are different arguments that have been made but if an experience isn't real then introspection by definition could not be the cause of a false belief about the existence of that experience. I also think it's worth noting that we can't establish what we don't know without first establishing what we do know (likewise, you can't legitimately criticize the idea that X is good or bad without establishing what is good or bad).

I've also argued that true hedonism must a) be a moral realist claim about the nature of happiness and pain and b) have one's own direct personal experience of happiness and pain as the epistemic justification for that claim. If you are a moral nihilist you don't consistently 'view' happiness as good. 'Considering' happiness to be good if you believe that it is objectively neutral is as meaningless as considering a square to be a triangle. A thing is objectively what it actually is, not what is projected on to it (nor can moral nihilists make an appeal to consistency because not only would consistency have no objective value if moral nihilism is true, I don't think the idea of consistency itself being inherently good is internally consistent either, but you are already contradicting yourself in 'considering' a thing that you believe to be neutral to be good or bad). A moral nihilist who adopts pan-hedonism as a subjectively appealing position is juggling two fundamentally different positions. Furthermore, if one's justification for adopting pan-hedonism is that they stepped on an acorn on the 9th of September when it looked as though it were about to rain then the nature of happiness itself isn't what they're preoccupied with or what they have in mind (probably everyone views the happiness and suffering of some people in some scenarios as good and bad but pan-hedonists think that what makes happiness happiness and suffering suffering is what's good and bad). If you reject hedonism when you find out that it was actually the 10th and not the 9th, again, it was never the very nature of happiness or pain itself that you viewed as good or bad.

Arbitrariness is the lack of an objective reason (or justification) to (for) believe (believing), value (valuing) or do (doing) anything. Information is ambiguous when there is the perception of multiple contradicting possibilities. Arbitrariness implies ambiguity and vice versa, ambiguity can only be minimized with a non-arbitrary option that justifies excluding competing positions and boiling them all down to one. Ambiguity is to uncertainty (which also implies confusion) as humor is to amusement. What makes pan-hedonism the only non-arbitrary ethical view is the fact that we experience happiness and pain as inherently good and bad. Adopting pan-hedonism because it is non-arbitrary implies anti-arbitrariness and if you're adopting it because of what makes it non-arbitrary then you're adopting it because it's non-arbitrary (in the same way that you can't justify supporting X policy because it treats or considers everyone the same in some respect yet argue that you support that policy for reasons that have nothing to do with it being egalitarian). The three all imply each other.

Information is ambiguous precisely because it's not self-evidently X, Y or Z. Happiness and pain are self-evidently good and bad, an experience itself can only be what it appears to be.

All inconsistencies are arbitrary and imply ambiguity (they imply that X can be ultimately Y in one scenario but not another - that X can mean different conflicting things). Value monism, and maybe less obviously universal compassion, both imply ambiguity 'intolerance' (ie. an agenda to minimize ambiguity). Value pluralism implies that goodness can ultimately mean different things (and relativism implies that mutually exclusive positions can all be true simultaneously, albeit true 'for' different people) and selective compassion implies that suffering does not have a single fixed value, that it can also mean conflicting things (ie. it can be ultimately good, bad or neutral depending on conditions or context that has nothing to do with the felt nature of suffering).

[huruma]

Arbitrariness, ambiguity and pan-hedonism revisited

I would argue that anti-ambiguity is written into pan-hedonism (or at least pan-hedonism as a moral realist position that’s defended by epistemic solipsism or direct experience) and not because ambiguity by its nature (ie. for a universally non-arbitrary reason) causes uncertainty and confusion (which I understand to be negative emotions like humiliation, boredom, anxiety, frustration etc. rather than things that cause emotional distress. Uncertainty is what we feel when we hold conflicting beliefs or desires and confusion, which is implied by uncertainty, is what we feel when we can’t effectively process or comprehend information. Both inherently lead to the experienced frustration of desire by preventing us from acting or even reacting. I can’t imagine a scenario where a theoretically possible person had a positive emotional response to the frustration of their desire, that would imply instinctively wanting to frustrate their own desire. There is apparently a lot of research to support ‘the link between uncertainty and stress’ that I was initially unaware of when I adopted my view. All of our choices are rooted in a value and a belief about what will serve that value. Uncertainty is not a lack of information, although a lack of information can cause uncertainty, and it isn’t necessarily future oriented either. I don’t know who the prime minister of India is but I don’t feel uncertain about that, uncertainty requires the realization of two or more specific mutually exclusive possibilities). There is only one reason to adopt pan-hedonism and that is our direct experience of happiness and emotional distress (as a justification for adopting hedonism ‘the nature of happiness - emotional distress’ and ‘experience’ is one and the same since happiness-pain is an experience. The nature of happiness - pain, epistemic solipsism and anti-arbitrariness / ambiguity is the three in one justification for adopting hedonism; anti-arbitrariness is connected to this because what makes hedonism the only non-arbitrary position is the fact that we experience happiness and emotional distress as inherently good and bad. By contrast, the actual existence or non-existence of alien life does not give us a reason to believe that alien life does or does not exist. ‘Evidence’ for or against the existence of alien life is what would, for all intents and purposes, give us a reason to believe or disbelieve in alien life. Our experience of our own happiness and pain justifies viewing the happiness – suffering of every possible being as inherently good and bad because we can’t imagine a scenario where happiness and emotional distress did not feel inherently good and bad and in the same way that we can’t imagine something that is wet despite not being water we can’t imagine the existence of a thing that we would ‘perceive’ or experience as inherently good or bad despite it not being happiness or pain. I’ve said this before but every possible being has to instinctively want to experience pleasure and avoid emotional distress, pre-‘rational assessment’, because we experience these states as inherently good and bad, you can’t want a thing without assessing or considering the nature of that thing). The fact that X causes suffering does not give us a reason to oppose that thing as an end in itself or for any reason other than it causing suffering (as notable as I think it is that the perception of ambiguity, which only exists in our own minds, can cause stress for a ‘non-arbitrary reason’) so I would not argue that ambiguity is inherently bad or that the starting principle of ambiguity being inherently bad justifies hedonism (and that ambiguity causes emotional distress for a ‘universally non-arbitrary reason’ is only meaningful to someone who already cares about suffering). Only our experience of happiness and pain gives us a non- arbitrary reason to believe that everyone’s happiness and only happiness is inherently good, it’s not that I am against arbitrariness and suffering as two distinct values or one as an end in itself because of its relationship to the other but my accepting hedonism because it is the only non-arbitrary ethical position already presupposes being anti-arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness is often defined as something that is baseless, not supported by anything valid, decided on inadequate grounds or ‘random’. Basically arbitrariness is the lack of an objective reason or justification (and implies ambiguity which can only be resolved with a non-arbitrary option). Even if I didn’t state it in that way – that I’ve adopted pan-hedonism because it is the only non-arbitrary ethical position, if I’m making a claim to knowledge in saying that happiness is factually inherently good and I justify this with my own direct experience of happiness then I’m accepting happiness and pain as inherently good and bad because they are self-evidently good and bad and that is inherently non-arbitrary, I’m relying on an objective standard as opposed to projection (I could claim that X demographic is Y based on my own personal experiences but I can’t legitimately conclude that all of them, or even most, are that way based on my observations of only some of the members of that population and if I can even imagine a coherent scenario where X and Y don’t coincide then X isn’t intrinsically Y and I have to accept the possibility of X existing without Y even if I’ve never personally experienced this), I’m claiming that there’s an objectively valid reason to adopt pan-hedonism whereas every other possible ethical theory is rooted in subjective preference or intuition. There might be other moral realist positions that claim to be non-arbitrary but if something isn’t self-evidently good or bad (experiencing happiness and pain as inherently good and bad means that they are self-evidently good and bad) then we can only project value on to it based on arbitrary and subjective criteria that has nothing to do with the directly perceived or experienced nature of that thing.  We have to adopt arbitrary beliefs but only when there is no non-arbitrary alternative. Our experience of happiness and pain clarifies why pan-hedonism, as a claim about reality, is actually true.

 Information is ‘ambiguous’ when it can mean multiple conflicting things. Minimizing ambiguity involves going through a process of elimination that takes multiple mutually exclusive possibilities or options and narrows them down to one and this requires a non-arbitrary option. Arbitrariness does not necessarily cause uncertainty (I don’t feel uncertain about other minds existing even though I could never know whether or not they do) but it is what allows for uncertainty, in a theoretically impossible world without arbitrariness there could be no uncertainty. It’s worth noting that X contradicting direct experience does not in itself mean that X is false, only that X can’t be true if direct experience is real. We could just as well conclude that X is true and direct experience isn’t real but there’s a non-arbitrary reason to accept direct experience as real at face value – direct experience being self-evidently real.

The search for truth requires minimizing ambiguity because, contrary to popular belief, every question has one objectively correct answer (many things can be true about something but a set of mutually exclusive claims can be boiled down to only one, if any). The very concept of ‘truth’ requires competing mutually exclusive claims about reality being objectively false. If you accept direct experience of happiness as an authority on the nature of happiness then you were already looking for a standard that goes beyond your personal preferences because a cost in accepting hedonism (for psychologically normal human beings at least) is having to sacrifice hardcore intuitions about morality and goodness (emotional states have sensory – cognitive objects that we must intuitively associate them with, after all). The epistemic reason to accept pan-hedonism is direct experience but the value in accepting pan-hedonism and epistemic solipsism as monistic theories of value and knowledge is that no other world view can as effectively or reliably help us to make sense of reality (in addition to pan-hedonism incentivizing us to value the happiness of all possible beings without consideration to competing values). I wouldn’t expect it to make a difference in practice but in theory I might assume that more uncertainty avoidant or ambiguity intolerant people would be more open to pan-hedonism.

Regardless of whether or not one is consistently anti-arbitrariness / ambiguity if his or her justification for adopting hedonism is their direct experience of happiness (ie. happiness and pain being self-evidently good and bad) then their justification is rooted in anti-arbitrariness (this might sound pointlessly tribal and I might disagree with many people who share my world view on many issues but I would argue that true hedonism implies both the belief that happiness actually is inherently good and the actual nature - experience - of happiness as the justification for that belief). You can phrase it as being pro-objectivity and anti-subjectivity but in addition to the fact that there can only be one objective standard, arbitrariness is the lack of an objective reason ; it’s not that I’m against subjective reasons because I don’t believe there can be multiple subjective normative reasons to adopt a belief or value. There can be multiple explanatory reasons but considering something to be true or good doesn’t make it so, reality is what it is regardless of what we project on to it. Considering that we have to intuitively associate our emotional states with their objects and the fact that we all experience happiness as inherently good despite the fact that a very small number of us identify with pan-hedonism I think anti-arbitrariness would be the motivation for someone who adopts ‘true’ hedonism for the right reason.

Ambiguity necessarily implies contradictions and all inconsistencies also imply ambiguity (if X is fundamentally Y in one scenario but not another the implication is that X can mean fundamentally different conflicting things). All inconsistencies are arbitrary. If multiple fundamentally different things can be inherently good or bad then ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can mean different conflicting things. If John Doe’s happiness can be inherently or ultimately good in one scenario but Mark’s happiness is inherently or ultimately neutral or bad in another scenario then happiness can also mean different conflicting things in terms of value. While a ‘tolerance’ for ambiguity and value pluralism are generally considered sophisticated and admirable, the impression I have is that universal compassion is also generally seen as an admirable or noble ideal but universal compassion, like value monism, is inherently ‘intolerant’ of ambiguity. The premise of universal compassion is that everyone’s suffering is the same - suffering can only mean one thing (if it’s ever inherently bad, it’s always inherently bad).

I can relate all of this to the kind of ambiguous hinting and innuendo people often engage in (speaking in German while simultaneously communicating something else in American Sign Language is not ‘ambiguous’. The ambiguous communication I have in mind involves communicating information that contradicts what is explicitly or ‘officially’ stated or done). If John says that he is going to the store there is, for all intents and purposes, a non-arbitrary reason to believe that he’s communicating an intention to go to the store. It is self-explanatory in a way that’s analogous to direct experience being self-evident. Even if he’s lying or won’t follow through that’s what he’s communicating. Even if he’s an insentient philosophical zombie or a hallucination he is unambiguously acting as though that’s what he’s communicating.

If he indirectly hints at having an affair there is, strictly speaking, no non-arbitrary reason to believe he is or is not hinting at having an affair. It might be practically obvious and only technically ambiguous or the listener might genuinely feel some degree of uncertainty (if they don’t pick up on the hint at al then no ambiguous communication has occurred. If they interpret a hint that was never intended the information is still ambiguous for them).  There are subjective common sense cues (largely rooted in pattern recognition) that psychologically normal humans over a certain age are universally wired to recognize that give us a reason to believe John is communicating his having had an affair but there is only an objectively non-arbitrary reason to accept what has been explicitly stated. If everyone in a linguistic community agrees on what words mean then ‘I am going to the store’ can only officially mean one thing, there is, for all intents and purposes, no possibility of it officially meaning otherwise whereas we could technically or practically be mistaken about x y z being an indirect admission of an affair.

This is why people tend to ambiguously hint at what personal, cultural and social inhibitors prevent them from stating overtly. I have never understood the idea that the nature of information is affected by how it’s communicated and this is related to a point I’ve always made about the nature of a thing being constant in all imaginable scenarios (ie. if happiness is ever inherently beneficial and good it is always so). If the information of your brother’s death is a source of grief it makes no difference whether or not it’s communicated in Japanese or kiSwahili (as far as your emotional reaction to the information itself is concerned). If you find the idea of being a child molester unflattering or damaging to your reputation it would be consistent for you to be bothered by people suspecting you are one even if they’re not sure, let alone their being absolutely confident that you are one despite technically not being able to ‘prove’ your having admitted it. It makes no sense to feel comfortable hinting at something you wouldn’t state explicitly (barring a scenario where there might be material consequences to stating something overtly that wouldn’t come with innuendo or you using code to keep someone holding you hostage in the dark or something like that but the nature of information itself is unaffected by how it’s communicated, if the information itself is pleasing or distressing to someone it being communicated indirectly won’t change that).

For all intents and purposes, one implication of the knowledge through experience view is that very little in academia is objectively gradable or something that anyone can demonstrate authority or ‘expertise’ (knowledge) in although it might be culturally meaningful and there’s an argument to be made that an ‘education’ helps to develop cognition. Beyond memorization and maybe demonstrating basic comprehension science and math and anything involving the scientific method are more or less the only subjects that anyone can demonstrate authority in (and I mean real science, not sociology or psychology). I say for all intents and purposes because ‘strictly speaking’ even the authority one can demonstrate in science and math is only justified under universal but subjective common sense assumptions (like the future more or less resembling the past) that aren’t objectively valid. Nothing is objectively ‘probable’ or ‘improbable’ and we can only know what we presently experience. Testable scientific theories are, for all intents and purposes, validated when they help us to reliably and consistently predict the behavior of observable natural phenomenon.

The flaw in academic philosophy is that theories in philosophy are rooted in subjective logic or reasoning that isn’t necessarily testable (inter-subjectively, as scientific theories are, or via introspection), no matter how impersonal or emotionally detached they are accepted intuitively because they’re subjectively plausible, not self-evidently true. All x-y-z reasoning is ultimately rooted in subjective intuition. I am completely confident in the existence of my present conscious experience and by extension the inherent positive and negative value of happiness and emotional distress (I believe I can be justifiably dogmatic about this), but this is why I accept that my judgment in general is unreliable and fallible (most of my blogs have been repeatedly edited, I don’t want to edit the ones prior to this one ever, ever again, but the one thing I can stand by is the claim that everyone’s happiness and only happiness is intrinsically good and direct experience is the epistemic justification for this, however flawed and lacking I will and already find this post).

On a final note, relativists can’t have their cake and eat it too. You can’t hold on to all of your subjective intuitions about morality and give some kind of quasi realist critique of ‘murder’, rape, ‘theft’, cruelty, genocide, racism etc. You can only legitimately criticize the beliefs and values of other people if you can offer a non-arbitrary alternative.

