I'll also add that the seam would be very easy to damage by shoving stuff like furniture up against it. Putting a board down to cover the corner makes the corner sturdier.

There is no such thing as a "sum total of positive conscious experience." Why do you think there would be?

Or if there is, how could such a thing possibly be accessible to our limited, forgetful, mortal brains?

"Ethics" is not a meaningful context.

I assume you mean something like, "How do I assign value to experiences in the course of making choices between different possible courses of action?"

And I'll answer for myself, but with what I think applies to every human being: "Poorly, inconsistently, intuitively, and with very little reflection, reasoning, or conscious judgment in 99.9% of cases."

"Good or bad" what? In what context?

A tautology is not an argument. It does not have a conclusion.

I'm more than happy to grant that people use an intuitive form of utilitarian judgment as a heuristic aid in decision-making. That's quite far from claiming, as the original article does, that utilitarianism can form an "ultimate ethical theory," or that conscious valence solves the "is/ought" problem in moral reasoning.

The fact is, the vast majority of the decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives don't really involve any reasoning at all, ethical or otherwise.

As an ethical theory, utilitarianism is, at best, a limited lens through which we can examine certain very simplified, highly circumscribed decisions, for points at which we have (or think we have) a far clearer understanding of the most likely consequences of an action than we do in normal circumstances.

This is why, I think, utilitarians seem to like thought experiments so much: it's much easier to formulate a utilitarian reasoning chain to decide dramatic imaginary scenarios than it is to apply it to normal daily behavioral decisions. Utilitarianism might be able to figure out whether it would be ethical to choose to annihilate the human race in nuclear fire, but it has a lot less to say about whether I should tell my kid to stop picking his nose.

That conclusion absolutely does not follow from those premises, and the article makes no coherent argument that it does. It smuggles its conclusion into the premises themselves, and asserts it with no argument.

How does that help?

I think all of us would rather have "indifferent" experiences than have no experiences at all, which would imply that humans value experience in its own right, regardless of its "score" on this imaginary joy/suffering scale. In addition, all of these "indifferent" experiences can be distinguished from each other linguistically and cognitively, so they're not equivalent to one another. And people can have preferences from among these "indifferent" experiences along axes that are not obviously related to the concepts of "joy" and "suffering."

The point is that the evaluation and description of human experience is way, way more complicated than any utilitarian account can ever reflect, because people very often do not make their experiential choices based on a neatly articulable account of where they are located on the "joy/suffering" metric.

Let's go a bit further: how do we even distinguish "an experience" from a different "experience"?

Temporally? But we can experience a variety of different things at the same time.

Sensorially? But we can sense a variety of things at once, even with the same sense.

How about in memory? But our memories often are radically simplified narrative constructs of our experiences, with vast amounts of both sensory data and emotional response discarded, or they are inaccurate combinations of different events, or they include imaginary elements that we did not actually experience, etc.

I am eating a delicious steak dinner at Chili's. At the same time, I am listening to an irritating pop song on the radio. At the same time, I am thinking about a funny joke I heard earlier in the day. At the same time, I am looking at the ugly wallpaper in the Chili's. At the same time, I am being told by the waiter that a second plane has hit the Twin Towers. How many experiences am I having?

And then we have the further problem of varying levels of "reality" of experiences. Is remembering something very clearly a form of re-experiencing that event? If I intentionally, deliberately imagine something that did not actually happen, do I experience it? What about vicarious experience, when I watch something happen to someone else, and respond emotionally as though it were happening to me? What if I have a nightmare (that certainly seems like "suffering," but is it a real experience)?

So if we cannot even confidently define what "an experience" is, or how it can be distinguished from other "experiences," or how to assess the relationships between the different levels of reality of experiences, then how in the world can we rate them all on some kind of linear scale and assign points to them?

Yes, and even if one considers humans simply as experiencers, we still have a whole lot of experiences that are not easily classifiable into either suffering or joy.

When I'm driving my car on an empty highway, not thinking about anything, and not really paying attention to the road, am I experiencing suffering, or joy? What about when I brush my teeth? What about when I'm in a meeting at work that's not exactly boring but not exactly interesting?

And, of course, there are a bunch of experiences that seem to be complicated mixtures of suffering and joy, and I'm not just talking about that Hellraiser stuff. When I read a stupid comment on Twitter that makes me mad but also makes me feel smarter than that dope, am I experiencing more suffering, or more joy? What about when I laugh at an offensive joke, while also feeling ashamed for laughing? What about when I go to a horror movie and get scared for fun?

From the article:

>If we accept the reality of experience, it’s hard to deny that the universe has value built in. The good must derive from reducing suffering and promoting bliss, every coherent conception of it must ultimately point to this fact. If we buy the self-evident fact that conscious valence is real, we get an ought from an is.
>
>Given this strong argument for moral realism, I find it hard to imagine an ultimate ethical theory that isn’t based on some form of utilitarianism. Deontological and virtue ethics may provide good tools for achieving good outcomes, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. Any coherent ethical theory must aim to attain a world-state with less suffering. This ultimately reduces to a form of utilitarianism that is based on measuring the quality of conscious experience, often referred to as valence utilitarianism.1

So the argument here is: if you accept the premise that utilitarianism is the only option, then you must conclude that utilitarianism is the only option.

Okay then.