Maverick Philosopher

Wolff on Anti-Natalism

Top o' the Stack.

A glimpse into the mind of a leftist activist.

A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?

Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . . my mother could not get enough of being alive, she reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that." (143) But this being was the being of a sick mortal human animal soon slated for destruction. And so the question arises: is an attitude toward life like that of Sontag excessive and idolatrous? Is it not absurd to attach an absolute value to something so transient and miserable?

There are inordinate loves in this life — of wine and travel, loot and land — and there is the inordinate love of life itself, this life, mortal life, life that ends utterly with the death of the body after a short span of years. That is the case of Susan Sontag, secularist. Convinced that this is it, she had no belief in a life beyond this mortal life.

The horrors of this world strike many as an argument against its value, and in the case of such anti-natalists as David Benatar, the horrors speak against the morality of human procreation. But the horrendous evils of this life did nothing to dampen Sontag's vital enthusiasm. "She thought the world a charnel house . . . and couldn't get enough of it. ". . . my mother simply could not get her fill of the world." (149) She thought herself unhappy . . .  and wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could." (147) And ". . . how profoundly she had been unhappy." 

She lived in and for the future because she was unhappy in the present. ". . . my sense is that she had always lived in the future . . . and yet surely the only way to even remotely come to terms with death is to live in the present." (19-20) Sontag couldn't be here now and abide in the present. She lived for a future that must, she believed, lead in a short time to her extinction.

Was Sontag's attitude toward and valuation of life reasonable? You might retort that reason doesn't come into it: the love of life is irrational! Yet Sontag was science-based and had utter contempt for the false hopes and cancer 'cures' peddled by her New Age friends. Secular to the core, religion for her was but a tissue of superstitions.  She was too rational for religion but not so rational as to see the absurdity of attaching an infinite value to her miserable life.

Rieff quotes Marguerite Duras: "I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." And then he quotes his mother: "Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the 'I'." "But she who could do so many things in her life could never do that." Rieff thinks his mother "the very incarnation of hope." (167) 

I'd say her hope was a false hope, false because baseless and irrational.  An absurd hope, absurd because an unquenchable love of life cannot be satisfied in a charnel house. It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world. It would be more reasonable to take one's unquenchable love of life as pointing to a fulfillment beyond this life. Why would we have this unquenchable love if we were not made for eternal life? This non-rhetorical question can be cast as an argument, not that it would be rationally coercive; it would, however, properly deployed, render rationally acceptable the belief in and hope for eternal life.

But Sontag couldn't bring herself to believe in eternal life. So she should have made friends with finitude and dismissed her excessive love of life as delusional and idolatrous.

One of the questions that arise is whether an atheist can be an idolater. I answer in the affirmative over at Substack.

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

Top o' the Stack. 

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.

I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.

Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online

Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005

Abstract

This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad, hence bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism. My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.

The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjective expressions of our desires and aversions; they must be (i) objectively binding standards that are (ii) objectively possible in the sense of concretely realizable. The realizability condition, however, cannot be satisfied on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.

Keywords

• anti-natalism
• procreation
• naturalism
• metaphysical naturalism
• human life

The entire issue is available here.

The View from Mount Zappfe

Substack latest.

Benatar Defended Against a Scurrilous Attack

In my latest Substack article I defend Benatar's courageous pursuit of the truth, not the results of said pursuit. 

Was Sisyphus a Bachelor?

Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him:

The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother.

There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you, unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and without result. Sisyphus was a bachelor.

(Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, New York: Schocken, 1975, p. 401.)

The View from Mount Zappfe: The Absurdity of Human Life and Intellectual Honesty

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe:

Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin to the Lord in The Book of Job, since it allows its breathing creations to be “tumbled and destroyed in a vast machinery of forces foreign to interests.” Asserts Zapffe: “The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.” The only escape from this predicament should be to discontinue the human race. Though extinction by agreement is not a terribly likely scenario, that is no more than an empirical fact of public opinion; in principle, all it would require is a global consensus to reproduce below replacement rates, and in a few generations, the likening of humankind would “not be the stars or the ocean sand, but a river dwindling to nothing in the great drought.”

So if you believe in a moral world order and the ultimate hegemony of love in the midst of all this misery and apparent senselessness, if you deny our irremediable "captivity in dying beasts," (what a great line!) then you  display a lack of intellectual honesty.  Let's think about this.

The gist of Zapffe's  position as best I can make out from the fragments I have read is that our over-developed consciousness is an evolutionary fluke that makes us miserable by uselessly generating in us the conceit that we are more than animals and somehow deserving of something better than dying like an animal after some years of struggle. Giseles: "Evolution, he [Zapffe] argues, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a contemporary of the hunter, a deer misnamed the ‘Irish elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers."  A powerful image.  The unfortunate species of deer, having evolved huge antlers for defense, cannot carry their weight and dies out in consequence.  Similarly with us.  We cannot carry the weight of the awareness born of our hypertrophic brains, an awareness that is not life-enhancing but inimical to life.

Human existence is thus absurd, without point or purpose.  For human existence is not a merely biological living, but a conscious and self-conscious living, a reflective and self-questioning living in the light of the 'knowledge' of good and evil.  Human existence is  a mode of existence in which one apperceives oneself as aware of moral distinctions and as free to choose right or wrong.  Whether or not we are really free, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free.  Having become morally reflective, man becomes self-questioning.  He hesitates, he feels guilty, his direct connection to life is weakened and in some cases destroyed.  He torments himself with questions he cannot answer.  The male beast in heat seizes the female and has his way with her.  He doesn't reflect or scruple.  'Respect for persons' does not hobble him.  The human beast, weakened by consciousness, self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, reason, objectivity, and all the rest, hesitates and moralizes -- and the female gets away.

In short, man is a sick animal weakened by an over-developed brain  who torments himself with questions about morality and ultimate meaning and then answers them by inventing consolatory fictions about God and the soul, or else about a future society in which the problem of meaning will be solved.  Either pie in the sky or pie in the future to be washed down with leftist Kool-Aid.  The truth, however, is that there is no ultimate meaning to be found either beyond the grave or this side of it.  The truth is that human existence -- which again is not a merely biological living -- is absurd.  And at some level we all know this to be the case.  We all know, deep down, that we are just over-clever land mammals without a higher origin or higher destiny.  One who will not accept this truth and who seeks to evade reality via religious and secular faiths is intellectually dishonest.  Anti-natalism follows from intellectual honesty:  it is wrong to cause the existence of more meaningless human lives.  It is unfortunate that the human race came to be in the first place; the next best thing would be for it to die out.

Many of us have entertained such a dark vision at one time or another.  But does it stand up to rational scrutiny?  Could this really be the way things are?  Or is this dark vision the nightmare of a diseased mind and heart?

There are several questions we can ask.  Here I will consider only one: Can Zapffe legitimately demand intellectual honesty given his own premises?

The Demand for Intellectual Honesty

Zapffe thinks that we ought to be intellectually honest and admit the absurdity of human existence.  This is presumably a moral ought, and indeed a categorical moral ought.  We ought to accept the truth, not because of some desirable consequence of accepting it, but because it is the truth.  But surely the following question cannot be suppressed:  What place is there in an amoral universe for objective moral oughts and objective moral demands?  No place at all.

It is we who demand that reality be faced and it is we who judge negatively those we do not face it.  We demand truthfulness and condemn willful self-deception.  But these demands of ours are absurd demands if our mental life is an absurd excrescence of matter.  The demands would in that case have no objective validity whatsoever.  The absurdist cannot, consistently with his absurdism, make moral demands and invoke objective moral oughts.   He cannot coherently say: You ought to face the truth!  You ought not deceive yourself or believe something because it is consoling or otherwise life-enhancing.  Why should I face the truth? 

"Because it is the truth."

But this is no answer, but a miserable tautology.  The truth has no claim on my attention unless it is objectively valuable and, because objectively valuable, capable of generating in me an obligation to accept it.  So why should I accept the truth?

"Because accepting the truth will help you adapt to your environment."

But this is exactly what is not the case in the present instance.  The truth I am supposed to accept, namely, that my existence is meaningless, is inimical to my happiness and well-being.  After all, numerous empirical studies have shown that conservatives, who tend to be religious, are much happier than leftists who tend to be irreligious.  These people, from the absurdist perspective, fool themselves, but from the same perspective there can be no moral objection to such self-deception.

So again, assuming that human life is absurd, why should we accept rather than evade this supposed truth?

The absurdist cannot coherently maintain that one ought to be intellectually honest, or hold that being such is better than being intellectually dishonest.  Nor can he hold that humans ought not procreate.  Indeed, he cannot even maintain that it is an objectively bad thing that human existence is absurd.

The fundamental problem here is that the absurdist cannot coherently maintain that truth is objectively valuable.  In his world there is no room for objective values and disvalues. By presupposing that truth is objectively valuable and that our intellectual integrity depends on acknowledging it, he presupposes something inconsistent with his own premises.

"You are ignoring the possibility that objective values are grounded in objective needs.  We are organisms that need truth because we need contact with reality to flourish.  This is why truth is objectively valuable."

But again this misses the crucial point that on Zapffe's absurdism, acceptance of the truth about our condition is not life-enhancing, not conducive to our flourishing.  On the contrary, evasion of this 'truth' is life-enhancing. 

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Addendum :  Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.

Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.

I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:

Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this. 

I shall now dispute it.

We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce.  The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen.  It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce.  (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)

The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce?  I answer in the negative.

Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal."  The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman.  The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*

And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control  it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.

Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman.  It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.

Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose)  is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all.  (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)

Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease -- no chance of that! -- or b) that procreation ought to cease.  For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation.  It is only for those we are specially called to it.

Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.

Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it.  This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity.  But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.

_________________________

*Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience.  As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions.  Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!

ADDENDUM (3/4/19)

Karl White responds:

To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.

 

What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."

 

Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.

 

So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.

 

BV:  Now we agree!

 

Dave Bagwill writes,

Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.

 

The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." - C.S. Lewis

 

It is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" - if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.

 

ADDENDUM (3/5/19) Karl White responds to Dave Bagwill:

 

. . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought - in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy - many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.

Wolff on Anti-Natalism: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist

In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:

I have to confess that blogging is weird.  It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn.  Anti-natalism?  Seriously?  With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?

Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion.  When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.

