Negative Utilitarianism is often presented as a grim, anti-human morality, focusing only on sacrifice without any emphasis on joy. This is wrong. In this article, I will explain why it is in fact more intuitive, less constraining, and more pro-human than Classical Utilitarianism. I will do so by presenting a series of intuition pumps in the form of short stories. Each story will contrast one feature of the Negative Utilitarian framework with its “positive” counterpart. Several of them are based on well-known examples from the literature, albeit they were rarely examined through a Negative Utilitarian perspective. It will be shown that the Classical version is almost always less intuitive and more difficult to accept, often leading to monstrous outcomes that are avoided by default in the “negative” framework. The aim of this article is not to be exhaustive, but rather to correct some misconceptions that people usually have about the view.
The version of NU that will be discussed in the present article can be found in the writings of David Pearce, who argues for the elimination of suffering through the recalibration of the hedonic scale. The words “pain” and “suffering” refer both to the physical and psychological definitions.
Without further ado, welcome to the Negative Utilitarian Compendium!
Intuition pump #1: Your Happy Friend.
Suppose you just learned that you have terminal cancer. You are in shock, depressed, and in a lot of physical pain (that’s why you went to the doctor in the first place). On your way back home, you meet your friend Phil. Phil is a Utilitarian philosopher, and a very successful one at that. As such, he is able to get access to the latest research on happiness, and he is currently jubilating because he just took an experimental pill that makes him experience joy ten times more intensely than normal. He greets you:
“Hello my friend! How are you doing today? Beautifully, I hope!”
On the brink of tears, you tell him about your predicament. Phil listens to you, smiling, and replies:
“Yeah, that’s really bad. How about you tell me a joke to cheer me up?”
You look at him, shocked at what he just said, unable to articulate a word.
“I’m so happy, it’s incredible!” he continues on. “I really feel like dancing right now! Why don’t you sing me a song?”
“Phil,” you whisper “did you hear what I just told you?”
“I sure did! But you ain’t getting any more cancerous and you are unlikely to feel much better if I try to console you! You may feel somewhat better, but I’ve just taken an experimental joy pill, and if I heard you sing or tell a joke right now, I would be ten times happier! You clearly have a moral obligation to entertain me!”
“I have cancer. Do you even hear yourself?”
“Yes I do! And I find it incredibly funny, this situation is so absurd, it’s like we were characters in some kind of philosophical story!”
He starts laughing uncontrollably while you walk away, incensed by what he just said.
If you think that Phil acted wrongly, you already have the intuition that alleviating suffering should take precedence over increasing happiness. Phil is already happy, he doesn’t need help. Most people will agree that it is incredibly callous of him to tell his dying, distressed friend, that he should make him even more happy by performing silly acts for him.
And yet this is what Classical Utilitarianism entails, especially in aggregate. If someone, or a population, is sufficiently happy or derives sufficient happiness from others’ sacrifices, these other people have a moral obligation to make them even happier at a cost to themselves, even if they are in dire need of help. In this sense, Classical Utilitarianism is a scapegoat morality.
This kind of reasoning appears a lot in “classical longtermism”: for instance, the idea that all the suffering in the world today is a rounding error compared to the “glorious future” that awaits us. However, such a mentality will almost certainly lead us down the wrong path and maintain unnecessary (and possibly extreme) suffering along the way. It is also possible that it leads to an even worse scenario: our distant descendants could become like Phil: callous egoists who just laugh in the face of suffering because they are too self-centered. See David Pearce (2017) for a discussion of the risks associated with achieving Paradise for a subset of the population that decides to “turn inwards” before they can help others.
Intuition pump #2: De Sade Von Masoch.
You are still walking the streets, trying to calm down after your infuriating talk with Phil, when you meet De Sade Von Masoch, your neighborhood’s sadomasochistic sociopath. He smiles at you, the sun reflecting brightly on his stainless steel teeth.
“Well well well. What have we here? You look very depressed today, my friend.”
