Published on June 28, 2025 1:09 AM GMT
I consider myself a utilitarian, but basically don't agree with them about anything. That's because I understand that joy is largely relative. It's radically, but quietly warped my morals over the years.
We know that people adapt to pain and pleasure. We know that context means everything. What does it do to a system of morals though?
An ice cream today will give you a smile. Tomorrow you will have a higher frame of reference and be disappointed with a lack of sweets. The total joy from ice cream is zero on average. Give birth and you will suffer from pain, but the relief after it's done will make the rest of your life brighter. What is left to latch on to?
The answer is changes that affect the rest of your life. Debts that don't need to be paid. Eating ice cream before you die. Having a child that outlives you. Making the world a better place. Achieving mental stability and health. Finding your place in society.
Most traditional utilitarian theories stumble when they try to treat joy as an absolute quantity. As if eating an ice cream could be weighed against raising a child on the same scale, but that’s not how humans work.
Joy can be a spike on a chart or a contextual, long-term state that arises when your life genuinely improves in a way you can feel and believe in. Fleeing-joy and effective-joy. Once you understand this, utilitarian thinking shifts to chasing a different category of joy.
This is a moral system based on maximizing long-term, psychologically grounded joy, stability and circumstances that facilitate it, not momentary pleasure or hypothetical utility.
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### Core Tenets
1. Happiness is relative to life context. A small improvement in a bad life can feel enormous. A luxurious life can feel hollow. We care about perceived movement toward meaning and fulfillment, not just raw stimulation.
2. Short-term suffering often builds long-term joy. Meaningful change usually involves sacrifice, discipline, discomfort — even pain. But the shape of a life matters more than any one moment in it.
3. The core moral goods are mental health, trust, and stability. These are the conditions under which relative joy can grow. Everything else is a means to these ends.
4. The goal of morality is to shape the world for higher baseline joy. That means improving environments, institutions, interpersonal systems, and internal conditions so that people are set up to feel well and be healthy in the long term.
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A Tricky Example: crime and punishment
Those that are disruptive to society need to be put under constraints so that they don't lower the society's joy with long term issues, however if a person has no risk of committing further crimes, the only reason to keep them from society is for the comfort of those they have wronged. A sense of vengeance drives much of the criminal justice system, but revenge has no place in my moral framework.
In my opinion, we should learn to be kind to those that have wronged us. We should think of their joy when we can. Not at the cost of the joy of others, but if we seek to harm them, letting go of that anger is the best way to maximize joy for all. I believe this is no more than leftover evolutionary thinking that is functional in a tribal society and doesn't help the world we live in. I would love to chat more about this though.
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### Why This Matters for Utilitarianism
This kind of relativistic, contextual joy-measurement solves several classic objections to utilitarianism:
- The Experience Machine: You reject it not because “fake happiness” is bad, but because it removes you as a force of good. We are repulsed by not contributing to real matters and the lineage of man that might go on forever. Your small life of joy is a blip in your own mind, while the good you do can ripple on forever.The Organ Harvest Problem: You reject it not just because it feels wrong, but because it would systematically destroy trust, which is foundational to collective long-term joy.The Incest Scenario: You can see why taboo exists, it’s a signal of psychological trouble, not a violation of some cosmic rule. You treat the system impacts, not the acts in isolation.
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### Who This Moral System Serves
This system assumes that people:
- Adapt to pain and pleasure over timeNeed meaning, safety, and internal coherence to feel joyAre not always good judges of what will make them happy in the long termDeserve to live in a system that sets them up for upward momentum in life
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### Final Thought
Once you accept that happiness is relative and embedded in a life story, morality becomes about designing the kinds of lives and systems that lead upward, not just feel good now.
This isn't about immediate gains, we are in it for the long haul.
It's about maximizing life's momentum toward stable future.
(Note: I drafted this with the help of an LLM. The ideas are mine and the message is mine, but I wanted to get this in a LessWrong style so I got some help with formatting and style.)
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