From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything.  One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.

Our sane, conservative appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere. 

I call this The Conservative Disadvantage.

The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle and Novák's Objection

This entry is an addendum to my Prague paper (see link below) in which I deploy a principle I call GOC, a principle that comes under withering fire in the ComBox from Dr. Lukáš Novák.  Here is my reformulation of his objection.  You will have to consult my Prague paper to see what I mean by 'really possible.' Neither of us are metaphysical naturalists, but we are assuming naturalism to be true for the sake of this discussion. The burden of my Prague paper is to show that metaphysical naturalism is not logically consistent with David Benatar's claim that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (The Human Predicament  67)

1) Necessarily, if a state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible. (GOC)

2) That no child starves is a state of affairs that ought to be. (Novak's plausible premise. It is supposed to hold whether or not naturalism is true.)

Therefore:

3) That no child starves is really possible. (1, 2)

But:

4) That no child starves is not really possible on naturalism. (Premise I share with Novak:  e.g., a child who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck washes ashore  on a deserted island where there is no food.)

5) (3) and (4) are mutually contradictory.

Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum,

6) Either (1) is false or (2) is false or (4) is false.

7) (2) and (4) are both true. (Novak assumes)

Therefore

8) (1) is false.

How might I respond? Well, I agree that (4) is true.  And I have a separate argument for (1). So I argue that, on naturalism, (2) is false.  Thus I argue:

1) Necessarily, if a state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible. (GOC)

4) That no child starves is not really possible on naturalism.

Therefore

~2) It is not the case that on naturalism no child's starving ought to be.

This is the analog of the cases of the ought-to-do in which an agent cannot do X. If an agent cannot do X, then it is not the case that he ought to do X. 

Related articles

Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?

Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?

This is the penultimate draft of the paper I will be presenting in Prague at the end of this month at the Benatar conference. Comments are welcome from those who are familiar with this subject.

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IS THE QUALITY OF LIFE OBJECTIVELY EVALUABLE ON NATURALISM?

William F. Vallicella

Abstract

This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar's anti-natalism according to which “all procreation is [morally] wrong.” (DP 12) This source is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.

The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjectively excogitated but must be objectively possible; they cannot be on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.

…................................................

David Benatar maintains that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (HP 67) The claim is that each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not, and no matter how good an individual's life is compared to that of others. This is a very strong thesis since it says more than that some human lives are objectively better than others. It says in addition that no human life is objectively good. This is one of the sources of Benatar's anti-natalism, according to which “all procreation is wrong.” (DP 12) What sorts of considerations could persuade us that no human life is objectively good?

The Allegedly Poor Quality of Human Life

In The Human Predicament Benatar begins with the minor discomforts suffered by the healthy on a daily basis: thirst, hunger, distended bladders and bowels, heat and cold, weariness, and the like. Now most of us consider these sorts of things inconsequential even if we add to them the usual run of aches and pains and annoyances. But for Benatar they are “not inconsequential” because:

A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. (HP 72)

This is a signature Benatar move: adopt some nonexistent, and indeed impossible point of view, and then, from that point of view, issue a negative value judgment about what actually exists or some feature of what actually exists. It is this sort of move that I want to examine. It strikes me as dubious because there is no species of animal relevantly similar to us that never experiences anything like the discomforts mentioned above, and it seems to me that such a species of critter is nomologically impossible. If so, why should the fact that I can imagine a form of animal life free of everyday discomforts have any tendency to show that we should take more seriously, i.e., assess more negatively, the everyday discomforts of our actual animal lives?

This opening consideration brings me to the central question of this paper: Do the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism? My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. But first we need to review further features of our predicament that cast doubt on its quality.

Besides the minor discomforts of the healthy, a second class of negative states includes those experienced regularly though not daily or by all. These include itches, allergies, colds, fevers, infections, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, and so on. And then, beyond physical sensations there are the various frustrations and irritations of life: waiting in lines, having to put up with the bad behavior of others, traffic jams, boring work, loneliness, unrequited love, betrayals, jealousies, the list goes on. But even these things are not that bad. If we stop here we don't have much of an argument for the claim that the quality of all our lives, even the lives of the luckiest, is objectively bad. If the only bads were the ones so far mentioned, then most of us well-placed individualswould say that they are outweighed by the goods.

When we get to the really horrific events and setbacks, however, Benatar's case gains in credibility. Cancer and the miseries attendant upon its treatment, clinical depression, rape and murder and the tortures of the gulag, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so much else bespeak the poor quality of human life. And don't think only of the present; consider also the horrors of the long past of humanity. Anyone who without blinkers surveys these miseries must admit that the quality of human life for many or most is very bad indeed. People who gush over how wonderful life is, what a gift it is, etc. should be made to visit insane asylums, prisons, torture chambers, and battlefields. And even if my life is good, how good can it be given that I am aware of the horrific fates of others and that it is possible that I end up where they are? But surely many are fortunate and escape the evils just enumerated and their like. So we still don't have a good argument from the quality of life for the extreme thesis that every human life is such that the objectively bad outweighs the objectively good, and that therefore all procreation is morally wrong.

Is There More Bad Than Good for All?

Benatar nevertheless insists that "There is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans." (HP 77) So no matter how well-situated you are, your life is objectively more bad than good, and if you think otherwise then your assessment of the quality of your life is biased and inaccurate. The first consideration Benatar adduces is the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) And then there is the long physical decline of the mortal coil, the frustration of desires and aspirations, and the constant striving and struggling that life involves to keep the whole thing going. We are effortlessly ignorant, "but knowledge usually requires hard work." (80) We value knowledge and longevity, but can realize these values only to a tiny extent. We are far closer to nescience than to omniscience.

Why Do We Fail to Notice the Preponderance of the Bad?

In short, the bad preponderates and for all. Why do we fail to notice the heavy preponderance of the bad in human life? Because we have accommodated to the human condition. (82) "Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard." (82) The point is that the brevity of human life, when measured against “an ideal standard” is an objective reason for a negative evaluation of the quality of our lives. And similarly with respect to knowledge, understanding, and moral goodness. We measure ourselves against the human baseline and not against an ideal standard. This is why we fail to notice that the bad outweighs the good. If the standard of knowledge is the human baseline, then this philosopher feels good about himself; but if the standard is omniscience, then he must sadly confess that he knows next to nothing. And while he fancies himself a better man than most, he owns to being an utter wretch, morally speaking, in comparison to Moral Perfection itself. In religious terms, we are all sinners in the eyes of God, and the moral differences between us shrink into insignificance relative to the divine standard of holiness. But of course no appeal to God as an existing ideal standard is possible within Benatar's naturalism.

Towards a Critique

At this juncture we need to ask again: How can anything be objectively devalued relative to an ideal standard that is not only nonexistent but also impossible of realization? Such a standard is an axiological analog of an unperformable action. If I cannot do action A, then I cannot be morally obliged to do A and morally censured if I fail to do A. An agent cannot fairly be judged morally defective for failing to perform actions that it is impossible for him to perform. Analogously, if a thing fails to meet a standard that it is impossible for it to meet, then its failure to meet it is no ground for its objective devaluation. Merely subjective complaints about the brevity of life are understandable enough, but given the nomological impossibility of achieving extremely long life spans it is no argument against the value of our short lives that they are short. Let me see if I can make this clear.

The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle: What Ought to Be Must be Possible

Pain is far worse than pleasure is good. That this is so strikes us as a very bad natural arrangement. It would be better if this were not the case. One way to express this is by saying that animals ought to feel only as much pain as is necessary to warn them of bodily damage. Or humans ought to be wired up in such away that “aversive behavior [is] mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain.” (DP 56) These are examples of an ought-to-be as opposed to an ought-to-do.1 For they make no reference to any (finite) agent who is morally obliged to bring about the state of affairs and has the ability to do so. But what ought to be must be possible. Or so I maintain. The principle may be expressed as follows:

GOC: Necessarily, if state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible and not merely imaginable or conceivable.

The principle covers both the ought-to-do and the non-agential ought-to-be. (The non-agential ought-to-be is a state of affairs that ought to be, but is not in the power of any finite agent to bring about.) If I ought to do A, then it must be really possible for A to be done in general and for me in particular to do it. And if there ought to be less animal pain in the world than there is, then it must be really possible that there be less animal pain than there is. By contraposition, if it is nomologically impossible that there be less animal pain than there is, then it is not the case that there ought to be less animal pain than there is. If so, then it cannot be objectively bad that there is as much as there is. If what I desire is impossible, then it cannot be objectively bad that what I desire is not the case.

By 'conceivable,' I mean thinkable without narrowly-logical contradiction. By 'really possible,' I mean possible in reality and not merely conceivable by a finite mind, or imaginable by a finite mind, or epistemically possible (possible for all we know/believe), or not ruled out by the law of non-contradiction (LNC). That which is possible for all we know might be impossible in reality. And that which is not ruled out by LNC merely satisfies a necessary condition for being really possible. But satisfaction of LNC is not itself a type of real possibility. If a state of affairs is merely logically possible, then it is not (really) possible at all: 'logical' in 'logical possibility' is an alienans adjective. One must not assume that for each different sense of 'possible' there is a corresponding mode of real possiblity. That would be to conflate semantics with ontology. One principle governing real possibility is as follows:

CNP: Conceivability or imaginability by finite minds does not entail real possibility.

So if we ought to live longer than we do then it must be possible that we do. If we ought to be more knowledgeable than we are then it must be possible for us to be. If we ought to be morally better than we are, or even morally perfect, these states of affairs must be possible. If we ought to have the capacity “to breathe not only in air but also in water,” (DP 57) then this too must be really possible.

Like Benatar I find it horrifying that some animals are eaten alive by other animals. Those of us who are sensitive are regularly struck by the horror and heartlessness of predation and the vast extent of unpalliated animal pain. Some of us who are theists feel our theism totter when we wonder how a loving and omniscient and all-powerful God could create such a charnel house of a world red in tooth and claw. We feel that such a world ought not be! It ought to be that all animals are herbivores, or zombies as philosophers use this term, or machines, which is what Descartes thought they were. But these oughts-to-be are normatively vacuous unless they are nomologically possible, unless the (contingent) laws of nature permit them. In the case of the usual run of aches, pains, maladies and miseries to which our mortal flesh is heir I should think that they are nomologically necessary if we are to have animal bodies at all. If this right, then it is no good argument in devaluation of the quality of our lives that we suffer in the ways Benatar reports.

