Three types of negative utilitarianism

Abstract

This piece discusses three intuitions about the badness of suffering that can’t all be true. Depending on which is rejected, the result is either pure negative utilitarianism, lexical-threshold negative utilitarianism, or negative-leaning utilitarianism. I don’t know which view I subscribe to, but fortunately, the choice isn’t important, because all three flavors of negative utilitarianism yield roughly the same practical conclusions.