#hedonism #ethics #ambiguity

[huruma]

Causing vs. allowing and ideological consistency

All other factors being equal – causing pain (either to yourself or to people you identify with) is inherently more difficult than allowing it. I think that when given the ultimatum to stab themselves in the eye with a nail or to have someone else stab them in the eye with a nail most people, if not everyone, would rather allow themselves to be stabbed in the eye than to proactively injure themselves. In addition to being able to hold on to the hope that the ultimatum isn’t fixed playing the passive role allows us to prepare or brace ourselves for what’s to come in a way that actively injuring ourselves does not, the latter completely goes against our instincts.

I think another factor in the inherent psychological difference between causing and allowing is the fact that inaction is default and passivity is energy conserving – preparing for the future, especially preparing to act, is the opposite of relaxing (which isn’t to imply that passivity never has negative consequences depending on circumstance or that it never indicates imprudence or low empathy). For reasons that are related to why causing pain even to oneself is inherently harder than allowing it I believe that deliberately or knowingly causing pain to another person, even with the best intentions (ie. out of empathy for their future self or for other people) has a natural hardening effect that makes it difficult to love and sympathize (you have to instinctively want to avoid pain but the easier harming others becomes, if it gets easier, the more desensitized you become to their pain and the pro-social feelings that make you feel naturally connected to them) and if hedonistic consequentialists aren’t emotionally invested in the happiness of other people, if their choices are rooted in an impersonal commitment to an abstract philosophical idea and nothing related to organic prosocial feelings then they can’t be relied on to make the choices that are necessarily more likely to maximize the most happiness or minimize the most suffering for the most people. I agree with some pacifists, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains that ahimsa or a commitment to non-violence (and non-aggression in general) is one of the secrets to stable long-term happiness and peace of mind (not taking into consideration what happens circumstantially as a result of committing oneself to non-violence) - that isn’t a value judgment, it’s only my assumption about what actually makes self-aware / rational beings happier, but the difference between us is that I think sacrificing some peace of mind for the benefit of others can be theoretically justified. Not only do I think that hedonistic consequentialism justifies making a practical distinction between causing and allowing pain (not a fundamental logical or moral distinction but regarding the former as quantitatively worse once other factors have been considered) but I think it might be best if we were unwilling to cause a certain level of extreme or unbearable pain in virtually all practical scenarios, even fewer in cases that don’t involve self-defense ('Unbearable' pain would be pain that is so overwhelming that nothing could be even mildly pleasurable and there are different degrees of intensity even after that), I think there’s even an argument to be made for some form of pacifism (although I accept the kind of forced restraint and the threat of it that the welfare state is built on and in practice enforcing that can imply some violence).

Causing extreme unbearable pain that most people find completely shocking and demoralizing might have the best possible overall immediate consequences in some hypothetical scenarios but when you consider the general long-term consequences of the policies we promote I think we have to view causing pain as worse than allowing it and there should be certain arbitrarily drawn lines we don’t cross. Even on a purely emotional or intuitive level my preoccupation is with pain avoidance and not autonomy, health, rule adherence, abstract desire fulfillment or anything else. 

I wouldn’t criticize someone who valued the happiness of all sentient beings to some degree for prioritizing the welfare of their parents, family members, spouse, children, companion animal, friend etc. ( if we’re talking about specific individuals they have concrete relationships or a concrete history and emotional bond with and not just members of their sex, ethnic group, racial group, species or countrymen) over complete strangers but I think that strict egalitarianism should be the ideal. I think we’re more likely to give greater consideration to other people and to take them seriously as entities with their own independent feelings instead of reducing them to objects of our own feelings (or to understand that the important thing we have in common with someone is our capacity to experience happiness and distress) if we have strict egalitarianism as the end goal when it comes to the kind of people we want to be and the kind of society we want to develop and are held to that higher standard, even if the goal is never reached.

It's inconvenient that I would have to specify that I don’t think the emotional states of separate people can be meaningfully aggregated and also to point out that there is a fundamental psychological difference between causing pain and allowing it that (hedonistic) consequentialists  would have to consider and even that non-human animal happiness is just as valuable as (the same intensity / duration of) human happiness (it’s not just their suffering we should care about, we should want them to experience happiness), valuing everyone’s happiness is inherently personal and not academic or philosophical (and I say this despite my being as standoffish, detached and sometimes misanthropic as I am. I'm not as compassionate as I should be), causing pain is something that should be considered unconditionally bad in all possible scenarios and when we believe it's justified it should still be done reluctantly and letting a kitten be tortured for the amusement of a crowd of millions doesn't make sense, in addition to being callous, because we should be promoting universal compassion, if not hedonistic consequentialism explicitly. I like the simplicity of reducing my world view to 'pan-hedonism' or the position that everyone's happiness and pain and only happiness and pain is intrinsically good and bad but I don’t really want to be associated with what appears to be mainstream hedonistic consequentialism or the impression that most people have of it. The core differences between myself and at least some other hedonists that I feel most existentially attached to (that aren't rooted in a single issue. Even with the causing vs. allowing distinction the difference is quantitative and circumstantial, sometimes allowing pain is both overall worse and harder for the most egalitarian minded actor) are my epistemological justification for pan-hedonism as a moral realist position (solipsism), my belief  that the happiness of separate minds can't be aggregated (I think this establishes hedonism as a welfare-centric position which makes it harder to depersonalize the way that some consequentialists would like to) and my theory about the one and only thing that causes pain because of it's *nature* (ultimately experienced desire frustration – criticism, ambiguity and relative complexity are rooted in this) – meaning it is the only thing that would apply to every possible mind once you account for cognitive development (this is important because people often have hold the idea that there are universal guidelines to what makes people happy, there are some near universals when it comes to what makes most humans and other animals happy but a lot of this, when it comes to humans, is tied to philosophical baggage, that includes a lot of psychology, which is an inauthentic science, or is circumstantial. Earlier even I claimed that compassion is vital to long-term happiness. At the very least I'd commit myself to the idea that someone would necessarily be happier if they didn't feel anger or fear, which is what aggressive behavior is generally rooted in, without considering the long-term instrumental value anger and fear might have, and I've mentioned in other blogs why I think pan-hedonism helps us to make sense of reality better than any other world view possibly could). I think epistemological solipsism also justifies both of these positions (we know through experience that happiness is measurable in terms of intensity and duration and maximizing happiness means increasing the intensity and duration of it, you don't maximize more happiness as a result of causing 100 people to experience a single point of happiness each than you would in causing one person to experience a 100 points of happiness, just like a 100 people who each have an IQ of 70 can't collectively understand what one person with an IQ of 130 can. With the desire frustration point, we can't imagine a possible scenario in which someone could have a positive emotional response to the realized frustration of their desire, our desires motivate us, if the frustration of our desire was pleasurable we'd want to instinctively bring it about – because it's pleasurable and we have to instinctively want to experience happiness which would contradict the fact that we don’t want it to exist and are motivated to avoid it). Even the terms 'utilitarianism' and 'pleasure' turn me off because of their connotations ('pleasure' seems egoistic and narrow and ‘utilitarianism’ seems to be associated with hyper-'cerebral' callousness and psychopathy in most people's minds, even 'consequentialism' doesn't explain what is considered good or bad and only deals with decision making). 'Happiness' also has certain connotations (which is why I've often gone out of my way to say 'sexual happiness' instead of 'sexual pleasure') but they're less obnoxious and sinister.

You also have to consider the insecurity people would feel living in a society where you'd have to worry about you or your loved ones being killed - for any reason other than euthanasia or self-defense - or seriously harmed. I think that compassion implies euthanasia no matter how hard that might be so my focus is really on causing unbearable or relatively extreme pain but I no longer think this justifies regarding causing pain to be fundamentally worse than allowing it (this post has been edited at least twice but initially my argument was that hedonism could justify regarding causing pain to be fundamentally worse even if it was ideologically inconsistent). If this is necessary for peace of mind it can just as well be justified by faith in a third option - that causing a certain degree of harm will never be necessary (or even just the belief that the cost to ourselves of having to actually do this or prepare to do this would, in the long run, outweigh the immediate benefit) without being ideologically inconsistent. The stress that we might feel from identifying with a world view that could theoretically justify non-euthanasia related killing or causing serious harm or even the prospect of actually doing this should clarify why hedonistic consequentialism is the desirable ethical position. If you think that hedonistic consequentialism is harsh because of it’s disregard for autonomy, health or life per se or any other value besides emotional well-being then it really is harsh to you but for me the harshness of hedonistic consequentialism can be reduced almost entirely to the fact that it can justify depriving people of happiness (ie. killing but this also applies to not procreating or creating sentient life when you have the opportunity to which obviously bothers me less) or causing unbearable or relatively extreme pain (it’s worth noting that consequentialism doesn’t state what moral agents should or shouldn’t do in terms of concrete actions - it’s the justification for doing or not doing anything). 

There are things that hedonism could justify that would disgust or bother me but I don't really feel that their being intrinsically neutral acts and having no reason to avoid them if they didn't bother me is 'harsh'. Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of that is somewhat harsh would be the idea of allowing the memory of a friend or loved one to be erased and replaced with the fabricated memories of other people that would be sources of just as much happiness or inspiration and clarification but in a hypothetical scenario where the consequence of this was the other person (the person you'd be forgetting) experiencing shockingly intense euphoria for the rest of eternity then it would obviously seem to be the right thing to do even on a purely emotional gut level. That intuition isn't entirely unrelated to pan-hedonism because the kind of person who wouldn't want to preserve memories of a friend or loved one probably doesn't form strong emotional bonds or experience stable feelings of affection which is not only a pleasurable emotion but related to the psychology of identifying with and valuing the happiness of other people (or whatever is considered to be in their best interests). If there's anything else besides causing pain or depriving people of happiness that hedonism justifies that I find repugnant or might find repugnant (ie. cannibalism and eating dead animal flesh or the idea that friendships and close relationships per se have no intrinsic value) it can probably be understood in that context (ie. with friendship – apart of that is empathy so if you actually care about your friend's happiness the question of 'which is more important : friendship or happiness?' isn't that meaningful). 

If you’re like me then you can’t say the idea that the sole objective of our decisions should be to maximize happiness - minimize suffering indiscriminately is harsh because it justifies causing pain or depriving someone of happiness (when doing so is the only possible way to maximize more happiness or minimize more suffering for more beings) because you’d be rejecting ethical hedonism for hedonistic reasons. It’s not the idea that everyone’s happiness and only happiness is intrinsically good that’s harsh, it’s the ultimatum in a scenario when we supposedly have to choose between causing some pain or allowing a greater amount of pain (or the same amount experienced by more people). Nothing about hedonistic consequentialism requires that we accept that ultimatum and we don’t experience the future so the consequences of our choices are inherently unknowable (this is ‘especially’ true for subjective emotional states because they can’t be objectively measured).

[huruma]

The freedom to be whoever makes you happy

'Social roles' prevent or help to prevent people from expressing themselves in ways that make them happy. By 'social roles' I mean the normative expectations that we have for people based on age, gender, ethnicity and other things, expectations that justify criticizing or negatively judging people who fail to meet them. People more or less have the 'freedom' to express themselves however they want to, criticizing them for how they choose to do so does not violate their autonomy, but we are social animals and if people are self-conscious expressing themselves in whatever ways that they want to or pursuing whatever interests and lifestyle habits that they want to then that will influence whether or not they do and how emotionally fulfilling it will be even if they do (although people can feel self-conscious about expressing themselves in whatever ways even in the absence of any expressed criticism). I have an especial problem with gender roles (not necessarily because they're more harmful but because they discourage behaviour and attitudes in men that I consider to be ethical).

Not only are men sometimes discouraged from expressing pain (which can be cathartic and therapeutic and nobody who sympathized with someone would feel inclined to negatively judge them for expressing pain or showing vulnerability rather than responding to it with compassion), at least in the 'extreme', but they are often discouraged from expressing affection (or at least extreme affection) which is not only a 'form' of happiness but clearly related to the psychology of valuing the happiness of other people and they are also often expected to be compassionate and generous only in moderation if at all. Men typically aren't encouraged to be nurturing. I am definitely not denying that both men and women are negatively affected by gender roles but if an attitude is moral then every moral agent should adopt it (some people think that women should be compassionate because it's 'feminine' and not because it's moral - because the suffering of other people being the same as one's own and intrinsically bad warrants identifying with it and placing negative value on it. I won't get into why the idea of 'feminine males' and 'masculine females' is logically incoherent or the difference between stereotypes – which are always irrational – and generalizations which may or may not be accurate). For the record, I don't believe that we are hardwired with romantic preferences for certain personality traits, our preferences are largely influenced by our values, I do think that some personality traits are universally non-arbitrarily appealing for reasons I mentioned in my third last blog. There are other social inhibitors besides the roles I have in mind like art elitism, intolerance toward eccentricity or 'weirdness' and many other things.

The sections on attraction and authenticity are edited versions of posts I made on another website. Acting on one's attraction (or even letting it be known to specific people) is definitely a bad idea in some scenarios but I thought a section on attraction was relevant because being honest about one's attraction and accepting it can be cathartic and liberating, no one should be made to feel ashamed about it – especially if it is or can be a source of happiness.

There's nothing wrong with sexualizing children (or anyone else) because there's nothing wrong with sexual happiness ('reducing' someone to their attractiveness is wrong because it involves a lack of sympathy for them but there's nothing especially wrong with a lack of sympathy combined with sexual interest). I don't believe that child-adult sexual / sensual contact is intrinsically harmful to children (and by extension intrinsically bad or necessarily wrong) but that's another topic – here I'm focusing on sexual / romantic attraction to children or whoever else. It's always good to feel sexual happiness and romantic love regardless of who the objects of those feelings are. Attraction is never bad or inappropriate (to the extent that attraction implies someone being the object of one's sexual pleasure. Sexual frustration – which includes but is not limited to experienced unrequited attraction- is bad and that requires sexual desire but sexual pleasure is always intrinsically good) and there are no exceptions to this, whether it's pedophilic, incestuous, homosexual etc.

Sexual pleasure that stems from a lack of sympathy for other people (ie. someone who's turned on by causing other people pain, the suffering of other people, killing and death etc.) is intrinsically good (and I don't think that sexual suppression in terms of fantasy is ever a good idea. My assumption is that if you persuade someone who's turned on by killing or hurting other people or just their suffering and misfortune that their happiness has the same value being the same thing and it's rational to be indiscriminately compassionate for that reason then they will naturally not have a positive emotional response to the suffering and death of other people since they would have a negative attitude toward those things and we can't have a positive emotional response to something we have a genuine negative attitude to. The sadism I have in mind is a desire to cause or see other people in real pain – the emotional state – and not aggressive role playing or pretend) but there's still something morally wrong with the psychology of someone who is turned on by the suffering or misfortune of other people. People who don't value the happiness of all sentient beings are necessarily less likely to make the choices that result in more happiness / less suffering for more beings so we should discourage sadism and cruelty but sadistic sexuality has to do with acts and things that are sexual turn-ons and not the people someone is attracted to. Nothing about sexual attraction to someone ever implies a lack of sympathy for them (or anyone else).

There's nothing wrong with an elderly man having a crush on or sexually fantasizing about his grandson or a woman having those feelings for a hardened serial killer or rapist or her daughter's boyfriend or siblings falling in love etc. (I'm talking about the feelings, though. Not necessarily acts).

The emphasis on authenticity prevents people from being who they want to be (or more precisely – being whoever would make them happiest. The kind of personality they find appealing isn't necessarily what would cause them the most long term happiness or someone who would value the happiness of other people and by extension be necessarily more likely to maximize the happiness of other people). People should be free to develop or project whatever personality makes them happiest (again, as long as they genuinely value the happiness of other people and if they don't – inauthentic displays of sympathy are fundamentally no worse than an open lack of sympathy for other people), even if it really isn't natural to them and they are acting (I'll resist the temptation to get into what a 'fake' personality would be or whether or not it's even possible to not be who you are because it's not ultimately important to me. Fakeness is not bad). They should be free to reinvent themselves as often as they want to and to have fun with their image. They already are free to do so from a libertarian standpoint but I mean they should be free to do so without criticism. If they feel self-conscious as a result of projecting a fake personality (or being their natural selves – whether they're criticized for that on the basis of it being perceived as inauthentic or just unappealing in itself) then they're less able to enjoy the image they project or act out and there's no point in their doing so if it doesn't make them happy. This also applies to the issue of cultural appropriation (I hope it's obvious how) and even some of the 'Rachel Dolezals' of the world.

