On some basic level, we can all agree that some things are good. Eating when you’re hungry is good. Not having tooth ache is good. Being able to walk, jump and scratch your back is good. Some other examples:

  • not being cold or too hot
  • not wanting to go to a toilet
  • lying down when you’re tired
  • not being annoyed by uncomfortable clothing or fleas

[But: eating when hungry feels good, but taking cocaine also feels good. But it’s not good for you long-term, because you have to increase the dose, and quite quickly the side-effects start to outweigh the pleasure. But if we had a drug that gave us a lot of pleasure yet was self-limiting (e.g., taking it more often than once every 3 months lead to very bad experience), we would probably see it as good.]

Since we’ve determined that being healthy is a good thing, we can reasonably say that smoking is a bad thing. Sure, there might be instances when smoking is good (it calms your nerves and you don’t jump off a bridge), but these moments are exceedingly rare, and smoking is bad in 99.99% of the time. I believe pretty much all humans would like for smoking to have never existed.

[I’m sure there are people who love cigarettes and don’t want them to ever go away. These people either don’t know what smoking does to them or are invested in smoking - it’s part of their identity. In the same way there are people who’s identity is built around phisycal sufferring. All these people will have to be bracketed for now.]

So far, this has all been about the individual. But another uncontroversially good thing is having some sort of positive connection to other people. Having a parent you can talk to is good. So is having friends. Being able to interact with friendly humans at least every several of days is generally a thing everybody wants.

In the same way as with smoking, we can say that chronic stress is bad. Occasional stress keeps you on your toes; chronic stress kills you. And most of the time it’s caused by other humans around you. Your boss yelling at you at random. Neighbours playing loud music when you’re trying to sleep. Constant worrying about not being able to afford healthcare, constant worrying about price of food, or about losing your job. These are all results of our social structures.

Thus we can say that the current social structures cause us a lot of chronic stress. They have this bad aspect to it. Therefore it should be generally desirable to change our social structures somehow so as to reduce the generated chronic stress. Maybe it’s impossible to do that without major disruption. Then it will be a trade-off, and any talk of general desirability will have to be stopped. But at least a search for such social structures should be an uncontraversially good idea.