SUFFERING

In my last post I wrote that I would provide you with a universal moral code of my own creation. However, I feel I have to lay down its foundations first, lest you push it down with one finger.

Let me start with the master rule, the rule that underlies all other rules:

Minimize suffering for all those capable of suffering.

This rule is similar to the silver rule: do not do onto others what you would not have them do onto you. One difference with the silver rule is that the master rule clearly states suffering, which only the silver rule implicates. The silver rule could have been written thus: do not make other people suffer, because you don't want other people to make you suffer. Another difference is that the master rule does not stress the feelings of the person following the rule, because, of course, the feelings of the person upon which is acted matter too. And we cannot expect that everybody experiences everything the same.

WHAT IS SUFFERING?

The way this rule is interpreted depends very much on the definition of suffering. When I talk about suffering I don't mean the experience of "physical" pain, or nociception. Pain can cause suffering, though one can also suffer without pain. Think of what you feel when you fail a test, or when your love relationship has ended, or when a loved one dies. For this incorporeal negative feeling I will use the word aversion to avoid confusion. To suffer is to experience aversion.

Certain mutations in the SCN9A gene cause a disorder called channelopathy-associated insensitivity to pain. The pain sensors of the mutants do not send signals to the brain when tissue damage occurs. So when these people damage themselves, they fail to notice, and often continue with their auto-mutilating behaviour. Clearly nociception is useful.

Other mutations in the same gene can cause the opposite: sensing pain when there is no tissue damage. People with paroxysmal extreme pain disorder have regularly recurring episodes of burning pain typically in their eyes, their lower jaw, and their rectum, though the pain is not limited to these locations. Simply touching things may be severely painful, so it is clear that apart from the increased suffering, this condition also diminishes people's ability to sense tissue damage.

Furthermore, pain can be experienced without the incorporeal aversive feeling, a condition called pain asymbolia. It is caused by brain damage or certain drugs. In this case, the area that produces pain does not send signals to the area that creates the aversive feelings. When these people cut themselves they feel the pain, but they are not bothered by it.

So it's clear that pain and aversion are different things. The ability to sense aversion is useful in the evolutionary sense, for the same reason nociception is useful (because pain creates aversion). Aversion is our negative motivator. It is what makes us avoid things that diminish our survival and/or reproduction.

Imagine that the part that creates aversive feelings in your brain has received too little blood, and died (hypothetical situation, I don't know whether this has happened before). First, probably, you would get an incredible smile. You feel great. Nothing can break you. Suddenly, like you have pissed off lady Fortune, your partner in love gets hit by a speeding car right before your eyes. Do you cry? Does the earth crumble beneath your feet? No. You keep on smiling. Whatever happens, you will be happy. Because the part that makes you unhappy is gone. Without the ability to suffer, love does not exist. And to me love is the most valuable thing in existence. Therefore the ability to suffer is also pretty valuable to me. Not the (internal) ability to suffer is condemnable, but the (external) events that trigger suffering.

There is a movement that promotes the elimination of suffering (i.e. the ability to suffer) using biotechnology, confusingly called abolitionism, promoted by David Pearce. Obviously I cannot agree with him. If love is destroyed, what is there left to live for? Riches? Fame? Knowledge? Perfect health? When you can't suffer, you cannot emotionally attach to any of these things. Nothing that exists has any value to you. There might as well be nothing at all.

WHO SUFFERS?

The master rule could have been shorter, simply: minimize suffering. But many crimes are committed because people do not consider the feelings of other people outside their own family or gang. The addition: for all those capable of suffering, does demand an explanation. Who exactly are capable of suffering?

Some people only act morally to members within their own group (e.g. Nazis, strict Muslims). Other people apply their rules to all visible animal life (e.g. Jainists), and some even include non-living things like rocks (various shamanistic religions). It is obvious that all humans can suffer, and that no non-living thing can. But the grey area of living things that are not human?

Humans can speak about their feelings, which allows some indirect measurement of suffering. Non-human animals cannot, though of course there's no reason to assume that the inability to communicate with us reflects the inability to suffer. We cannot draw a clear line between species that can suffer and species that cannot. What we can do, is look at characteristics that greatly influence the ability to suffer.

First there's memory. When you have an extremely short memory, lasting only seconds, you do not have much ability to suffer. You might sense some aversion for a moment, and then it's gone. However, if painful memories last forever, one negative event may cause infinite suffering. Well, not literally infinite, because a creature dies at a certain moment. So life span is also important. If negative events are remembered indefinitely, then a creature that lives only 200 days can suffer much less than a creature that lives 200 years. In short, the better the memory, and the longer the life span, the stronger the ability to suffer.

Secondly, there's imagination. Memories may be accessed when encountering the thing that caused the negative experience in the first place. For example, you got attacked by geese when you were young, and experience distress each time you see a goose. But when you can imagine yourself encountering geese, you will also suffer. Or consider imagining your partner in love getting killed. That triggers suffering even though there's no suffering-inducing precedent. Therefore, the better an organism is at imagining things (that may happen in this reality), the more it is capable of suffering.

