That is likely because you know you can do the same without knowing and probably have. — I like sushi

There are mantras of the programming community we might learn from:

1. There are only two kinds of programs: those so simple they obviously have no mistakes, and those so complex they have no obvious mistakes.

2. If you write a program as cleverly as you can, then, by definition, you are not smart enough to debug it.

I have come to believe that my fascination with formal methods in philosophy is, in part, a flight from the responsibility of thinking, a desire to be able to build a machine that answers will fall out of. On the other hand, the motivation for thinking in small, simple, verifiable steps is itself honorable, and to some degree a bulwark against nonsense. (This is one of those things the fellow next door, who thinks logic might be evil, doesn't get.)

working in psychology, we responded to the replication crisis quite well I think — Isaac

Agreed! I find I sometimes have to point this out to people who point to the replication crisis as more evidence that science is bullshit. It's more evidence, not less, that science is, at least, intended to be a self-correcting communal enterprise. That is its great value, not the supposed "scientific method".

One particularly nice example of this is "the blowback effect" that was very widely reported because it provides an all-too-neat explanation for the entrenchment of people's political views. Unfortunately the original study failed replication. I heard the principal author interviewed and he laughed, well, I have a choice now, don't I? I can retrench or I can admit that their study was a lot better than mine, so yeah, there is no evidence of a "blowback effect".

Why do you think that? — Luke

I was describing MU's views, based on dim memory of similar disputes before. And as it turns out:

If I don't have the type, and you don't have the type, then where is the type? I think you're wrong here. A type must be somewhere, if it has any existence at all. I think that types are within my mind, and they are within your mind as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's a surprising strain of psychologism in MU's thinking.

the point we now find ourselves, where one's conclusions are all that matter, not the diligence with which one has arrived at them — Isaac

Here's an example that horrified me, a few months ago I think it was.

The US Census Bureau had finally released some results, late. There had been a lot of concern about the potential of (another) minority undercount, because of the pandemic, funding and operational issues, various sorts of political interference in the process like the public debate over the citizenship question, and so on. The results showed a perfectly predictable decline in the "non-Hispanic white" percentage of the total population, in line with all other recent results.

The day these numbers were released, I heard a discussion on the radio in which a 'journalist' was asked for her reaction to the news and she said, "I was surprised that the census was so accurate." "Accurate" was her word. "Accurate."

I have a lot of respect for the statisticians at the US Census Bureau. It's my understanding that enormous amounts of social science and political analysis relies directly or indirectly on their products. As near as I can tell, their work is the gold standard. They were months late, needing extensions, to produce their report, and this 'journalist' glanced at a top-line summary, saw that it included the numbers she wanted to see, and immediately pronounced it "accurate".

I don't know how to react to that except with contempt and disgust.

He's the place we're trying to avoid ending up when talking about active inference. — Isaac

I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that. That guy is full of shit. He seems determined to be the new Sheldrake.

Kind of like 98.6 fahrenheit is just an average of many bodies. — Joshs

It's not even that. I think there's a Radiolab episode about it... ADDED: Well, I mean, yes it is quite specifically "an average of many bodies", but it isn't and never was the "average normal human temperature" or something.

I don’t think that it necessarily follows from this that I’m wrong when I claim that people believe they are doing what is best when they select some solution to their problems. In other words they think that it makes sense. Otherwise it’s hard to believe that they would voluntarily choose to do what seems inferior and absurd. — Average

Actually there's plenty of reason to think they wouldn't bother to find out what's best. Google "herbert simon satisficing". Perfect is the enemy of good.

At first I thought you were stuck on the problem of the criterion, which most people prefer to ignore as circular nonsense, but in several posts, you seem to demand something like knowledge of the future in order to make a decision. I'll grant you, sometimes people pull in their horns too readily in the name of human fallibility, but some standards or expectations are still obviously unreachable. This for instance:

I don’t think that it would make sense to try something even if you feel fairly certain that it will succeed. What we need is some sort of proof or evidence that guarantees that we are making decisions that make sense. — Average

Proof? Guarantees? Ambition is commendable, but are you serious?

pain hurts/feels bad/is painful — RogueAI

I just don't understand what your point is in saying this. Do you think you're describing pain by saying that it's a sensation that hurts? It hurts because that's what pain is. Are you defining pain? Explaining it? Are you saying anything at all?