Why Accept the Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle?

I grant that the principle is not self-evident, but I consider it evident. For suppose you deny it. Let S be a 'mere ought,' a state of affairs that is not, but ought to be. Then you are maintaining both that S ought to be, and that it is not the case that S is really possible. You are saying that S ought to be but cannot be. This is incoherent since it severs the link between oughtness and being (existence). What OUGHT to be, ought TO BE.

OB. Necessarily, every ought is an ought TO BE.

But if the ought in question is a 'mere ought,' one that as a matter of contingent fact is not, then the only possible link between oughtness and existence is forged by real possibility. Therefore, GOC. Nothing ought to be unless it can be.

The situation is analogous to that of the possible and the actual. The merely possible by definition is that which is possible but not actual. Although not actual, the merely possible cannot be out of all relation to the actual. The possible is by its very nature as possible, possibly actual: it is actualizable. If you tell me that talking donkeys are possible but not actualizable, then you are telling me that talking donkeys are both possible and impossible. Thus:

PPA. Necessarily, if a state of affairs S is really possible, then S is possibly actual or actualizable.

But nothing is actualizable unless there is an agent that can actualize it.

AA. Necessarily, if a state if affairs is actualizable, then there is an actual agent with the power to actualize it.

The really possible is grounded in the causal powers of actual agents. For if a state of affairs is really possible, but there is no actual agent having the power to actualize it, then it is not possibly actual, in violation of (PPA).

Would it be Better if We were Amphibious?

As far as I know, Benatar does not speak of the ought-to-be. Instead he says things like the following: “it would certainly be better for humans if they could not drown – that is, if they had the capacity to breathe not only in air but also in water.” (DP 57) Of course, he means objectively better, not just subjectively desirable. So clarity bids us supply a connecting principle: what is better than what is, ought to be.

BOB. If state of affairs S is objectively better than actual state of affairs T, then S ought to be instead of T.

Now I can run my argument. If it were better for us to be amphibious, then it ought to be that we be amphibious. (BOB). If it ought to be that we be amphibious, then it is really possibly that we be. (GOC) But it is not nomologically possible, and therefore not really possible. Therefore it is not the case that it ought to be that we be amphibious. And if it is not the case that we ought to be amphibious, then it is not objectively bad that we are not amphibious.

Metaphysical Possibility

But I hear an objection coming.

Granted, it is not nomologically possible that we breathe both air and water, but it is metaphysically possible. Why should nomological possibility exhaust real possibility? Metaphysical possibility satisfies the Generalized Ought-Implies-Can principle.

The answer is that what is really possible or not is grounded in the actual causal powers and causal liabilities of actual agents, and on metaphysical naturalism, the only agents are those found in the space-time world. No natural agent has the power to actualize a possible world in which humans breathe both air and water. God has the power but God cannot be invoked by the naturalist.

On metaphysical naturalism, the normative, if it is to be objective, can only be grounded in natural facts independent of our subjective attitudes. For on metaphysical naturalism, there can be no existing ideal standards for a species of living thing except actual perfect specimens. But any actual perfect specimen, whether leonine, human, whatever, will fall short of Benatar's demands. Even the best human specimen will be limited in longevity, knowledge, moral goodness, and the rest.

My point is that Benatar's ideal standards, without which he cannot evaluate as bad even the most fortunate of human lives, are merely excogitated or thought up by him and others: they can have no basis in physical or metaphysical reality given his naturalism. To fall short of a standard that is nowhere realized and has never been realized is not to fall short. But the point is stronger when put modally: to fall short of a standard impossible of realization is not to fall short. A lion without claws is a defective lion; he falls short of the standard, a standard that actually exists in non-defective lions. But a lion that cannot learn to speak Italian is not a defective lion since it is nomologically impossible that lions learn human languages.

One can imagine a cat that talks, and wouldn't the world be better if we could converse with our pets? But neither imaginability nor conceivablity entail real possibility, and if a state of affairs is not really possible, then no actual state of affairs can be devalued relative to it. It is not bad that cats can't talk. And it is not bad, given that human beings are just a highly-evolved species of land mammal, that they can't know everything or live to be a thousand years old. Thus it is no argument against the quality of human life that it falls short of a standard that is nowhere realized but is merely dreamed up as an empty logical or metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility.

What Benatar is doing is a bit like complaining that turkeys don't fly around ready-roasted. That is no argument in denigration of the value of turkeys because it is nomologically impossible that turkeys fly around ready-roasted. Similarly, on naturalism, it is no argument against the value of human life that human longevity maxes out at about 122 years or that our science is closer to nescience than to omniscience.

The Problem Summarized as an Aporetic Tetrad

As I see it, the underlying problem is that not all of the following propositions can be true even though each has a strong claim on our acceptance:

1. The quality of life is objectively bad for all and ought to be other than it is.
2. GOC: What ought to be is really possible.
3. If naturalism is true, then it is not really possible that human life be other than it is (in the respects that Benatar mentions including longevity, moral perfection, etc.).
4. Naturalism is true: Causal reality is exhausted by space-time and its contents.

A fairly strong case can be made for each of the limbs of our tetrad. But they can't all be true.

Three Solutions

I can think of three possible solutions to the tetrad. I'll call them Platonic-Theistic, Anti-Platonic or Nietzschean, and Hybrid. (Needless to say I am not engaged in Plato or Nietzsche exegesis.)

The Platonic-Theistic Response

On Platonism broadly construed as I am construing it the ideal standards relative to which our lives are substandard actually exist and are therefore possible. They don't exist here below in this merely apparent world of time and change, but up yonder in a true world of timeless reality. Moral perfection, for example, exists as a Platonic Form, or in Christian Platonism as God. (Thomists, by the way, are Platonists in heaven even if they are Aristotelians on Earth.) Since Moral Perfection exists, it is possible of realization; indeed it realizes itself as the paradigm case of moral perfection thereby serving as a standard for other moral agents. This allows us to say, coherently, that it is objectively the case that we humans fall short of moral perfection, and that it is objectively bad that we do so.

Clearly, we ought to be much better than we are and perhaps even perfect. “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:48) But this normative statement cannot be objectively true unless Moral Perfection exists, up yonder in a topos ouranos, if not here below. On this scheme one solves the tetrad by denying (4). One rejects naturalism while retaining the other propositions. One argues from the first three limbs taken together to the negation of the fourth. On this approach one agrees with Benatar that the quality of natural life is objectively bad and ought to be other than it is. If so, then naturalism is false.

The Anti-Platonic or Nietzschean Response

Benatar maintains that human life is objectively bad for all regardless of what a particular human feels or thinks. A Nietzschean could solve the problem by rejecting (1), by denying that life is objectively bad . (Obviously, if it is not objectively bad, then it is not objectively bad for all.) It cannot be objectively bad because the quality or value of life cannot be objectively evaluated at all, either positively or negatively. As Nietzsche writes in The Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,”(W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, Viking 1968, p. 474):

Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. . . .the value of life cannot be estimated. (Der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.) Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men -- they were not only decadents but not wise at all?

As I read Nietzsche, he is telling us that life is in every case an individual's life. There is no human life in general and no fact of the matter as to whether or not human life is objectively more bad than good. Judgments of the quality of life are all essentialy subjective, reflecting as they do nothing more than the quality of the particular life that is doing the judging. The negative evaluations of the weak and decadent are merely symptoms of their weakness and decadence. And similarly for the positive evaluations of the strong and healthy. The affirmations of the robust are not objectively true; they are merely expressions of their robustness. Life is the essentially subjective standard of all evaluation; as such it cannot be objectively evaluated. There is nothing outside of it against which to measure it and find it wanting. As a philosophizing gastroenterologist might say, “The quality of life depends on the liver.” Pessimism and anti-natalism are merely symption of physiological-cum-cultural decadence on the part of those who advance such doctrines.

The Hybrid or Mixed Response

On the third response to the problem one attempts to retain the ideal standards while rejecting their Platonic-theistic non-naturalistic foundation. This is what I see Benatar as doing. He rejects (2) and/or (3) while accepting (1) and (4). Life is objectively more bad than good and concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. And yet the ideal standards that we fail to satisfy and that render our lives objectively bad do so regardless of their being nonexistent and impossible.

Evaluating the Three Responses

The hybrid response of Benatar strikes me as incoherent. For either there is a fact of the matter concerning the value/quality of life or there isn't. If there is, then the standards of evaluation cannot be merely subjectively posited by us or mere expressions of what we like or dislike. There seem to be two possibilities. One is that the ideal standards objectively exist in nature. I am thinking of an approach like that of Philippa Foot. But this approach is of no use to Benatar. So the ideal standards must exist beyond nature. But Benatar cannot countenance this either. On the other hand, if there is no fact of the matter as to the quality/value of life, then Benatar's case is just a tissue of subjective complaints, to which the appropriate response would be : Man (or woman) up! Or Nietzsche's “Become hard!” (Zarathustra).

I would say that if there is a genuine solution, if the tetrad is not an aporia in the strict sense, we must choose between the Platonic and the Nietzschean solutions, and given the untenability of Nietzsche's doctrines, I choose the former. This allows me to agree with Benatar that it is objectively the case that the bad preponderates, and for all, and that it does so despite our optimistic illusions and denials. Human life, viewed immanently, is wretched for all and no amount of Pascalian divertissement can ultimately hide this fact from us. But precisely because this is objectively the case, naturalism is false: concrete reality is not exhausted by nature. There has to be an Unseen Order relative to which this world and we in it are objectively defective. Our lives are defective because this world is a fallen world, one in need of redemption.

How does this bear upon the question of anti-natalism? If Benatar is right and the quality of life is objectively bad for all, then anti-natalism follows. But if I am right, Benatar's view is inconsistent and does not support anti-natalism.

Conclusion

I agree with Benatar that the human condition is a predicament. We are in a state that is drastically unsatisfactory and from which there is no easy exit, and certainly no exit by individual or collective human effort. Pace Leon Trotsky, there is no 'progressive' solution to the human predicament. We are objectively wretched, all of us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Pace Nietzsche, this wretchedness is not a symptom of remediable weakness or decadence. It is an objective condition all of us are in. But precisely because it is objective, metaphysical naturalism is false. That is what I have argued.

