Not to derail your thread, but why - given this equation - is it not justified to go around killing off all miserable people? (Or equivalently, tanking them up on heroin, giving them lobotomies, or whatever.)
As an asymmetry, it still harbours the symmetry with would be subtraction instead of addition. And subtraction would seem to have the advantage of fixing things right away rather than waiting to make the desired change over time. — apokrisis
To answer your question, a proponent of the Asymmetry would likely respond by saying that helping miserable people get better, is better than just killing them. — darthbarracuda
Indeed many symmetry-advocates have outright proclaimed that they deny the Asymmetry despite finding it incredibly appealing. — darthbarracuda
It's why I think the Asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why I think David Benatar's antinatalistic asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why the mere-addition paradox is so repugnant, etc. We seem to have, regardless of what we consciously argue for, an inherent negative utilitarian-like disposition. — darthbarracuda
Not to kill off the miserable while producing as great a population of the happy as possible would be a positive crime, if we take this kind of calculation at its face value. — apokrisis
Who is this "we"? Personally it strikes me as a PC version of fascist eugenics. Humans are against nature and therefore should be extinguished. Give the planet back to the bugs and fungi. — apokrisis
So yes, we can take a compassionate view about the suffering of others. We can wish for a better world. And feeling inadequate to the task of making it a better world, we can then decide the final solution is to remove the problem by removing the sufferers - antinatalism merely seeming to be the kindest approach to this holocaust against folk having a freedom to choose and act on their own accord. — apokrisis
Do you really believe you have the right to deny a future generation to fix what your generation seems to be failing to fix (and I say "seeming" as the evidence being given is so slight that it is routinely talked up to the skies)? — apokrisis
Perhaps you can re-describe the asymmetry in a way I can follow its intuitive appeal. I still only see that its natural logic demands we start subtracting the miserable immediately for their own good. — apokrisis
That is of course a repugnant idea. But largely of course because you can't create a happy world in that kind of binary fashion. Talk about happiness as an idea, as opposed to adaptive balance - some notion of flow and fit - is where the whole analysis starts to go wrong. It is not even the proper measure of anything here. And so therefore neither is this obsession with pain and suffering. — apokrisis
Or to put it another way, it is what it feels like to be pointing towards death instead of life. If you are getting pain that intense, that's your signal you are getting down to your last chance to stay alive. — apokrisis
Suffering isn't the end of the world, just a normal aspect of life. — apokrisis
So suffering - in nature - is affirmation that life is in fact valued. It is the fate better than death. And yet you want to take away the gift of life for untold generations of the unborn! Isn't that PC eugenics? — apokrisis
apokrisis — darthbarracuda
Typically I'd say we value personal value over impersonal value anyway so the idea that we ought to kill miserable people for the sake of some abstract impersonal value is a bit convoluted. — darthbarracuda
Do you really believe you have the right to force a future generation to fix what our generation is failing to fix? i.e. instrumentalizing future generations without their consent? — darthbarracuda
This is also where antinatalism can be a potential gamechanger in this debate. We don't need a procreative population ethics because we don't need to procreate nor have a population to begin with. — darthbarracuda
No, it wouldn't be for their own good, it would be for an abstract impersonal good. Which I also find to be repugnant. — darthbarracuda
No, suffering in nature is the affirmation of life without the person suffering consenting to life. It's the body's way of forcing a person to do something, i.e. enslavement, i.e. instrumentality. — darthbarracuda
clearly a suicidal person who jumps off a building is suffering, and clearly this is not an affirmation of life nor an affirmation of the value of life, rather the complete opposite. — darthbarracuda
And no, it's not eugenics, because eugenics is all about finding the perfect, ideal organism, and antinatalism is usually focused on the fact that there are no perfect, ideal organisms. — darthbarracuda
What dilemma? Asymmetry, at least as you've summed it up, is not at all compelling or intuitive for me. But symmetry is. Who is it that finds it so? Has there been a survey or something? — Sapientia