So you don't need to describe pain because we already have the word "pain"?

That's just a way of saying that seeing red and feeling pain are subjective — Marchesk

Well you're demanding a physical description right? How does it go when you avail yourself of the non-physical? Should be easy as pie now, shouldn't it?

The mental aspect of pain (that it hurts) — RogueAI

You said that before. Do you mean something besides "pain is painful"?

It makes no sense to say that we each have a type called "pain". — Luke

I think this is exactly what he believes. We each have our own type system, each have different meanings for the words we share.

Does anyone think they can describe "what it's like to see a red patch" or "what it's like to be in pain" in non-physical terms?

the salient aspect of pain isn't that it involves nerves and brain states x,y,z, it's that pain hurts. It feels bad. — RogueAI

That sounds to me like you're saying it's painful to be in pain. Were you hoping to say something more than that?

Knowing all the physical facts about the brain states of people having experience x (e.g., seeing red) won't lead to knowing what experience x is like (e.g., what it's like to see red). — RogueAI

But even if we grant that, is it an argument against some sort of naturalism or physicalism? Is there no difference between the brains of people who have read about swimming and people who have done it and know how to swim? That seems crazy, doesn't it? And only people who have done it know what it's like to swim. Knowing what it's like is a function of memory, isn't it?

but Mary's Room doesn't really address this very point — InPitzotl

Maybe not. It's clearly trying to, and a lot of people have taken it as having done so.

If we were to talk about Mary's room "as psychologists", the first thing we'd note is that her developmental environment was impoverished, abnormal, so psychologically all bets are off.

That's clearly not the intention behind the thought experiment, but it does raise a question: is there a coherent way to frame this thought experiment, so that it makes the point it's trying to make, the one that you believe it doesn't? If not, maybe that tells you something, but then maybe that's just an argument from poverty of imagination.

Will she learn anything or not? — frank

We can distinguish readily, at the person level, between 'knowledge that' and 'knowledge how':

WE can read about riding a bike, watch people ride bikes and maybe even dream of riding bikes ... but that isn't riding a bike. — I like sushi

Could you learn to ride a bike just by reading about it? No. Experience is required. — RogueAI

We could say something similar, distinguishing 'knowledge by acquaintance' --- there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do that with just a preposition, again simply at level of a person's experience:

Surely you can picture the dramatic difference between sitting in your chair and pondering a 480,000 mile trip, and actually going 480,000 miles. — InPitzotl

We might think of this as the difference between physically interacting with something and interacting with it 'mentally', only thinking about it or imagining it. And we will want to say that the acquisition of knowledge how, say, how to ride a bike, requires that physical interaction, that it's no use just thinking about it. Of course we recognize there are causes all the way through in either version: if I read accounts of someone riding a bike, they are causally connected to the physical event of someone riding a bike, but we're connected as readers to that event differently than the person participating in it, and that's all we need for 'mental' here.

The question is whether all instances of an agent knowing how or being acquainted with can be reduced, without remainder, to something someone could know that. That is, can we pinpoint a difference in the structure or functioning of the brain of a person who knows how to ride a bike from the brain of a person who doesn't? Can we pinpoint a difference in the structure or functioning of the brain of a person who has been to the moon from the brain of a person who hasn't? Is it conceivable that those differences could be written down and read about? Is there any sort of ability or acquaintance not describable as a physical fact about the person?

I think that's the idea. At first it looks like just a sort of 'dualism of the gaps' --- just because neuroscience can't yet achieve these sorts of explanations, then it will never be able to. What we want is to isolate something that it looks like neuroscience couldn't explain in principle, something that would categorically escape it. I don't know why people think color vision fits the bill, but apparently they do.

Still thinking about this...

We can talk about the scent that a flower "gives off" as a sort of separate thing; we do, of course, say that we smell flowers, but we can think of the scent as something the flower, as it were, causes, as something it sort of does, but we don't think this way about how the flower looks. When we see the flower, we see it, not something it causes (its "appearance") or something it does.

Same for the sound of a horse's hoof striking cobblestones. When you hear that, you hear something the horse, or the horse's hooves, cause. But when you see the horse, you don't think of that as something the horse is just the cause of, but as just the horse itself.

