It's wrong to say that vegetarianism can only be arrived at by romantic thinking. — darthbarracuda

That's why I didn't say it. Instead I highlighted two ways people approach the natural world, and thus the question of the good.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result. — apokrisis

Because it is only natural to seek perfection. In any case, it's not romantic at all because I'm not applying an aesthetic to this issue; non-human suffering is not bad because it disrupts some special organic family, it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this.

it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this. — darthbarracuda

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet?

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet? — apokrisis

What does this mean? Suffering sucks regardless of intensity, although intensity offers prioritization.

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely?

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure?

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all?

It can only be if you take some essentialist approach to suffering that you could object to these logical consequences.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection".

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely? — apokrisis

To call suffering "mild" is to abuse both terms. A little pinprick isn't a case of suffering, clearly, because it doesn't break someone's spirit.

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure? — apokrisis

If the same person is experiencing both and they consented then no, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Nobody is being instrumentalized.

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all? — apokrisis

I doubt the existence of neutral feelings. You might not be feeling anything but you're still in a state of mind, or a mood, which is either positive or negative. Analysis leads to the realization that most moods are not enjoyable but rather striving.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection". — apokrisis

Because you shouldn't gamble with another person's life, or use another person's life for your own benefit, against their will.

It makes sense that we are biologically evolved to value the world in ways that work. And pleasure, pain and empathy are all biologically evolved "intuitions" in that regard.

How do you define 'ways that work'. Can you give an example?

But the example of chocolate and sugar illustrates the fact that moral judgements have to be complex. What's good in the short-term as instant gratification of an impulse may be very bad as a long-term habit.

And humans bring on this particular moral dilemma for themselves. It is because we are smart enough to refine food that we can produce all the sugar and alcohol we like. The "intuitive" responses we might have due to a lengthy evolutionary history become mal-adaptive after we've removed the constraints on our ability to satisfy our urges.


If we were thinking morally, we would have to identify then what is actually "the good" that nature had in mind originally, and how we can then re-introduce the constraints so as to arrive back at that "better" balance.

So as you say, what is pleasurable ain't always reliably good. And it becomes a cruel kind of empathy to share your sugar and alcohol with your children or pets.

But we can - by taking this naturalistic approach - start to see how "the good" was defined for us through historical evolutionary forces. Pleasure, pain and empathy all existed as intuitive evaluations of something. And that something is mostly the obvious thing of meeting the goals of life - ie: to grow, to reproduce, to flourish.

So from what I understand you'd say our innate impulses, when sufficiently constrained, can be considered our moral intuitions? Or rather, our impulses are generated out of some innate understanding of what is good (*for us*) ?

Maybe this is a right approach. What comes to my mind is the end of 'coming back to stability' -- the body desires food or shelter or some other thing in order to bring itself back to some equilibrium set-point. If temperature seems to have suddenly changed from a given set-point, then the body struggles to bring it back to that set-point. People desire food, naturally, when the body is devoid of energy -- it strives to hit the minimum baseline of satiation and the pleasure taste encourages more food intake until the baseline is met (**or at least until the maximum capacity of intake is met)..

But then there's more to that. There's a difference between 'good for me' and 'good for us'. And it's certainly fair to say, as much as we are whole in terms of our 'biological selves', we are also parts of much larger biological selves. Communities of people, communities of ecosystems. Intuitions that power those interactions can come into conflict. What's good for my community may not be good for 'me' at a given moment per se. I may have an impulsive desire to jump in front of the bullet that's about to hit my comrade, but what of my impulse to save my own self. So then to define what's good would have to take this sort of stuff into account.

And then there are goods that have nothing to do with stability or equilibrium. We know that if we want to be healthy we need to keep under a certain weight, eat certain foods, exercise regularly. If we want to be a carpenter or a chef or a cleaner or a philosopher, if we want to change ourselves in any way we'd need to break out of that stability and into something we're uncomfortable with. We may believe that's good for us and perhaps it might be.. but that intuition certainly doesn't have the same origin as the intuition driving our desire for food. Accounting for these sorts of 'goods' seems to involve something more than just what comes out of our biological impulses. I feel like there's a distinction between intuition and impulse