"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandActivists from the United KingdomTranshumanistsUtilitarians
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"The Pinprick Argument", BLTC Research, 2005
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
David Pearce (philosopher)
81 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Pearce (philosopher) →
Related Quotes
"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our …"
"[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...]."
"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and tr…"
"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."
"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a p…"
"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it wil…"
"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, …"
"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love…"
"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demoni…"
"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfill…"