It's ironic that a lot of the people who criticize cultural appropriation support multi-culturalism and ethnic inclusiveness (this might be off-topic but even though I disagree with affirmative action on the basis of 'levelling the playing field' I do think it might be justified in some scenarios for the sake of visibility and representation – making people feel included or helping to combat stereotype threat. I won't get into the details on that). Not wanting ethnic outsiders to enjoy aspects of your culture (or the culture associated with your ethnic group or your biological ancestors, which is what ethnicity is based on) seems like a fundamentally nationalist position to me. Culture can't be considered the property of a group because a cultural artifact isn't a physical entity that someone can claim control over, from a libertarian standpoint you own your own brain (or mind) and the thoughts and ideas that exist in it, even if they're copies of information produced by other minds , as well as the rest of your body which you use to participate in certain cultural practices and the physical things that embody certain cultural artifacts (and I don't think the idea of collective property is coherent either – some people in a group are open to sharing their culture with outsiders and other people within the same group prefer that their culture remains exclusive – who has the final authority?). Unlike a finite good a cultural artifact is never scarce and doesn't have to be prioritized in terms of distribution – a lack of empathy for outsiders is really the only justification for not wanting them to share in aspects of your culture. I don't believe in property – all goods and resources should be shared or distributed indiscriminately according to benefit or controlled with the agenda of producing the most happiness / least suffering possible for the highest possible number of beings (which isn't to say that something resembling current personal property norms wouldn't exist in my ideal society).

[huruma]

Beauty privilege, appearance modification and appearance shaming double standards

No one intrinsically benefits from or is intrinsically harmed by their physical appearance but it can indirectly affect their emotional state of mind (I don’t believe that hedonism as a theory of value can be logically demonstrated but I do think that hedonism as a theory of welfare can be logically demonstrated to be the only internally consistent theory of welfare for reasons that I won’t get into. In short – you by definition can’t benefit from or be harmed by something that doesn’t affect you but I won’t get into why I think this excludes physical states as well as sensory perception, beliefs, desires or any mental states other than happiness and distress from being coherently regarded as intrinsically beneficial or harmful. Being internally consistent doesn't make an idea true, it would still be incoherent to 'regard' happiness as intrinsically beneficial if it's not actually intrinsically beneficial. Happiness being intrinsically beneficial is just an implication of it being intrinsically good which can be realized through direct experience – the sole source of knowledge. I mean good in and of itself, not 'for' specific people, only John Doe directly benefits from his happiness but everyone has a reason to want it to exist – that reason is the nature of it's existence). The only thing that is intrinsically beneficial is experiencing the emotional state of happiness (all pleasurable emotional states) and the only thing that is intrinsically harmful is experiencing the emotional state of distress (all negative emotional states). We have to talk about welfare before we can talk about ‘privilege’. I don’t believe that relatively conventionally attractive people are absolutely and categorically privileged (discrimination can always potentially go both ways, and probably will, if individuals in different groups or classes have the physical power to make choices that can harm or disadvantage whoever they are prejudiced against).

Conventionally attractive people are often mistreated out of envy, because their vulnerability is less apparent or taken less seriously, because some people of both sexes are intimidated by them and because of unwanted vulnerability to unrequited attraction and the social power imbalances or differences in social status that can come with differences in conventional attractiveness (it can feel harsh or harsher to be rejected or criticized by someone you are attracted to or someone who is more conventionally attractive or to be compared to them ). Aside from discrimination (in the sense of people giving comparable interests that conventionally attractive people share with less conventionally attractive people more or less consideration because of their social status) I still think that conventionally attractive people (like rich people but not like males or white people) are or will probably be better off once other factors are considered

1) They are less likely to experience body dysphoria and more likely to find their own appearance to be aesthetically pleasing (and our self-image is practically tied to some degree to our physical appearance), 2) they are less likely to feel naturally self-conscious about their appearance or to be criticized for it (since by definition the more 'beautiful’ someone is the fewer flaws they have to criticize to begin with and not because they have a higher social status that exempts them from receiving criticizing they otherwise would if they had a lower status despite having the same traits that are considered flaws when held by lower status people. I mentioned in my second last post why criticism is universally non-arbitrarily shaming / humiliating and in my last post why I consider criticism of anyone’s appearance to be invalid since I don’t consider anyone’s appearance to be inherently beautiful or flawed) and 3) they are less likely to experience unrequited attraction (which is stressful because of the desire frustration point I made in my second last blog). To be clear – all of this is to explain why a conventionally attractive person is more likely to be privileged and not to claim that a conventionally attractive person who does struggle with body dysphoria, who is self-conscious about their appearance or feels shame / humiliation in response to whatever criticism about it they receive and who is attracted to people whom they believe are not attracted to them (my preoccupation is with *experienced* unrequited attraction) is privileged just because they are less likely to struggle with these things.

I think people make an arbitrary distinction between socially acceptable forms of appearance modification (like combing one’s hair, wearing make up or shaving) and more controversial forms of appearance modification like plastic surgery or black and non-white people straightening their hair or bleaching their skin (ignoring for the sake of conversation the health issues involved with bleaching). I don’t want people to be shamed into altering their appearance by 'society’ or other people or because they themselves regard their appearance as inherently flawed and in need of improvement. I don’t want people to feel shame about their appearance which is why they would alter it (leaving aside people who alter their appearance for the sake of creatively trying something new – which still implies dissatisfaction- or for practical social reasons) but I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with their doing so in whatever ways if it would help to minimize feelings of body dysphoria and self-consciousness or unrequited attraction (actual unrequited attraction also means fewer sexual / romantic opportunities).

Many people who disagree with the body or appearance shaming of women or overweight women or various people (in the form of direct criticism, the promotion of beauty standards that exclude them or both actual and perceived shaming behaviour that is unintentional) feel differently about the appearance shaming of men, thin women or other various people for whatever reasons. To determine whether or not this is a double standard  (whether or not comparable interests shared by different people are being given more or less consideration because of their identity, social status or for various reasons that aren’t inherently related to those interests) we first have to establish why fat shaming or appearance shaming women is bad to begin with. People often give non-welfare based arguments to justify positions that can only be defended out of consideration for the emotional well-being of the patients in a scenario but the only coherent argument you can make as to why appearance shaming is wrong is a hedonistic one.

The beliefs that might justify criticizing someone for being overweight – that losing weight for some people is not harder than one might assume for various medical reasons or that one hasn’t already attempted or isn’t already attempting to do so, the cause of weight gain, the effectiveness of certain diets or lifestyle choices etc. might be wrong and it might make the criticism all the more humiliating and frustrating (in addition to pointless, if not counter productive, if it doesn’t result in the person losing weight or give them new information about their appearance or accomplish any goal the critic might have other than to criticize for the sake of criticizing) but if the problem is the belief itself then the problem exists whether or not the ignorant person maliciously or non-maliciously criticizes or 'shames’ the overweight person for being overweight. A belief is not a choice, even though our beliefs are indirectly influenced by our values or biases (you’re more likely to consider that your assumption about someone is wrong if you’re sensitized to how they would feel as a result of your voicing an assumption about them, or something that implies it, that they know is wrong and assumptions in general if you care about the unnecessary harm a decision that’s justified by a false belief might cause. Even an inaccurate belief that one has no control over one’s weight or whatever other physical 'flaws’ might make criticism more humiliating and frustrating but, again, that in itself isn’t a reason for other people to adopt that belief) and that relates to a point I’ll make later. If the problem is with the value the criticism is rooted in (ie. there’s not necessarily anything fundamentally wrong with criticizing someone’s appearance but the criticism in this case is invalid because their appearance isn’t flawed) then the critic expressing a value he would otherwise still privately hold (his opinion on what is beautiful or ugly. Disrespecting people is also is also a negative value judgment, even though people tend to say that something that doesn’t express a negative attitude toward someone is 'disrespectful’ if it’s inconsiderate or subjectively unflattering) gives people the opportunity to challenge that value as well as the assumption that justifies the criticism. The only non-arbitrary distinction you can make between privately holding a belief or value and expressing it is how other people are affected by your doing so.

You can try to persuade people that their belief is irrational or untrue or that their value is wrong but you can’t ask people to reject their beliefs or values out of consideration for other people. People can only reject a belief or value if they come to see it as wrong. Furthermore, if you think that something is good or bad it makes sense to try to persuade other moral agents that it is good or bad and to try to bring about what’s good and minimize what’s bad (inherent to regarding something as good or bad is wanting it to exist or not to exist). If someone's appearance is good or neutral, criticism about it doesn't change that and if not being credited for having a good appearance is a problem then, again, the problem exists whether the criticism is voiced or not, voicing the criticism allows for it being addressed.

The idea that fat shaming is unjust or unfair requires that overweight people are disadvantaged by it and not just that the value or belief that it expresses or is justified by is invalid.

For the record, I think that medically overweight people should attempt to lose weight for the sake of avoiding the long term suffering caused by obesity related health problems (or because they will ultimately feel happier for the reasons I mentioned earlier) but I wouldn’t consider their successfully doing so to be an improvement in their appearance. Many people who argue against not fat shaming people because obesity is a serious health problem don’t understand that you can encourage someone to lose weight without shaming their appearance or advising it out of consideration for beauty. Many people also think that obesity being a legitimate health problem is a reason to regard obese people as objectively non-beautiful ('ugly’ sounds extreme but 'attractive’ technically just means that at least some people are attracted to someone) but health and beauty are two fundamentally different concepts and the former does not legitimize the latter (the later is a value judgment. Health is a neutral description of how efficiently a biological system is functioning). Fat pride or body pride in general is a good thing, not because anything about anyone’s appearance warrants feeling proud or ashamed of but because pride itself is a 'form’ of happiness.

People who maintain the double standard seem to either believe that the shame or humiliation some people feel as a result of being criticized for their appearance is not harmful (not only is it intrinsically harmful but it can’t be dismissed as unwarranted – it shouldn’t not be considered even if it is unwarranted or the result of an irrational mindset or 'bad’ character etc. but criticism indirectly and directly causes shame and humiliation for a universally non-arbitrary reason and on top of that the criticism is invalid because physical traits don't matter), if they acknowledge that it exists, or it’s considered harmful but acceptable because of their social status, the characteristic that’s being criticized (maybe because it’s expected to cause quantitatively less pain and the critic doesn’t subjectively regard the criticism as very harsh or maybe they believe we have to justify caring about pain and if the criticism is warranted then that should take priority) or because of how they personally feel about them (for the record, I do think that tactfully advising people on their appearance can be justified but as I said in my last blog – that advice would be non-critical since my ideal actor wouldn’t 'care’ about appearance in terms of inherently valuing or dis-valuing it. S/he would advise someone to alter their appearance only because s/he believed that they and / or other people would ultimately feel happier as a result for whatever reasons). Lastly, they might not assume that it would cause shame or humiliation (for various reasons including some of those mentioned in the last two points. Any of the points for any of the three reasons might apply to any other), and it might not, but to say that body criticism causes body dyshporia or shame and humiliation for a universally non-arbitrary reason is to say that, when it does, it does so because of it's *nature*, it's potential to do so isn't circumstantial. It’s not that the same reasoning that justifies condemning appearance shaming in one scenario doesn’t apply to appearance shaming in others (since everyone has a comparable interest in avoiding shame or humiliation and distress in general, even if some people are more vulnerable to it), it’s that people feel differently about different kinds of people and that’s ultimately what justifies all double standards ('double standards' that deal with how people are 'treated' or considering their interests). It’s egocentric (if not egoistic) because it’s contrary to indiscriminately feeling with other people. All double standards are irrational because if the nature of a thing is X then it is X always, in every imaginable scenario.  

Contrary to popular belief, discrimination on the basis of something that is within one’s control is just as wrong and suffering is still bad even when it is the result of one’s own choices (that said – people often suffer more because they believe they have no control over a situation, although a common factor in regret is the belief that one had control over a past situation. It's worth noting that if someone doesn't have the means or information to change a situation then they don't have 'control' over it, even if there is a possible solution to the problem. Some options also come with unacceptable costs or ultimatums and trade-offs and personal preferences can be a factor in that - discrimination against people with blue eyes could still be harmful even if they had the option of different colored eye contacts or some kind of surgery).

Just as you can't drawn a non-arbitrary line between the distress some people feel and the same distress other people feel, if there's value in anyone improving their appearance (and there must be if we consider it to be an 'improvement') then there's value in everyone improving their appearance (if someone's appearance is flawless by whatever agreed upon standards then this wouldn't apply to them because their appearance can't be improved but not because they would be exempt from a core ethical principle that applies to everyone else).

[huruma]

Some implications of hedonistic consequentialism

To summarize : hedonism as a theory of value implies that every possible sentient being's happiness is or would be intrinsically good and only happiness is intrinsically good.

I'm using 'happiness' as an umbrella term for all pleasurable emotional states or emotional states that are felt as inherently positive (and there is only one 'kind' of happiness - different positive or negative emotional states are distinguished by the kinds of objects that they are oriented toward, the basic pleasurable-ness of love, pride, certainty, clarity, sexual happiness etc. is the same) and by 'happiness' I do not mean an attitude, personality trait, the fulfillment of life goals, 'mental health', certain observable  behaviour or anything other than a concrete emotional state or mood. Likewise, when I've used the terms 'empathy' and 'sympathy' I was explicitly referring to an identification with the feelings of other beings under the assumption that valuing someone's happiness is the natural extension of identifying with that person's happiness since we all instinctively want to experience happiness and to avoid distress.

Unlike many other hedonistic consequentialists (and I can only claim to be one ideologically - many people who do not identify with hedonistic consequentialism are far more compassionate than I am) I don't believe the happiness of separate beings can be meaningfully aggregated (I do believe emotional states can be aggregated across time because duration itself is one of the measurements of happiness-suffering. A million people can't collectively experience happiness that is more intense or stronger than what one person feels. To increase happiness you increase the intensity and duration of it, increasing the number of individuals who experience happiness doesn't do that) so I would rather say that the right choices are the ones that maximize the greatest (most intense / prolonged) happiness / least suffering for the greatest number of sentient beings instead of the greatest balance of happiness over suffering in 'the world'.

I'll try to stick to the basics of why I believe hedonism implies these things (and there could always be something I could add, clarify or correct in some way). I'll start with a point I've never mentioned before and hide the rest because they're basically rehashed from what I've mentioned in other blogs and this post is long.

Art elitism and fashion

In my opinion, art only has direct or indirect value to the extent that it makes people happy (because they actually enjoy it) or because it encourages them to be the kind of people who value happiness indiscriminately and alone (or inspires them in other ways or makes them happier for whatever indirect reasons). I don't accept the concept of higher or lower art or any standard of judging art as good or bad independently of whether or not it ultimately makes people happier. Criticism of art is invalid if art is neither intrinsically good or bad (I don't mean criticizing art that glorifies violence or promotes ethical attitudes that contradict universal sympathy or pan-hedonism specifically for that reason alone). The only thing that warrants a negative attitude is the suffering of any being or their being deprived of happiness. Even the happiness caused by art that promotes attitudes that contradict pan-hedonism still has intrinsic value.

'Beautiful' and 'ugly' aren't neutral physical descriptors. If we're making a value judgment in saying that something is 'beautiful' (and not just that it's aesthetically pleasing to some people which doesn't say anything about it's inherent nature) then no art is intrinsically beautiful or ugly from the hedonistic point of view (the same reasoning applies to literature, poetry and any other non-sensory art form). It's the emotional experience of 'beauty' that is intrinsically valuable, not physical traits or any art form in and of itself.