Thinking about how we might catch onto any of sight or smell or sound first, and then have to match up other aspects to that, I was thinking that whatever privileging of sight was in your very first post here was accidental, in a sense. But now I think there's something to it. We do seem to think of seeing things as more directly grasping them as what they are than hearing them or smelling them, which feel like they're one step away from the actual thing.

But the same could maybe be said for touch and taste -- that those are more the actual thing. That would be very odd for taste since it's so closely bound up with smell. And it could be that the feel of a surface or the resistance we feel when hefting an object, maybe these are a bit too narrow an experience of the object and so, in a way, generic, realizable in many different objects.

I just don't have clear ideas about all of the senses, and might want to take back a lot of this, but I think it does turn out that we don't naturally distinguish how a thing looks from the thing, as we are inclined to do with at least some of the other senses.

Which brings us right back to your original version of the puzzle, that there's a potential for being surprised by perhaps any sensible aspect of an object except its appearance.

If true, that's very curious indeed.

I am emotionally sure my onw logic is evil too, that is why I started the discussion, after a life of watching what I do when I argue I have a very bad feeling about it. — FalseIdentity

Perhaps you have noticed yourself trying to win an argument. That's not in itself evil; it's not even a bar to discovering truth. But if your principal motivation is to win, rather than to seek the truth, you put yourself at risk of practicing sophistry rather than philosophy, or what the rationalist community calls the dark arts.

Being mindful of your motivation is a good thing, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

What about cases where you know that they'll appreciate the imposition later down the line? — khaled

That was more or less the starting point for this discussion, not with a claim that we know it for a fact in the case before us, but that we assume it and it's reasonable to assume it.

Can moral sentiments be misleading if they lead to bad conclusions? — schopenhauer1

I don't think of the moral sentiments as just a matter of the individual's reaction --- it's more like language: each of us speaks an idiolect, sure, but collectively, in the aggregate, those overlapping idiolects define a speech community, and the practice and intuitions about usage of each of us also carries some authority. There's no Correct English; there's only what English speakers by and large think is correct, and what they say. Each can speak, to some degree, for the entire community on correctness of usage, even though now and then they will disagree. And that authority comes not just from knowledge but from the fact that the practice of each us determines, in part, what counts as correct English.

As morals go, it's plain that there are differences among individuals, and between communities, but if you think of humanity in the whole as your moral community, then these are just idiolects and dialects. There are commonalities across communities and traditions as well, and they are considerable. I look for the basis of morality in what people feel is praiseworthy and blameworthy, what fills them with admiration, what they resent or find repulsive. I don't see any firmer ground for morality than that.

Happy slave. — schopenhauer1

That's an interesting example, and it's apparently pretty important to your view, so maybe we should spend some time on that. I'll just note, to start with, that my case doesn't rest on every individual slave feeling wronged by his master. It is true that slavery has been a common practice throughout the bulk of human history, in a variety of forms; but the fact that all of the modern world officially disapproves of slavery doesn't support either of us more than the other. If you compare, say, ancient attitudes toward slavery and modern ones, the fact of change shows that human beings can be brought, en masse, to finding slavery repellent. There's room for you to think of yourself as one of the first abolitionists, if you like, but it doesn't undermine my view of the task you face, to move us to find life itself repugnant, as we find slavery repugnant, and hold blameworthy those who place another in that situation.

I shouldn't punch people, whatever their later feeling on it is. It is wrong to cause suffering, period — schopenhauer1

But of course you can't mean this. A boxer does not feel wronged when their opponent punches them, even if it hurts. On the other hand, if you punch me after the bell has wrung and I've dropped my guard, I will feel wronged. There's an issue of consent here, which is important to your case as well. But there is a further counterexample: sometimes young men are in the habit of playfully punching each other on the bicep, and it's supposed to hurt, just not much. Whether anyone consents to that isn't quite clear. What is clear is that there will be cases where the punched party does not feel wronged, but cases, if the punch was in anger and hard enough to raise a bruise, where they might. Intention matters as well, and plays almost no role in your account of our being wronged by our parents. If someone takes a swing at your buddy, who's standing next to you at a drunken party, but hits you instead, do you feel wronged? Maybe, maybe not. If you feel very wronged and pull a knife, those around you will (one hopes) try to de-escalate the situation by getting you to feel differently about it -- he's just drunk, he didn't mean it, you're not even bleeding, it's just a party, shit happens. None of that is a denial of the bare facts that A caused harm to B, but it's an invitation to see it in a different light so that you feel differently about it.

