>>60027
>Of course it can. There are a vast number of actions which cause far, far more suffering than happiness. For instance the whole prison system is explicitly designed to cause suffering, so it isn't hard to say that it's unethical. Equally there are a whole range of actions which are undeniably good because they bring mostly happiness.
The prison system, it could be said, creates immediate suffering on the intent of making net suffering decrease in future, through deterrence and incapacitation.
>There is a large gray area in the middle, but I'd argue that it looks gray because we aren't sufficiently intelligent to understand the fine details of all the consequences. Our uncertainty in the outcome is large, so there are a lot of situations where we can't decisively say what the right course of action is. If we had perfect information, I think it would be possible to eliminate most of that gray area.
I agree with this. I don't think it supports either your or my argument. It doesn't make your ethical system more practical to say that, if we were omniscient, it would be workable. Mine, as simple as it is, would be executed better if we were omniscient. The same could be said of any system.
>I can't give an exact number, but if lots of people are starving to death that's a good sign that either our population is too large or our resource distribution system is too inefficient. The lower bound would be set at the point where new children can expect to live lives without experiencing a lack of basic resources and without compromising the long-term wellbeing of the ecosystem which sustains us. Unfortunately to get an exact number you have to do a lot of research and modeling.
What if we're choosing (which, considering we have the means and production) to let people starve? If we're letting them starve, how does that inform what the world population should be? How few people do their need to be in order to stop the human nature of cruelty?
>Look at the research done on declining fish populations in the oceans. Pay a visit to any third world country and see the way people are living.
I'm asking about the trade-off being creating happiness and minimizing suffering. This is the trade-off between an immediate booming population and long-term sustainability. I'll give you the sustainability point, and I agree. Perhaps I badly worded the point, what I meant was how much suffering should one undergo to create happiness or, how much happiness should one sacrifice to prevent suffering.
>I don't know where the exact trade off point is. I can only give you a broad range of acceptable values.
Then it is an ethical system that is very hard to communicate and not very useful. You'd be better off arguing that my system is so wrong that nothing is better than mine rather than trying to put something no one can predict in its place.
>No shit. It turns out the universe is a messy, complicated place and we're just small, stupid animals trying to do the best we can. Nothing is ever that simple outside of school. There is no single right answer to most of the world's problems, or if there is we're too stupid to find it. Every decision results in an explosion of cause and effect which propagates outwards and ends up subtly influencing every future event. Human brains are spectacularly complicated machines which can break in all sorts of interesting ways (none of which we fully understand).
Ethical principles are generally easy to state but very, very hard to strictly adhere to. The best we can do is take note of the most glaring examples of success and failure and use those to guide our future actions. If you want hard math proving exactly what action to take in any given situation, wait a few thousand years and pray we've found a way to build a star-sized quantum computer which isn't constrained by the speed-of-light limit.
Abdicating responsibility isn't a logical answer. Saying you do things, in so many words, intuitively just lends support to my argument that my philosophy is logically coherent and that yours isn't.
>"Should we create babies just to torture them" is about as trivial as ethical dilemmas come.
No, because we're wasting resources on the torturing that should be used in making more babies. But we should still make the babies and making the babies wasn't wrong.
It would be less evil to make the babies and torture them than to purposefully waste said resources and never make any babies at all. Both actions are still very evil- I think that's where we disagree though, on which is more evil.