“Oh no,” you think. De Sade is a sadist. Not only will he delight in your suffering, he will actively try to increase it. And if you fight back (not that you can put up much of a fight given your health condition), he will just enjoy his own pain, because he is also a masochist!
De Sade starts taunting you, salivating at the idea that this will make you cry. You already feel the tears rising. You wish you were somewhere else. He starts cracking his knuckles, preparing to punch you in the face.
You hear someone shout: “Freeze!”
De Sade’s eyes suddenly stop glowing. They slowly turn red while he looks around and sees that the police is here.
“We’ve been searching for you, De Sade Von Masoch! You are going to the slammer!”
“Never!” De Sade screams. “I spent ten years in there! I will die rather than going in again!”
The cops then spend several minutes struggling to restrain him.
“No! Not the slammer! The boredom is unbearable, it makes me nauseated and depressed! I’ll be good this time, I promise!”
“Too late! If you can’t do the time…”
You watch them drive away, while De Sade is wailing like a wounded animal in the back of the car.
Most sadists do not want their own suffering to increase and will use the same arguments as non-sadists to try to convince people to not hurt them. Masochists only seek pain because it makes them feel good otherwise, so it’s a cost-benefit analysis for them. Suffering is when you can’t desire to experience (or keep experiencing) the pain because there is no possible counterbalancing benefit to it. The character in this story is experiencing two of the reasons why even self-interested people should seriously consider becoming Negative Utilitarians: he meets a force that is more powerful than him, and he is about to have an experience that will make him actually suffer.
This story doesn’t adequately capture the idea that some suffering cannot be offset, mainly because extreme suffering is often beyond words and is probably of a different nature than ordinary pain. For instance, De Sade Von Masoch would also suffer, regardless of his masochistic tendencies, if he was experiencing a cluster headache instead of the thrill of a fight or the pleasure of being whipped during BDSM roleplay.
The character would be much better off if he was neither a sadist nor a masochist, and if the other agents weren’t either (arguably, the cops in the story also have some sadistic tendencies, since they have no empathy for his plight). A state where agents constantly struggle for supremacy in order to subject others to their whims is both unstable and detrimental to every agent.
On the contrary, a world with no suffering at all (and no desire to cause suffering) would enable everyone to enjoy almost anything that they want at the “objective reality” level, without incurring any unacceptable costs to others. If we add in some safeguards such as “respecting agency” and allow for simulations to exist, we get an optimum.
In other words: it is better for the agents involved in this story to change their own preferences, because it would ensure that their new preferences would be satisfied much more reliably. The ethical system that offers the surest path to preference satisfaction (both ensuring no downside and allowing for the existence of a wide variety of preferences) is Negative Utilitarianism. We will get back to this in Intuition pump #5.
Intuition pump #3: Optimia, The Perfect City.
Optimandias is the all-powerful, all-benevolent, immortal ruler of Optimia, the Perfect City, where everyone is living the best possible life. His subjects love him, there is perfect sanitation, perfect healthcare, perfect childcare, perfect holidays, the food is perfect, the weather is perfect thanks to geoengineering, in short, it is truly the most perfect city, in the sense that it is maximally good on every possible metric.
However, Optimandias is also a restless optimizer, constantly obsessing about how he could make things even better, and he believes Total Utilitarianism is the correct morality. So he starts thinking: “surely, if I add more people, they will also be happy, and having more happy people is good. Sure, they will have to live in slightly smaller houses due to physical limitations, maybe they would have to pay a little more in taxes, but it wouldn’t impose any costs on the others and there would be more goodness in total.”
So he starts aggressively pursuing a pro-natalist policy. In a few generations, he gets what he wanted: the city is now twice as big, with one part of the population living their best lives, and another living lives that are slightly less good, but still very good. He contemplates his work, and he is very happy about it.
But then he starts thinking “surely, if I added even more people, they would also have very positive lives. Well, maybe not as good as the first ones and second ones, I would have to give them slighly worse healthcare and smaller houses and less tasty food, but it would still be a good thing”. And lo and behold, after a few generations, the policies that he implements lead to a population that is three times as big as the first one, still very happy, with more happiness in total.