Here's another way to think about my story's reliance on our instinct for self-preservation.

Do people who find themselves to be alive feel wronged by their parents? Overwhelmingly the answer is no, but there are obviously problems with that. Some, perhaps many, might feel that way sometimes, and that's a reminder that feelings are tied to specific events, to specific circumstances. People can have something like a feeling that is present across varying circumstances, but we tend to reach for different words there, something like "attitude" or maybe "outlook" or "mindset", though the latter have a more cognitive ring to me, more to do with expectations than affect.

I find it plausible that we experience our own instinct for self-preservation largely as an attitude that life is fundamentally a good thing. There are of course extreme experiences when we just want it to stop, and those powerful feelings might trump the general attitude. There's a sort of corollary too, that we may generally have a pretty negative and sour affect but if we find ourselves suddenly in danger (car skidding off the road, that sort of thing) then our instinct for self-preservation will come roaring back as a feeling, a powerful desire not to die in this moment.

Antinatalism is the claim that a person brought into being has thereby been wronged. Their being wronged might be accompanied by an attitude that they have or have not been wronged, or, more fleetingly, feelings that they have or have not been wronged. In other words, sometimes the antinatalist claim will align with the purported victim's own feelings or attitudes, and sometimes it won't.

To start with, then, we need to clarify in what sense someone may have been wronged without feeling that they have been wronged. That's certainly possible, but I'm not sure the usual cases are much help. For example, if you steal from me but I don't know it, sure, I've been wronged and don't feel that I have been. But that's a matter of knowledge; if I knew, I would feel wronged. Being alive isn't like that: we know perfectly well that we are, and, past a certain age, we know perfectly well how we came to be. I haven't been able to think of an example that's more like the wrong life is supposed to be.

Now for the wrong done. Is the wrong intermittent? That is, am I wronged by my parents only at the moments in my life when I am suffering? Taking that option, we could focus on whether, in those moments of suffering, I have feelings of having been wronged by my parents for bringing me into being. (And then, if those feelings are absent, we have to have ready an account of that, along the lines suggested in the previous paragraph.)

Another option is that the wrong is something like exposure to risk of suffering; in that case, the risk is persistent from the beginning of your life until its end, and you are wronged in this sense every moment you are alive, whether you are suffering at the moment or not. An analogy for this sort of wrong leaps to mind, that of a general who sends troops on a mission based on a preposterously faulty idea. The troops may come to no harm, through luck or their own ability, but they will still feel wronged; they will resent having had to run that risk because of someone else's folly. Here again, we need an account of why people mostly do not feel wronged as the troops sent on this mission do.

The conception of the wrong done can be strengthened, it seems, by noting that not only are you exposed to risk every moment of your life, but it's a near certainty you won't always escape harm. How should we think of the wrong done here? It's not clear to me. We have, in the first take, actual harmful events; we have, in the second, unjustified risking of harm. This third seems more about establishing culpability: if our general knew a certain sort of mission was risky and sent the troops out not once, when they might have gotten lucky, but over and over and over again, people might feel he was "tempting fate", relying on a faulty view of the chances of no one coming to harm. I'm not sure we even need that calculus here, because there's no question about whether the parents are culpable. (It might have some point if we take parents as a group, and stipulate that some of their offspring will be unlucky, and so on. Not clear then who we take to be the moral agent; when I suffer should I blame all parents, as a group, rather than mine?)

What's the point of all this? Twofold. On the one hand, insofar as I incline to any theory of morality, it's based in the moral sentiments, but I don't want to make too much of that, because I don't have much of a theory. On the other hand, most successful moral arguments succeed precisely by arousing the moral sentiments. It's no good telling someone that they should think something is wrong that they don't; you change their view by showing it to them in such a way that they feel it is wrong. (And obviously there's just as little point in telling people how they should feel.) I think this is what you are attempting with your favorite analogy lately, the "forced game": you want to elicit from your audience a feeling that placing someone in such a situation is wrong.

I don't think "optimism bias" is any help here. If it's real, it only explains why people think their lives have been, and will be, overall better than they actually have been and will be. But that's a cognitive issue. If people in moments of suffering, do not feel wronged by their parents, optimism bias doesn't explain that; if they do not feel wronged all the time because they are constantly at risk of being harmed, optimism bias doesn't explain that; and if you fail to arouse the moral sentiments of your audience, to feel that children have been wronged simply by being brought into being, optimism bias doesn't explain that either.

