One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.
That’s literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one’s values and not particularly up for debate - so there’s nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.
Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.
I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.
One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.
That’s literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one’s values and not particularly up for debate - so there’s nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.
Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.
I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.