Intelligence (which includes the abilities to memorize and imagine) is correlated with brain size, but only when you compare it to the size of the body. Larger creatures have more motor neurons and sensory neurons, and so need larger brains to process all the outgoing and ingoing signals. Therefore, absolute brain size does not correlate with intelligent abilities. But if one compared the brain size for similarly big animals, one would see that those with larger brains are the smarter ones, those better at remembering and those better imagining. One can calculate the ratio between the actual brain mass, and the predicted brain mass for animals of a given size, as a strong indicator of the ability to memorize and imagine. This ratio is called the encephalization quotient (EQ). The higher the EQ, the higher the intelligent abilities, and the higher the capacity to suffer. 

So both brain size corrected for body size, and life expectancy (average life span of species) are strong indicators for the ability to suffer. Knowing these parameters, one can calculate a suffer-value. A high suffer value indicates strong ability to suffer, and a low value indicates a weak ability. When calculating this suffer-value for all animal species, one can make good decisions to minimize total suffering. Below I calculated a suffer-values using EQ and LE information from wikipedia. I used the following formula: suffer-value = EQ * EQ * LE. I decided to let the EQ count twice, because the EQ matters in both areas of memory and imagination, and life span only in memory. Note that this is only an example of how such a suffer-value could be calculated. Perhaps there are better ways.

EQ:

Human - 7,6

Bottlenose Dolphin -  4,1

Chimpanzee - 2,3

Dog - 1,2

House mouse - 0,5

Life Expectancy (LE; in protected environments):

Human - 70 years

Bottlenose Dolphin - 45 years

Chimpanzee - 55 years

Dog - 12 years

House mouse - 3 years

Example suffer-values (EQ * EQ * life expectancy; rounded to nearest integer):

Human - 4043

Bottlenose Dolphin - 756

Chimpanzee - 291

Dog - 17

House mouse -1

  

The suffer-value isn't perfect, and that's because the EQ isn't perfect. Firstly, the EQ does not account for brain surface increase by brain folding. It would be better if brain surface instead of brain mass was used in these calculations, though that is more difficult to measure. Additionally, the size of the cerebral cortex is better correlated with intelligence than the rest of the brain. Some species might have a bigger cerebellum for their size, but this makes them more dexterous and agile, not more intelligent. And when we do only use the size of the cerebrum, we cannot create an EQ for invertebrates because they don't have a cerebrum.

With these suffer-values, or with better ones created differently, one can make moral calculations. For instance, we can measure whether it is allright to use laboratory animals. From the values above it is clear that life-long suffering in multiple mice to save even one human from life-long suffering is good moral judgement. This means using laboratory animals to test cures for human diseases is usually fine (though of course suffering should be limited when possible). Less obvious is the routine use of laboratory animals to test new cosmetics, because most people do not suffer greatly from a lack of new products. Calculations can also be made when only humans are concerned. Consider for instance a situation where a Muslim fanatic is on his way to blow up a building with hundreds of people, and policemen have to decide whether or not to shoot him. Shooting him only hurts his friends, and not shooting him hurts his friends plus thousands of relatives of the people that die from the bomb explosion, and even more people out of fear for such attacks. In this case, shooting the Muslim fanatic is the right thing to do.

This last thing is important: the consequences of an action determine whether it is good or evil (consequentialism) rather than some actions being intrinsically evil, and others intrinsically good (moral absolutism). You cannot say "all killing is evil", simply because it depends on the context whether killing is good or evil. Furthermore, good and evil should also not be regarded as absolute. Torturing a house fly for 1 day is far less evil than torturing 1 human being for 10 years.

Also see the image above. Consider a system with a certain amount of beings capable of suffering. Its current suffering level is at the middle of the spectrum (it actually does not matter because we do not care about absolute amounts of suffering). By doing something that decreases the amount of suffering in the system we move to the right, indicating that we do good (red arrow in the middle). By doing something that increases the amount of suffering we move to the left, indicating that we do evil. The length of the arrow indicates how good or evil we act.

After the change of the suffering level, the new level becomes the new neutral point, as is shown in the image. This does not implicate that there is no difference between a high-suffering level or low-suffering level, or that it does not matter whether the level is high or low. No, the level of suffering in a system should be as low as possible. What I try to show with the image is that the same actions, with the same lengths of arrows, are equally good or evil, it does not matter what the current absolute suffering value is. Torturing 1 person for 10 days is equally evil in hell as it is in paradise. The image also shows that one cannot compensate for evil actions. Torturing 2 people is evil no matter how many people you save in the future (or have saved in the past). On the other hand, torturing 2 people in order to save 10 people is good.

This is all for now, in the next post I will come to the universal moral rules.