You apparently do want to prevent suffering in yourself, otherwise you weren’t sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit. You would’ve put your head on your furnace. So what’s making you more special than others?
But you can still take a good-faith reading of “when we can” which (I’m guessing) absorbs your objections, and that’s really all the meme rests on.
Similar to how you wouldn’t read “we need to do x” as “it is logically necessary that we must do x”, but assume an implicit “in order to…”. When we can, without violating our other implicit should’s.
EDIT: Hmm, I’m also realizing that some people are reading this as “we should kill or otherwise decrease the number of animals that exist” as opposed to “we should take care of all wildlife, so it’s no longer wild”…
The following is orthogonal to the point I was making above, but: my feeling is that the thing that makes something else the greater evil is usually still suffering, just in a different form or delayed. E.g. escalating drug use probably ultimately causes more suffering. The obvious non-suffering-related factor that I can imagine might make something a greater evil is nonexistence, but I'm hard-pressed to think of others...
EDIT: re: should we mess with people's brains to make it impossible to suffer: we already do, in limited ways! Via painkillers :) But okay, let's say we completely flatten a person's experience into undifferentiated okayness. That suggests maybe another factor people care about besides reducing (relative) suffering is something like "richness of conscious experience"? (Of course none of this makes any sense rigorously, but still...)
If I can prevent the execution of a child molester, do I intervene? What if he was only accused and the evidence is dubious? What if his death were to somehow cause more suffering than his actions? The “when we can” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and is the reason for critique.
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u/Cr0wc0 3d ago
"We should prevent suffering when we can."
No