Reflections (without having read it) on:
Singer, Peter (2017) (ed.) Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity Oxford.
“Mattering” is neither a logical nor a scientific matter. In a “zombie” universe — one that is like ours, but in which living organisms do not feel — nothing would matter. What happens to zombies does not matter. (Why would it matter? to whom? to what?)
So it is because organisms feel that things matter in the universe. Let’s simplify what they feel: pleasure and pain.
Suppose there could be a one-sided “pleasure universe”: Organisms do feel, but they only feel pleasure, nothing negative. There can be more pleasure and less pleasure, but feeling less pleasure would not feel “worse.”
In a pleasure-only universe, nothing would matter either. Less versus more pleasure would not matter. It would just be a fact, the way everything in the zombie universe is just a fact, and the way everything that has no effect (now or in future) on feeling organisms in our actual universe is just a fact.
It follows that it is only pain that matters, and the only ethical principle is to minimize pain.
But a complication of “negative utilitarianism” is conflict of interest —in things that matter, hence pain: A benign despot could do the utilitarian calculus and decide mechanically what must live and die in order to minimize overall pain. But individual (sentient) organisms in our world (and perhaps any viable world) — and especially social, altricial mammals — are designed so that their own needs, and the needs of those close to them, usually matter more to them than the overall utilitarian calculus. (There are exceptions.)
Ethics is about that conflict of interest in matters that matter to feeling organisms. A world with only one feeling organism would be a simpler matter.
Harnad, Stevan (2016) My orgasms cannot be traded off against others’ agony. Animal Sentience 7(18)