It's difficult to keep this discussion distinct from the antinatalism discussions elsewhere. I'm trying to avoid critiquing arguments in favor of antinatalism, and focus on why it's unpersuasive. Maybe this post makes it clearer how closely connected I think our experience of moral life is to what we find persuasive in moral discussion.

(As philosophers, we'll always be tempted to believe that the class "persuasive" can be identified with the class "coherent and logical", though we know perfectly well that it cannot. I am going to make an effort to connect any criticism I have of antinatalism's coherence to the goal of moral suasion as described above.)

Small point of interest: since antinatalism is sort of the Hippocratic Oath on stilts, I looked it up: alongside the original injunction to "do no harm" are injunctions against performing abortions and against administering poison "even if asked", which, depending on who's asking, means not aiding in suicide or euthanasia. That's slightly interesting.

But even these more "obvious" categories have been philosophized as to what "degree" what was the "intent" etc. — schopenhauer1

"Have been" is inarguable, but I see no reason to think philosophy is the origin of the taboo against kin-slaying, for example.

The point being with all of this is what counts as moral is not immediately realized, nor does it have to be to still be considered moral. — schopenhauer1

I take your point, and I could see how someone would find the comparison to, say, veganism compelling.

I remember Freud describing how an overdeveloped superego could make a person miserable, insisting on standards of thought and behavior they could not possibly meet, but at the same be a source of pride, because look what high standards they have!

If AN is a matter of human beings developing a standard of morality that human beings can only meet by not existing, that's at least paradoxical.

Rather than steal your thunder and debate AN here, I've been trying to figure out what makes people even less likely to accept AN than, say, veganism. The arguments are interesting, but they're far from the whole story. You see the rest of the story as a process of realization, or consciousness raising, and that's plausible. You could say I'm just looking at the other side, at our resistance to that process.

I find that resistance reasonable, but I want to get the facts right first.

(I could be helping your cause by figuring out what you really need to argue against, rather than just making the same arguments all the time without convincing anyone.)

Oh yes, I know you and I suspect there's not a real question here. I was hoping to get others to wonder whether "better" and "worse" make sense here.

In fairness to @ToothyMaw's approach, I suppose it's better to ask if "better" and "worse" can be made sensible here. But then we're back to the whether whatever sense can be made with this question --- people think they're doing something when they talk about it --- actually engages with the sense that people think of as their moral lives. If they don't hook up, it's still just a little logical puzzle.

All I would argue is that reasons should always be considered when procreating, and that people do consider reasons for procreating more than you think. — ToothyMaw

People consider all sorts of things --- whether they can afford to take care of the child, whether they feel prepared to handle the responsibility, whether they want that responsibility, whether they think they are capable of being a good parent, a loving parent. It is a great moral undertaking, raising children.

But hardly anyone considers the possibility that not being alive is better than being alive. Does that mean they assume being alive is better?

Maybe? Or maybe "better" and "worse" don't make sense here.

My little story attempts to go around the question by noting that living things exhibit a preference to continue living. (Plants defend themselves against parasites --- do they do so because they think it's better to go on living?) That gives acts like saving a life or creating one a certain moral sheen: we act in accord with a norm that is prejudiced in favor of life, and we do so knowing that we act in accordance with that norm. The question of whether living is better than not living need not arise.

But we, not being plants, can form the question:

All that said, asking the question (no matter how absurd) is a possible step towards understanding it to be absurd and that not all sentences with '?' at the end warrant a '?'. — I like sushi

Does that mean we can answer it?

You made an argument in favor of an ethical theory, and didn't acknowledge my counter-argument. Why don't you have to address it? — ToothyMaw

Is a philosopher, then, like a troll guarding the bridge to parenthood? He pops up saying, "You may not pass until you have answered my riddle!"

Most people just ignore the troll, and that's what I find interesting.

"But the child might immediately fall into a pit of lava!" cries the troll, as people stream past him.

"What lava pit? There's no lava pit around here." someone calls as they pass by. "Why would I give birth in a lava pit?" asks someone else.

"Well," says the troll, "Life is kind of like a pit of lava."

The crowd is unconvinced. "No it isn't." They keep crossing 'his' bridge.