But then he starts thinking…
Over the centuries, the city of Optimia reaches larger and larger populations, each one living in a slightly worse neighborhood than the former, until it gets to the last of the last, a population of people with lives barely worth living. These people live in slums, they only eat scrapes and only drink muddy water, they die young, and they have no healthcare nor comfort to speak of. But they still have some moments of joy that make their lives barely positive, they cling to life because it is still better than nothing.
Upon contemplating his final work, Optimandias can’t help but think that something went horribly wrong along the way. On the gates of the last neighborhood, the most recent addition to his great city, he carves an inscription, maybe as a warning, maybe as a cry for help:
“My name is Optimandias, The Kindest King:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Beyond the gates, stretching endlessly, a festering mass of misery.
This story is about the mere addition paradox, also known as the Repugnant Conclusion: starting from any given population with positive welfare, you can make the world better by adding more people with slightly worse, still positive welfare. Derek Parfit spent most of his later years trying to find a moral theory that avoids this conclusion. He failed because he was still using a Utilitarian framework.
Negative Utilitarianism does not have this issue by design. The question of adding more people is not a moral question, the only moral question is “will they suffer?” If the answer is “yes”, then the answer is automatically “so don’t do it”.
This provides a safeguard against welfare levels falling below a certain threshold. Moreover, it allows for democratic deliberation: since there is no single “best world”, once suffering is solved, agents with pluralistic values can freely debate and decide what the best decision would be, again as long as it doesn’t lead to suffering.
Note that this does not imply antinatalism. See the next intuition pump for an argument against anti-natalism from a Negative Utilitarian perspective.
Intuition Pump #4: The Sisyphean Plight Of Planet Depressia.
On planet Depressia, an advanced species of aliens has evolved to have extremely high intelligence and extremely low hedonic set points. They are “sad geniuses”, able to solve complex problems, but permanently malcontent. They are hypersensitive to pain, light, noise, are prone to despair, anxiety, and depression, and overall lead what a Utilitarian would call net negative lives. These Depressians are also unable to conceive of a better future (a common feature of depression), and are therefore stuck in a permantently bearish prediction mode. Due to this, once they develop the technology, they decide to collectively sterilize themselves and end their species. Because they want to avoid the reemergence of suffering, they also develop a sterilization method that ensures that all the animals and plants on their planet become sterile too. They disappear from the Universe, leaving only a barren, deserted planet behind them.
After a few millenia, a combination of meteorites, solar radiation, and random chemical processes leads to the reapparition of protolife on Depressia. After a few more millenia, complex ecosystems have reemerged, with the usual orders: plants, herbivores, predators, and parasites. A species of crabs has started to develop a neocortex and rudimentary tool use. They are extremely fearful, extremely pain sensitive creatures, but selection pressures are leading them to develop higher and higher intelligence…
This story shows Negative Utilitarianism is incompatible with antinatalism. Getting rid of suffering requires active prevention. Antinatalism offers no guarantee that suffering will not just reemerge in one form or another due to random physico-chemical events and natural selection. In fact, because natural selection is an amoral process where the only thing that matters is that individuals survive long enough to reproduce, and because pain is a useful mechanism to prevent organisms from dying before they are able to do so, antinatalism will almost certainly lead to the resurgence of suffering over the long term.
For these reasons, Negative Utilitarianism does not recommend antinatalism as a viable strategy to eliminate suffering, and instead prescribes the recalibration of the hedonic scale so that organisms become motivated by gradients of well-being: “invincible happiness”, to quote David Pearce.
Intuition pump #5: The Hedonium Catastrophe.
Suppose a species of aliens discovers Hedonium, a state of matter that is only capable of experiencing a single conscious state: bliss. Pure, unadulterated bliss, and nothing else, like a perpetual orgasm of cosmic proportions. No art, no love, no science, no language, no thought. Not even eyes, sound or taste. Just bliss. The aliens then decide that they have a moral obligation to tile the Universe with this new state of matter. They send self-replicating probes before turning themselves and their planet into Hedonium too. After a few millenia, everything else is lost. The Universe is just a gigantic, barely conscious mass of orgasmic flesh.
