David Benatar argues there is crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure and pain, which means it would be better for humans not to have been born:
1. The presence of pain is bad.
2. The presence of pleasure is good.
3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
4. The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation — Wikipedia
Personally, I do not accept 1.
I do not like pain, and not liking pain keeps me safe. Therefore pain is good. — unenlightened
Your purported contradiction is not a contradiction in the asymmetry, it is the asymmetry. — zookeeper
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The asymmetry is not an argument, it's a description of how we humans experience pain and pleasure. — zookeeper
Benatar's asymmetry, as far as I can tell is that the absence of pleasure is not bad but not bad. — TheMadFool
As soon as you say 'good thing' it becomes clear that non-existence of anything cannot be a good thing in its own right. And indeed good and bad are relational, — unenlightened
I don't think it can be. Humans don't experience absence and they don't experience non-existence. — unenlightened
Secondly, Benatar's "good" must be viewed vis-a-vis suicide. The person who takes his own life chooses to do so because nonexistence is a better ("good") option for him compared to, say, being subject to a long drawn out battle with a painful life-threatening illness. It follows then that people's intuitions on the matter are in line with Benatar's views. — TheMadFool
Yes, I think one should take the suicide seriously. But I think the non-suicide such as thou and I should also be taken seriously, and clearly our intuitions are different. But you confirm my point, that good and bad are relational. The suicide considers his existence bad-for-him, (and probably bad-for-others). I don't. — unenlightened
3. Absence of pain is good even if that good isn't enjoyed by anyone. — TheMadFool
Basically, he's treating unborn, potential persons differently in 3 and 4. — TheMadFool
So this is the sense in which I think in those untold generations the pleasant lives of the many cannot compensate for the one miserable life. This is the radical choice you are offered, to be responsible for many ordinary pleasant lives and some miserable ones, or no lives at all. No one is deprived by you not having children, but some will suffer if you do. That is the asymmetry. — unenlightened
That said, I wonder if there's a good reason why Benatar would think this way - switching his views on the potential of the unborn to feel from relevant to irrelevant depending on whether what is being felt is pain or pleasure respectively.
Comments... — TheMadFool
There are no aliens having children on Mars to experience the joys of life. Does that make you sad, empathetic, or grief-stricken? The answer is probably no. No one intuitively seems to care whether "no one" is enjoying life. In fact a whole planet of no people enjoying life doesn't seem to bother us at all. That doesn't seem a moral obligation (that people must be born/exist to enjoy life).
If there were Martians having children on Mars and you knew they were suffering greatly, would that make you sad, empathetic, or feel bad in some way? It probably would to some degree.
There seems to be a difference in how we perceive "pleasure not happening" vs. "pain not happening" in the absence of an actual person. This leads to different conclusions for obligations to bring pleasure and prevent pain in the scenario when a parent has the potential to procreate and can prevent it. — schopenhauer1
The absence of pain is much more of an intrinsic good than the absence of pleasure is an intrinsic bad, and he thinks our intuitions and psychology support this asymmetry between the two intuitions. — schopenhauer1
Also, just so everyone can at least get some primary sources here, please read David Benatar himself. Unfortunately I can't PDF the whole book, Better Never to Have Been, but this is a summarized version in an earlier journal article:
https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/benatar — schopenhauer1
The crucial point here being that in our heart of hearts we know our biggest pain in the neck is nonexistence. To then suggest the solution to our pain (death/nonexistence) is exactly that which pains us blows my mind. — TheMadFool
I'm pretty good, considering, thanks for the concern though. — unenlightened
I have a daughter working in a hospital and that's a worry, but I'm loving the less traffic and hearing some birdsong again — unenlightened
In a good or bad way :chin:? Anyways, Yes, nonexistence, at least as it refers to the next generation of progeny, is the best way to go. You don't need to overcome anything, if you don't need to overcome anything in the first place. Why put people in a deficit and see how well they fare? Why put people in absurdly repetitive needs of survival, maintenance, and entertainment-seeking, when you don't need to in the first place? Of course, he is less concerned with the issues I raise here of absurdity, and existential deficits. He seems to focus on suffering, although the extent of what suffering means can extend to the absurdities and existential deficits I mentioned. — schopenhauer1
I think pleasure is an outlet for those with suicidal idealizations. In small doses please. — Shawn
Firstly I'm not referring to existentialism or absurdism by "existential threat". I simply mean that pain is ultimately about death - pain is death's envoy and that's what makes it so unpleasant, so undesirable (to life) - and if one is in pain, either you're experiencing death itself or death is near. So, to fear/dislike pain is to fear/dislike death itself. — TheMadFool
Secondly, given the above is true, imagine a person P who has an immense fears/dislike of pain, and by extension he greatly fears/dislikes death. If P were to seek advice for his problem from an antinatalist [with special powers over time] the antinatalist would say that he (the antinatalist) could travel back in time and prevent the P's parents from ever meeting and having P and since there would be no P to begin with, P would never experiene fear/dislike of pain and death. This course of action defines the antinatalists' agenda.
However, P is being offered a raw deal by the antinatalist, no? P fears/dislikes pain because pain is associated with death i.e. P's fear/dislike of pain is just a projection of his fear/dislike of death/nonexistence. In the setting of this realization, the antinatalist's offer to prevent P from existing i.e. making P nonexistent amounts to offering death to P and we know that's exactly what P fears/dislikes. :chin: — TheMadFool
I believe there was a philosopher, I forget his name, who claimed that the biggest problem in philosophy is suicide in the sense that not enough people are contemplating it in the face of the meaninglessness of life. People who are suicidal seem to see no purpose in their continued existence. — TheMadFool
This is just an assertion that he doesn't back up with anything. Why is it that any badness immediately makes the alternative preferable? Again, he doesn't seem to be entertaining the idea that the dynamics between the good and bad of existence makes it preferable, despite the lack of bad in non-existence. — QuixoticAgnostic
He is illustrating how not getting sick is an absolute good (in his terms it seems to mean something like good, in any state of affairs). — schopenhauer1
The joys of life, would only matter once born, and thus are not a consideration for the non-born, as his analogy illustrates, it's only instrumentally good. — schopenhauer1
To make someone sick so they can recover from the illness, would be analogously a bad or immoral thing to do. — schopenhauer1
Yeah but this is a scenario that is not the case of the never born. You can argue that once born, we fear death, and the idea of full annihilation might be something to fear. This wouldn't be the case for a situation where someone who could have been born from a parent was not (colloquially referred to for the sake of easy reference "non-existent people".) — schopenhauer1
I believe there was a philosopher, I forget his name, who claimed that the biggest problem in philosophy is suicide in the sense that not enough people are contemplating it in the face of the meaninglessness of life. People who are suicidal seem to see no purpose in their continued existence. — TheMadFool
But, not to fixate on it surely? — Shawn
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