[lit-ideas] Re: What is the cumulative suffering of mankind?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:04:36 -0700
Last week I told my maid I wouldn't be paying her because I had decided to send
her salary to the "Free Tibet" league. Imagine, she was so indignant! You just
can't get good moral help these days.
Walter O.
Bentham Chair in Arithmetic and Moral Philosophy
Outremont Secretarial College
Outremont, QC
Eric wrote
Consider this quote [from C. S. Lewis]:
“There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for
no one suffers it. When we have reached the
maximum that a single person can suffer . . . we
have reached all the suffering there can be in the
universe. The addition of a million fellow
sufferers adds no more pain.”
In one way, the statement is persuasive. You
suffer. I suffer. They suffer. It doesn't add up.
Suffering is personal and cannot be experienced
collectively.
On the other hand, "the sum of suffering," as an
imaginative construct -- never felt, but vaguely
imagined -- seems real enough. It's the kind of
thought that makes us shudder and run for cover.
Darfur. Dachau. Atrocities we briefly hold in our
minds before sipping our coffee and turning the page.
Walter replied that the hedonic calculus 'would seem to require' some
measure of pain and pleasure, such that (and here I put words in his
mohth) if Lewis were right, Ultilitarianism would be unworkable. This
seems true, given Utilitarians' propensity for trying to quantify pain
and pleasure as if they were something like color samples of varying
intensity and hue.
Suppose though that Lewis were somehow right, and that there's no more
suffering in the world when millions suffer than when one does. Yet
rather than worry about the ontological status of suffering, shouldn't
we be concerned with the number of creatures suffering, which is
something that is quantifiable? It strikes me as simply a dodge to try
to avoid the problem of pain by invoking the tired formula, 'My pains
are my pains; nobody else can have them.'
Robert Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