If you hold any other value than pain and pleasure, you probably feel like something was lost along the way. No knowledge? No love? No virtue? Not even variety in experience? It probably feels like a terribly impoverished world to you, even though the Utilitarian might object: “but think about the orgasms!”
Will MacAskill recently published an article where he outlines an alternative view aimed at solving this issue (among others). However, he admits that his solution might have unpalatable implications in the case of very negative worlds. This is expected, since it still allows for pleasure (worse: non-hedonic values) to compensate for pain and suffering. This should never be allowed in any ethical system.
Negative Utilitarianism solves this issue by default, and has the additional advantage of not allowing for suffering to exist. In NU ethics, there is no moral obligation to keep increasing happiness indefinitely once suffering is abolished. You are free to pursue any of the other things you value, including non-hedonistic ones. If you value art, go for it. If you value knowledge, go for it. And of course, if you value orgasms… you get the idea.
Intuition pump #6: What’s Your Bet?
Martin Gal is the ruler of Casinearth, the Casino planet. The citizen of Casinearth are all very rich and happy. Unfortunately, they are also all addicted to gambling, with their ruler being no exception. Most of their economy is based on complex bets, their epistemology is based on Bayesianism, and they have prediction markets for their prediction markets.
Thanks to all the data that he has access to through the hundreds of billions of bets that they make daily, Martin Gal has been able to construct the equivalent of a Global Utility Function that describes the preferences of the population in aggregate. He tasks the most brilliant minds of his world with finding a way to maximize that function.
After years of research, the scientists come back with a technology that can increase the value of the function by a factor of a billion, but that only has a one in a million chance of success. If it fails, everyone on the planet dies. Martin Gal quickly looks at the numbers, approves the deployment, and everyone dies.
This story illustrates one of the problems with expected utility, which is that you can expect just about anything of just about any probability. This allows you to expect events with vanishingly small probabilities but infinitely large payoffs, on which you can then bet because the expected result just makes sense on paper.
This is, again, one of the problems with longtermism, although longtermists are trying to safeguard against it by stipulating some constraints (mostly path-dependency, it seems). Like the others, this problem is also solved by default by Negative Utilitarianism, because it is a satisficer morality, not a maximizer morality. Had Martin Gal been a Negative Utilitarian, he would have felt no moral obligation to maximize expected Utility at all costs, and thus wouldn’t have risked the lives of the citizen of Casinearth on a bet with such vanishingly small odds. In this sense, Negative Utilitarianism is less mortiferous than Classical Utilitarianism.
Intuition pump #7: The Surgery.
Mr. Smith and his wife have a young son that they love very much. As their son grows up, they become ever more proud of him: brilliant student, helpful at home, always respectful, kind with everyone, in short: the perfect son. The two parents feel like they are in Heaven, and thank the Universe every day for having given them such a wonderful, fulfilling life.
One day, their son wakes up screaming. This is the first time something like this happens. The two parents run into his room and find him crumpled in his bed, crying in distress, visibly in extreme pain. They try to question him about what is happening to him, but he cannot answer, he just keeps on screaming and screaming. They call an ambulance.
After running a series of tests, the doctors realize that the young man has a rare disease that has altered his brain in such a way that he is unable to experience anything but extreme pain. The only way for them to cure him is to perform a complex brain surgery and transplant new neurons from a compatible donor, like a parent. However, the donor will no longer be able to experience any pleasure. He will not be in pain, he will not be suffering, but he will not be feeling any joy either. The doctors can make it so that the donor won’t miss having felt happy in the past, so there will be no psychological pain associated with the loss of the ability to feel joy either.
As he watches his heavily sedated son grimace in his sleep, as if he were still feeling the pain in his deepest nightmares, Mr. Smith says: “I’ll be the donor. Schedule the surgery as soon as possible.”