"But it might be!" responds the troll, sensing an opening. "You don't know for sure that it isn't."

"If life were kind of like a lava pit, I would have kind of caught fire and kind of burned to death years ago," says someone, and gives the troll a little shove so he topples back under the bridge.

It's a bit like the argument from error: because someone, sometime, in some specific circumstances, was 'deceived by their senses', everyone, always, and in all circumstances, must accept the possibility that they are, at that moment, in those circumstances, being deceived by their senses.

"So you're saying that. because a straight stick looks bent when it's half in the water, that bent tree branch there might actually be straight?"

"It might be. How could you know for sure that it isn't?"

"But where's the water?"

There are circumstances in which people feel that whether to have a child is a moral choice, and that they should weigh, as best they can, what they know against what they don't, what is good in life against what is bad, and so on. But does that entail that absent those circumstances, and absent any such concerns, everyone should always feel that it's a moral choice, and that what they ought to consider in making that choice is just the issues that the anti-natalist raises, and weighted in just the way he does? You agree with the AN, prove him wrong, or admit that you're irrational -- that's the trilemma you're offered. And almost no one believes it.

I have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of trying to refute AN, but I never for a moment thought that if I couldn't come up with a refutation then my only remaining options were agreement and dogmatic disagreement. Mostly I think of it as a minor paradox: something that feels like it might be a moral principle leads quickly to a patently absurd conclusion. Either it's not a moral principle, or we oughtn't be trying to do ethics that way. You can learn from looking at paradoxes.

It just seems plain to me that, curious though it is, AN is a free-floating theory that doesn't actually engage with the moral lives of people. When it tries to evoke moral sentiment in its audience, it's ridiculous. ("But the lava!") It's just a strange logical artifact. (I'm reminded of Ariel Rubinstein here, by any estimation one of the world's leading game theorists, who always says that game theory is just an interesting branch of math and has nothing to do with real life.)

I doubt you're convinced, and that's probably because nothing here is exactly an argument either. It's a question of how you approach the doing of philosophy. People say all kinds of shit, and only some of it is taken seriously by other people. It might be worth thinking about why that is. Dewey somewhere says that most problems in philosophy aren't solved, they just no longer feel "live", compelling, or important to philosophers. AN is a solution to a problem only it believes in: it both asks and answers the question, is it immoral to have children? No one else asks, but AN keeps insisting it has an answer.

That isn't an argument for anything. — ToothyMaw

No, it isn't. I know.

a person who procreates or saves a life cannot guarantee that the person given life will share their value system - what if they are a Schopenhauer? — ToothyMaw

No one can guarantee anything. I claim it is perfectly reasonable to assume, without argument, that people want to live. And I claim that if you reflect upon humanity, then you do also have a reason in support of the premise. And if you think about it a little more, the fact that everyone seems to assume this about everyone else is only more reason to count on it.

There will be occasions when you're wrong, or when the circumstances incline you to look for more.

Then we aren't discussing ethics, because reason is central to any ethical theory — ToothyMaw

Then I'm certainly not offering an ethical theory. What difference does that make to our discussion? (For the record, I lean toward "moral sentiments" as a foundation, so this whole line of thought comes naturally to me.)

You genuinely seem to be ignorant of all of the good anti-natalist arguments. — ToothyMaw

I am not ignorant of the arguments, though I may be ignorant of the good ones. I think the AN position is prima facie absurd. I've enjoyed trying to figure out how it works, but I thought I'd try something else for a change.

I'm not directly addressing the arguments for AN here. There's always two or three places to do that, if you'd like. I do think it's reasonable to discuss why I don't think I have to address them.

The inconsistency lies in an adherent’s inability to accept the full consequences of their premises. — khaled

Sure. You can argue that someone holds B because of A, but A also entails C, and they shouldn't hold C, so they should give up A. That leaves B as an option, just unsupported.

As I said, that can be fun, and I'll probably keep doing that, but it's also possible to start, as I do, from the position that B is insane.

claiming that if it is natural it requires no reason — ToothyMaw

Ah, no, not really. I'm saying people behaving in this way do not experience themselves as needing a reason to do so, do not experience the need for decision at all.

