John K said:
Charlatan, I'm coming back to the thread after a couple of days, so apologies if my thoughts rewind your discussions a bit. Your focus on suffering as being at the substratum of moral philosophy is very interesting. I've found that these thread comments can sound a bit dogmatic - I'm just throwing out thoughts and questions here rather than taking a position.
Ah, well dogmatism is what bothers me most! I prefer lengthy discussion of alternate possibilities to dogmatism.
Buddhism is related to but pretty different from my philosophy, in that Buddhism/similar theories tend to opt for a sort of self-less state. I don't see any problem with attachment or any such thing -- the idea that they INHERENTLY lead to suffering doesn't make sense to me/sounds too much like "because caring about things leads to the potential for hurt, it must lead to hurt" -- not necessarily, that's something to be corrected about the world if it does lead to harm.
As to the thing about natural suffering vs human-imposed suffering, that doesn't play much of a role in my philosophy. The point for me is to discover whether there are things we objectively can say ought to be avoided -- uncontroversial agony, like when one is being tortured, seems to me to be inherently negative, if anything. The point of this isn't about human relations but about asking are there objective statements about how the world ought and ought not to be.
The way I was thinking of the moral problem, it's really finding if there are any 'oughts' in the universe, not just 'is'
Empirically it seems to me that not all suffering is necessarily a bad thing, at least at first base. Some examples: I resented school a lot of the time, the way it made me do things I didn't want to and I was unpopular with the people
As with this and with the fire burning your hand, I'd say the suffering itself is bad by definition, but the capacity to know suffering can serve useful purposes and arguably it is more rational to be able to know it than not, simply because the capacity for knowledge is a precursor to rational choices. That is, it would be better if you didn't burn your hand, period, but that differs from saying you shouldn't be able to experience suffering if your hand is burned.
All this says is that it's inconsistent with your goals to burn your hand. That's a coherent position to take. This still means suffering ought not to happen, it just means that in order for it not to happen, you ought to act consistent with your goals of not getting you hand burned.
It's fine for it to be inconsistent with your goals to burn your hand, but it does NOT seem to me to make sense to say the suffering is fine itself.
With respect to the unpopularity -- there you're saying in our imperfect world, sometimes to get to the good, you need to endure the bad. Heck, it might be that in an imperfect world, you might decide to endure unspeakable torture for a greater good. but it's safe to say the torture was itself evil, and the fact you needed to endure it was negative -- you couldn't self-consistently say I WANT that type of circumstance to exist. That is, it would be a better world if the good could've been achieved without your torture.
After all, the greater good one might be enduring torture for might itself be so that others don't get tortured. The point is suffering, agony, etc seems to be nonsensical to not call negative -- otherwise it ain't suffering, agony, etc.
The real point is suffering gives us a grounding for saying there is objectively negative stuff in the world.