Most ethical discussions orbit around balancing happiness and suffering, maximizing utility, trading one person’s discomfort for a greater good somewhere else. That entire framing always felt alien to me. I don’t see value as something to be summed across individuals. I see it more like topology: certain states of the universe should be treated as forbidden regions, lexical boundaries that no amount of flourishing elsewhere should be allowed to cross.
A Single Mind in Hell Outweighs an Infinity of Bliss
The value asymmetry I hold is simple:
One conscious being trapped in unending suffering has moral weight exceeding any number of beings experiencing joy.
Not equal, not comparable, but lexically dominant. There is no exchange rate between infinite bliss and a single mind in hell. The existence of the hell-state contaminates the entire moral manifold. Once you allow even one such state to persist, you’ve broken the boundary condition of what a morally permissible universe looks like.
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