My central thesis, then, is that Benatar's position is logically inconsistent. One cannot maintain both that life is objectively bad for all and that naturalism is true. If nothing else, I have shown that Benatar's position is not rationally compelling and that therefore it can be rationally rejected.

I myself favor the Platonic-Theistic approach sketched above. But intellectual honesty forces me to admit that it too has its problems. So my fall-back position is that the terad above is simply insoluble by us, a genuine aporia.

 

Benatar, Death, and Deprivation

This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102.

Recall the Issue

If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as escape or release, and therefore as good, or at least as not bad. This is the view I would hold if I were a mortalist. I am not in fact a mortalist: I believe in God, (libertarian) freedom, and immortality. I also hold that no one can establish with certainty the existence of these three great Objects of human concern. People who think there are proofs hereabouts are engaged in metaphysical bluster. There are good arguments for the Kantian trio, but no proofs. So I might be wrong. If I am wrong, then I welcome death as release from this world of misery, malevolence, ignorance, and strife. The Grim Reaper is, in truth, a Benign Releaser. 

Death, where is thy sting? 

Either I move on in the hope of further moral and intellectual growth on a higher plane, or I become nothing, in which case nothing can matter to me. For in the second case there won't be any 'me.' The only nasty part is the transition, the dying; for broadly Epicurean reasons I do not consider the 'state' of being dead bad. It is not bad if I survive and it is not bad if I am annihilated.

We have seen, however, that Benatar holds that not only is life bad, but being dead is also bad.   But then he faces the Epicurean challenge according to which death is nothing to us, and thus nothing bad.   The Epicurean challenge comes in different forms. I judged in our last installment that he met the challenge in its hedonist variant. A little review can't hurt. The hedonist variant can be put like this (my formulation, not Benatar's):

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state. 
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

Hedonism is dubious if not untenable.  The major is not obvious. Here is an example of my own. Consider the fact that there are painful conscious states. This is an intrinsically bad state of affairs. But it is not a conscious state. We now consider the deprivation response to the Epicurean challenge.

The Deprivation Response

On this response, death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives him of the intrinsic goods that he would otherwise have enjoyed.  This response is consistent with different theories of the intrinsic good. Interesting, a hedonist could make this response. He could hold that what makes death bad is that it deprives the dead person of the pleasures that he otherwise would have enjoyed.

I don't think the deprivation response is compelling.  Here are a couple of examples of my own.

Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20-year-old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident.  Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral.  It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else.  It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.

On the other hand, if the dead person is not, how can he be deprived of anything? Don't you have to be, to be deprived? If you are missing (nonexistent), how can you miss out? This strikes me as the crux of the matter to which we will come in later entries.

It is not quite the same for the 90-year-old.  One cannot be deprived of the impossible (as a matter of conceptual necessity), and the older one gets the closer the approach to the nomologically impossible.  (I assume that there is some age -- 150? -- at which it become nomologically impossible for what could reasonably count as a human being to continue to live.) So one cannot employ the same reasoning in the two cases.  If we say that the being dead of the 20-year-old is bad because it deprives him of future goods, we cannot give the same reason for the badness ( if it is badness) of the being dead of the 90-year-old.  Someone who lives a life that is on balance happy and healthy and productive and then dies of natural causes at 90 or 100 is arguably not deprived of anything by his being dead. 

So it is not clear to me that the deprivation response shows that being dead is bad for one who dies. 

In our next episode we discuss annihilation! Stay tuned.

David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form

This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.

Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?

Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?

Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.

But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94)  If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.

If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering.  Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)

How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born.  So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.

Benatar versus Silenus

Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.

Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.

But Is Death Bad? 

To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many.  The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying.  And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.

The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form

Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament  because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.

When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state. 
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing  is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out.  Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it.  Benatar:

It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)

The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise.  But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?

Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered.  The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself.  What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.

If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar.  I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.

But there are other arguments!  

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II

David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous <i>New Criterion</i> Attack

Anti-Natalism: Jordan Peterson versus David Benatar

A lengthy podcast. (HTs: Paolo Juarez, Paul Craddick, Karl White, et al.)

I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I have heard enough to know that Professor Peterson is out beyond his depth and no match for the super-sharp Benatar.

My ongoing series on Benatar's latest book is here.

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack

By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.

The hit piece is entitled The 'Wisdom' of Silenus. It bears no author's name and looks to be something like an editorial. The view of Silenus is easily summarized:

Best of all for humans is never to have been born; second best is to die soon.

We should first note that while Benatar subscribes to the first independent clause, he does not embrace the second. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering.  Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, 96)

Benatar outdoes Silenus in pessimism. We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way, Epicurus notwithstanding. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is a misfortune twice over: because life is bad and because being dead is bad.

My first point, then, is that the NC author wrongly assimilates Benatar to Silenus. But why should that bother someone who thinks it acceptable to criticize a book he has not read? I have no problem with someone who dismisses a book unread. My problem is with someone who publishes an article attacking a book he hasn't read.

. . . apart from professional pessimists like Nietzsche’s mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, most people are rightly repelled by this so-called wisdom of Silenus. They understand that life is an inestimable gift, the denial of which is part folly, part obscenity. We said “most people.” There are exceptions. Suicide bombers, disturbed teenagers, and of course certain grandstanding academics. Take Professor David Benatar, head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In 2006, Oxford University Press . . . published Professor Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. [. . .] “The central idea of this book,” we read on the first page of its introduction, “is that coming into existence is always a serious harm.” 

Understandably repelled, but "rightly repelled"?  How does the author know that? How does he know that "life is an inestimable gift"?  If life is a gift,then it has to have a donor, and who might that be, God?  I'm a theist myself, but surely the existence of God is not self-evident to one whose critical faculties are in good working order. If life is a gift of an all-good God, why is life so horrible for so many in so many ways? Of course there is goodness and beauty in the world as well. 

I should think that an intellectually honest person would admit that it is just not clear whether life is an "inestimable gift" or "a business that doesn't cover its costs." (Schopenhauer)  Such a person would admit that it is an open question and if he were inquisitive he would want to examine the arguments on either side. But not our NC author who is content to psychologize and ridicule and dogmatize in a manner depressingly ideological but most unphilosophical.

One of the comments on this book at Amazon.com complains that people have been rejecting the book without reading it or arguing against Professor Benatar’s position. Doubtless there is plenty to argue with, not to say ridicule, in Better Never to Have Been. One might start by meditating on what words like “harm” and “better” might mean in the world according to Benatar. It is sobering to contemplate what logical and existential armageddon had to have occurred in order for something like this book to have been written. Still, we believe people are right to take that high road and reject the book without engaging its argument. To quote Nietzsche again, you do not refute a disease: you might cure it, quarantine it, or in some cases ignore it altogether. You don’t argue with it. Reason is profitably employed only among the reasonable. (Emphasis added.)

The irony here is that the NC author is using Nietzsche of all people to clobber Benatar.  Assuming one thinks it acceptable to engage in quarantine and prohibition, is there any Western philosopher more deserving of quarantine and inclusion on the index librorum prohibitorum? Has our author ever read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ? If you do not refute a disease, you also do not invoke the product of a diseased mind to dismiss as diseased the work of some other thinker.

As for rationality, Benatar is a paragon of rationality compared to Nietzsche who rants and raves and forwards incoherent views. For example, his perspectivism about truth collapses into an elimination of truth.  

Dr. Johnson had the right idea when he employed the pedal expedient against Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of universal hallucination. Something similar should be employed in the case of Professor Benatar’s Lemmings First doctrine of human fatuousness.

This is the worst kind of pseudo-philosophical journalistic cleverness and name-dropping. It shows a thorough lack of understanding of Berkeley's idealism. Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind.  If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the good bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.

The gross facts, the Moorean facts, are not in dispute and philosophers are not in the business of denying them. I would have no trouble showing that even with respect to the characteristic theses of Zeno of Elea, F. H. Bradley, and J. E. M. McTaggart.

I do not deny that there are claims that are beneath refutation.  It is not always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof.  Some claims are refutable by "the pedal expedient." Suppose you maintain that there are no pains, that no one ever feels pain.  Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you higher up.  I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim.  Or suppose sophomore Sam  says that there is no truth.  I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.

But Berkeley is not denying the self-evident. Neither is Benatar. It is not self-evident that human life is an "inestimable gift."  That's not a datum but a theory. Maybe it's true. But maybe it isn't. Inquiry is therefore not only appropriate but necessary for those who seek rational justification for what they believe.

When James Burnham published The Suicide of the West in 1964, what he chiefly feared was the West’s lack of resolve to stand up to encroaching Communism. Quite right, too. Burnham was well endowed with what Henry James called the “imagination of disaster.” But we think that even Burnham might have been nonplussed by a Western intellectual who went beyond political capitulation to total existential surrender and whose proclamation of that gospel found a home at one of our greatest university presses. Even as we were absorbing Professor Benatar’s repackaging of Silenus, we stumbled upon an article revealing that sun-drenched, life-loving Italy had become “the least happy” country in Europe. “It’s a country,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, “that has lost a little of its will for the future.” It’s also a country that has eagerly adopted the philosophy of Professor Benatar and Ms. Vernelli: Italy’s birth rate is an astonishing 1.23, among the lowest in Europe. This is “anti-natalism” with a vengeance.

This is disgusting tabloid stuff. First of all, Benatar is not repackaging Silenus. He is saying something different from Silenus, as we have already seen, and his books are chock-full of challenging arguments and distinctions. There is a lot to be learned from his discussions. I don't find his arguments compelling, but then no arguments in philosophy for substantive theses are compelling. 

Second, our journalist subordinates the search for truth to ideology.  I don't doubt that the West is under demographic threat.  Anti-natalist doctrines, if taken seriously by enough people, will tend to weaken us overagainst the Muslims and others that aim to displace us. But the philosopher seeks the truth, whatever it is, whether it promotes our flourishing or not.

Finally, if one is going to urge the ignoring of  Benatar because of the possible consequences of his views, then one should do the same with others including Herr Nietzsche. His views were input to the destructive ideology of National Socialism. (See Nietzsche and National Socialism) And then there is Karl Marx . . . . 

See also: Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

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David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

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David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II

This is the fifth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 71-83 of Chapter  Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."

