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Famous Magnus Vinding Quotes

“... the notion that happiness and suffering are morally symmetric deserves our most meticulous scrutiny. It may, of course, seem intuitive to assume that some kind of symmetry must obtain, and to superimpose a certain interval of the real numbers onto the range of happiness and suffering we can experience — from minus ten to plus ten, say. Yet we have to be extremely cautious about such naively intuitive moves of conceptualization. … [I]t is especially true when our ethical priorities hinge on these conceptual models; when they can determine, for instance, whether we find it acceptable to allow astronomical amounts of suffering to occur in order to create “even greater” amounts of happiness.”

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Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
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“… a problematic feeling is indeed the exact opposite of an unproblematic feeling. Yet the fact that two states are each others’ opposites in this sense does not imply they are symmetric in the sense of being able to morally outweigh each other or meaningfully cancel each other out. Consider, by analogy, the states of being below and above water respectively. ... one can say that, in one sense, being 50 meters below water is the opposite of being 50 meters above water. But this does not mean, quite obviously, that a symmetry exists between these respective states in terms of their value and moral significance. Indeed, there is a sense in which it matters much more to have one’s head just above the water surface than it does to get it higher up still.”

SufferingEthicsAnalogyUtilitarianismPrioritizationSuffering Focused Ethics
Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
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“... when we take into account what we know about happiness and suffering in psychological and neuroscientific terms, we find reasons to doubt that (to use Popper’s phrase) we can treat degrees of pain as “negative degrees of pleasure”, and to doubt that pleasure can ethically “cancel out” pain — any more than putting people far above a water surface can cancel out or outweigh the bad of putting people far below it.”

HappinessSufferingEthicsUtilitarianism
Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
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