Choosing Desert: Painful Calculus
[Mill] believed that the pleasure and pain of all people affected y your actions… belong in your moral calculus. Further, Mill stressed not just quantity of pleasure but wuality, attaching a special value to pleasures involving the “higher faculties.” He wrote: “Few human creatures would consent to e changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.” [moral animal, 132]
…in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount. And yet we violate that dogma routinely. The most obvious case is that of a declared war, where as a society we officiallydsldip into an alternative collective mode in which the value of the lives of a huge subset of humanity is suddenly reduced to zero. I needn’t spell this out because it is so blatant. Another clear violation of our dogma is capital punishment, where society collectively chooses to terminate a life. asically, dsociety has judged that a certain soul merits no respect at all. Short of capital punishment, there is incarceration, where society treats people with many different feels of dignity or lack thereof, implicitly showing different levels of respect for different-sized souls. Consider also the phenomenal differences in the measures taken y physicians in attempting to save lives. A head of state (or the head of any large corporation) who has a heart attack will receive far better care than a random citixzen, not to mention an illegal alien… I think that wittingly or unwittingly, we all equate the size of a living being’s souls with the “objective” value of that being’s life, which is to say, the degree of respect that we outsiders pay to that being’s interiority. And we certainly do not place equal values on all beings’ lives! [Strange Loop, 343-344]
Schadenfreude: https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2017-03-01/the-roots-of-schadenfreude-why-we-take-pleasure-in-other-peoples-pain