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This sounds just like the debate between deontology vs consequentialism in ethics. For people who prefer the former, then it doesn't matter what consequences following ethical rules results in; even if it causes maximal suffering for everyone in every situation all the time, with no positive side-effects, as long as the ethics were followed properly, that is better than if the ethics weren't followed properly and resulted in prosperity and less suffering, with no negative side-effects. For people who prefer the latter, then the truthiness of some set of ethics is contingent upon the consequences that follow from people following those ethics and, as such, ethics that lead to maximal suffering for everyone all the time with no positive side-effects is just bad ethics that ought to be scrapped.
This has nothing to do with whether some set of ethics would require some sort of sacrifice sometimes, which is orthogonal to the issue. The original comment seems to be not about some sort of sacrifice for the sake of ethics, but rather a set of ethics that, when followed, just results in negative consequences and hence, from a certain point of view, is just bad ethics.
I think you are confusing consequentialism with utilitarianism. Consequentialism judges ends rather than means, but it does not require 'gross hedonic product' to be the only criterion by which to compare outcomes. We might say, for example, that as one of many discrete terminal values, we want the number of starving children in the world to be 0. A policy designed to achieve this end by any means necessary, up to and including the end of Western civilization as we know it, would still be a policy driven by consequentualism (i.e. a policy that is judged on outcomes, rather than the virtuousness of the means used to achieve them).
I'm not sure where you're getting that in my comment, as I mentioned nothing about gross hedonic product, which is certainly not an antonym of "suffering" or synonym of "positive... effects" which are the terms I used.
The very introduction of "suffering" seems to me to evidence a degree of confusion between consequentialism and utilitarianism; consequentialism needn't have anything to do with pleasure, suffering, or whatever else. A paperclip maximizer is a consequentialist, so long as it believes that it should take whatever actions maximize paperclip amount in the long term (up to and including destroying paperclips while its human handlers are watching, so as to demonstrate its supposed human-friendliness), rather than only engage in actions with directly create paperclips. There is no contradiction between being a consequentialist, and believing that the ethical course of action requires us to destroy civilization and cause untold suffering in the process; it all depends what consequences you're looking at.
I think you just have a misread of what is meant by "suffering," considering you seem to pair it with "pleasure" as if they're particularly related. "Suffering" isn't an antonym to "pleasure," not is it a synonym to "pain." "Suffering" just means "getting a less desirable consequence than some alternative." It's intrinsically tied to consequentialism, because getting a consequence one dislikes is intrinsically suffering, and consequentialism has to do with determining ethics based on the consequences that they produce.
A paperclip maximizer, to whatever extent it can "believe" things or experience qualia or whatever, is "suffering" if it's not maximizing paperclips, definitionally.
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