Some people claim that Negative Utilitarianism is just too demanding. Since suffering is the only thing that matters morally, it seems to imply that you should sacrifice any arbitrarily large share of your own well-being in order to prevent any vanishingly small amount of pain. However, this is not what most Negative Utilitarians are actually arguing for. Most of them are arguing for two things:
first, the abolition of suffering, thus eliminating the need for hedonic tradeoffs in the first place.
Second, that there is a threshold of suffering that cannot be offset by any amount of corresponding well-being, ever. If someone is suffering beyond that threshold, then yes, we have a moral obligation to help them at almost any cost.
However, the second argument is actually much more acceptable than what Classical Utilitarianism prescribes. Remember the first intuition pump, when Phil, your happy friend, tells you that you have a moral obligation to make him even happier than he already is, even though you are suffering horribly. Classical Utilitarianism entails that, no matter how good they have it, and no matter how bad you have it, you still have a moral obligation to make others happy if their happiness is “greater” than your suffering. How absurd does this sound to you ? Does anyone really think, intuitively, that Mr. Smith should have asked the doctors if they could simply make him, or someone else, experience great joy at the idea that his son was suffering horribly, that he had a moral obligation to do so?
Intuition pump #8: A Benevolent Paradise.
The Benevolentes are a species of superintelligent aliens who have managed to take control of their own evolution, thus becoming post-Darwininan. They have decided to pursue a firmly Negative Utilitarian ethics, guided by the following principles:
completely eliminate suffering except maybe as a vaccine, to be administered once in their life so as to remind them what they must guard against
become superempathetic in order to ensure that they have no desire to make others suffer, and actively maintain this disposition, thus limiting the risk for suffering to reemerge through callousness or selfishness
help every sentient being in existence to get rid of suffering (an entailment of the second principle)
once this is achieved, give maximum freedom to every sentient being
As a result, their planet has become a Paradise. The beings who live there are motivated by gradients of well-being, they can experience levels of bliss that are inconceivable to us, but they are not stunted, they are not blissed out. Because they don’t think that ensuring bliss is itself a moral obligation, they have developed a diverse society, filled with all sorts of other values. Their scientists are orders of magnitude bolder and more creative thanks to their hyperthymia, their art is unfathomably more beautiful, their thoughts are incomprehensibly more complex than what we know on Earth. They are free in a sense that we can only dimly imagine, because their freedom means being truly free of consequence, both for them and for others, an invincible freedom that enables them to build and create with abandon.
The Benevolentes still value things like agency, knowledge, and have complex webs of contractualizations underpinning their society, they have deliberative institutions to decide what is the best course of action, but these deliberations are not endowed with any moral gravity, they are as light as childplay. There is no incentive for a Benevolente to take advantage of others, because they don’t know anything like loss aversion, they have no fear of falling into poverty and suffer if they fail to accumulate resources, and most importantly, as stipulated above, they are superempathetic, which allows them to experience joy in the joy of others.
As such, the concept of a tradeoff is alien to the mind of a Benevolente. Never would any of them think something like “creating lives that experience a small amount of suffering would make the world better”, or “torturing someone to prevent a large number of people from experiencing the inconvenience of a dust-speck if morally fine” because their superempathy would prevent them from doing so: all of them would be ready to act in order to prevent the maximum sufferer from suffering. Their planet never knows the fate of Optimia: the possibility of the Repugnant Conclusion is closed off. Because happiness and the absence of suffering are maintained through an active process of bliss engineering, the Benevolentes never think about antinatalism either. They never risk taking even one step on the path that the Depressians took (see intuition pump #4). Their planet enjoys a fluctuating, multidimensional tapestry of values woven with threads of blissful creativity. As such, it avoids the pitfall of Hedonium, and retains its depth.
The Benevolentes then decide to send probes to spead this wonderful state of being to other planets. After a few millenia, their observable Universe is filled with millions of civilizations, each one a unique gem of organic, complex beauty.
