反向功利主义是一种道德观点，主张人们应尽量减少总体的痛苦，或者优先减少痛苦，再其次最大化幸福。它认为减轻痛苦比增加快乐更为重要。尽管极端的反向功利主义可能导致“毁灭地球是道德上好的”等荒谬结论，但作者认为许多人内心深处的反向功利主义直觉比表面上更受欢迎。文章通过“不逗孩子玩”、“喜欢蛋糕的员工”等案例，探讨了人们在面对痛苦和快乐时的道德判断，指出大多数人认为造成痛苦是不道德的，而未能增加他人快乐则不然，这与反向功利主义的侧重点不谋而合。

🌟 反向功利主义的核心在于优先考虑减少痛苦（负效用），而非增加快乐（正效用）。这与古典功利主义认为减轻痛苦和增加快乐同等重要的观点有所不同。

📉 尽管极端的反向功利主义结论可能令人难以接受（如认为毁灭地球是道德的），但作者认为许多人在实际道德判断中，倾向于关注避免痛苦，而非积极创造快乐。

⚖️ 文章通过“不逗孩子玩”和“喜欢蛋糕的员工”的例子说明，人们普遍认为造成他人痛苦是不道德的，而未能增加他人快乐（即使是简单的快乐）则不是。例如，不逗孩子玩以避免自己麻烦被视为可接受，而要求员工加班错过蛋糕则可能被认为是不道德的，特别是当员工有眼部不适时。

💡 大多数人的道德直觉更接近于“不造成痛苦”，而非“积极促成幸福”。这体现在人们更关注避免伤害和痛苦，而非最大化他人的快乐，尤其是在个人利益与他人快乐发生冲突时。

🤝 尽管多数人可能不遵循任何特定的道德理论，但他们的行为和判断往往体现了对负面效用的高度重视，即认为造成痛苦的行为更应受到道德谴责。

Published on August 11, 2025 4:13 PM GMT

From Wikipedia:

Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that they should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the total amount of happiness. It can be regarded as a version of utilitarianism that gives greater priority to reducing suffering (negative utility or “disutility”) than to increasing pleasure (positive utility). This differs from classical utilitarianism, which does not claim that reducing suffering is intrinsically more important than increasing happiness.

Negative utilitarianism is unpopular because it leads to absurd conclusions like “destroying the earth is morally good because there will be no more suffering creatures” or “fish species where most individuals die soon after birth should be eliminated”.

But although pretty much no one I have met buys into full-on negative utilitarianism or would bite its murderous bullets, I think many of the underlying negative-utilitarian intuitions are more popular than one may naively suspect.

At least judging by their other stated normative beliefs, most people:

Don’t think positive and negative sensations or experiences lie on the same continuous line of “goodness”Would agree that negative experiences are bad, and more of them is even worseWould agree that’s it’s immoral to create more negative experience (or in some cases fail to reduce the amount of negative experience)Would not agree that it’s immoral to fail to create more positive experiences (or reduce the amount of positive experience someone has)

Failing To Make A Child Laugh

Imagine you are walking past a shallow pond on a warm day and see a small child playing next to it. You know that the child absolutely loves seeing adults get wet in the pond. You are wearing fancy clothes that would make seeing you wade into the pond even more fun for the child. You could easily wade in and make the child very happy, but doing so would cause mild inconvenience because you’ll have to do an extra load of laundry that evening. Is it unethical to not wade into the pond?

The Employee Who Likes Cake

You’re the manager of an employee who really likes cake. Every lunch break he steps out of the office to get a slice of cake from the local bakery which closes at 2pm. He enjoys the cake very much. Let’s also say that he’s very healthy and goes for long runs and so the cake is not damaging to his health.

It’s lunch time but your team needs to present to a customer straight after lunch and the slide deck is unfinished. You don’t like cake so your lunch plans involve just a boring soggy sandwich that lies ready for you in your backpack. You can either skip the break to finish the slide deck and have your sandwich after the meeting, or ask your employee to stay back and finish the deck himself, knowing he’ll miss out on his favorite cake. Is it unethical to ask your employee to work while you take a break, knowing he’s missing out on a lot of pleasure? Most would say it’s OK to ask the employee to work.

Now imagine a different situation. Your employee has a mild eye strain problem. He hasn’t mentioned it to you yet but you overheard him talking to his colleagues about it. You know that if he doesn’t take a break by 1pm he gets headaches in the afternoon. Would should you do now? Is it still OK to ask him to work over lunch?

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In general, hurting people for your own personal gain is seen as unethical, and the more you hurt them the worse it is. Whereas prioritizing your own pleasure over others’ is seen as acceptable and not immoral. You are not obligated to make others happy, but you are obligated to not make others suffer. At least this seems to be the view of most regular people. People with a particularly altruistic inclination generally speak of helping the poor and sick avoid hunger and pain, not of making the happy as happy as possible.

So in practice I find most people’s moral intuitions to be rather negative utilitarian flavored.

And though most cannot be described as actually following any particular named ethical theory, I think a reasonable approximation for many people’s ethical view is that they:

Have a (non-normative) preference to personally feel happy/have positive experiencesHave a (non-normative) preference for others to feel happy/have positive experiences, usually centered on their family, close friends, and other personal acquaintancesBelieve it’s immoral to cause harm/pain/suffering to others, where the more suffering, the worse the sin

That is, their moral beliefs (rather than their personal preferences) mostly relate to reducing the negative rather than increasing the positive.

Discuss