Ren said:
Would you then say that a Truman Show-like world in which certain people are living a lie, but are not suffering and may in fact be happy, is not immoral from your standpoint? Or would you argue that therein lies the possibility of future suffering (as we see in the case of Truman eventually)?
Good question -- here are the dimensions I see to this:
- If something will create future suffering, that is certainly ruled out -- I see no reason to oppose present suffering but not oppose future suffering
- In my answer, I included try to be rational, which rules out the whole living a lie thing -- in practice, it is implausible that we can ensure things go as they ought to be without knowing how things are
- As to whether even in principle, one ought to be rational, well, I'd say if one ought to do anything it's to attempt to be rational, because the willingness to accept contradictions basically leads to being willing to accept/reject anything, so you can't really have any other oughts before accepting the most basic ought-obligation
- However, there's a subtle question: assuming *I* am being rational, ought I to ensure other people are? That is, suppose people are living a fairytale, and they're happy. Is there anything wrong with leaving that state of affairs be, assuming it couldn't possibly lead to suffering and/or the failure to prevent it (e.g. if I told someone that people are suffering and they could do something about it, then obviously I tell them)?
It isn't obvious to me that there's anything wrong with this.....
Still, it makes me uncomfortable because I do think I am obligated to be rational, so is it really clear I'm not obligated to make others aware, so as to promote their rationality (again, in principle -- in practice I do this already)
Another similar thing is suppose people are living like a brain-in-vat/Matrix type scenario and aren't aware of it, where their brains are being stimulated to create the experience. If the experience isn't causing suffering, is there something wrong with the fact that really, they're not making decisions 'freely', their decisions are being 'made' by the program hooked up into the brain?
Again, not obviously bad to me but makes me nervous, because being able to make decisions yourself is a precondition of being rational. It seems like this type of scenario being 'forced' on someone without knowledge would be something the someone is obligated to reject. Plausibly this would lead to suffering were the person to find out some day.
I think things that would lead to suffering in someone were they to find out may be things I can't call immoral on the basic level, but unloving. That is, if I value them, I am forced to incorporate their 'oughts' into my 'oughts' too somehow.
Another way to think of this is you can end suffering by just getting rid of everyone painlessly. Is this intrinsically bad -- that is, nonexistence? Harder to say for me than inflicting suffering.
This last bullet point is where a lot of my thoughts are still going/am not quite sure. I might decide some of these things ain't OK even in principle in the future, but I'd have to see some reasons that convince me it's not just my subjective discomfort.
Generally the 'objectivity' of morality to me is as real as the objectivity of suffering. We can have different likes, dislikes, strategies, philosophies, but the one thing that leads to some objectivity seems to be the suffering itself.