But according to an anti-natalist it does need a justification — ToothyMaw

On the one hand, I'm claiming that there is a way to construe our behavior as reasonable -- this is the claim that the person affected by our actions would want us to behave that way, because they have the same instinct we do. (Oh! Note this also implies reciprocity: they too know we have the same instinct they do, and would do the same for us. And we know that they know ..., and they know that we know ... Nice to get all that for free.)

That's an argument.

On the other hand, why? Why should it need justification? I claim that this is an assumption of the moral theorist, despite the evidence that most people do not believe these actions require justification.

Right. I'm not defending the instinct for self-preservation. But I am arguing that we can rely on all members of our species having the same instinct.

I also claim that we already do this, in rendering aid to people in peril without analyzing whether they want it or not, and in most people who decide to have children not considering it a moral issue at all unless there are specific circumstances that raise the issue --- hereditary disease, a parent's personality disorder, extreme poverty. Such circumstances make it an issue; reproducing itself needs no justification.

I think I'm comfortable claiming that this "extended instinct" is also rationally defensible, that we are perfectly right to rely on the approval of those whose future life we attempt to guarantee.

So the whole claim is there's something we can rely on, and that we generally do, and that we should, but only defeasibly, taking into account all sorts of reasons when we find ourselves in circumstances that seem to call for a decision.

Insofar as this relates to AN, it might be around here, if there's an assumption that reproducing is always a decision faced, always a moral question, always requires analysis of reasons. Of course, maybe AN only claims that something like that should be the case.

We both reject the conclusion of the anti-natalist argument.

Does that conclusion follow from the premises offered by the anti-natalist? I think, by and large, it does. It's not a complicated argument.

Perhaps they rely on some suppressed premise, one you could conceivably get them to reject. Perhaps they make an inference that is unsound in some very subtle way.

Figuring out how a paradox works is fun, but it's not necessary for rejecting its conclusion.

You could look at this thread as an "argument" for starting from different premises.

As a matter of fact, it was they who accused me of being "ignorant" (and of lying) and not for the first time — Apollodorus

1. We are, all of us, ignorant and stupid, and have to expect others here will point out where we have shown that we are. (Our patron saint is famous for proclaiming his own ignorance.) We are not, all of us, liars.

2. "He did it first" is a an excuse, not a justification.

I didn't accuse anyone of anything. I simply asked what they would call the obviously incorrect statements they keep making. Hence the question mark. — Apollodorus

Uh huh.

It's right here in the guidelines:

2) Tone matters:

A respectful and moderate tone is desirable as it's the most likely to foster serious and productive discussion. Having said that, you may express yourself strongly as long as it doesn't disrupt a thread or degenerate into flaming (which is not tolerated and will result in your post being deleted). — TPF Site Guidelines

Accusing your interlocutors of lying, no matter the grammatical form of the accusation, is not "respectful and moderate".

I respectfully ask you to reconsider whether, upon reflection, you want that accusation to remain in the record of this otherwise vigorous and valuable discussion.

compulsive mendacity — Apollodorus

I would appreciate it if you did not accuse forum members you disagree with of lying.

I can appreciate it more forcefully if need be.

Here's my first stab at it --- don't know if it's any good.

What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision.

Suppose we maintain a sort of catalog of scents we have smelled. What matters here is not quite the individual and possibly unique quality of each one, but how we can arrange them. You could imagine a sort of graph or map that would keep similar scents near each other shading off around the periphery into other groups that are more similar to each other than to these, and so on. The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences.

I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start.

And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons.

But there are at least two reasons this doesn't work at all.

First, the various sensible qualities of objects just fail to match up for us this way. Things that appear to have similar texture -- baby powder and cocoa powder -- have almost nothing else in common in their other qualities. The scent of cocoa leaves might be close to a combination of the scent of powdered cocoa and other sorts of leaves, but it looks like one and unlike the other. Failure everywhere. The way things group together, the whole pattern of relations, the map, is different for each sense.

The second reason is that the maps don't even have the same population: there are an enormous number of things we have only partial experience of. I can walk through the grocery store and see everywhere foods that I have not tasted but that I now know the look of. The population of the visual catalog explodes here with no additions to the taste catalog at all, not just at the moment anyway. Of course there's no reason to imagine we catalog absolutely everything we see in this way, but the point remains that we have to expect there are objects we took enough interest in to note their look or feel or scent, whatever, but for a large number of these we won't have a complete set of sensory impressions and thus cannot conceivably rely on the same set of similarities and differences to catalog them.

