1. God, courage, and the design vs response distinction

You say:

“It would be reasonable for a benevolent God to value courage, fortitude, and adventure. Since pain and danger are necessary if these virtues are to exist God might have created a world in which there are pain and danger.”

This sounds plausible — but it relies on a quiet equivocation that keeps doing the work.

There are two very different claims:

1. Courage requires the possibility of danger and loss.
2. Courage requires the existence of large-scale, involuntary, preventable suffering.

(1) is true.
(2) does not follow.

A world can contain:

risk,
uncertainty,
vulnerability,
moral difficulty,
genuine stakes,

without containing:

childhood cancer,
torture in the name of religion or ideology,
mass predation engineered into biology,
the genocide of one tribe by another,
natural disasters killing millions,
the mass extinction of 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth,
extreme suffering and slaughter imposed on those who didn't consent, e.g. factory farm animals.

Courage is a response virtue, not a design justification.

A benevolent designer could value courage without embedding vast quantities of non-consensual suffering into the fabric of reality. Saying “God might have done it this way” is not an explanation — it’s a permission slip.

And crucially:
You don’t need this move at all, because you’ve already said you’re not religious.

2. The “benevolent God” hypothesis adds nothing explanatory

Notice what invoking God does not do here:

It doesn’t tell us how much suffering is necessary.
It doesn’t tell us which beings must suffer.
It doesn’t explain why suffering is distributed so arbitrarily and unevenly.
It doesn’t explain why courage in one being requires agony in another.

“All this suffering exists because courage is valuable” is not an explanation — it is post hoc aestheticization.

If someone said:

“Perhaps a benevolent God values music, so He created tinnitus,”

we would immediately see the non sequitur.

Same structure. Same flaw.

3. Science, measurement, and the Whitman mistake

You write:

“Surely a ‘scientific worldview’ sees the world in measurable terms.”

No.
It sees some aspects of the world in measurable terms — when measurement is the right tool.

This is the core misunderstanding that keeps resurfacing.

A scientific worldview says:

The moisture content of air is measurable.
The mystical feeling Whitman describes is real as experience. The neural activity underlying our experiences can be observed in real time using fMRI and PET scanners. However, we don't have the capacity to experience what it is like to be another sentient being e.g. you don't know what it is like to be me, and I don't know what it is like to be you, or a bat, or a whale, or a chicken, etc.

What it rejects is this leap:

“Because an experience is meaningful, it can overrule facts about the world.”

Whitman’s “mystical moist night-air” is not threatened by science unless one commits to scientism, which neither I nor any serious philosopher of science is defending.

Whitman is reacting to explanatory saturation, not to truth.

He leaves the lecture because wonder returned, not because the astronomer was wrong.

A scientific worldview allows both:

knowing what stars are,
feeling the wonder of looking at stars.

It only insists that we not confuse the two.

4. “Mystical” does not mean “non-natural”

This is another quiet slide.

“Mystical” in Whitman means:

emotionally resonant,
subjectively expansive,
phenomenologically rich.

It does not mean:

supernatural,
metaphysically spooky,
epistemically privileged.

A scientific worldview has no problem whatsoever with:

awe,
wonder,
altered states,
depth experiences.

It only denies that these experiences:

reveal hidden truths about cosmic purpose,
justify suffering,
or license metaphysical conclusions.

5. Where we actually differ

You are not arguing that suffering is good.
You are arguing that a world containing suffering might be justified by the virtues it makes possible.

I am arguing something narrower and firmer:

Even if suffering exists, and even if courage arises in response to it, suffering itself does not gain moral standing from that fact.

Courage is admirable.
Suffering is tragic.
The first does not sanctify the second.

And once that distinction is kept clear, the pressure to defend suffering — cosmically, theologically, or poetically — disappears.

Hope you have safe travels.

Even if suffering exists, and even if courage arises in response to it, suffering itself does not gain moral standing from that fact.

Courage is admirable.
Suffering is tragic.
The first does not sanctify the second.

And once that distinction is kept clear, the pressure to defend suffering — cosmically, theologically, or poetically — disappears. — Truth Seeker

:100: :fire:

Every theodicy only rationalizes evil / suffering (e.g. "teleological suspension of the ethical").

Thank you very much.

I am arguing something narrower and firmer:

Even if suffering exists, and even if courage arises in response to it, suffering itself does not gain moral standing from that fact.

Courage is admirable.
Suffering is tragic.
The first does not sanctify the second. — Truth Seeker

I'll go along with this. Sometimes, though, there are "necessary evils". If we value courage or adventure, suffering is a necessary evil, although, of course, it's reasonable to argue the positive and negative values case by case.