I think the concept of high fashion becomes meaningless if you accept the premise of hedonism. The justification for wearing anything is that you and / or other people actually find it to be aesthetically pleasing (if not just because it is comfortable, it protects you from the elements or for the sake of privacy) which has nothing to do with whether or not it's considered to be high fashion for the current time period. If a hedonistic consequentialist advised someone to change their clothing or hairstyle it would be because they believed it would indirectly make them and / or other people feel happier in the long run. The advice would be non-critical because changing one's hairstyle or clothing wouldn't be considered an improvement in and of itself.

Non-monogamy and sexual promiscuity

1) Monogamy promotes competition and exclusivity. This is true regardless of whether or not competition is good or bad. If two people are interested in the same monogamous person - one of them has to be rejected in favor of the other (if s/he is interested in being with either) even if s/he is relatively attracted to or interested in both of them. Non-monogamy wouldn't necessarily eliminate all competition (including sexual / romantic competition) but it would necessarily reduce it. It would eliminate competition for mates. If you reject the competition for resources inherent to capitalism and even 'socialism' then I think it's consistent to reject deliberate / formal monogamy (and I'm including the romantic monogamy associated with swinging). 

All other factors considered - it's better that multiple people benefit from a 'thing'. Non-playful competition and possessiveness contradict valuing happiness indiscriminately.

2) Monogamy is inherently repressive. If you are physically attracted to person A who is physically indistinguishable from person B (who, unlike A, has what you would consider to be an unappealing personality, does not share your values or is someone you would consider a relationship with to be inappropriate for whatever reasons) then you have to be physically attracted to person B because they are physically identical. Even if you believe that both psychological and physical traits play a role in sexual or sensual attraction, you still have to be relatively attracted to person B (attraction or lack of it is not the same as being turned on or off by the idea of having sex with someone). I don't believe there is a possible universe where sexual /sensual attraction - the desire for physical intimacy with someone as an end in itself and not as an expression of affection - could not be determined by physical attributes alone (which isn't to deny that affection is a natural consequence of physical intimacy or that sex is social activity) but that may be besides my point. There is more than one at least potential person who shares some of the traits that make person A appealing to you. 

My argument for non-monogamy isn't one in favor of unlimited novelty. The less easily bored someone is the less interested they'll be in novelty for the sake of novelty. My point is that attraction is not a choice, people (who aren't asexual) are necessarily attracted to multiple potential persons (including people they might not want to be attracted to) and sexual suppression is necessarily harmful. My argument is concerned with sexual suppression - it desensitizes people to the objects of sexual pleasure and results in their experiencing less happiness and more distress (and being more easily distressed) overall, the harm of suppression is rooted in a point I made in my last blog about desire frustration). All possible sexual animals are polygamous by orientation, even if we can choose to live a monogamous lifestyle.

Sexual and romantic promiscuity should be the ideal and in the long run I think it's the best mindset to have in fantasy at least. By promiscuity I mean being open to some kind of a romantic or sexual relationship with every single person you're relatively attracted to (contrary to popular belief there are many different kinds of 'polyamorous' arrangements. I'd also like to note that non-monogamy can still imply some exclusivity) or not discriminating when it comes to potential partners (for reasons other than physical attraction, although altruistic sex can be a good or overall good thing in some scenarios). Obviously there are practical reasons to not act on your attraction to someone in real life but I think there’s a fundamental difference between not exploring a real life relationship with someone because you resent or dislike  them or because of various taboos (that aren’t rooted in sympathizing with them or other people) and not acting on that attraction because of real world consequences that don't apply to fantasy (this is one example of a moral taboo - I wouldn’t fault anyone for being physically attracted to a dead body but considering mainstream human psychology as it actually is I wouldn’t expect someone who valued the happiness of the deceased to want to have sex 'with' something that reminds them of something they have a negative attitude toward – the person's death - but even someone who did would still have to have a preference for a conscious partner who could share the experience with them  and enjoy it as much as they would. You wouldn’t sexualize the suffering or misfortune of someone you identified with, which isn't to suggest that I think being permanently unconscious is  harmful to the deceased but in ideal circumstances their existence would be preferable since experiencing happiness requires existing)

Romantic commitment

If commitment is unconditional devotion to something then the only aspect of a romantic relationship that we're justified in committing to is the part rooted in identifying with and valuing the happiness of the other person. That might be an overly strict definition of 'commitment', in some sense one can commit to a healthy lifestyle on the assumption that their long-term happiness depends on their health and not because they value health as an end in itself (another example is 'pacifism'. If pacifism involves an assumption that violence ultimately always causes unnecessary suffering – because it contributes to the cycle of violence or robs us off our peace of mind and ability to connect with others – then that's compatible with hedonism, what isn't compatible is the idea that violence is immoral in all possible situations for reasons that have nothing to do with emotional well-being). Even under the less strict definition of commitment I don't agree with romantic commitment because romantic love is transient and unstable by nature.

Communism

In a pan-hedonistic society goods and services would be systematically distributed according to expected benefit alone. I don't believe there is a possible universe where diminishing marginal utility could not exist (in such a world our desires could never be satisfied - nothing could make us happy) and there are only so many resources that even a utility monster could benefit from so pan-hedonism justifies sharing if there are enough goods or resources to begin with. There would be no private property if there was widespread agreement that the justification for controlling some resource was indiscriminately maximizing benefit and not ownership. 'Communism' might not be the best word for me to use since what I'm advocating for (or at least the justification for a society where resources are distributed 'to each according to need') is very different than Marxism (and other far left positions). The Marxist-Leninist ideologies of 'communist' or state socialist dictatorships and totalitarian regimes that exist or have existed and their disregard for suffering is definitely incompatible with pan-hedonism.

Animal Equality

All sentient animals are persons (moral patients) and equal when it comes to the basic experience of happiness and distress. Even some of the hedonistic consequentialists who seem to take (non-human) animal suffering seriously don't seem to place the same value on animal happiness that they do on human happiness (I think some people are biased in favor of human happiness, even in the absence of formal ideological inconsistencies). There is no more or less of a reason to maximize animal happiness than there is to minimize animal suffering and animal happiness requires animals existing.

Mental health

Mental illness (by definition) isn't inter-subjectively testable (the hormonal imbalances or brain pathology that cause or are assumed to cause various emotional problems and mental states and dispositions that we consider to be problematic for whatever reasons are or would be physical disorders. A mental illness is something we would have to experience and the concept is purely speculative if it's something we can never experience or observe) and the concept of health can’t coherently refer to both the capacity of biological systems to function (the inherent consequence of poor health is death) and the nature of certain mental states that we make value judgments about but I want to focus on the implications of hedonism when it comes to our concept of mental health as it is or could be and not on why I believe the concept is logically incoherent and non-scientific. Either mental health is a value judgment, in which case mental illness is either suffering itself (which contradicts a lot of our current understanding of mental illness. Mental illness is sometimes believed to cause or disposition people to suffer but people are still considered mentally ill in various ways even at specific moments when they’re not experiencing distress. I also reject the idea of drawing an arbitrary fundamental line between mild, infrequent and short term emotional distress and quantitatively more intense, frequent or prolonged suffering) or it’s some other thing that psychiatrists consider to be bad, out of 'sympathy’ with or judgment of those individuals who are considered to be afflicted, that I consider to be neutral or even good (ie. manic euphoria or the happiness caused by certain delusions and hallucinations) or it’s some neutral thing that causes suffering (which would shrink the list of mental illnesses drastically), in which case there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being mentally ill just as there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being physically ill. There would be no moral imperative to treat mental illness for it’s own sake. In real life, very poor health does cause most humans and most other sentient animals very intense unbearable suffering so I want to eliminate it for that reason but realistically psychiatrists and pro-mental health people are almost never concerned with minimizing felt emotional distress alone. A mental illness still wouldn’t be a distinct 'condition’. The nature of suffering is the same regardless of it’s intensity, duration or frequency or it’s object and that’s part of the animal experience that everyone can relate to (it would be callous to downplay the difference between mild distress and shockingly extreme suffering but it’s not callous to point out that the difference is a difference in degree and not kind).

I won’t claim that efforts to minimize mental illness have nothing to do with wanting to minimize suffering but saying that something is bad in and of itself and saying that something is bad because it causes felt suffering at specific moments in time are two different positions. The concept of mental illness exists to legitimize our value judgments, most people intuitively take for granted that health is good and synonymous with well-being ('welfare' or 'well-being' is a value judgment, we can't neutrally state that something is harmful as an amoral medical fact). If everyone accepted pain itself as bad we wouldn't need the concept of mental illness to legitimize compassion for people who suffer from unbearable or crippling depression, anxiety, body dysphoria etc. or to criticize the low empathy associated with narcissism and psychopathy.

Anti-nationalism

This one is similar to animal equality. No government is justified in prioritizing the welfare of one group of people over any other. My argument against nationalism is similar to the argument I would make against cultural Marxism and even ecological species diversity or human ethnic diversity for it’s own sake. I reject the idea that groups as groups have collective interests (only individuals as individuals can benefit from or be harmed by anything) and grouping people based on aspects of their identity that have nothing to do with our capacity to experience happiness and pain (or at least those group identities don’t matter in and of themselves. Social cohesion requires similar values but differences between what people from different cultural, ethnic and racial groups or between men and women look like, sound like, our mannerisms, how we express our emotions or to what extent we do and even the fact that different things trigger positive or negative emotional responses from us don't ultimately matter because they have nothing to do with our common internal experience of happiness or pain itself). I once wrote that voluntary racial or ethnic separatism could be justified (and it could be victim-less and even a short term solution) but I think people are probably wired to have an empathetic preference for people who share an aspect of their identity that is important to them so priming people for universal sympathy and inclusiveness probably requires encouraging them to think of themselves as sentient beings first and foremost (although I also think that someone who identifies with a view like pan-hedonism, pan-Africanism, pan-humanism, animal equality etc. that involves solidarity with individuals who do not ascribe to that view isn’t necessarily going to have an empathetic preference for people who share that view which is -to themselves - an important aspect of their identity).

My support for anti-nationalism is not rooted in humanism. Two-way human-turtle unity might not be possible but we can still identify with them.

Cultural Marxism

The idea that people of color and women aren’t capable of racism and sexism (whether it’s defined as privately discriminating in the sense of regarding one group as superior to another or the power + prejudice definition which would still apply to anyone who is physically capable of harming or disadvantaging other people) is illogical but even if they really weren’t capable of it - harming someone because of their race, sex or any group identity (or not giving them equal consideration for any reason) would morally be just as wrong as true racism, sexism or group oppression etc. There’s nothing especially wrong with racial or group based discrimination (I could argue that all discrimination is 'group discrimination' because whatever trait or characteristic someone has that is perceived as justifying discrimination against them is potentially shared by some other people, although only some of these traits are immutable). Even in a society where some groups really were systematically (under law) discriminated against, members of the systematically privileged group (as well as legitimate oppressors) would still deserve equal consideration which would justify ALM over BLM, gender egalitarianism over feminism (and it’s male equivalent) etc. in every possible society. The egalitarianism inherent to pan-hedonism is incompatible with the double standards of both liberals and conservatives (and all ethical double standards). If our objective is to minimize the number of people who are harmed by some problem then it wouldn’t matter if group X really is disproportionately affected by that problem, if any individual from another group is or could be (directly) harmed by it then it’s not a group X problem

God

It is not moral to act according to God’s will or the will of any other authority figure for the sake of acting in accordance with their will. If there is a god s/he or it is moral because they value happiness indiscriminately. Valuing happiness indiscriminately is not moral because it is in accordance with anyone’s will or commandment. I don’t believe an omniscient, all powerful god who is absolutely (as opposed to relatively) compassionate could allow anyone to suffer.

Statism / authoritarianism

A society without state coercion or the initiation of force would be ideal but in every society moral actors would be willing to initiate force if they believed it was necessary. Pacifism, or at least a 'do no serious harm’ stance, appeals to me for completely selfish reasons, the reason why I wouldn’t harm one person for the greater benefit of another (or the same benefit to more individuals) is my own peace of mind (I think there is a fundamental psychological difference between actively harming and passively allowing harm that makes the former quantitatively worse in most scenarios, other factors being equal, not only is actively and knowingly harming yourself or someone you identify with more difficult and psychological damaging to yourself but the latter has a hardening effect that can make it difficult to connect with other people and be emotionally invested in their well-being and hedonistic consequentialists have to factor both of those things into consideration). The future is inherently unpredictable (anything that’s logically possible could happen. Nothing is objectively ‘probable’ - something is either true or it will happen or it’s false or it won’t happen and our common sense assumption that the future will more or less resemble the past isn’t inherently rational or irrational) and I like the assumption of a third option, even if it can’t be honestly held in every scenario. Authoritarianism doesn't necessarily imply 'violence' though (there are some hypothetical scenarios where you can violate someone's autonomy without causing them physical or psychological pain and you can cause someone pain without violating their autonomy). For me, the harshness of harming someone for a greater good is rooted entirely in not wanting to cause either them or myself unbearable or relatively extreme pain so I can't reject hedonistic consequentialism as repugnant because I'd be rejecting it for hedonistic reasons (and it's not just guilt or sympathetic pain that I would feel as a result. There's just something about causing pain to someone you empathize with that is fundamentally harsher, I have another blog about this, and I have to think that if you could desensitize yourself to this it would be because you no longer had the natural pro-social feelings that play a role in spontaneous empathy. It's similar for me with painlessly killing someone for non-euthanasia related reasons but just being permanently unconscious isn't terrifying or unacceptable the way that a certain level of pain is so it's for more obviously selfish reasons, as harsh as the idea of not valuing the happiness of someone I loved, respected or identified with is).

Respect

This might be interpretative but I’ve come to the opinion that negative utilitarianism doesn’t involve the respect for persons that classical utilitarianism does because it is preoccupied with something negative (suffering - if we mean negative hedonistic utilitarianism). 'Respect’ implies regarding something as being of intrinsic positive value and while a person isn’t their happiness - happiness is a state of mind, it’s a way that emotional beings exist. To me, valuing someone’s happiness implies respecting them because their happiness is intrinsically beneficial to them. John has to exist in order for his happiness to exist. Obviously we should care about suffering - people are intrinsically harmed by it - but I don’t think wanting to minimize someone’s suffering (for it’s own sake) requires respecting them (although I don’t think you can genuinely want someone to be free from suffering if you completely hate them. Just as affection is inherently related to sympathy, I think hatred is inherently related to sadism and schadenfreude or at the very least it blocks empathy. 'Hate’ might be something more than just dis-respect or having a low opinion of someone though).

That’s not to say that I think wanting to minimize someone’s suffering is 'disrespectful’. A person doesn’t have to die in order to be free from suffering but they do have to exist in order to experience happiness. Even a person in pain is capable of happiness and would experience it if they experienced the cognitive and sensory objects that would make them happy (and were not experiencing whatever cognitive or sensory objects that are causing them pain). Admiration means something different than respect, to me, if I 'admire' someone I hold them up as a role model.