The Benevolentes are derived from David Pearce’s proposal in “Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?”. Pearce argues that a civilization built on superempathy, superintelligence, and superhappiness is possible, and presents several paths that he thinks will lead to its advent. Interestingly, the paths that he presents are the result of already existing human values, mixed with the technologies that Humanity is already developing. These values, expanded to their full potential, seem to entail a future civilization close to that of the Benevolentes.
The Benevolentes are what a Negative Utilitarian ethics will lead to. The other stories are what a Classical Utilitarian ethics might lead to. Classical Utilitarians try to solve their theory’s paradoxes by proposing safeguards, thresholds, and by using heuristics such as two-level Utilitarianism. And of course, some just bite the bullet and claim that it’s totally OK to torture someone in exchange of trivial benefits to a sufficient number of people, or to derive sadistic pleasure from the pain of others. The biggest advantage of Negative Utilitarianism is that it doesn’t necessitate any of this. You don’t need safeguards because the safeguards are already built in, entailed both by what the theory stipulates and by what its practical application necessitates.
Conclusion
In this article, I have outlined several reasons why Negative Utilitarianism is a much better candidate than Classical Utilitarianism to serve as the basis of a universal consequentialist morality, and tried to show that it is also much more intuitive. Contrary to what many people think, the view does not entail the boogeyman consequences that are often ascribed to it. The one that does is actually the “positive” version!
I admit I was very skeptical myself at the beginning. “What? How can a view that only focuses on the bad stuff possibly be correct?” And yet, the more I engaged with the literature, the more it appeared to me that this theory had none of the “negative” features that its ill-chosen name seemed to imply.
If you want to engage further with the topic, I highly recommend you read “Suffering-Focused Ethics, Defense and Implications” by Magnus Vinding and “Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?” by David Pearce. The latter book also contains a lot of practical recommendations, which show that it is not only possible to hardwire happiness into the very structure of the Universe, without sacrificing freedom and diversity, but that it will also soon become achievable.
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Amazing work, seriously. I think NU is very much under appreciated!
½ - continued in the replies
Many thanks for writing this fine work, and on a subject closely in tune with one of the most important problems now facing the human species. I am not a utilitarian, although it is a position that I admire. I am also a fan of (David Pearce's) biohappiness proposal,
and I consider it one of the greatest idea so far made in history. I consider contributions to it worthy, both out of a compassion for the numerous sentient beings undergoing woes, and also a contributor to the resolution of our (current) human-historical conundrum, of the issue of progress- namely, that any progress involved the creation of more destitution and harm than ever seen in the previous hundreds of thousands of years, however great the advance for some group. Here, I present various remarks, and critiques, both from a position of support, and opposition, on the specific examples, their principles, the overall worldview, and my own guiding thoughts.
I should note that I wrote this in reverse order, so that the following "Pump #X" section was done first, then the introduction, and then this, and the next sentence: before writing this, I did not check the comment section, so I did not know that you do not consider yourself a utilitarian, and the object to more narrowly compare this with classical utilitarianism; do not consider it personal, if not applicable.
Pump #1
I assume you meant to say, that there is only one such pill in existence. Otherwise, it seems quite strange to not give the pill to the friend, too, or at least save it for later. But even so
This is trying to cause us to analogize the case, as if it is someone deriving greater pleasure from imposing a lesser suffering. However, if we concentrate on the fact that this is not explicit, it becomes much less 'incredibly callous'. For example, acting in a jovial manner can help ease other's burdens. We know from experience that people can also cheer themselves up from telling a joke. Likewise, if we concentrate on the fact, that alleviating other's suffering is also often motivated by a feeling of pleasure, and since this is arguing for decreasing suffering, surely we do not want to prima facie discard this as something bad. Finally, we should concentrate that, contrary to this case, it is not some necessary connection that being happier makes us feel more manic, or unable to recognize others' emotions. It seems, as a general rule, easier to help reduce suffering, if one is pleased, than if one is suffering- for most people, the automatic instincts kick in and make them focus only on themselves.