Mystical: having a spiritual symbolic or allegorical significance that transcends human understanding. — dictionary

I assume that's what Whitman is referring to. The stars are both a scientific fact, and a presence that engenders feelings of awe, in part because of their spiritual significance (i.e. cultural associations).

Thank you for your reply. Have you read "Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" by Richard Dawkins? If not, I recommend that you read it.

If we value courage or adventure, suffering is a necessary evil — Ecurb

What about those who don't want to be courageous or adventurous? Should terror, pain and death be forced on them? I think it is totally unethical to force sentient beings into situations where they suffer and die when they didn't ask to be in those situations, e.g. dying slowly in a famine, being tortured to death, being gang raped and beaten to death, being imprisoned and slaughtered in a factory farm, etc. Life imposes catastrophic costs on sentient beings without their consent. I didn't ask to be born as a human being. I wish I had never existed. Sadly, I can't kill myself without causing suffering to others. So, I am trapped in my constant suffering in a world full of suffering, injustice, and death. Life is fundamentally unethical.

What about those who don't want to be courageous or adventurous? — Truth Seeker

If courage is a virtue people can freely choose to eschew it, just as they can freely choose to avoid being kind, compassionate, law-abiding, and forgiving. Terror, pain, and death are forced on all of us. That's the human condition. Your position, at least, is finally becoming clear, although "injustice" does not properly describe the universal condition you detest.

Our disagreement: you despise the human condition, I don't. You think each birth is a tragedy, and, of course, you are right. But that tragedy is redeemed by the possibility of virtue: of courage, of fortitude, of kindness, and of love. The birth of a child -- tragic though it may be because of the human condition -- is also the occasion of love, the greatest of virtues. The Christian parable is reborn: every child is born to grant eternal life to his or her parents (through descent), and to save them from their sins (through love).

Our disagreement: you despise the human condition, I don't. You think each birth is a tragedy, and, of course, you are right. But that tragedy is redeemed by the possibility of virtue… — Ecurb

This misrepresents my position, so let me correct it plainly.

I do not despise the human condition.
I despise suffering, injustice, and death — wherever they occur, in all sentient beings, human and non-human alike. That's why I am a vegan. Vegans cause much less suffering, injustice, and death to sentient beings than non-vegans.

That distinction matters.

What I reject is not humanity, but the forced imposition of terror, pain, and death on beings who did not consent to any of it. That is not a uniquely human issue. It is a condition shared by animals, children, and every sentient organism dragged into existence without choice.

Calling this “the human condition” does important rhetorical work — it normalises what is, in fact, a universal moral catastrophe.

Terror, pain, and death are forced on all of us. That's the human condition.

Exactly — they are forced.
And it is precisely because they are forced that I object to them.

To describe this as merely “the human condition” does not explain or justify it; it only renames the problem. Injustice does not cease to be injustice because it is universal. If anything, universality deepens the moral urgency.

If a system guarantees that every sentient being will suffer and die, then the correct response is not reconciliation but moral protest.

That tragedy is redeemed by the possibility of virtue: of courage, fortitude, kindness, and love.

This is where we fundamentally diverge.

Virtues that require suffering in order to exist are not redemptive — they are adaptive responses to harm. Courage presupposes danger. Fortitude presupposes adversity. Compassion presupposes suffering.

I value kindness and love deeply — but I reject the claim that they justify the conditions that make them necessary.

If a child must be exposed to terror, pain and death so that courage may later emerge, then courage has been purchased at an unacceptable price.

The birth of a child — tragic though it may be — is also the occasion of love.

Yes, love emerges — and it does so despite the conditions imposed on that child, not because of them.

Loving someone who will inevitably suffer and die is not evidence that the system is good. It is evidence that humans — like other sentient beings — are capable of profound attachment even under tragic constraints.

Love does not retroactively justify a world structured around unavoidable harm.

So no — I do not despise the human condition.
I despise the fact that sentient beings are forced into existence, forced to endure suffering, and forced to die — and then told that the virtues developed in response somehow redeem the coercion itself.

My moral intuition is simple and consistent:

• If suffering were preventable, it should be prevented.
• If injustice were removable, it should be removed.
• If death were avoidable, it should be avoided.

If I could go back in time and prevent all suffering, injustice, and death, and make all living beings forever happy, I would do so without hesitation — not because life lacks value, but because life without imposed harm would be infinitely better.

That is not contempt for the human condition.
It is compassion extended to every sentient being, without exception.

A factual clarification on “eternal life through descent”

You write that “every child is born to grant eternal life to his or her parents (through descent).”
Taken literally, this is not biologically correct.

