Foundations
Meta-Ethics: Why Pleasure and Pain Matter
At the most fundamental level, moral philosophy must answer: what makes actions right or wrong? My view, called analytic hedonism, holds that pleasure is identical to intrinsic value and pain is identical to intrinsic disvalue.
When you experience genuine pleasure or pain, you're not just having a nice or unpleasant feeling—you're directly encountering moral value itself. Try describing the feeling of happiness or suffering without using value-laden language like "good" or "bad." It's impossible, because these experiences are inherently normative.
This explains why we can derive moral conclusions from facts about conscious experience. The is/ought gap dissolves once we recognise that some facts (about pleasure and pain) are inherently evaluative. If someone is suffering, that suffering itself constitutes a moral reason to help them—not because we project value onto their experience, but because we recognise the disvalue that suffering literally is.
Normative Ethics: What We Should Do
Given that pleasure and pain are the fundamental moral facts, what should we do? Hedonistic utilitarianism provides a clear answer: maximise the total amount of pleasure minus pain across all conscious beings.
This leads to several important principles:
Moral equality: All conscious beings count equally. A unit of suffering matters the same regardless of who experiences it—human, animal, or any other sentient creature.
Consequentialism: Actions are right or wrong based solely on their outcomes, specifically their effects on total wellbeing. Good intentions don't make an action right if it produces more suffering than alternatives.
Scope sensitivity: If helping one person is good, helping two people in the same way is twice as good. This means we should often focus on problems affecting large numbers of beings, even if each individual case seems less emotionally compelling.
Population ethics: In principle, we should consider not just the welfare of existing beings, but also how our choices affect who will exist and what their lives will be like.
Applied Ethics: Real-World Implications
These principles have significant practical implications:
Effective altruism: If we want to do the most good, we should evaluate charitable interventions by their cost-effectiveness at reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing. This often means supporting global health interventions or animal welfare reforms rather than more emotionally appealing but less effective causes.
Animal welfare: Since animals can suffer, their suffering counts morally. Given the scale of factory farming (billions of animals in poor conditions), this might be one of the most important moral issues of our time.
Personal decisions: From career choices to consumption patterns, we should consider the broader consequences of our actions on total wellbeing, not just their effects on ourselves or those close to us.
Policy questions: Whether evaluating economic policies, healthcare systems, or legal frameworks, the relevant question is which approach better promotes overall welfare.
This framework doesn't provide easy answers to every moral question, but it gives us clear criteria for thinking through difficult decisions: add up the wellbeing effects, and choose whatever maximises the total.