But don't you routinely extrapolate from the personal to the general in this fashion? It is not the suffering within your own experience that is the issue for you but the impersonal fact that suffering exists. So yes, this is "convoluted". Which is what I thought I had argued. — apokrisis
I talked of their right to a choice in the matter. So equally they could decide to make their existence as miserable as they like. — apokrisis
But clearly, if it is admitted that suffering exists due to things that can be changed, then the fact we seem to be doing a poor job - your claim, not mine necessarily - doesn't give us the right to take away that opportunity from future generations. — apokrisis
But it could only be a personal choice not to have kids. And should your partner and family, or even society, have no say at all here? It is not clear you automatically would have this right. And indeed, a society in which its population ceased to breed might be within its right to take a more coercive stance. Or if the cult of antinatalism got to widespread, again a society might want to protect itself against such an antisocial threat. — apokrisis
No amount of pleasure could justify even a paper cut or the risk of a horrible death in a fiery car crash, remember? — apokrisis
OK, it gets weird when you talk about personhood as if it could be disembodied. All natural logic breaks down here. — apokrisis
But now we are into a position where suicide is taken to be the right choice and so all sufferers should be assisted off the top of the nearest high rise if they can't do it for themselves. — apokrisis
It is eugenics because it shows a fascist intolerance of imperfection. The goal is to eliminate unwanted population traits. And the solution is as final as it gets. — apokrisis
I have to wonder why you would be opposed to perfection. — darthbarracuda
Are you really so sure that there are no such things as necessary evils? — Barry Etheridge
I'm surprised you don't find it at least somewhat compelling. The idea that we have an obligation to bring happy people into existence seems to be a bit too strong. — darthbarracuda
In any case I have to wonder why you would be opposed to perfection. Indeed Plato, Aristotle, and others all thought that there were the Forms, or the Telos, or whatnot that we ought to strive to instantiate. They wouldn't have looked too kindly on imperfection. And yet here you are being apologetic for the inherent imperfection of nature...why? Why is imperfection acceptable? Why is mediocrity acceptable? Seems to me that tolerating imperfection is a form of apathy, a weakness of the will. An inherent unjustified affirmation of the normal. — darthbarracuda
You can talk about such dynamical balances as "mediocre" or "imperfect". But that just shows your metaphysics is fundamentally unrealistic. You are not even understanding the message that metaphysics wants to deliver when it comes to the (self)organisation of nature. — apokrisis
For anything to exist - phenomenologically - there must be the extremes which together allow the spectrum of what then actually is. — apokrisis
I don't think you understand how not all axiology or aesthetics is realist in nature. Any value is going to be subjective, depending on the existence of a mind. — darthbarracuda
Perhaps you're thinking more about moods than brute sensory experience. — darthbarracuda
I can't help but wonder that if you got lost in the woods one day and faced a cold winter's night, if you wouldn't reconsider the duality of what I'm saying here. Your metaphysics, no matter what it's validity is, would have very little importance. Again people like to think they are complex, in control of who they are, and powerful, but when faced with the aforementioned scenario they inevitably fall into mania or depression. — darthbarracuda
To claim that such an outcome is inevitable is nuts. Being lost in the woods for a night doesn't even sound traumatic, just embarrassing. — apokrisis
Being lost in the woods when it's negative ten degrees out and snowing and you have no tent or warm clothes because you barely survived a plane crash in the Siberian tundra. Not a walk in the park, in fact probably a death sentence (just look at Stalingrad - and they even had resources). — darthbarracuda
If you had a strong argument, it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. You wouldn't need to pile disaster upon disaster. — apokrisis
it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. — apokrisis
There cannot be poetry after Auschwitz. — darthbarracuda
So you accept that everyday existence is mundane (i.e. dull, unoriginal, repetitive, boring, tedious, annoying...everything I have been saying for the past week or so). A direct contradiction to what you had previously said regarding the "richness" of everyday experience. — darthbarracuda
At its heart lies the claim that some bloke living in relative comfort somewhere in the West is in a better position to know whether a couple in Mali or Malaysia or Madagascar should have a child than they are. Claims like this baffle me. — mcdoodle
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