Having children does not make parents immortal — neither personally nor genetically.

A child inherits only half of each parent’s chromosomes. In the next generation, that contribution is halved again, and so on. After a small number of generations, any given ancestor’s genetic contribution is vanishingly small, statistically diluted, and often entirely absent due to recombination and lineage extinction.

So even on purely naturalistic terms, descent does not confer anything resembling eternal life. At most, it offers a partial, temporary, probabilistic genetic continuation, not persistence of the person, their consciousness, their experiences, or their identity.

If “eternal life” here is meant symbolically rather than biologically, then it should be acknowledged as metaphor — not presented as a literal redemption of mortality. Metaphor may offer meaning, but it does not undo death, nor does it negate the fact that each individual still suffers and dies as an individual.

In short:
• Parents die.
• Their children die.
• Genetic dilution continues.
• Nothing eternal is achieved through descent.

Whatever value love, memory, or legacy may have, they are not immortality, and they do not cancel the reality of mortality or the suffering and injustice that precede death.

You could argue that even though individual organisms die, species survive, but at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth are already extinct, and the remaining 0.1% are also at risk of extinction and will probably go extinct sooner or later.

A brief response to the Christian redemption framing

You invoke a Christian parable in which birth, suffering, and mortality are redeemed by love, descent, and salvation. I understand the existential comfort this narrative provides, and I don’t deny its emotional power. But comfort and moral justification are not the same thing.

From my perspective, redemption that occurs after imposed suffering does not morally redeem the imposition itself. A system does not become just because it later offers meaning, forgiveness, or eternal compensation to those it first exposes to terror, pain, and death without consent.

If a child must suffer in order for others to learn love, or must die in order for salvation to acquire meaning, then the moral problem has merely been reframed, not resolved.

Christianity interprets love as salvific — and I respect that internal coherence. But I reject the idea that love requires suffering as its precondition, or that suffering is morally licensed because it can later be redeemed. Love that emerges despite suffering is admirable; suffering that is justified because it produces love is not.

In short:
Redemption may console those already harmed.
It does not justify the harm itself.

My objection is not to love, meaning, or virtue — it is to a worldview that treats unavoidable suffering and death as acceptable entry fees for them.

You should remember that the Bible also provides eternal torture in hell for those predestined by the Biblical God to go there.

I do not despise the human condition.
I despise suffering, injustice, and death — Truth Seeker

Suffering and death are part of the human condition. You are contradicting yourself.

So no — I do not despise the human condition.
I despise the fact that sentient beings are forced into existence, forced to endure suffering, and forced to die — and then told that the virtues developed in response somehow redeem the coercion itself. — Truth Seeker

If you regret being born, why do you object to dying? That makes no sense. Once you are dead, all that suffering to which you object will end.

• If suffering were preventable, it should be prevented.
• If injustice were removable, it should be removed.
• If death were avoidable, it should be avoided. — Truth Seeker

However, suffering is not preventable, nor is death avoidable. This is not "unjust" by any reasonable definition of justice.

You write that “every child is born to grant eternal life to his or her parents (through descent).”
Taken literally, this is not biologically correct. — Truth Seeker

Good grief, Joe literal! The sun will burn out and every living thing will perish. Eventually. Eternity is metaphorical and relative.

You continue to tout your negative ethos. Life is horrible! Suffering is terrible! The human condition is pathetic! I disagree. For all we know, this may be (per Candide) "the best of all possible worlds." Indeed, it may be the only possible world. Why not make the best of it?

Suffering and death are part of the human condition. You are contradicting yourself. — Ecurb

No contradiction is present.

Suffering and death are parts of the human condition — they are not the whole of it.
Likewise, they are parts of the sentient condition more broadly.

What I reject is the slide from:

“Suffering and death are part of the condition.”
to
“Therefore, rejecting suffering and death means rejecting the entire condition.”

That inference does not follow.

Love, joy, curiosity, creativity, attachment, play, empathy, learning, and care are also part of the human and sentient condition. My objection is selective and principled: I oppose the harmful components, not the existence of sentient life itself.

Opposing disease does not mean despising biology.
Opposing injustice does not mean despising society.
Opposing suffering and death does not mean despising sentient existence.

If you regret being born, why do you object to dying? That makes no sense.

It makes sense once coercion and harm are kept in view. According to the Bible, death is not the end - it is the beginning of eternal torture in hell for those predestined by the Biblical God to be non-Christian.

I do not “regret being born” in the sense of wishing harm upon myself or others. I object to the non-consensual imposition of suffering, injustice and death on all sentient beings — including myself.