In our last installment we discussed whether Benatar is justified in his claim that the quality of life is in most cases objectively worse than we think it is. (I cast doubt on whether there is an objective fact of the matter.) But even if the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is, it does not follow that the quality of our lives is objectively bad. You will recall that Benatar holds that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67)  In other words, each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not.  To arrive at this conclusion further argument is required. To its evaluation we now turn.

The Allegedly Poor Quality of Human Life

Benatar begins with the minor discomforts suffered by the healthy on a daily basis: thirst, hunger, distended bladders and bowels, heat and cold, weariness, and the like.   Now most of us consider these sorts of things inconsequential even if we add to them humidity, mosquitoes, and the usual run of aches and pains and annoyances such as irritating noises and smells, etc.  But for Benatar they are "not inconsequential" because:

A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. (72)

This is a signature Benatar move: adopt some nonexistent, and indeed impossible point of view, and then, from that point of view, issue a negative value judgment about what actually exists or some feature of what actually exists.  There is no species of animal that never experiences anything like the discomforts mentioned above, and it seems to me that such a species of critter is nomologically impossible. Or to put the point a bit more cautiously, there is no species of animal relevantly similar to us that never experiences anything like, etc.

So why should the fact that I can imagine a form of animal life free of everyday discomforts have any tendency to show that we should take more seriously, i.e., assess more negatively, the everyday discomforts of our actual animal lives?

How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard of value? I will come back to this in a moment.

A second class of negative states includes those experienced regularly though not daily or by all.  Itches, allergies, colds, fevers, infections, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, and so on. And then, beyond physical sensations there are the various frustrations and irritations of life: waiting in lines, having to put up with the bad behavior of others, traffic jams, boring work, loneliness, unrequited love, betrayals, jealousies, the list goes on.

But even these things are not that bad.  If we stop here we don't have much of an argument for the claim that the quality of all our lives, even the lives of the luckiest, is objectively bad.

When we get to the really horrific events and setbacks, Benatar's case gains in credibility. Cancer and the miseries attendant upon its treatment, clinical depression, rape and murder and the tortures of the gulag, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so much else bespeak the poor quality of human life.  And don't think only of the present; consider also the horrors of the long past of humanity. Anyone who without blinkers surveys these miseries must admit that the quality of human life for many or most is very bad indeed.  People like Roberto Benigni who gush over how wonderful life is, what a gift it is, etc. should be made to visit insane asylums, prisons, torture chambers, and battlefields.  And even if my life is good, how good can it be given that I am aware of the horrific fates of others and that it is possible that I end up where they are?

But surely many are fortunate and escape the evils just enumerated and their like.  So we still don't have a good argument for the extreme thesis that every human life is such that the objectively bad outweighs the objectively good.

But is There More Bad Than Good?

Benatar returns an affirmative answer: "There is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans." (77) So no matter how well-situated you are, your life is objectively more bad than good, and if you think otherwise then your assessment of the quality of your life is biased and inaccurate.

The first consideration Benatar adduces is the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77)  There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) And then there is the long physical decline of the mortal coil, and the frustration of desires and aspirations, and the constant toiling and moiling, striving and struggling, that life involves to keep the whole thing going.  We are effortlessly ignorant, "but knowledge usually requires hard work." (80)  We value knowledge and longevity, but can realize these values only to a tiny extent. We are far closer to nescience than to omniscience.

Why Do We Fail to Notice the Preponderance of the Bad?

In short, the bad preponderates and for all. Why do we fail to notice the heavy preponderance of the bad in human life? Because we have accommodated to the human condition. (82) "Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard."

And similarly with respect to knowledge, understanding, and moral goodness.  We measure ourselves against the human baseline and not against an ideal standard. This is why we fail to notice that the bad outweighs the good.  If the standard of knowledge is the human baseline, then your humble blogger feels good about himself; but if the standard is omniscience, then he must sadly confess that he knows next to nothing.  And while he fancies himself a better man than most, he owns to being an utter wretch, morally speaking, in comparison to Moral Perfection itself.  In religious terms, we are all sinners in the eyes of God, and the moral differences between us shrink into insignificance relative to the divine standard of holiness. 

Towards a Critique

At this juncture we need to ask again: How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard? If God exists, then we are by comparison miserably defective in every way. But Benatar's metaphysical naturalism rules out the existence of God along with such other entities as Platonic Forms and the Plotinian One.  For on a full-throated naturalism the real is exhausted by space-time and its contents. So neither Omniscience nor Moral Perfection nor the Form of Justice, etc., exist. There is nothing supernatural whether concrete or abstract. The New Testament exhortation, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect," (Matthew 5:48) presupposes for its very sense the existence of a perfect heavenly father. If there is no such being, then the exhortation is empty. 

On metaphysical naturalism, the normative, if it is to be objective, can only be grounded in natural facts independent of our subjective attitudes. For on metaphysical naturalism, there can be no existing ideal standards for a species of living thing except actual perfect specimens. But any actual perfect specimen, whether leonine, human, whatever, will fall short of Benatar's demands.  Even the best human specimen will be limited in longevity, knowledge, moral goodness, and the rest.

My point is that Benatar's ideal standards, without which he cannot denigrate as bad even the most fortunate of human lives, are merely excogitated or thought up  by him: they can have no basis in physical or metaphysical reality given his naturalism.  It seems to me that to fall short of a standard that is nowhere realized and has never been realized is not to fall short.  But the point is stronger when put modally: to fall short of a standard impossible of realization is not to fall short.  A lion without claws is a defective lion; he falls short of the standard, a standard that actually exists in non-defective lions. But a lion that cannot learn to speak Italian is not a defective lion since it is nomologically impossible that lions learn human languages. 

One can imagine a cat that talks, and wouldn't the world be better if we could speak to our pets? But neither imaginability nor conceivablity entail real possibility, and if a state of affairs is not really possible, then no actual state of affairs can be devalued relative to it.  It is not bad that cats can't talk. And it is not bad, give that human beings are just a highly-evolved species of land mammal, that they can't know everything or live to be a thousand years old. Thus it is no argument against the quality of human life that it falls short of a standard that is nowhere realized but is merely dreamed up as an empty logical possibility.

What Benatar is doing is a bit like complaining that turkeys don't fly around ready-roasted.  That is no argument in denigration of the value of turkeys because it is nomologically impossible that turkeys fly around ready-roasted.  Similarly, it is no argument against the value of human life that human longevity maxes out at about 122 years.  

Generalizing: if it is impossible that a state of affairs S obtain, there is no actual state of affairs T such that T is devalued by S.

The objection I am making is conditional upon the acceptance of naturalism. Given that Benatar accepts naturalism, he is in no position to argue that every human life, even the best, is objectively bad.   

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David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

Life and Thought

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

C. L. writes and I respond in blue:

You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to  your overwhelming pile.

BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.

Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.

For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.

I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously. 

BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity.  See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously.  The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a  position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.

I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction.  And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible.  So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.

And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.

A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

Even a  philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced,  he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation!  That attitude is typical of a real philosopher.   If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation.  The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.

It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism.  Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)

You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers. 

BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved.  The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.

The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion. 

BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth.  Such a one was Edith Stein:

In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."

Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?

I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken.  Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective. 

Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain.  If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical.  This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae.  Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later.  To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth.  It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.

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Anti-Natalism and Demographics

I can imagine someone objecting to me as follows:

Why the careful and respectful attention to the anti-natalist writings of David Benatar and others when the West, Europe especially, is under dire existential threat from hordes of non-Western immigrants who have no intention of assimilating but aim at cultural conquest?  Anti-natalism is an expression of exhaustion and decadence.  By taking it seriously, you lend it credibility and aid and abet the decline of the West!

To answer directly: the aim of the philosopher is truth, whatever it is, whether it serves his form of life or not, whether it serves any form of life or not.

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David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part I

This is the fourth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 64-71 of Chapter  Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."

The Meaning Question and the Quality Question

These are different questions. Although for Benatar no human life has what he calls "cosmic" meaning, a life can have a high degree of what he calls "terrestrial" meaning even if its quality is low, and a life can have a low degree of terrestrial meaning even if its quality is high. The life of Nelson Mandela, for example, had a high degree of terrestrial meaning despite its low quality due to his long incarceration.  On the other hand, "The meaningless life of a jet-setting playboy millionaire might be regarded as a life of high quality (by some)." (66)

Though distinct, meaning and quality are related.  If I feel my life to be meaningful, then this feeling will enhance its quality whether or not my life really is meaningful. Conversely if I feel my life to be meaningless. Or suppose the quality of my life degrades drastically. This may cause me to question its meaning.  If one's life is of high quality, however, this is no guarantee that one will not question its meaning.

Benatar's Thesis on the Quality of Life

The common view is that while some lives are on balance bad, others are on balance good. Benatar rejects the common view holding that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67) No human life, then, is good, not even the best life.  This is a very strong thesis. Benatar is not telling us that many or most human lives are objectively bad, but that every single instance of human life is objectively bad. Some lives are worse than others but all are objectively bad. One can appreciate how this will feed into his anti-natalism.

An Obvious Objection

One might object that the sole authority on the quality of one's life is the liver of that life. As a philosophizing gastroenterologist once said, "It all depends on the liver." (Is the James attribution to the left accurate? Paging Dave Lull!) So if my life seems to me to be good, then it is good, and no one can tell me otherwise. How could one be mistaken about the quality of one's own life? If the quality of one's life is the felt quality thereof, the quality as it appears to the subject of the life, and the felt quality is good, then it would make no sense to say that the quality is in reality worse than the subject feels it to be and that one is mistaken about the quality of one's life.

If, on the other hand, one meant by the quality of a human life a wholly objective feature that it has, irrespective of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the subject or  'liver' of the life, then one could be mistaken about its quality. But obviously the quality of a life is not a wholly objective feature of it.  This is because a human life concretely understood is a lived live, a conscious and self-conscious life, a life from a point of view, a felt life, a life in which subjectivity and objectivity are blended in such a way as to be teased apart only by a process of abstraction that is arguably falsifying.

Clearly, quality of life is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective.  Not wholly subjective, because we have animal bodies that are parts of the physical world. Not wholly objective, because we are conscious and self-conscious beings.  Given this blending of subjective and objective, the question is whether there is nonetheless an objective fact of the matter as to the quality of one's life.