Head - heart inconsistencies

Valuing is inherently personal. If you value something you are emotionally invested in it. Pan-hedonism is not an academic, intellectual or 'philosophical’ position (the idea that happiness is intrinsically good is consistent with direct experience, and as an epistemological solipsist I would argue that direct experience is the sole source of knowledge, but realizing that arguably doesn’t involve the kind of analytical reasoning that 'philosophy’ requires. I can’t 'logically' demonstrate that we experience happiness as intrinsically good but you’re admitting that we do if you agree that something inherent to the nature of happiness makes us have to instinctively want to experience it, the reason why all possible sentient beings have to instinctively want to experience happiness and avoid pain is because we experience the nature of happiness and pain as good and bad, something is good or bad if it's existence is a better or worse state of affairs, and we can only know whether or not happiness or pain is objectively good or bad through direct experience of happiness or pain). To say that happiness is intrinsically good is to say that everyone's and all happiness is intrinsically good (if the nature of anything is X then it is X in all possible situations. Something is 'possible' if we can imagine it, we can't imagine a situation in which happiness doesn't feel good) and only happiness is intrinsically good (we can't imagine a scenario in which happiness and goodness were separable, just like we can't imagine a scenario in which water and wetness existed separately, not only do we experience everything else as neutral but we can't imagine something that isn't happiness being comparably good without being happiness) but the basic preoccupation with happiness isn’t a 'philosophical’ stance. As a normative and meta-ethical theory I think of pan-hedonism as a socio-political and even 'spiritual' world view. If you valued someone’s happiness you would, depending on how generally emotionally resilient you are, have a negative emotional response to their suffering and death (which, again, isn’t to imply that death is inherently tragic but it does negate the possibility of one experiencing any future happiness) because there’s a non-arbitrary reason why you would have a negative emotional response to what you have a negative attitude toward but at the very least you couldn’t have a positive emotional response to something you have a negative attitude toward (for example, and this alone isn’t what I have in mind, the act of joking about someone’s suffering or death might be victim-less and so would saying 'I hope Donald Trump suffers’ but you wouldn’t be amused by someone’s misfortune or feel inclined to do either of these things if you valued their happiness).

It’s possible for a hedonistic consequentialist to be inconsistent even when s/he is not being ideologically inconsistent, they’re being inconsistent when their personal attitude doesn’t match their formal stance.

[huruma]

What causes happiness and distress

Different things make different people happy at specific moments in time for different reasons but I believe there are at least four things (ultimately only one thing) that cause happiness and emotional distress for a universal non-arbitrary reason (once you account for how cognitively developed a being is) and three of these things are ultimately rooted in the fact that experienced desire frustration is inherently painful (the fourth thing). I’m not arguing that these things are good or bad and warrant a positive or negative emotional response, that we shouldn’t accept them as part of life or denying that we have a personal responsibility to try to tolerate them. I’m also not claiming that they necessarily do cause happiness or emotional distress, only that there’s a universal non-arbitrary reason why they would. Things that cause emotional distress can be instrumentally good. I’ll try to focus on why I believe these things are non-arbitrarily pleasing or distressing without commenting on them beyond that.

Before editing this I initially included poor health but I don't believe that poor health causes pain for a universally non-arbitrary reason or because of it's nature. Poor health causes pain in most animals but that might be because animals who instinctively avoid injury and sickness because it is painful to them  are more likely to pass on genes associated with poor health being painful. There are some people with a rare medical disorder that makes them incapable of experiencing physical pain. It's obvious that certain pathological hormonal imbalances can sensitize us to painful stimuli but I think the reverse is sometimes true as well.

 I would like to note that there’s only one ‘kind’ or ‘form’ of happiness. What distinguishes different positive or pleasurable emotional states from each other is not their pleasurable-ness but the kinds of objects that they are oriented toward. The object of pride is one’s self-image, the object of affection is the intuitively perceived, if not consciously imagined, minds of other beings in the context of emotional intimacy with them being pleasurable, the object of amusement is the perception of something as humorous etc. The problem with the idea of a guide or secrets to happiness is that it’s anecdotal and only circumstantially true if it’s not ultimately rooted in the points I’ll outline, it doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of happiness and I think the concept of ‘studying’ happiness is as meaningless as studying (our subjective perception of) the color blue. Besides incentivizing people to share goods and services and treat other people with respect and compassion one advantage of a pan-hedonistic mindset is that it is the most reliable source of moral clarity and certainty (in terms of knowing what is inherently good and bad and by extension moral and immoral – not in terms of knowing what will maximize the most happiness or minimize the most suffering for the greatest number of beings). Even though the idea that none of the objects of our happiness or pain (with the exception of the remembered or imagined happiness or pain that we project onto other people or our past  and future selves) have intrinsic value is counter intuitive because we have to intuitively associate our emotions with their objects I don’t believe that any other world view can help us to reliably make sense of reality because all of the happiness and pain we experience clarifies that hedonism is actually true, I could argue that if we actually experience happiness and pain as intrinsically good and bad then every contradicting judgment we make potentially leads to some kind of internal dissonance in addition to being arbitrary because beliefs that contradict hedonism (whether it’s denying that every possible person’s happiness would be objective good or that only happiness is good) conflict with what we actually experience.

Arbitrariness creates the potential for uncertainty by its inherent nature (arbitrariness necessarily implies ambiguity and ambiguity, which is what causes the actual feeling of uncertainty, can only be eliminated with a non-arbitrary option). If we don’t accept a belief or value because it is self-evidently true or good then our judgment must necessarily be rooted in arbitrary, subjective criteria, we can’t make sense of reality with subjective intuitions that we can’t necessarily even articulate (truth is discovered, not created or decided) and when we’re torn between one intuition and another there’s no tie breaker that doesn’t come from our own momentary subjective whims (hedonism and the epistemic solipsism that justifies it doesn’t eliminate all arbitrariness but it inherently reduces it). Without an objective standard there is always the possibility we won’t be able to choose one among all of the conceivable mutually contradicting options. Pan-hedonism and the epistemic solipsism that justifies it are the inherently non-arbitrary theories of value and knowledge because we experience happiness and pain as inherently good and bad and only our own subjective experience in general is self-evidently real.

I cannot possibly be mistaken in claiming that happiness is inherently good because unlike sensory perception or belief happiness doesn’t simulate a reality other than itself (and our subjective experience of happiness - pain is self-evidently not the inter-subjectively observable neurological activity it corresponds with), unlike the presumed physical objects of sensory perception, for example, an experience cannot possibly not be what it appears to be (even our sensory perception of a world that might not be accurately represented by it is still real and what it appears to be). If happiness - pain factually feels inherently good - bad (if there’s something written into the experience that makes it so that it would have to ‘seem’ inherently good - bad to every possible mind who could experience it, and this would be evidenced by having to instinctively want to experience happiness and avoid pain - because it pre-rational judgment appears good and bad) then it can’t possibly be the case that happiness - pain isn’t good - bad because an experience is exactly what it appears to be, to deny that pain is inherently bad as an objective fact about reality despite it feeling bad is to deny that our subjective experience of pain actually exists. I have edited this blog a few times now at least and it’s very long but my point here is that no other position is so undeniably consistent with our direct experience of reality and as reliable a source of clarity and certainty for that reason. If you reject hedonism you either deny that we experience happiness as inherently good (and I’m not making a personal judgment about our experience of happiness when I say that it ‘feels good,’ the way that someone could say that a certain food tastes good, I’m stating a fact about the nature of that subjective experience or at least what it appears to be) or you accept that we experience happiness as inherently good but you don’t believe that our experience of happiness is what would justify the belief that happiness is or isn’t inherently good.

1) Criticism and disrespect (I realize that criticism is not necessarily ‘disrespectful’ but disrespect falls under criticism. ‘Disrespect’ reduces someone to their flaws and errors but you can have an overall positive attitude toward something that is considered flawed in specific ways. Criticism - that outlines something as being of negative value- is ‘disrespectful’ of the specific characteristic or judgment that is considered flawed or erroneous because to 'respect' something is to hold it in high esteem and I believe a whole is nothing more than the sum total of it’s parts. For reasons I won't go into, I interpret valuing someone's happiness to imply respecting them, even if you can respect someone in some way that doesn't consider their internally felt well-being, because happiness, which is a state minds exist in rather than something external to them, is intrinsically beneficial to the one who experiences it). There is a non-arbitrary reason why criticizing someone or something someone is associated with as flawed would indirectly cause shame (if the critic manages to persuade the criticized person that their criticism is valid or draws attention to something they’re already ashamed of) and directly cause humiliation (if the criticized person either disagrees with the value or belief the criticism is rooted in or justified by or they accept the criticism and even the belief that justifies it as valid but view the criticism as undeserved because it’s inconsiderate or ‘disrespectful’). I would argue that shame and humiliation both involve the felt degradation of one’s self-image and are the opposite of pride but with humiliation the degradation is viewed as undeserved. A ‘flaw’ is by definition something of negative value and shame is what we feel when we view ourselves, or something associated with ourselves, as being flawed and humiliation is what we feel when we believe we are viewed or treated with less respect than we deserve.

Even value neutral criticism can cause shame or humiliation to someone who prides themselves on their knowledge, expertise or skill in a particular area (or it might harm them in other ways if they're emotionally invested in the belief that's being refuted). I think there are some things that don’t involve viewing or treating some aspect of someone or something associated with them as flawed that could still cause shame or humiliation for non-arbitrary reasons. I would assume that being the object of amusement could cause shame or humiliation because humor is arguably belittling by nature and people take the things they value seriously. Condescension or treating someone as though they are ‘inferior’ in some way that doesn’t necessarily involve a negative value judgment could humiliate someone because viewing or treating someone in some way that they consider to be unflattering would be non-arbitrarily shaming or humiliating (there isn’t necessarily a universally non-arbitrary reason to consider X unflattering but if someone does then being treated or viewed that way would be shaming or humiliating unless they’re resilient to stressful stimuli in general).

I didn't connect criticism to desire frustration when I first wrote this but if you negatively value something you have to prefer that it not exist, that includes the traits that you consider to be flawed. I believe that we care about the beliefs and values of other people for two reasons - the first is that all of the choices we make are rooted in beliefs and values (desires are inherently motivating) and those choices have real world consequences that we might negatively value and the second is that other people being critical of our beliefs and values (which is logically implied by their merely holding conflicting beliefs and values) inherently introduces the possibility of self-doubt (you have to establish what makes your judgment superior to the other person’s. Without an objective standard your assumptions and your values are just as arbitrary as theirs).

I believe the human psychological need for privacy (the ability to control the transmission of information about one's self) is rooted at least partly, if not entirely, in shame avoidance. Social anxiety or shyness is fear of shame or humiliation in social situations and to feel ‘self-conscious’ is to be hyper aware of other people possibly being or becoming aware of sources of shame or humiliation that they might judge negatively.

2) Ambiguity. There is a non-arbitrary reason why ambiguity would cause uncertainty and confusion in addition to just being more difficult to process (this second point is related to my third point on simplicity vs. complexity. I would argue that ambiguity is inherently complex even though complexity doesn’t necessarily involve ambiguity). By ‘uncertainty’ I don’t mean a lack of information. Uncertainty is what we feel when we hold two or more conflicting beliefs or desires. Every choice we make is rooted in an impersonal belief about the consequences of that choice or the context that justifies it and the desire or value that motivates us - what we want. Uncertainty is inherently distressing because it prevents us from functioning (it delays decision making) which results in desire frustration (which is my fourth point). Not only does it prevent us from making a decision but without coming to a conclusion about something we can’t appropriately react to it (if you’re uncertain about whether or not your brother is dead you can’t completely grieve, and start the process of accepting and adjusting, or feel relieved. Desire satisfaction requires fully believing that our desires have been fulfilled).

Confusion is inherently distressing for the same basic reason. When we’re confused we can’t make sense of or understand information (again, this is related to simplicity because you have to process information in order to make a decision about it). I mostly have ambiguous communication in mind but I think this can apply to seemingly ambiguous information in general. Something is ‘ambiguous’ if it can mean multiple conflicting things. I believe ambiguous communication is inherently more difficult to process (in addition to causing uncertainty because unofficial hints give one a ‘subjective reason’ to believe one is and is not communicating ambiguously and confusion if what they are saying behind the lines is unclear and, when it comes to ambiguous criticism, making it more difficult - for social reasons - to defend themselves from what they see as invalid or unjustified criticism or to explain why they believe they’re being misunderstood). You can only officially say one thing at a time (in the context of a given sentence X can only overtly mean one thing. ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ is a metaphor but it’s not ambiguous, or ironic, because in the context of that saying ‘cats and dogs’ only means one thing - ‘very hard’).

Ambiguous communication or verbal irony is literally self-contradicting because it involves saying “I’m only saying this but I’m also saying that.” It’s inherently more difficult to make sense of (overt or deliberately obvious sarcasm isn’t what I have in mind but I think this point applies to that as another form of open insincerity as well). Studies have shown that participants exposed to ambiguous racism had higher levels of cortisol than those exposed to overt racism. There is a lot of evidence to support the claim that uncertainty is inherently distressing. Whatever information is communicated ambiguously is still pleasurable or distressing independently of how it's communicated.

3) Simplicity. All other factors considered, relative simplicity is inherently more pleasurable than relative complexity because ‘simple’ things are easier to process and manage (although I don’t think simplicity is inherent to cognitive objects. While we necessarily have to find some things to be simpler than others, ‘simplicity’ refers to the ease by which we can process or manage information. The same things can be more or less complicated for different people).

I have a ‘theory’ that two dimensional looking cartoon art that tends to lack detail is non-arbitrarily appealing because it is a simplified version of the real world (I say two dimensional looking because we actually perceive the real world as two dimensional. The impression that we see the world as three dimensional is an illusion our minds create from various physical cues that are absent in cartoon art). I also believe slow tempo music and especially ambient drone music lowers stress (regardless of whether or not people like it) for the same basic reason (the fact that people can dislike slow tempo music or cartoon art doesn't contradict my point, one - because other factors have to be considered and two - because the information itself has nothing to do with how quickly or slowly it's presented). Drone music (music with long sustained notes and little variation or sudden changes. There is probably a more detailed explanation as to why slow tempo ambient music with no dominant or linear melody lowers stress by its very nature, I know that by synchronizing with the brain it influences it to slow down) embodies simplicity and minimalism in music just as simplicity and minimalism is what distinguishes two dimensional looking cartoon art from mainstream representational art.

I’ve never believed that change was inherently stressful (some changes are positive, some are negative and some are neutral) and I don’t think there is any inherent connection between change and either anxiety or uncertainty but I do think sudden changes are harder to process than gradual change is. What makes slow music and slow movement in general ‘slow’ is that changes occur more gradually. I think that graphic fiction (fiction that involves telling a story through sequential art) might be non-arbitrarily appealing for the same reason drone music might be. We never directly see movement. We see the external world as a still image but remembering the images that immediately preceded what we currently see gives us the impression of directly seeing movement or a changing world. The impression of seeing movement is an illusion like our impression of seeing depth and distance (ie. three dimensional objects). In a comic book panel (like a still photograph) there is no change and our minds have time to process what we’re seeing.

I don’t know how much truth there is to this but I’ve read that people read for pleasure at a fourth grade level.

4) Desire satisfaction. (Non-experienced) desire fulfillment isn’t a distinct thing with a distinct nature and there isn’t necessarily a universal non-arbitrary reason why someone would want or value X but if they do value X then there’s a non-arbitrary reason why X not being realized (if they are aware that it hasn’t been realized) would cause them distress. The felt or experienced frustration of our desires is inherently painful.

I believe that both magic and advanced speculative technology (as well as certain speculative natural phenomenon) in fantasy and science fiction embody the concept of wish fulfillment to an extent that mainstream fiction can’t (although magic in fantasy fiction has none of the limitations that speculative technology or natural phenomenon in hard science fiction does. Both technology and magic are or would be sources of power, power being the ability to shape reality into what we want it to be) but because speculative phenomenon in science fiction is explainable (legitimately or not) by inherently impersonal laws of physics the fantasy genre is fundamentally more emotional by nature. Some people might be uninterested in fantasy because of its perceived impracticality (in addition to reasons, like common tropes, that aren’t inherent to the basic criteria that defines fantasy) but what I’m interested in is whether or not an experience depicted in a story is possible. For example, I believe the concept of time travel is logically incoherent (unlike some supernatural phenomenon that is, as far as I can tell, logically possible despite being contrary to the apparent laws of physics) but I can imagine being hooked into a virtual reality machine (or having a dream) that simulates the experience of what appears to be time travel and in this hallucination I believe that my experience represents genuine time travel - that would be identical to what time travel ‘would be’ and whether or not my experience represents  actual time travel is irrelevant to my experience (a better example might have been some supernatural phenomenon that I, as someone who rejects philosophical materialism and the belief that subjective experience is the neurological activity it corresponds with, believe is logically possible). For the record, I believe that prose fiction does a better job at stimulating imagination which is the basis of consciously empathizing with other people and that’s also related to the introspective direct experience that justifies the belief that everyone’s happiness and only happiness is intrinsically good (they are also both past oriented, all imagination draws on past experience and you can only reflect on the memory of experience).

