Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[The Grand Nudger]

Destroying all life on earth is to inflict the greatest possible suffering on the maximum amount of beings.  Harris, and he makes this argument alot, lol...considers this the very definition of bad.  If this is not bad, then nothing is bad.

Well you could make the argument that actually it does minimise suffering in the long term because in the same way that life procreates to create more entropy in the future, destroying life stops it procreating to create more suffering in the future. Better to take one hit now than billions of years more.

Of course I don't personally believe this, not least because I believe life will always develop somehow if it is possible.

A person can make any argument..but it wont make them good arguments. 

Imagine yourself holding the button.  If you press it, no one will ever cause more suffering than you have..because there won't be anyone left to suffer.  The contended selling point of the idea demonstrates exactly -why- it's a bad decision by the metric of suffering in a suffering reducing moral schema. You'll have not only done the opposite of what you intend..you'll have done it to a greater extent than will ever be possible again.

Unless more life arises, evolves..and find itself considering the same, ofc.....and then you'll have inflicted maximum suffering to no effect at all, lol.

Repeat ad infinitum.



Hedonism does have a problem, though, on that count..even if that's not a particularly compelling example. We do accept that it might sometimes be right (even if it's not good) to cause some suffering to reduce other suffering. The idea, generally, is that the suffering caused should be lesser than the suffering reduced..otherwise we've replaced a small problem with a bigger problem.