Response to the Objection: Judgments About Quality are Unreliable

Benatar tells that there are three psychological phenomena that impair self-assessment of well-being.

a) Optimism Bias. People tend to see themselves as happier than they really are. One reason is that people tend to suppress negative memories. Another is that people are irrationally prone to think that good things will happen to them in the future. Because of optimism bias, subjective assessments of well-being are unreliable.

b) Adaptation. Suppose something very bad happens: you lose the use of your legs. Your subjective  self-assessment of well-being drops precipitously. "In time, however, subjective assessment of quality of life will improve as one adjusts to the paralysis." (69) And this despite the fact that one's objective condition has not improved. The point, them, is that the subjective assessment of well-being does not accurately track one's objective quality of life and is therefore unreliable.

c) Comparison. Subjective assessments of well-being and quality of life involve comparisons with others. Suppose you note that you are no worse off than many others. This contributes to the illusion that the bad features of all human lives are not as bad as they actually are.  If what I just written is less than clear, it is because what Benatar wrote at the bottom of p. 69 is less than clear.

The main point, however, is clear. Benatar is claiming that for most of us our subjective assessments of well-being are inaccurate and tend toward the optimistic. Most of us fail to see that the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is.  It doesn't follow from this, however, that the quality of our lives is very bad. To show this requires a second step. I will discuss the second step in a subsequent post. What we now must decide is whether Benatar's response to the objection is tenable.

Can One Be Mistaken About the Quality of One's Life? Is There an Objective Fact of the Matter?

Benatar is telling us that for most of us the quality of our lives is objectively worse than we think it is. The objection above was that my life has the quality I feel it to have, and that about this I cannot be mistaken.  Benatar's response, however, seems merely to beg the question by assuming that one can be mistaken about the quality of one's life.  By assuming that one can be mistaken, Benatar assumes that there is some objective fact of the matter about the quality of one's life and of human life generally. Benatar assumes that each human life has an objective quality that is what it is regardless of what the agent of that life believes or feels. But that is precisely what is denied by someone who holds that the subjectively felt quality of one's life is partially constitutive of the quality of one's life.

The latter view can be defended.

One thing we can all agree on is that objective factors bear upon the quality of one's life. These are factors that don't depend on what we feel or how we think or what our attitudes are.  No matter how stoically I endure a sprained ankle, the objective fact is that the ankle is sprained. Equally true, however, is that if I were an insentient robot with a sprained ankle, there would be no point to talk of the quality of my life.  A robot, not being alive, has no quality of life. Quality of life is felt quality just as life is sentient life. Quality in this discussion has an ineliminable subjective component.  Quality of life includes both an objective and a subjective component.  This reflects the fact that I am not merely an object in the physical world, but also a subject who experiences his being an object in the physical world open to its rude impacts.

I submit that what I have just said is part of the non-negotiable data of the problem. If so, it is hard to see how one's life could have an objective quality independent of what one feels and thinks.

Imagine two physically indiscernible hikers on a hike together. Each sprains his left ankle in the same way at the same time. The physical damage is the same in both cases. But the hikers differ in their attitudes toward their injuries. The one is a philosopher who has practiced Buddhist and Stoic mind control techniques. He is adept at mastering aversion. The other is  a person who wails and complains and exaggerates the badness of the negative event.  He blames his partner for hiking too fast or for taking him on a route that is rocky and dangerous, etc.  He makes things worse for himself with his negative attitude.  Clearly, the quality of life of the second hiker is worse than that of the first at the time of the accident.  And this despite the sameness of objective conditions.

This seems to cast doubt on the idea that one could be mistaken about the quality of one's life.  I grant of course that one could be mistaken about the objective factors bearing upon the quality of one's life. In the above example, I might not realize the severity of the sprain, or I might mistake a bone fracture for a sprain. But if the quality of one's life is compounded of both objective and subjective elements,  it is hard to see how I could be subject to correction by an outsider observer. 

A Temporal Consideration

Benatar speaks of the "overall quality of one's life." Part of what he means by this is the quality of one's life as a temporal whole including past, present, and future. Whether or not a person is a primary substance in Aristotle's sense, a person's life is a process and thus a whole of temporal parts or phases. The past phases are subjectively real only in memory, and the future phases only in anticipation. The present alone counts for my happiness. From the lived first-person perspective, if I am happy now, then I am happy.  One cannot be tenselessly happy. Whether or not in general to exist = to exist now as presentists in the philosophy of time maintain, our mode of existence is such that to exist = to exist now.  

If so, one is well-advised to avoid dwelling on negative memories.  For they adversely affect the only happiness there is, the happiness of the present.  And this is what most happy and healthy people do: they either forget the past insofar as it was painful, or they learn to regard it with cool detachment, preseving its lessons, but without affect.    In this way they enhance the happiness of the present.  And similarly with regard to future ills. They hope for the best and prepare for the worse, but without worry.

If I suppress negative memories, thereby enhancing the quality of my life, does this lead to an inaccurate assessment of the quality of my life? Only if my life is a whole each phase of which is equally real. Then, to have an accurate objective view I would have to consider each phase of my life past, present, and future. I would have to adopt an atemporal perspective on a life which is essentially temporal.  But such a perspective is falsifying.  My life wells up moment by moment in a moving present: my mode of existence is not tenseless but essentially tempotal.  The present phase alone is subjectively real and relevant to happiness or well-being.

So one could say that the suppression of negative memories (which, qua memorial acts, are in the present) is just good happiness-hygiene, and not the source of an inaccurate view of the quality of my life as a whole.  There is no such thing as my life as a whole except by a falsifying abstraction from my lived life in the standing-streaming present. Hence there is no objective fact of the matter concerning my life as a whole.

I should think that the philosophizing gastroenterologist is right in the end: the quality of one's life depends on the liver and his attitudes and mental hygiene. 

David Benatar in The New Yorker

This New Yorker piece is worth reading. (HTs: Dave Lull, Karl White)  It helps clarify Benatar's anti-natalism. 

One feature of his position is that death is no solution to the human predicament.  As I would put it, the Grim Reaper is not a Benign Releaser. For while life is bad, so is death.  Not just dying, but being dead. His arguments for this in Chapter 5 of The Human Predicament are fascinating.  I will examine them in due course in my series on Benatar's book. I agree that dying is bad, but not being dead.

People sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it’s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)

One can see from this that Benatar's position is a nuanced one, and that it is a miserable psychologizing cheap-shot to protest, "Well, if life is so bad, why don't you just kill yourself." That is a perfectly stupid response for two reasons. First, if death is bad, then death is no solution. Benatar describes the human predicament as an existential vise: we are under squeeze both from life and from death.  Second,  Benatar is a  philosopher: he aims to get at the truth of the matter; he is not emoting like the cheap-shot man who is not comfortable with what Benatar believes the truth to be.

A second feature of Benatar's position is that his is not a misanthropic anti-natalism, but a compassionate anti-natalism:

For misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn’t life—it’s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a “compassionate anti-natalist.” His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.

As I read Benatar, his view is that life itself is the problem, insofar as life involves sentience.  So it would be better if all life ceased to exist, which of course includes human life. He is an anti-natalist with respect to all living things, not just humans. 

A further clarification that just now occurs to me, and one with which I think Benatar would agree, is that he is axiologically anti-natalist across the board inasmuch as he holds that it would be better if all life, insofar as it involves sentience, cease to exist. But he is ethically anti-natalist only with respect to humans for the obvious reason that only the latter can have a moral obligation not to procreate.

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More on Christian Anti-Natalism

More on Christian Anti-Natalism

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism?:

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist. Karl White responds, but without crediting the powerful objection I just raised:

Just a few thoughts: Anti-natalism as a potential component of Christianity works best within the time frame of the Gospels themselves. Most commentators agree that Jesus had a very strong eschatological element to his mission, preaching that the end of the world was nigh and people should prepare for it.

Bear in mind his words about the Apocalypse in Matthew 24:19, Luke 21:23, Mark 13:17 "How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women..."

It's notable that he was single, did not have children and disavowed family relationships: Matthew 12:48, Luke 8:21: "Who is my Mother? Who are my brothers?"

Then we have Paul in I Corinthians 7:8 recommending celibacy as the ideal. Of course if staying single is the optimum course then the inevitable outcome is a natural end to humanity.

Once the early Christians concluded the end of the world didn't seem to be happening anytime soon, and especially once the Church became co-opted withing the Empire then the inevitable compromises were reached and Christianity was obliged to become "respectable": family-friendly, conformist, "life-affirming" etc. 

Those are all good points and they do indeed point in an anti-natalist direction.  Karl's points can be extended. Think of monasticism and its anti-natalist world-flight. Kierkegaard too, though decidedly anti-monastic, is in the same line with his talk of Christianity as "hetereogeneity to the world."

As I mentioned earlier, Christianity blends probably incompatible themes. So it may be that there is no way of sorting out whether, in the end, historical Christianity is natalist or anti-natalist.

Related: Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope" and Monkishness

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Christian Anti-Natalism?

Christian Anti-Natalism?

From Karl White, esteemed cybernaut:

I found this topic from an online group interesting:

"I tried sharing and discussing my antinatalist beliefs with a Christian Anarchism group I'm a part of. My antinatalism comes directly and exclusively from my Christian faith, and I believe that any Christian who does not become an antinatalist after Bible study on the topic is an inconsistent, divided person. I wasn't met with any hostility. Most understood my stance, but likened my tone to depression (which might be the case).

Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian-Gnostic. Nietzsche was on to this when he remarked that Christianity is "Platonism for the people." (Beyond Good and Evil, preface) But if the central theme of Christianity is the Incarnation, then this implies a counter-Platonic valorization of this material world of time and change in which men are born and die. God entered this material world as a man, not as a purely spiritual redeemer. Born as a man among men, he valorized birth into a material world for all men. God is one of us, "a slob like one of us" in the words of a '90s song.

"Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."

I feel the young man's pain, but this is a sentiment that can be reasonably resisted.The Christian idea as I understand it is that by procreating, man participates in the divine creation of souls that have the capacity to share in the unending bliss of the divine life. Apart from the optional doctrine of predestination, souls are free to avoid hell. 