Our capacity to fantasize about sensory and cognitive objects that would make us happy in our mind’s eye is an advantage (our capacity for imagination is an advantage and a disadvantage - besides being the basis of empathy) but what we can imagine in our mind’s eye is inherently less vivid and attention grabbing than the perceived external world (this is why I believe that - other factors considered - people would necessarily have a stronger emotional reaction to what they see in film and graphic fiction than to what they read in prose fiction despite the former generally being considered lower forms of art). Fantasizing about something can never be as satisfying as the ideal 'real life’ experience (which would include dreams - a form of psychosis- and other hallucinations). When we dream we’re not perceiving what we do in our mind’s eye, we’re perceiving it as external to us (which is why we don’t experience blackness or blindness even though our eyes are closed and we’re not consciously processing the 'actual’ external world. We would also physically act out our dreams if it weren’t for sleep paralysis). I think it’s a misconception that dreams are less vivid than waking reality. I would argue that our sensory perception and emotional states are basically the same (if I’m not mistaken our limbic system is even more active. The happiness we experience in our dreams might be more or less intense for whatever reasons but it can’t feel any more vague or vivid - happiness only differs in terms of intensity and duration) but certain aspects of our cognition are impaired. I don’t think we’re capable of memorizing information in non-lucid dreams which is how long-term memory is formed (we only consciously reflect on our dreams after waking) so it’s only the memories of our dreams that are vague and not the dreams themselves when we’re experiencing them.

#happiness

[huruma]

The concept of mental illness and psychology in general

Theories in psychology can’t be rigorously tested in the same way that theories in the hard sciences can be. I don’t believe inter-subjectively demonstrable laws comparable to gravity or entropy can exist in psychology. We can all perceive a physical world and how it behaves but nobody has access to anyone else’s consciousness. Theories in psychology fall in and out of fashion for social, cultural and political reasons and not because they are supported or contradicted by hard evidence. Only one example of this would be the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder up until relatively recently. It’s hard to claim many things in psychology that don’t have moral implications and I think this is especially true when it comes to the concept of mental illness which I want to focus on in this post. The concept of ‘mental illness’ is only meaningful metaphorically as a value judgment. There are better people who could make an argument against ‘mental illness’ or psychology in general and I’m sure I won’t cover everything. It’s the normative implications of the concept of mental illness and psychology in general and the harm it justifies and causes that I ultimately care about.

When you consider some of the mental illnesses that are voted into the DSM it’s clear that psychologists typically care about something other than felt emotional well-being. That’s not my issue here but these values are legitimized under the guise of amoral and descriptive objective science and if anyone admits that psychology is not intended to be purely amoral and descriptive they are unintentionally admitting its real status as a ‘science’. From my point of view either a meaningful concept of mental illness is rooted entirely in emotional distress regardless of the sensory and cognitive objects it's in response to or how intense, frequent or prolonged it is (even though just calling pain 'mental illness' is superfluous and if a mental illness causes pain it's only instrumentally bad for that reason) or mental health has no inherent value. It would be better for people to experience intense happiness (which is sometimes classified by psychiatrists as pathological mania) despite being mentally ill than pain or even mild happiness despite having exceptional mental health.

Unethical and undesirable behavior isn’t medically pathological just because it contradicts our values. I consider a moral agent to be relatively unethical to the extent that they lack compassion or sympathy for other beings (or themselves) but the very concept of a ‘personality disorder’ is moral and political, not scientific. It implies that people should posses certain character traits and falsely relates their misbehaviour or unethical attitudes to physical conditions that by nature ultimately leads to the death of a biological system. It can’t be matter of fact and purely descriptive to diagnose someone as having an objectively ‘sick’ personality. We should discourage anti-social behavior and attitudes but nothing is necessarily medically wrong with the brains of people who are diagnosed with ‘narcissism’, O.D.D and other ‘personality disorders’. We can criticize someone’s judgment without stigmatizing them as having a fundamentally defective personality.

Genuinely irrational beliefs aren't medically pathological (and I think I would argue that beliefs, not actions, are irrational). I don’t believe in the inherent sanctity of life but I think there are some circumstances when paternalism is justified and preventing someone from committing suicide is the right thing to do. I don’t think institutionalizing someone is a long-term solution in most cases and the reasoning used to justify this is often circular. It’s believed that only irrational people would want to commit suicide so attempting suicide itself is considered necessarily irrational and indicative of someone’s judgment being ‘clouded’ by their desire to alleviate their own suffering (all decisions are rooted in a value as well as a neutral belief about the consequences of that choice or the context it’s made in. The idea that suicide is necessarily wrong, at least in cases that don't involve terminal illness or maybe unusually painful chronic medical conditions, is just a value judgment about life or life under circumstances that aren’t considered to justify suicide or the act of suicide itself, it’s not a neutral amoral accurate belief about life or suicide). The ‘proof’ that suicidal people are irrational and incapable of making a ‘legitimate’ decision to end their own lives is that they’re suicidal. Sadness and fear have actually been linked with an increased capacity for analytical reasoning and the reverse is true for anger. It’s because of a normative bias that some psychologists have that they believe, at least in the absence of a physical illness that is excruciatingly painful and maybe terminal, that a person cannot rationally decide to end their own life.

The concept of health doesn’t apply to the mind. Something is unhealthy when it prevents the body from functioning optimally in whatever ways it was adapted for (alternatively someone is in poor health when their body’s functioning has been impaired). Poor health ultimately leads to death and whether it’s in the form of injury, disease or body failure it is the single only reason why people die. There are no inherent normative implications of a cancer or HIV diagnosis, it's just a medical fact that the body’s ability to function in whatever ways necessary for prolonged survival has been impaired. The idea that minds should function in a certain way is a moral concept, not a scientific one.

There are no objective tests like a brain scan or blood test to determine whether or not someone is mentally ill. Diagnoses are completely subjective and based on interpreting interactions and what someone reports about themselves. There is currently no evidence for the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness and many psychologists will admit this. This isn’t to deny the indisputable link between physical brain states and consciousness. I think we have every reason to believe that anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs introduce rather than correct a chemical imbalance. If emotional problems are due to objectively tangible brain disorders they can be better thought of as symptoms of neurological or bodily disorders, diseases or illnesses as far as medicine is concerned. Anti-depressants and anti-psychotics have been shown to devastate physical health as well as long-term emotional well-being. They have been linked with several harmful side effects (including heart attacks, liver problems, sudden death, suicide, violence, psychosis, immune system failure etc.) and can lead to addiction, tolerance and withdrawal symptoms just like other psychoactive drugs. Anti-depressants are typically no more useful than placebos.

A well known experiment was conducted by David Rosenham in 1973. Rosenham and some of his colleagues feigned auditory hallucinations and allowed themselves to be admitted into various psychiatric institutions (if I’m not mistaken besides having claimed auditory hallucinations their actual behavior was ‘normal’ and most of what they told about themselves was true, some of my details might be inaccurate or I might be omitting some things) . They were apparently stigmatized and mistreated in various ways and detained against their will even after reporting that their hallucinations were gone and they felt fine. They were released on condition that they be placed on anti-psychotics and all of them except one was diagnosed with schizophrenia in remission. When informed of the experiment hospital administrations were confident that they could be able to identify a new group of impostors if they were sent. They identified 41 in a group of 193 new admissions as being mentally healthy or sane impostors even though no one had been sent. Similar experiments have produce similar results.

Body dysphoria, social and general anxiety, post traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive urges (and the discomfort felt if certain rituals aren't carried out), depression, road rage and some other so-called mental illnesses are all very real psychological states that are felt in various degrees by different people at different times and there is a moral imperative to minimize suffering but they’re not medical disorders. Anti-social attitudes, behavior and tendencies are also real and should be discouraged from the point of view that regards a lack of empathy as unethical. A lack of empathy can be the result of pain (I think anger, or at the very least resentment and hatred specifically, directly counter empathy and love and even the fear of being hurt by other people explains the lack of empathy in many cases) and I believe there is a  link between compassion and long-term happiness but unlike the other ‘mental illnesses’ nobody suffers directly from narcissism, psychopathy or most of the fundamentally unrelated ‘symptoms’ associated with them. Nobody suffers directly from being defiant or a preoccupation with the ‘purity’ of their foods (defiance would be a problem to the extent that it implied anger but it wouldn't have to and the trade-off between health, which is relative, and taste or convenience is personal. The point is that many mental illnesses either don't directly cause pain or they don't imply a lack of empathy for other people).

So far I've focused on mental illness but psychology in general is an inauthentic science. From the epistemological solipsist point of view there's nothing objectively rational or valid about the scientific method (which is rooted in experimentation and observation) but if, justified or not, we're already starting with certain universal common sense assumptions (that our memories represent an authentic past and that the future will more or less resemble the past, or 'probably' resemble it) then scientists can demonstrate their authority and expertise by accurately predicting the behaviour of observable natural phenomenon. Science doesn't tell us anything about the nature of reality. Psychology has very little usefulness when it comes to predicting human behavior but psychology doesn't even limit itself to observable human behavior, it claims expertise on the nature of human consciousness which makes it philosophical, not scientific. Knowledge about the nature of human consciousness could only be acquired through literal introspection. At best, theories in psychology are only theoretically plausible (in terms of what's possible, not necessarily what is inherent to human consciousness) and circumstantially true and can be falsified, if not through personal lived experience then by simply imagining scenarios in which supposedly correlating traits or variables that are presented as inherently connected existed independently (a common theme in psychology is connecting attitudes, traits, preferences etc. and treating them as intertwined by nature or making absolute categorical assertions about what necessarily motivates us or what behaviour, various attitudes, emotional responses etc. imply and what causes them).

This isn't to deny that certain common sense inferences can be drawn from observable animal behavior (which is the only reason why I have any interest in ethology) but those inferences aren't scientific per se and observable behaviour doesn't tell us anything about internal consciousness (if I see someone crying, for example, I assume they are expressing sadness because that is one way I have expressed sadness or could see myself expressing sadness.  We can assume that other people have minds like we do because they behave the way we would if we felt or experienced what we assume they do and if the neurological correspondents of our mental states are identical to theirs. I would argue that we can't reflect on what we experience while we actually experience it so introspection is ultimately past oriented, which explains the link between self-awareness and mental time travel, so this is rooted in the basic past experience point. I project my own experience on to the person I see crying, I don't get that from their behavior without context. Apparently, chimpanzees 'smiling' is an expression of anxiety but that assumption is still ultimately rooted in past observation and noting other similarities in our behavior). We can know that something is inherent to the nature of something if there's no imaginable scenario when 'two' traits can exist independently (for example, we can't imagine a dry body of water. We can imagine someone whom we'd classify as human, species is an arbitrary concept, who was atypical or unlike any human we've ever known of in whatever way) and if something is inherently X it is X in all possible scenarios.

[huruma]

My ideal government and society

My ideal government would have a constitution rooted in hedonistic consequentialism (impartial and non-egoistic but without the concept of aggregating the emotional states of separate individuals) meaning it’s sole objective would be the greatest happiness / least suffering for the greatest number of sentient beings. All sentient beings would be considered citizens of this government and considered as having an inalienable right to equal consideration of their felt welfare (the happiness-suffering of potential beings would also be given equal consideration). I believe in constitutionalism and the rule of law but I’m not committed to democracy for it’s own sake. Democracy tends to work best in practice and my ideal economy based on the systematic distribution of goods and services according to expected benefit alone could probably only work and without unnecessary force if it was supported by the values and principles of the majority of people but I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with a monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy etc. if this government was comprised of people who were intelligent, wise, capable and sincerely committed to universal sympathy, egalitarianism (equal consideration of every one’s welfare) and maximizing / minimizing every one’s happiness / suffering. What matters to me are the consequences of a decision and not who makes them. In a planned economy or even a non-democracy the economic and general preferences of the people could be made clear through public feedback.

I don’t think that different governments with the same core ideology outlined in my constitution could only be allies if they rejected the concept of national sovereignty and separate national interests but they wouldn’t necessarily share all of the same concrete policies. Besides intellectual differences between equally sincere and consistent hedonistic consequentialists who matter of factly expect different decisions and policies to have different consequences individuals who ascribe to H.C may have different preferences that aren’t necessarily due to intuitions and biases that contradict hedonistic consequentialism and what it implies (and not every individual in a predominately H.C society would necessarily agree with the dominant ethical world view which might be the primary reason why a ‘government’ would be needed to begin with). In the same way that municipal and state / provincial governments exist that govern the smaller societies within the broader nation-state societies that currently exist existing or new federal governments could exist under a one world government (or one galactic government or one government for a specific region of space or the known inhabited universe). People would be free to travel to different cities, provinces / states, countries or (hypothetically) planets with laws or policies that better accommodated their preferences. Maybe in one place public nudity is legal but in another where many people are extremely uncomfortable with it despite not lacking empathy for public nudists or thinking that their nudity is bad for any reason other than how it affects them (the only thing that warrants a negative attitude and by extension a negative emotional response is suffering itself and by extension cruelty, sadism, envy, schadenfreude or a general lack of sympathy, although I think there are some non-arbitrary reasons why some other things necessarily would be stressful other factors considered) an anti-public nudity law would be justified. I would think that governments with the same core ideology that could form alliances could form a super-government but I don’t know a lot abut politics or economics and some of my points might reflect that. If there are too many sentient beings in the known universe to cater to (or ‘govern’) or some societies reject cosmopolitanism or H.C specifically than an H.C government should cater to as many beings as is possible with no in-group / out-group discrimination. That would include economic, ‘humanitarian’ and general assistance to other human societies or societies comprised of beings who are cognitively similar enough to psychological normal older humans as well as non-human animals whom we can never form societies with

In my ideal society governments would be unnecessary to begin with but I don’t make any fundamental distinction between suffering caused by the initiation of force and violence or the threat of it and suffering in general. I’m not a pacifist or an anarchist even though I acknowledge that causing pain is always bad (not necessarily wrong) in all conceivable hypothetical scenarios. The justification for any law enforced by my ideal government would have to be that at least one of the persons who benefit from it would benefit more than any of the people who are harmed or disadvantaged by it would be harmed or disadvantaged by it or that a greater number of people would experience happiness or be spared suffering that would be equal to the happiness lost or suffering caused to any one of a smaller number of beings who would be disadvantaged by it. If it doesn’t do that or was not needed in order to do that then the law would be wrong.

The culture of my ideal society would be rooted in hedonism as a monistic theory of value and welfare, universal sympathy and egalitarianism (equal consideration of everyone’s happiness-suffering). I think ‘moral’ egalitarianism necessarily implies ‘social’ egalitarianism. I think it would be normal for the children of this society to address their parents and adults in general by their first names. I don’t believe children have any moral obligation to obey their parents or any other adult for it’s own sake.  They should do so when they and / or other people would benefit and for that reason alone but not because adults deserve more respect or have a higher social status. I don’t think police officers, judges, government leaders, men or women, people from different ethnic groups, people of different sexual orientations, people with or without a criminal history etc. should be given more or less respect. In addition to the general reasons why I think H.C implies non-monogamy (you should sympathize with the sexual / romantic happiness of your partner and their other partners as well as the fact that, even if you yourself are not non-monogamous for altruistic reasons, multiple people rather than just one would benefit from having a sexual / romantic relationship with you) and the attitude that every capable adult in the ‘village’ should help care for children I think non-monogamy and more communal rearing of children would help to broaden people’s emotional attachments. We are naturally biased in favor of people we’re emotionally attached to so that could help to encourage egalitarianism. I don’t think you can directly factor someone’s happiness-suffering into consideration out of impersonal ‘duty’. You directly factor someone’s happiness-suffering into consideration because you value their happiness / freedom from pain and that can’t be impersonal. That’s not to say that abstract duty isn’t sometimes a necessary substitute, no one who isn’t genetically engineered could ever hope to be perfectly benevolent, forgiving, egalitarian minded and morally pure 24 / 7.