Is this at all close, you think?

I'll try to take another swing at why we might think things should match up better. I'm not sure I really get that yet, and it's the most interesting part.

That sounds specious — ToothyMaw

Excellent! Seriously, this just what I'd like to hear.

You actually do cite a reason for giving life in absence of of a good reason not to — ToothyMaw

It's true. Maybe now that I've spent a little time with the idea I'd express this differently.

should we not always act for reasons? — ToothyMaw

On the one hand, we don't. On the other, we couldn't. On the third hand, no.

I think our behavior can be described in terms of reasons or in terms of causes. If someone else talks about my reasons for acting as I did, they're at most reporting what I said; but they can refer to things I may not even be aware of, and that will sound more like a causal explanation than a rational one. (Is that obvious, or do we need examples?) We sometimes speak of ourselves in these sort of causal terms as well, but I think it's more natural, more common to speak of our reasons because we're more confident we know them. (Again, the causes driving our behavior turn out often enough to be things we're unaware of to be discomfiting. I blame Freud.) ((Also not saying we do know our reasons; I'm trying to avoid doing much psychology here.))

To connect that with the talk of "instinct" I've been throwing around: I don't think we experience our instincts as reasons for behaving the way we do; I think we experience them as needing no reason at all for what we do. (Only for the specific elements of our behavior we think of as wired in, of course.) But now I can come along, as an amateur philosopher, and I can look at the behavior people engage in without thinking, as the saying goes, and I can offer an explanation -- and in this case it's the bit about self-preservation and so on. (Another amateur philosopher might say, instead, that everyone has "bought into the Narrative" or something like that. I hope I'm more convincing.)

Procreation is admittedly the messy part of this, so I think a person in peril is an easier place to start. It seems to me we do not reason our way to offering help or trying to get help, we do not feel there's a decision to be made here at all --- not as a rule, mind you, but if say there's great risk in helping and little chance of success, then yeah you might start to think about your chances of success. More than that, I think most people would be somewhat repulsed by the idea that someone would make a rational analysis and reach a decision before helping someone else in peril.

All I'm trying to do is shine a spotlight on this element of our lives. It's not an argument for anything, just trying to understand how we really think about life and death questions. Or, rather, mostly don't think.

If you are correct in your OP and reasons for not giving life are basically the only reasons that matter, — ToothyMaw

I don't think that's what I said. My claim, in a nutshell, is that we do not, as a matter of course, need a reason to save a life or create one. Under some circumstances, there may be an obvious and powerful reason not to, and then you can begin to weigh this against that, collect your pros and cons, etc. An extraordinary prima facie reason against first gets you to this point, to it being a decision, and maybe it carries the day, maybe not, but what it will square off against is not the assumption in favor of life, but actual reasons, stuff we like about life or value or feel some obligation to, perhaps even religious obligation.

Perhaps it's still not clear what I'm saying, and if I can't somehow make it clear, then maybe this is just a lousy idea.

One oddity of my claim is that I've presented it as if our knowledge of self-preservation is itself a reason. That might be true, but it's a little weird. It is a convenient way to present the tremendous evidence that life needs no argument, no justification.

Does your pleasure actually give their life value? — ToothyMaw

This is not even in the ballpark of what I've been posting. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to understand your responses.

In the case of procreation, and with reference to khaled's remark, what particular person? And how? And when? — tim wood

Human reproduction is a fact. I would like, if possible, not to become entangled in the metaphysics of how two people become three people. At some point in this process, the two we all agree on treat the third as a person, or consider them as they would consider a person. That may happen before conception, during pregnancy, at delivery, or even at some other time. Doesn't matter to me which, for the sake of this discussion.

He makes a distinction between starting a life and continuing a life. — schopenhauer1

I think English had already enshrined the distinction.

There are different things to consider with both. — schopenhauer1

That is a true thing to say.

Not interested. There's plenty of opportunity to have related discussions on their terms. I'm offering an alternative, not a counter-argument.

The whole notion of "giving" life evaporates — tim wood

What whole notion? Did you think I'm doing science here? Anyway, I provided an alternative if colorful English fails to meet your standards of precision.

It's an idiom.

Here it's meant to cover keeping someone from dying, resuscitating them, and procreating.

If you want to be pedantic, something like "taking steps to further the goal of a particular person being alive at a future time."