Admittedly, my somewhat glib answer leaves us with questions. One is this: if God wanted to manifest his super-eminent glory and  goodness, why didn't he create only angels? Why the need for this beautiful but horrifying meat grinder of a world? As Schopenhauer said, "The world is beautiful to behold, but terrible to be (a part of)." And as Kerouac asked, "How can one be clever in a meat grinder?' (Bang on the last link.)

Addendum

I wrote above  that Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian. The other is Jewish-Aristotelian. Brushing with broad strokes we can say the the first motif is other-worldly while the second is this-worldly.   

Theses motifs are pretty clearly in tension even if, in the end, they are not contradictory.

We find one indication of this tension in the Thomistic synthesis. Thomas adopts and extends Aristotle's hylomorphic constituent ontology according to which form and matter are not (primary) substances in their own right, but 'factors' or 'principles' invoked in the analysis of primary substances. Socrates, then, is a primary substance composed of substantial form and signate or designated  matter (materia signata). But the dude is also alive and conscious. So we have the formula: Anima forma corporis: the soul (life principle) is the form of the body. Soul is to body as form is to matter. This is anti-Platonic.  On the Platonic scheme a person is (identically) his soul, and his body is an accidental adjunct. If so, the death of my body is not the death of me. On the Aristotelian scheme, a person is a composite of two 'principles,' soul and body. If so, the death of my body is the death of me. Aristotelian forms are not substances in their own right. They are thus incapable of independent existence, existence apart from the thing of which they are the form.

Thomas adds a strange anti-Aristotelian twist in the case of humans: their souls, without ceasing to be forms, are capable of independent existence after the death of the human bodies of which they are the forms. For this and other reasons there is truth to the quip that Aquinas is an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven.  Thomas makes this move because he must somehow secure the identity and continuance of souls after death as they await the Resurrection of the body. But then, at least for a time, human souls are substances in their own right.  

Peter Wessel Zappfe's Anti-Natalism

Here, with some critical commentary.

UPDATE:

A reader comments:

That older post on Zapffe and his absurdism is fantastic.  You present the problem with deep sympathy and clarity.  We're kindred spirits.  I've often felt that if people just considered _seriously_ their own commitments, or our shared predicament--just to realize that it really is a predicament--their lives would be different.  It is _not_ just talk and "word games".  But it's so hard to get anyone to that point.  People take comfort in a facile unserious unreflective nihilism or absurdism.  Real philosophical thinking, with serious moral intent, offers a way out--as you argue, a rational freedom, at least, to embrace Meaning and Purpose and Value.  But it's so hard to get people to see this.  Anyway, thanks again for excellent essays like this.

Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

A scurrilous attack piece in The American Spectator actually provides a bit of support for pessimism about the human condition.  One ought to be disturbed by the inability of so many journalists to control their emotions and assess arguments in a calm and rational manner. The attack piece in question is beneath refutation and so I won't waste my time rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. My astute readers will be able to spot the mistakes and misrepresentations.

Here is what I would like you to do. First carefully read Benatar's succinct summary of his anti-natalism and think about his arguments. Then read the attack piece.  Ask yourself whether Benatar's position has been fairly presented.  If you think it has, then I pronounce you an idiot.

For the record, I am not now and never have been an anti-natalist.  I am speaking out against mindless ideologizing and for open inquiry which is under threat not only from the Left and militant Islam, but also from some on the Right.

UPDATE (10/23)

Jordan Peterson joins those who dismiss without examining.

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Maverick Philosopher: Is Life a Predicament?

Is Life a Predicament?

My old friend Joe sent me a vitriolic statement in denunciation of David Benatar, both the man and his ideas. I will quote only a relatively benign portion of Joe's rant:

I do not experience life as a predicament but as a great gift. I am surrounded by love and beauty, and even have been able to create some small additional beauty in this world, in my work as an architect and designer. I am hardly unique. Other people have created beauty as well, it is not a rare thing . . . .

Has Benatar bothered to find people like myself? If he has, he is calling us liars. If he has not, then he is lazy.

[. . .]

I could go on. I basically despise people like him.

I would guess that Joe's response is not atypical of those outside of philosophy. Except for alienated adolescents, few if any like Benatar's pessimistic and anti-natalist message. I don't like it either, and I'm in philosophy.

But liking is not the point. What alone is relevant is whether a rational case can be made for Benatar's theses.  

I admire the man's courage, the clarity of this thinking, and his resolute grappling with the undeniably awful features of human and animal life.  Do I agree with him? No. Do I have good reasons for disagreeing with him? Well, I have until the end of May 2018 to assemble and articulate them. I have been invited to read a paper in Prague at a conference on anti-natalism. 

So I accept the challenge that Benatar's work presents. That's the philosophical way. Ordinary people are content to rely on upbringing and emotion; they believe what they believe and reject what they reject on little or no evidence. They stop their ears to contrary views. They are content to live lives largely unexamined.  

But our patron, the (Platonic) Socrates, maintained that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Plato, Apology, 38a) So let us examine this life. Should it show itself, upon examination, to be not worth living, then let us accept the truth and its practical consequences. We should be open to the possibility that the examination of life, without which this life is not worth living, may disclose to us that this life is indeed not worth living.

For now I discuss just two questions. Is life a predicament? Is life a gift?

Is Life a Predicament?

Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' This seems to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (HP 94) He does does not say that real predicaments have no solutions.

Predicaments thus divide into the soluble and the insoluble. Is there a solution to the predicament of life? I say it is reasonable to hope that there is.  This is what Benatar denies. Three views, then.

Joe: The human condition is not a predicament.

Bill: The human condition is a predicament but there is, or it is reasonable to hope there is, a Way Out.

Ben: The human condition is a predicament and there is no Way Out.

Religion Implies that Life is a Predicament

My impression is that Joe has a religious sensibility. So I can appeal to him by appealing to it. According to Josiah Royce "the essential characteristic of religion" is the concern for salvation. Salvation from what? Let us listen to Royce from the Golden Age of American philosophy:

The higher religions of mankind -- religions such as Buddhism and Christianity -- have had in common this notable feature, namely, that they have been concerned with the problem of the Salvation of Man. This is sometimes expressed by saying that they are redemptive religions -- religions interested in freeing mankind from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912, p. 8)

Life is a predicament, then, because we find ourselves under the "vast and universal burden" so eloquently described by Royce, a state of affairs that is obviously deeply unsatisfactory, from which we need salvation.

It may be that no religious or secular solution is availing, but that is consistent with life's being a predicament. For it may be an insoluble predicament.

On the other hand, life here below remains a predicament even if orthodox Christianity, say, is true, and sub specie aeternitatis all is well, Christ's passion has atoned for our sins, we are back in right relation to God, heaven awaits the faithful, every tear will be dried, justice will prevail with the punishment of the evil and the rewarding of the good, and this vale of tears will give way to the Beatific Vision.  Even if all of this is true, life here below remains a predicament.

For even if, in the end, from the point of view of eternity, all is well, that is not the case here and now. Hic et nunc man is homo viator: he is on the road, a lonesome traveller through a vale of sorrows, treading the via dolorosa, behind a veil of ignorance. He does not KNOW, he can only believe.  But with belief comes doubt and doubt brings torment.  He is ignorant of the ultimate why and wherefore and temptations tempt him from every direction.  This deep ignorance is part of what makes our condition a predicament, and thus unsatisfactory -- even if all will be well in the end.

Is Life a Gift?

My old friend tells me that he experiences life as a great gift. But of course others experience it in other ways, which shows that the mere experiencing of it this way or that proves nothing. Life cannot be both a great gift and a "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One of these global perceptions must be non-veridical. 

If life is a gift, then there is a presumably an all-good Giver. No donation without a donor. But then whence all the horror?

It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Not true: there are theists who become atheists in foxholes. The imminence of death and the absurdity of the carnage around them seems to disclose to them their abandonment in an utterly godless and inhuman universe. It comes to them with the force of a revelation that their theistic beliefs were so much childish optimism.

On the other hand, there are those who when in such a Jaspersian  boundary situation have mystical experiences that seem to disclose to them the ultimate rightness of things and the reality of the Unseen Order.

Appeal to experiences, no matter how profound, does not resolve the the big questions. The tedious work of the philosophers, then, is needed to sort this all out, if it can be sorted out.

And that is what Benatar engages in whether or not one likes his conclusions. As I said, it is not a matter of liking or disliking. 

David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction

My plan is to work my way through David Benatar's latest book, The Human Predicament, Oxford UP 2017, chapter by chapter. Herewith, some notes on the Introduction, pp. 1-12. I will summarize the main points and add such critical comments as seem appropriate.

Benatar appreciates that the human condition is a predicament, an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of amelioration or escape.  For Benatar, however, our predicament is a tragic one from which there is no escape. We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death. "Life is bad, but so is death." Neither are bad in every way, but both are "in crucial respects, awful." (1-2) We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us. 

Cosmically viewed, our lives are meaningless. "We are insignificant specks in a vast universe that is utterly indifferent to us." (2) I would say that indifference is a human attitude, a deficient mode of caring. So I would put Benatar's point by saying that the universe is not even indifferent to us.   That our lives are ultimately meaningless is of course consistent with our lives being suffused with various mundane or proximate meanings and purposes.

Some might grant that our lives are cosmically or ultimately meaningless, but take this to be just an axiologically neutral fact, neither good nor bad. This is not Benatar's view. It is bad that our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane.

But not only are our lives meaningless, the quality of our lives is very poor: "even the best lives . . . ultimately contain more bad than good."(2)  That's a very strong statement. It implies that no matter how good your life is, it is more bad than good.

Is death then a welcome release from our nasty predicament? No! Death too is bad, pace Epicurus and his followers: ". . . death is the second jaw of our existential vise." (2) It is bad that we will all be annihilated in the near future.  I take him to mean not just that dying is bad, but being dead is  as well, even if there is no one who is aware of one's being dead. Life is bad and death is bad and the squeeze is on.

Benatar is a resolute mortalist. There is no immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body. Nor is there any hope for transhumanist life extension here below.

Suicide, although sometimes both rational and morally permissible, is not a satifactory solution to our predicament because of its negative effects on others and because it issues in annihilation. (3)

Overall, Benatar is a pessimist, but he is not pessimistic about everything. For example, convinced as he is that there is no immortality, he considers it optimistic to hold that immortality would be bad (because it would be boring). It is good that there is no immortality given that it would endlessly boring.   So even though annihilation is bad, immortality would be worse.  (4-5) On this point he is optimistic!