I don’t think social engineering will ever be enough. My hope is that futuristic pharmacology (drugs that cause literally unimaginably intense euphoria, love and happiness in general without the risks and costs of the psychoactive drugs that currently exist – if that's possible), neurosurgery and some kind of means to manipulate our nervous systems (like wire-heading), radically advanced technology in general and genetic engineering will eliminate emotional distress or at least radically minimize it (when it comes to advanced technology in general that doesn't involve directly tampering with hormonal levels, genes or brain activity that plays a role in happiness what stands out to me more than anything else is some kind of virtual reality technology that would allow people to experience their most desired life, not necessarily want they want outside of this simulation but the life that would make them happiest and all of the desires they would have in the simulation would ultimately be satisfied – I say ultimately because it might be that at least some people's best lives would require some challenges and potential stressors or some delayed gratification might be necessary for long-term happiness. So they could form real emotional attachments to the people they interact with this might involve inducing a delusional belief that the simulated world and their identity in it is 'real' or creating an inter-subjectively shared sensory world with real life people they know who are also plugged in with the realization that this physical world is artificially simulated or they could interact with characters they know aren’t real as part of fantasy or play. Most people couldn't spend the rest of their lives hooked into this simulated world but it could be something to look forward to. If artificial intelligence is possible maybe sentient programs could live out their entire lives in this world. I also like the idea of being able to design dreams that produce vivid, clear memories.  As a general point – technology serves the same purpose that magic would, it sometimes has serious costs and risks but it can make our lives easier). Future humans could spend their entire days alternating between shockingly intense happiness that doesn’t distract them from doing what they need to do to survive and keep paradise running and happiness that is so overwhelming it consumes their entire existence and they can’t think about anything else. I hope that genetic engineering or some kind of future technology will improve the lives of as many non-human animals as possible but if the technology is feasible and becomes widely available I don’t see why every single human baby can’t be genetically engineered to be naturally sympathetic and with little to no capacity for aggressive and anti-social tendencies, physically healthy and with a heightened sensitivity to pleasurable stimuli.

[huruma]

‘Anarcho-communism’ and socialism in general

I agree with some anarchist-capitalists that ‘anarchist-communism’ is an internally contradicting concept. I don’t know a lot about economics but my understanding is that capitalism is the system that allows for private property. In a capitalist society individuals have the exclusive right to control their property. If I'm not mistaken, 'socialism’ forbids private property and the exploitation by capitalists of the labor of workers whom they allow access to their capital but can still limit access to goods and services ultimately on the basis of meritocratic contribution. In a 'socialist’ society the workers but not the community in general collectively own means of production. 'Communism’ forbids private property and goods are distributed according to need. In a 'communist’ society the community in general has democratic control over capital (I don’t necessarily agree with democratic control over capital and I don't support that as an ideal. I also don't care about workers as a distinct class of people or have a problem with their exploitation as an end in itself). It's possible I misunderstand the most common usage of these terms, the distinction between socialism and communism isn't really clear to me, but what matters is that in my ideal society capital would be controlled for the benefit of every member of the community and goods would be distributed indiscriminately according to expected benefit alone but some people would argue that the political hierarchy and authoritarianism my ideal system would allow for disqualifies it as 'communist’. There are serious differences between my position and mainstream communism and it doesn't matter what terms are used to classify it but I believe 'communism’ is the best concept to describe the economic system a society comprised of consistent pan-hedonists would have to have). There are at least two reasons why I think communism is inherently authoritarian if 'authoritarianism’ is understood in contrast with libertarianism as the willingness to initiate force.

1) 'Means of production’ includes the physical bodies, labor, mental expertise, skill and direction we use to produce goods and services. For example, the means of production used to produce art includes the artist’s eyes, ears, hands and talent as well as their paint brushes, musical instruments, typewriter, laptop or pencils etc. A freelance taxi driver’s eyes, hands, feet and ability are just as much his ‘capital’ as is his actual cab. Even if the idea of property becoming yours through discovery and modification is baseless forbidding private property consistently implies a willingness to violate autonomy (I wouldn't necessarily regard the idea of someone’s body being their property to be internally self-contradicting but it has never been demonstrated to be actually true. The idea of natural rights that can be violated, even if they shouldn't be, is ultimately a value judgment and if it's not really true that it's objectively a better state of affairs that John Doe alone control what is considered his property then it's incoherent to 'consider' someone else controlling 'his' property against his will to be bad. I don't want to elaborate on this point but this is actually related to part of the problem I have with the idea of respecting autonomy – which is rooted in choice which is rooted in desire - , democracy, moral consistency and any kind of equality as ends in themselves, doing so doesn't consider the nature of specific moral judgments or whatever we're encouraged to value simply because other people value it or because they claim  to value it or for some other reason  than the state of affairs itself. I do think that the same intensity and duration of happiness felt by any two sentient beings is equally good but what's moral is accepting that everyone's happiness is good, not just accepting that everyone's happiness is the same in isolation from that). The vast majority of communists may distinguish between capital in the form of an external resource and capital in the form of one’s own body or certain mental attributes but people don’t always take a premise to it’s logical conclusion. I also believe that socialists and communists make a completely arbitrary and logically inconsistent fundamental distinction between property for personal consumption and property used to produce various goods and services. A society that doesn’t allow private property is a society that doesn’t accept an inalienable right to autonomy. Laissez faire capitalism is the logically consistent conclusion to anarchism and regardless of whether or not it’s pragmatic anarchist-capitalism is the logically consistent conclusion to libertarianism or classical liberalism. Totalitarianism and even just some degree of force can obviously cause a lot of unnecessary suffering and I would oppose it (when it does) for that reason but coercing a doctor into saving someone’s life or treating some extremely painful physical injury or sickness intuitively seems justified to me if this coercion is necessary and any harm to them is outweighed by the harm being minimized.

Strictly speaking a ‘gift’ economy arguably implies private property. In a communist society everything already belongs to everyone (or alternatively stated to make this more applicable to my ideal society, nothing truly belongs to anyone). Capitalism is not defined by inequal distribution of goods or exploitation of the working class. It’s defined by who has control over property. A gift economy can exist within a capitalist society but there would be no ‘guarantee’ that people would share goods and services according to expected benefit because it would be accepted that they have a right to not do so.

2) I don’t think the concept of collective property is coherent. The concept of public property sometimes works and individuals can pool their money to buy things which they share according to agreed upon rules and terms but to say that something is someone’s property is to say that they have an exclusive right to decide what is done to it. Two people cannot have equal decision making control over what is done to a thing. If a woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term and her partner wants her to have an abortion someone has to make the final call (as impractical of a concern as a 50/50 deadlock might be it’s one argument against being pro-democracy in principle). Multiple people can enjoy access to a thing like a park or library but ‘democratic ownership’ over it or it being ‘public property’ means that 'your’ property can be seized without your consent when other people take control over ‘theirs’. The libertarian argument that their defending their property doesn’t involve an initiation of force might be baseless but I don't think it’s internally self-contradicting.

I have a problem with the core grievance mainstream socialism seems to have with capitalism (the exploitation it involves). First of all, being coerced by natural circumstances like hunger is not the same as being coerced by moral agents. The former is morally relevant to me but it can’t be considered an injustice (although I think not helping people who need it can be). Secondly, I don’t care about exploitation beyond the felt emotional distress it might cause ('exploitation' is often an emotional buzz word but it doesn't mean anything to me if it doesn't imply that someone is harmed or disadvantaged as a result and it's unjust only if the exploiter isn't giving the welfare of the exploited serious consideration. You could argue that being exploited itself is disadvantageous to the exploited regardless of how it affects their emotional state but I would counter that only the emotional state of distress is intrinsically harmful and this only as an implication of emotional distress being intrinsically bad which can only be confirmed or falsified through direct experience). Let’s say that someone needs to eat their neighbour’s hair to survive. His asking that the exploited perform stressful acts in exchange for his hair isn’t unjust if he has an exclusive right to control what is done to his hair and something can’t stop being yours just because you start using it to produce some good or service that you can make a profit from (ie. using your personal car to taxi people around). I consider exploiting someone in a way that harms them more than it benefits you (if not themselves since they themselves believe, possibly erroneously, that the benefit to them in what they will gain outweighs the cost to them in acquiring it) or harms them unnecessarily to be wrong but only for the exact same reason I would consider not going out of your way to share goods or help someone when the benefit to them would outweigh any necessary cost to you to be wrong. My problem with capitalism is not that those who own property benefit from the labor of others or that the property that is the basis of this exploitation really belongs to the workers or everybody but it being a system rooted in egoism where resources are not allocated indiscriminately according to expected benefit alone. People who are better off are given greater access to goods and services that less well off people would benefit more from.

I can accept that the most desirable practically possible economic systems in the world as it actually is today are or would be mixed economies (at least if we’re dealing with very large communities comprised of strangers) and even though I think that pan-hedonism should be promoted (with it's emphasis on everyone's and only happiness being intrinsically good) it's worth noting that 'expected benefit' would take into consideration things that don't have to do with the direct benefit an object itself provides (for example, if I take someone's laptop I can assume that they would feel more emotional distress as a result than I would without access to a laptop, other factors considered, because they have an expectation of continued access to their laptop, in addition to a sense that it rightfully belongs to them. General experienced desire frustration is inherently stressful but there's a more specific fight or flight 'frustration' that is the result of someone expecting something that they want, these expectations can be entirely passive but they're also what justify working toward various goals, goals are rooted in desires even though desires can exist without goals. There are also things like sentimental or nostalgic items that can benefit someone more than they would anyone else for reasons that only apply to them and I could argue that there's some security that comes with expected sole control over certain items and considering this could lead to something that resembles the property norms of today). I don't accept meritocracy or retribution as ideal or moral in themselves (ie. I don't accept the idea that people deserve to be rewarded or punished as a result of choices that they made. Everyone's happiness and freedom from pain is an objectively better state of affairs because of the nature of happiness and pain itself) but I would consider the usefulness that meritocratic systems have in incentivizing economic production. It's not just a question of what 'works' but what the underlying justification for a system is, 'capitalism' arguably implies respecting property or autonomy as an end in itself meaning unconditionally and not just circumstantially.

[huruma]

(non-egoistic / impartial) Hedonistic Consequentialism without aggregating the emotional states of separate people revisited

Initially when I rejected the concept of aggregating the emotional states of separate people (the latest time) I only rejected it as a normative principle. I didn’t claim that it was factually meaningless to talk about the total amount of happiness or suffering in existence or the universe. I no longer think that the emotional states of separate people can be meaningfully aggregated and I think that my accepting that the happiness and suffering of separate people can be meaningfully aggregated while rejecting it on a normative basis was inconsistent with the basic principle of maximizing happiness / minimizing suffering (because happiness is intrinsically good / suffering is intrinsically bad.  I don’t think ‘the greatest happiness / least suffering for the greatest number of people’ maxim – which would only justify causing someone X amount of pain if it was necessary in order to either prevent or produce the same amount of suffering or happiness for a greater number of people or a greater amount of suffering or happiness for at least one other person – is inconsistent with the idea that happiness is the only intrinsic good because happiness and suffering only exist in distinct minds and I’m for maximizing and minimizing it in all of those distinct minds. If I thought that it was factually meaningful to aggregate the happiness / suffering of separate minds then I would have to concede that happiness being intrinsically good implies that the objective of ethical behavior would be ‘the greatest balance of aggregated happiness over suffering in the universe’ as opposed to ‘the greatest happiness / least suffering for the greatest number of people’).

I think that aggregating the happiness and distress of separate people is comparable to aggregating the IQs of separate people. We can meaningfully quantify a person’s capacity to understand and reason (maybe not precisely or in practice but some people are more or less intelligent than others) but it’s not meaningful to claim that a large group of chimpanzees have a higher collective IQ than Stephen Hawkins. The chimpanzees can never ‘collectively’ understand what Stephen Hawkins does even though if you literally add the numbers they collectively have a higher IQ. Being able to aggregate the happiness of a single individual over time isn’t comparable because duration is one of the two dimensions we use to measure happiness and we are all constantly in the process of becoming our future selves. The other dimension is intensity and a group of 1000 beings who each experience a mild 1 point of happiness don’t collectively or individually experience a greater intensity or strength of happiness than a singe individual who experiences 100 points of happiness.

Everyone is a distinct mental universe. We can compare the emotional states of separate mental universes and make cost-benefit trade offs between them because logically happiness is happiness and the value of their emotional states is interchangeable but they are distinct universes. I care about the number of people who experience happiness or suffering when we factor into consideration the person or any one of the persons who (when we’re making comparisons) experiences the greatest intensity – duration of happiness or suffering. So I wouldn’t think causing 1 person 100 points of pain in order to prevent 1000 people from each experiencing a single point of pain would be justified but I do think we would be justified in causing 1 person 100 points of pain in order to prevent 2 or more people from each experiencing the same amount of pain.

  Like I said before, a group can’t collectively benefit from their aggregated happiness and ‘the world’ can't benefit from the total amount of happiness in existence because sentient beings experience happiness as individuals. Separate minds can't experience the same states (their states can be identical but two or more distinct minds can't share the same one state), they only benefit from what they experience as individuals. No entity feels the aggregated 1000 points of pain mentioned in the previous scenario so no one is harmed by it. This is true even if the happiness and suffering of separate people can be meaningfully aggregated. The pro-aggregation view has to concede that it’s not concerned with helping people but with the promotion of some thing in the universe that is considered valuable independent of whether or not it benefits anyone. The pro-aggregation view is anti-sympathetic because it contradicts why we intuitively want to maximize happiness. A father buys the daughter he loves and cares about a gift in the understanding that she is better off experiencing happiness and being free from pain, not so there can be more happiness in ‘the world’, and this would be true even if he valued the happiness of all beings equally with no special consideration of hers.

[huruma]

Attraction and monogamy

For the time being I think that sexual and sensual attraction are determined exclusively by physical attributes (this is not to say that there isn’t an inherent psychological aspect to attraction or that affection isn’t a natural component of it). By ‘sensual’ attraction I mean the desire for non-sexual physical intimacy as an end in itself and not necessarily as an expression of affection. If physical attributes are only partly responsible for attraction then I think you would have to be relatively attracted to someone you disliked platonically, or even someone you didn’t dislike platonically but who had a personality you considered to be romantically unappealing, if they were physically identical to someone you consciously experienced attraction toward and had no issue with personality wise. I think it seems otherwise because the stress or negative feelings someone can associate with someone they would otherwise feel attracted to blocks that natural attraction but the disposition toward that attraction is still there even if it’s not experienced at any given moment. On the other hand, if sexual attraction is at least partly due to personality then I think it makes sense to assume that everyone is bi-sexual and somewhat attracted to at least some people they find completely physically unattractive. I think it’s possible to be turned on by the idea of having sex with someone you are not attracted to as much as it is to be turned off by the idea of having sex with someone you are. Someone who’s turned on by the idea of having sex with a doctor or police officer isn’t physically more attracted to doctors and police officers. Another example could be a heterosexual male who is attracted to a transwoman who looks, sounds and is physically identical to a 'cisgendered’ woman who was born biologically female. He may be genuinely turned off by the idea of being with a trans person once he finds out but there’s no reason why he would have no attraction to her if he would be attracted to a physically identical cisgendered woman. The same would apply to his being attracted to a serial killer, his enemy, someone with different values, someone he has a personality clash or bad history with etc.