Death ends suffering by destroying the sufferer. That is not a solution; it is a termination. Wanting suffering to end is not the same as wanting the subject of experience to be annihilated. If the subject is terminated, the subject can't be happy.

To be clear:
• I want suffering to end without ending the ones who suffer.
• I want life without coercive suffering, injustice and death.

Those are morally coherent positions.

However, suffering is not preventable, nor is death avoidable.

This confuses current limits with moral ideals.

That something is not yet fully preventable does not mean it is not partially preventable, nor does it absolve us of responsibility to reduce it wherever possible.

By this reasoning, medicine, public health, law, and disaster prevention would all be meaningless.

As a vegan Compassionist, I act on this principle consistently:
I avoid causing unnecessary suffering to sentient beings, and I work to save and improve lives — human and non-human alike. Unlike non-vegans, I do not treat avoidable harm as morally acceptable merely because it is common.

I have saved and improved many sentient lives. That fact alone refutes the claim that my position is purely “negative.” The word "vegan" was coined in 1944. 82 years later, only an estimated 1% of the 8.27 billion humans currently alive are vegan. This is deeply depressing. Veganism is better for human health, for the environment and for the animals, but despite this fact, most humans have not yet gone vegan.

This is not "unjust" by any reasonable definition of justice.

Justice concerns how harms and benefits are distributed and imposed.

When harm is avoidable by going vegan yet imposed anyway, justice becomes relevant.

Much suffering inflicted on sentient beings is not inevitable. It is a product of choices, systems, and traditions. Calling that “just the way things are” does not make it morally neutral.

Good grief… Eternity is metaphorical and relative.

If “eternal life through descent” is metaphorical, then it should be acknowledged as such. In my previous post, I addressed both literal and metaphorical interpretations of your words.

Metaphors can console. They do not alter biological reality, nor do they redeem mortality itself. Each individual still suffers and dies as an individual. Symbolic continuity does not undo that fact.

You continue to tout your negative ethos. Life is horrible!

This is a caricature.

My position is not “life is horrible.”
It is: life contains enormous, unnecessary, and avoidable suffering — and that suffering matters morally.

I affirm life strongly enough to want it without cruelty, without injustice, and without premature death.

I want all living things to be forever happy — not because I hate life, but because I value sentient experience so deeply that I refuse to romanticise its harms.

Why not make the best of it?

I do my best constantly to save and improve all sentient lives.

Making the best of the world does not require pretending it is already good enough. It requires reducing harm, expanding care, and refusing to baptise suffering as morally ennobling.

Making the best of the world does not require pretending it is already good enough. It requires reducing harm, expanding care, and refusing to baptise suffering as morally ennobling.
1h — Truth Seeker

:up: :up:

Suffering and death are part of the human condition. You are contradicting yourself.
— Ecurb

No contradiction is present.

Suffering and death are parts of the human condition — they are not the whole of it.
Likewise, they are parts of the sentient condition more broadly.

What I reject is the slide from:

“Suffering and death are part of the condition.”
to
“Therefore, rejecting suffering and death means rejecting the entire condition.” — Truth Seeker

Well, yes it does mean rejecting the entire condition, since suffering and death are universal portions of the human condition. Your point would be like saying, "I'm not rejecting the rules of basketball, but I think traveling, fouling, and double dribble should be allowed." Those are essential rules -- suffering and death are universal conditions.

I oppose the harmful components, not the existence of sentient life itself. — Truth Seeker

Almost everyone "opposes" suffering and death. So what? They remain part of the human condition. Opposing them is meaningless and irrational. Accepting them is rational.

I have saved and improved many sentient lives. — Truth Seeker

Once again, this is negative. You have "saved sentient lives" by becoming a vegan? I've "saved sentient lives" by refraining from murdering people. So what? In addition, you haven't saved any lives. Ranchers raise animals for sale. If more people became vegans, fewer animals would be raised, and there would be fewer "sentient lives". That constitutes "saving"? It's reminiscent of your earlier claim that you wish you had never been born.

I affirm life strongly enough to want it without cruelty, without injustice, and without premature death. — Truth Seeker

Well, we can agree about cruelty and injustice, but aren't all deaths "premature"? Death is a fact of life. Nobody lives forever.

Making the best of the world does not require pretending it is already good enough. It requires reducing harm, expanding care, and refusing to baptise suffering as morally ennobling. — Truth Seeker

What if suffering begets moral ennobling? Isn't fortitude one of the seven "virtues"?

Nobody thinks the world cannot be improved. But death and suffering cannot be eliminated. It's not possible.