So, I would say that this pump does not motivate the claim that "If someone, or a population, is sufficiently happy or derives sufficient happiness from others’ sacrifices, these other people have a moral obligation to make them even happier at a cost to themselves". None of that is obviously indicated. It might be the case, and is also common sense for many people which do not have a codependent personality, that we shouldn't be as effortful into helping already got-it-all callous egoists, but it is more difficult to grant the more narrow claim attempted in this text. However, we also have to be mindful that this is trying to analogize different personalities or mental types. This is a caricature on some cluster B personality disorder or bipolar behavior, right? Well, the problem is that people sometimes are still very different, in this sense too, under negative utilitarianism. We could also think of similar sounding intuition pumps, but just choose an example of a cluster C personality or major depressive disorder behavior.
It is also not clear whether it is a benefit, from even a long-term perspective, to have no people who are a little callous towards ordinary pain. Now, here I do not mean the cancer, but rather the sadness at the news, and the other's behavior. Of course, that can still be quite uncomfortable, and in the future hopefully also eliminated, but as long as we're doing formulaic comparisons of the intensity of the pain, it shall remain relevant; even if not with pain, then let's say, lesser or greater feeling of pleasure. So this should not obviously persuade the classic hedonistic utilitarian (henceforth CHU).
Pump #2
I actually broadly agree with this, although with extra emphasis on long-tailed, extreme pain. However, the explanation is a little too remotely related to the case, I'm afraid. Be that as it may, it is not so simple to endorse utilitarianism here always, rather than various kinds of interacting consequentialisms. In fact, you already mention one such problem- if the police were all very empathetic, they might not be able to handle seriously violent offenders. More generally, it assumes that sadist/masochist interactions are comparable to "agents constantly struggle for supremacy in order to subject others to their whims". Yet, this is often not the case.
Some examples of this are genocide, or modern factory farming. I do not mean to say they are endorsed by CHU; it should certainly be a very plausible reason to reject it, if this was the matter of fact. Rather, I mean to say that these 'gaps' do exist, and I think they, in one way and generically speaking now, indicate the overcoming of different agents. "Mere" settlements are not enough, and these need to be binding forces to have any impact- no wonder that the creator of utilitarianism was a jurist, and primarily applied it to the realm of law. However, I think it goes deeper. Any true, not even just ethical, but action, requires a self-overcoming of more limited ideas of what the self or the agent are. We can debate how, in which cases, etc, but this is my idea on the connection between 'power' and 'progress'. So it applies to utilitarianism, just as any other ethical system. Now, as a woolly trans/posthumanist, for hedonic valence, I do think it probably implies a world regulator and network of it along with emotions, for different needs managed and carried by a mix of machines, biology, etc - on this, also quite inspired by David Pearce - but I digress, although to note this is where I diverge from utilitarianism as a whole, and think of something else as more fundamental.
Pump #3
Let's grant, for now, that it does not endorse anti-natalism, and even, that your described state would be net barely positive. Strictly following negative utilitarianism might still lead to unideal conclusions in the real world, from the perspective of economic development. Now, we probably do not want to say, Mao was a swell guy, even if he did help out some on that end. However, it seems that, almost without exception, the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society allowed massively more suffering, only to then massively improve many living standards later on- although, sad to say, there are some places in which we're still not sustainably on the upshot side, and in the case of animal agriculture, even the light at the end of the tunnel is not visible. So, it might be that NU commits us against industrialization-equivalent transitions; yet, one might argue, such a transition was needed, because, it might allow for the eventual possibility of the very abolitionist project.
Pump #4
If you would agree that NU does not imply anything I've outlined in the response to pump #3, then it also becomes less clear how this is a defeater for CHU. In my opinion, weighing suffering as significant implies a conditional antinatalism anyway, at a minimum or otherwise- under this broad tent, as opposed to pronatalism, which says that, as a rule, reproduction is morally good or neutral; and there are at least, too many exceptions in my view, for this to be a rule.