In my opinion, the fundamental distinction that pro-monogamy people make between being attracted to people other than their partners and acting on that attraction is meaningless. There are many reasons to not act on your attraction to someone in any given scenario (because of what might happen as a result, in my view) and only choices, not desires, are considered immoral but if the choice to do X is wrong in some way then the desire to do X has to be considered inappropriate in some way (every choice we make is rooted in a desire or preference). You can’t penalize someone for wanting to kill but if the decision to kill is immoral then the desire to kill must be inappropriate or erroneous for the same reason. Sexual attraction is not a choice and people in monogamous relationships will be attracted to people other than their spouses whether they act on it or not. If someone can accept that their partner will be attracted to other people whether they act on it or not then I don’t understand why acting on it would be fundamentally worse (in terms of it being 'disloyal', breaking a  special bond rooted in exclusivity or being a cause for jealousy. I understand the distinction in terms of breaking a contract).

I believe that in discriminating between people you would naturally be physically attracted to in the absence of negative feelings you associate them with or that you have toward the idea of being with them for whatever reasons, at least when it comes to fantasy, you're desensitizing yourself to the characteristics that make them attractive and this might help to partially explain why at least some people have low libidos.

#sex

[huruma]

Beliefs and ethics

Amoral beliefs can't be racist, sexist, bigoted or immoral in any way. Someone can have a bias that is indirectly responsible for a certain belief but a belief itself is just a matter of fact assumption about reality. 'Black people are inferior' is a value judgment, 'black people have lower IQ's’ is a morally neutral claim about how things are, even if a bias against black people makes one more likely to genuinely believe that there's an inherent connection between being black and having a relatively lower IQ (race does correlate with IQ scores but there’s no direct causal relationship). Likewise, the belief that homosexuals choose to be gay isn't bigotry even though it may be indirectly caused by bigotry (the fact that someone who believes this doesn't consistently assume the same for heterosexuals indicates their bias but it's not a value judgment. There is a difference between a belief and a claim to knowledge, you only have to apply the same standard universally if you claim that standard is objectively valid. We have no direct control over our emotional responses and felt attraction to someone is an emotional response but even if the idea of choosing to be gay, directly or indirectly, is legitimate straight people would still be making a choice to be straight in not choosing to be gay if they believe this is an option and they have the information and means to do this, being straight by default would only make the choice passive), only actual discrimination against gay people as well as the negative evaluation of homosexuality itself (two distinct things) can be criticized on moral grounds. The debate about whether or not gay people can choose to be gay is secondary because while being able to choose who you're attracted to is a necessary prerequisite for legitimately criticizing homosexuality as immoral, it doesn't address whether or not homosexuality is good or bad or why it should be discouraged even if it is a choice and someone can still think that there is something 'wrong' with homosexuality even if gay people can't be criticized for choosing to be gay. I don't think false belief is worth criticizing for it's own sake and I don’t think holding false amoral beliefs can be considered immoral because they don’t involve value judgments (and by value judgments I am, as a moral realist, including beliefs about what, if anything, is intrinsically good and bad) - I also don’t believe that we choose to believe what we believe since beliefs are rooted in subjective feelings and you either instinctively believe something or you don't and that would include a belief about what objectively justifies a belief. It's the value biases that lead to certain stereotypes and beliefs that are the rationalization for certain choices that we should focus on criticizing first and foremost because value biases are what will incentivize someone to seriously consider alternative claims and sensitize them to the possibility of being wrong if their holding a false belief could have negative consequences (ie. not wanting to execute a man even if we subjectively estimate that there is is a 90% probability that he's the killer). 

[huruma]

‘All lives matter’ vs. ‘Black lives matter’

ALM encompasses situations where black people are unjustly killed by police officers and civilians. BLM does not encompass situations where white and non-black people are unjustly killed by police officers and civilians. Even if black people are more likely to be unjustly killed, assaulted or mistreated by police officers and this is due to racist discrimination ALM would cover all victims and BLM would only cover the majority. It doesn’t matter whether or not black people are disproportionately killed by police officers because no one individual’s interests matter more or less depending on how statistically likely it was that those interests would be disregarded. White and non-black people are unjustly killed by some officers but even if advocating for non-black victims was unnecessary ALM has a ‘possible’ advantage that BLM does not or alternatively BLM has a ‘possible’ disadvantage that ALM does not. ALM contradicts not taking black lives seriously whereas BLM does not necessarily contradict not taking non-black lives seriously. If ALM doesn’t persuade someone to take black lives seriously then BLM will not because they both logically imply that all black lives matter.

BLM is not wrong but it is lacking. I disagree that the emphasis is necessary because nothing is even potentially lost with using ALM instead of BLM. It’s not like wasting finite resources trying to help someone who doesn’t benefit or benefit as much from it when you could be spending that time, energy or resources actually helping someone else who would benefit or benefit more. Under ALM the response to Eric Garner’s death is the exact same as it would be under BLM. People are definitely killed unjustly by some police officers but I think the racial aspect of a lot of cases is exaggerated. I also think that it’s probably a minority of police officers who use unnecessary force and some incidents that are thought to exemplify police brutality were legitimate cases of self-defense. These are matter of fact claims that don’t detract from my core ethical argument if I’m wrong. Police officers should be penalized for their wrong doing for the sake of deterring police brutality just as civilians are and should be but police officers killing civilians is fundamentally no better or worse than civilians killing other civilians or police officers and white people killing black people is fundamentally no better or worse than black people killing other black people or white people. I don’t consider racism to be worse than discrimination in general (giving more or less consideration to comparable interests that different beings have for any reason).

The fact that black people are disproportionately killed by police officers or that ‘society’ takes the deaths of white police officers more seriously would be a good argument against emphasizing ‘White Lives Matter’ or even ‘Blue Lives Matter’ but not against favoring ALM over BLM because black lives, non-black lives, civilian lives and the lives of police officers are unambiguously covered under ‘all’ lives. Black people only matter because people matter.

[huruma]

Why I don’t consider myself to be a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’

‘Liberalism’ vaguely refers to a set of political tendencies, attitudes, personality traits and values that aren’t necessarily intrinsically related in any way. I consider libertarianism to be a consistent theory of ‘justice’ if not morality in general because it’s rooted in a single principle ; autonomy or property rights. It is unambiguously hypocritical for a libertarian to want public nudity to be illegal because using government coercion to deter behavior that doesn’t violate anyone’s autonomy contradicts the non-aggression principle. It isn’t really hypocritical in the same way for liberals to be anti-choice when it comes to abortion or for conservatives to oppose capital punishment for moral and not just pragmatic reasons because ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ aren’t clearly defined explicit ideologies. There’s only a greater tendency for people who support one position we classify as liberal or conservative to support other stances we categorize them with. Consistency doesn’t require giving a libertarian argument for abortion just because you support the welfare state or affirmative action. Hedonistic consequentialism is a clearly defined ideology or value system that’s concerned exclusively with maximizing the happiness / minimizing the suffering of all beings. Other people might classify my views (pan-hedonistic consequentialism without the concept of aggregating the happiness-suffering of separate individuals) as liberal or conservative but I’m not invested in liberalism or conservatism generally if ‘other’ liberals or conservatives don’t necessarily share the same explicit core value system. Researcher Jonathon Haidt claims that conservative morality revolves around 1) harm / care, 2) fairness, 3) in-group loyalty, 4) respect for authority and 5) sanctity / purity with greater emphasis on 3-5 and liberal morality is built on the same values except with greater emphasis on 1 and 2. I don’t consciously value 2,3,4,5 or autonomy for it’s own sake. I like the term ‘egalitarian’ even though there are different kinds of equality that people who identify as egalitarian might be concerned with.

There’s a common idea that liberals are less resistant to change than conservatives are. I can acknowledge that change is an enduring constant of reality but I don’t consider change as change to be intrinsically good or bad. Some changes are good, some changes are bad and some changes are neutral. I think it’s meaningless to define ‘liberalism’ as a desire for political change or to reform the system or society and ‘conservatism’ as wanting to maintain or return to the status quo or political traditions or the kind of society or government that does or once did exist because doing so completely ignores the actual nature of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ political values. There are certain political traditions in some countries that liberals want to conserve and certain changes that conservatives favor. In what meaningful way can someone be considered socially / politically conservative just because they were raised in a society with long-standing traditions of tolerance, multi-culturalism and social welfare programs  that they want to maintain or even re-establish if those traditions had been abandoned? What inherent contradiction is there in being psychologically conservative and supporting universal health care or having empathy for the poor? If I’m not mistaken psychopaths tend to score higher on openness or novelty seeking and nostalgia has been linked with increased empathy.

In economic terms modern liberalism might just be a support for the welfare system maintained by regulated capitalism and I support welfare states as part of a non-revolutionary democratic transition to an international communist economy where goods and services are distributed according to expected benefit alone but not necessarily for the same reasons that liberals and other leftists do (if I’m not mistaken ‘socialism’ falls between left of center liberalism and far left communism and while socialists oppose capitalism they support a meritocracy where capital is reserved for the benefit of the workers and not everyone in the community). The arguments leftists make for economic redistribution are often rooted in concepts of justice and fairness that aren’t entirely rooted in compassion for the poor. I don’t agree with the concept of just desert which is a double standard based on the morality of agents –I don’t believe anyone deserves to be punished or rewarded on the basis of the choices they’ve made (a grievance with unearned privilege would fall under the pro-just desert ideology). I consider not giving everyone’s felt emotional well-being the same impartial consideration to be unjust and unfair (ie. unethical), retribution and meritocracy are two flip sides of the same one coin and I consider both of them to be fundamentally immoral (if we’re talking about retribution and meritocracy for the sake of retribution and meritocracy and not to deter harmful behavior or incentivize economic production or good behavior). I’m not a Marxist-Leninist and I don’t view literal economic (or actual welfare) inequality per se as bad.

     Liberals tend to advocate special consideration for groups that they believe are marginalized or systematically discriminated against. I don’t believe any individual deserves more or less consideration in any circumstance although equal consideration can justify special treatment. I think progressive taxation is justified because poor people benefit more than rich and middle class people do from paying lower taxes but not because they deserve more consideration than wealthier people do. People should be viewed, considered and treated first and foremost as individuals and not as members of a privileged or underprivileged group. Even genuine oppressors deserve as much consideration as the individuals they oppress.

[huruma]

Beliefs

I’ve recently come to explicitly reject the idea that people can choose to believe what they do, although our emotional and cognitive biases influence how receptive we are to certain beliefs and we can make choices that are indirectly responsible for our beliefs. You can choose to pretend to believe something that you don’t genuinely believe or to close yourself off to information that might raise more doubt in your mind (if you go out of your way to do so for that reason it's because you already accept the possibility of being wrong or of some proposition you don't currently accept as being true) but a belief itself is something we instinctively accept as true based on feelings of clarity and certainty. Ultimately, it intuitively seems as though a proposition is true or makes sense or it doesn’t regardless of what we want. If I place my hand on a stove and instinctively pull away it’s only because I intuitively believe that there’s a causal relationship between the pain in my hand and my having placed it on the stove. There was no rational decision making involved in the formation of that belief and I would still hold it even if I couldn’t consciously remember any prior experience with stoves.

[huruma]

pro-LGBTQ activists should fight for pedophiles

This post is not about actual child-adult sex. You can consider child-adult sex to be absolutely wrong in all hypothetical and practical circumstances and still respect pedophiles and criticize discrimination against them as well as the stigmatization of their sexual orientation. Even if you think it’s inappropriate to compare child-adult sex to gay sex between adults because of the consent argument or the possibility of adults using their authority or status to intimidate and coerce children into sex or all of the practical reasons why child-adult sex might harm children the same rationale for ‘tolerating’ gay people and homosexuality requires tolerating pedophiles and their attraction toward children. Non-active pedophiles cannot choose to not be pedophiles and even if they could their sexual / romantic interest in children doesn’t stem from malice or sadism or a lack of empathy for them. Sexual attraction in general is 'objectifying’ but if people see nothing wrong with it generally why should it become bad depending on who the object of that attraction is? Edit – logically I stand by my claim that physical attraction to what prepubescent children look and sound like has nothing to do with whether or not they are cognitively developed enough to consent to sexual or erotic intimacy (we can imagine a hypothetical adult with the body of a child despite having fully developed adult cognition) but realistically I understand that sex is social activity and people tend to associate people with their bodies. Someone can invent a new identity for someone they’re physically attracted to (that’s what people inevitably do when they come across attractive strangers in photos or video and film whom they know nothing about – invent a fantasy identity for them) but on some level a pedophile does want to have sex with children so if this is notable at all (because I’ve never liked the implication that something being understandable to any given person in some way justifies it or puts into context, everything is understandable from some possible person’s point of view) I can somewhat ‘understand’ the distinction between homosexuality and pedosexuality but not the hatred for and prejudice against non-active pedophiles. You can suppress attraction, and it can be naturally suppressed by stress, but you can’t choose to not be physically attracted to who you are attracted to and suppressing it in terms of fantasy has to lead to long-term emotional distress and desensitize you to a source of pleasure because you’re frustrating a built in psychological need. -Simulated child pornography should be legal (although I think people should consider that it might have a drug-like effect on the brain and desensitize people sexually). This would not only provide non-active pedophiles with an outlet for their sexuality but probably curb the production of real child pornography and help minimize actual child-adult sex itself, at the very least I don’t see why it would increase real life child-adult sex. Pedophiles have the same deep rooted psychological need to satisfy their sexual desires that most other human beings do and it’s cruel to deny them that if their doing so isn’t at anyone else’s expense. -Non-active pedophiles who are in jail for viewing child porn and child molesters tend to be especially vulnerable in many prisons (people who view child porn or actually have some kind of sexual contact with children aren’t necessarily pedophiles by orientation). I don’t know what the policies of various prisons are when it comes to a prisoner’s right to privacy or the confidentiality of their crimes but they, along with other prisoners who are targeted for having committed particularly offensive crimes or for whatever other reasons, should be afforded due protection and LGBTQ activists should pressure prison authorities into doing this. 

  - Child molesters should not have to register as sex offenders upon being released and their 'debt to society’ should be considered paid. Harassment toward them and hate crimes against them should garner more attention and criticism from LGBTQ activists. I have mixed feelings about allowing them to work in jobs or careers that involve working with children or having authority over them because it might trigger temptation but I don’t think they should have their identity, location and past crime be made available to the general public.  - 'Pedophile’ is a dirty word and just below ‘murderer’ and ‘rapist’ on the scale of the worst things you can be. It’s all the more insulting that 'pedophile’ is often used interchangeably with 'child molester’. LGBTQ activists should be working toward raising general sympathy for pedophiles and 'tolerance’ for their sexual orientation. If they don’t already exist anonymous support groups should be set up for them but without the objective of trying to 'fix’ them - Often the people who are the most tolerant of pedophiles think they should be pitied instead of  condemned because their orientation is a 'mental illness’. They advocate for 'helping’ them even though there’s no evidence suggesting that sexual orientation can be changed. Homosexuality was once considered a mental illness by psychiatrists and this changed due to socio-political and cultural pressure and not because of any new evidence that suggested otherwise (psychology being an inauthentic science there was never any evidence for homosexuality being a ‘mental illness’ to begin with). Imagine the response this kind of condescending and paternalistic attitude toward homosexuals would garner among pro-LGBT people (which is not to say that I consider genuine ‘paternalism’ to be necessarily wrong or ‘condescension’ to be disrespectful when it doesn’t involve the intent to insult someone but it can be inconsiderate even without the intent to insult or offend). If a sexual / romantic attraction toward children is not inherently distressing to pedophiles and it doesn’t imply any anti-social tendencies then there’s nothing wrong with it beyond pedophile’s not being able to fully satisfy their sexual desires. I would imagine this kind of prejudice against pedophilia, even when it isn’t coupled with bandwagon hatred, malice and disrespect toward pedophiles as individuals, is damaging to a lot of them and who knows how many of them are in the closet (apparently, one study which involved attaching penile plethysmographs to a random sample of men designed to measure physiological responses that indicate sexual interest showed that 95% of the men responded to female adult images, 88.7% to female child images and 26.25% were more interested in children than adults despite only 20% of the men admitting an attraction toward children. If this is an accurate sampling of the general male population and the child images used were of prepubescent girls a more useful definition of pedophilia might be a sexual preference for prepubescent children rather than just some degree of sexual interest in them).