There are no good reasons in support of the standard optimistic answers to life's big questions. To the extent that optimistic answers are actually believed, they are believed because people want to believe them.  Those who cannot bring themselves to accept the optimistic answers and yet will not face reality are left in a state of bewilderment. (7)

For Benatar, life's big questions have answers knowable to us here and now. (One could hold that the big questions have answers, but not answers accessible to us in our present state. Or one could hold that there are answers that no one will ever know.)  Benatar is not a solubility-skeptic: the problem of the meaning and value of human life is not an aporia as I tend to think.  Nor is he a mysterian. "There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror." (7)

Our condition is a predicament, Benatar insists, and none of us can avoid the horror of it. Palliation is possible, but not a cure. 

Benatar concludes the Introduction by considering whether he is justified in depriving people of their optimistic delusions. He concludes that he is justified in the relatively mild, non-crusading, way he has to chosen to do so: by writing books. For optimistic delusions, he thinks, are not innocuous, and are justifiably combated.

For one thing, the delusions ". . . facilitate a reproduction of the human predicament by creating new generations that are thereby thrust into the predicament." (10) A second reason is that putatively "redemptive ideologies," whether religious or secular, often "cause a great deal of gratuitous suffering." (10) 

Epitaph on a Pessimist

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,

    I've lived without a dame

From youth-time on: and would to God

    My dad had done the same.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, ed. Grigson, 1977, p. 186.

Anti-Natalism, Zombies, and the Role of Consciousness in the Question of the Value of Life

Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). This is an axiological thesis. From it follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)

Procreation is obviously a biological process. But in the case of humans, procreation is more than a merely biological process in that it leads to the production of extremely sensitive conscious and self-conscious individuals. Human procreation is an objective process in the world that leads to the production of subjects of experience for whom there is a world! If you don't find that astonishing, you are no philosopher. For as Plato taught, wonder is the feeling of the philosopher.

A Thought Experiment

Suppose one could keep (human) procreation going but that the offspring were no longer conscious. The offspring would react to stimuli and initiate chains of causation but have no conscious experiences whatsoever. It is conceivable that all biological processes including all the ones involved in procreation transpire 'in the dark.'

The idea is that at some point procreation becomes the procreation of genetically human zombies, as philosophers use the term 'zombie.' This is a learned usage, not a vulgar one.

A human zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.) 

When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)  I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie.  But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion.  His denial of qualia is not evidence.  It might just be evidence of his being a sophist.  More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier. 

Zombies are surely conceivable whether or not they are possible. (We are conceiving them right now.) But if they are conceivable then it is conceivable that, starting tomorrow, human procreation proceed as usual except 'in the dark.' It is conceivable that future human offspring lack all  sentience and higher forms of consciousness.

On this scenario it might still be the case that it would have been better had we non-zombies never have been born, but it would not be the case that a convincing quality-of-life case could be made that "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). For without consciousness, human life is devoid of felt quality.  No consciousness, no qualia. Without consciousness there is no suffering mental or physical or spiritual. And without these negatives, what becomes of the anti-natalist argument?

What my thought experiment seems to show is that what is problematic about human life is the consciousness associated with it, not life itself viewed objectively and biologically. If so, it is not the value of life that we question, but the value of consciousness.  So the problem is not that we were born (or conceived) but that we became conscious.

The Original Calamity?

If a philosopher can't speculate, who the hell can speculate? Could it be that the Original Calamity, the Fall of Man if you will, repeated in each one of us is the arisal of consciousness? Or perhaps the calamity is not the arisal of consciousness from the slime and stench of life, bottom up, but the entanglement of consciousness in the flesh, top down. Either way, embodied consciousness is the problem. This is a thought I had when I was 20 or so but lacked the 'chops' to articulate.  

The question now shifts to why the value of consciousness is in doubt.  Presumably consciousness is bad because of its objects and contents, not because it itself is bad.  Being conscious, as such, is presumably good. But consciousness -- this side of enlightenment --  is never without an (intentional) object or a (non-intentional) content. 

If consciousness were a pure beholding, a pure spectatorship, then perhaps consciousness would be an unalloyed good. Schopenhauer says that the world is beautiful to behold but terrible to be a part of. Things wouldn't be so bad if the beholding were transcendental to the world. But it is not: it is incarnated in the world.  Every beholding is a situated beholding. I am not a merely a transcendental spectator; I am also a bloody bit of nature's charnel house.  I am a prey to wolves human and non-human with all the mental and physical pain they bring, and prey to doubts about the sense and value of life with all the spiritual suffering they bring.

A Way Out?

If consciousness is contingently entangled in life, then there way be a way out, a path to salvation. Maybe there's a way to get clear of the samsaric crapstorm and step off of:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  ( Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Here is an anti-natalist passage from Kerouac's Buddhist period. From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything -- nature is bestial -- desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing -- I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. -- Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

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Prudential Anti-Natalism

Karl White writes:

If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging someone else into said dilemma kicking and screaming (literally), while we attempt to work out our own salvation or lack thereof. That's why I subscribe to a form of prudential antinatalism. This differs from the kind that says life is and always a negative thing, as for all I know there could be a pay-off at the end of it currently indiscernible to humans, but for want of indisputable proof then I cannot see any reason to expose someone else to the dilemma of life, or at least I personally cannot do it, given I cannot find any ultimate meaning or justification for my own existence, at this present time at least.

This entry will attempt to articulate and develop Mr. White's suggestion.

What do we know? We do not know whether human life has an overall positive or negative value. It could have a positive value despite appearances to the contrary. For example, it could be that after our sojourn through this vale of tears, the veil of ignorance will be lifted and we will find ourselves in a realm of peace and light in which every tear is dried and the sense of things is revealed. It could be that the vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making in which some of us  'earn our wings.'  But this is an article of faith, not of knowledge. We don't know whether there are further facts, hidden from us at present, in whose light the world as we experience it here and now will come to be seen as overall good.

What we do know is that the problem of the value of human existence is a genuine problem and thus one that needs solving.  It needs solving presumably because it is not merely a theoretical problem in axiology but a problem with implications for practical ethics.  In particular: Is procreation morally permissible or not?

But does it follow from what we know that anti-natalism is the prudential course?  Karl answers in the affirmative.  I don't know whether Karl is an extreme or a moderate anti-natalist, but I don't think it matters for the present discussion. Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13) from which axiological thesis there follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)  A moderate anti-natalist could hold that most procreation is wrong.

One assumption that Karl seems to be making is that, absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative.  This assumption I find very plausible.  But note that it rests on a still deeper assumption, namely, that the value of life can be objectively assessed or evaluated.  This assumption is not obviously correct, but it too is plausible.  Here, then, is the argument. It is a kind of 'moral safety' argument. To be on the morally safe side, we ought not procreate.

Argument for Prudential Anti-Natalism

1) There is an objective 'fact of the matter' as to whether or not human life is on balance of positive or negative value.

2) Absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative, that is, the harms of existence outweigh the benefits of existence.

3) We do not know that the value of life for most humans is not on balance negative, i.e., that the harms of existence are compensated by the benefits of existence.

4) We do know that bringing children into the world will expose them to physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, and that all of those so exposed will also actually suffer the harms of existence.

5) It is morally wrong to subject people to harms when it is not known that the harms will be compensated by a greater good.

6) To have children is to subject them to such harms. Therefore:

7) It is morally wrong to procreate.

Now you have heard me say that there are no compelling arguments in philosophy, and this is certainly no exception.  I'll mention two possible lines of rebuttal.

a) Reject premise (1) along Nietzschean lines as explained in my most recent Nietzsche post.  It might be urged that any negative judgment on the value of life merely reflects the lack of vitality of the one rendering the judgment.  No healthy specimen takes suffering as an argument against against living and procreating!  I do not endorse this view, but I feel its pull. Related: Nietzsche and National Socialism.

b) Reject (3). There are those who, standing fast in their faith, would claim to know by a sort of cognitio fidei that children and life itself are divine gifts, and that in the end all the horrors and injustices of this life will be made good. 

Zapffe Must be Popular!

This weblog averages about 1,350 page views per day.  But yesterday it snagged 10,695 views, and now at 6:20 AM local time it has already racked up 3,200 or so.  What explains this?  Reddit got hold of my Zappfe post, scroll down a bit, and that must be driving the surge.

Perhaps we philosophers need to pay more attention to anti-natalism as a cultural phenomenon and as a component in der Untergang des Abendlandes.

We are losing the will to perpetuate our civilization and its values.  Christians in the Middle East are being slaughtered and their churches pulverized by Muslim savages.  So what did Pope Francis say in response to Donald Trump's call for a wall along the southern U.S. border?  We don't need to build walls, but bridges.  Francis the fool is one dope of a pope.

Evangelicals understand this, though they are too polite and politic to put it the way I just did.  This is why, mirabile dictu, so many of them support Trump, the nasty sybarite of Gotham who builds casinos to the greater glory of Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Lady Luck.

Point of logic:  'Muslim savages' does not imply that all Muslims are savages.  Or do you think that 'deciduous trees' implies that all trees are deciduous?

UPDATE 2/27:  Traffic settled down a bit yesterday with a mere 4,509 page views.  It should get back to normal over the next few days.  As every conservative appreciates, the 'regard' of fellow mortals is a decidedly mixed blessing.  I am quite happy to bump along at 1, 500 page views per day.  Obscurity is bliss and he who craves fame is a fool.  Fame is conferred by others and the quality of these others is a good measure of the value of fame.

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The View from Mount Zapffe: The Absurdity of Life and Intellectual Honesty

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe:

Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin to the Lord in The Book of Job, since it allows its breathing creations to be “tumbled and destroyed in a vast machinery of forces foreign to interests.” Asserts Zapffe: “The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.” The only escape from this predicament should be to discontinue the human race. Though extinction by agreement is not a terribly likely scenario, that is no more than an empirical fact of public opinion; in principle, all it would require is a global consensus to reproduce below replacement rates, and in a few generations, the likening of humankind would “not be the stars or the ocean sand, but a river dwindling to nothing in the great drought.”

So if you believe in a moral world order and the ultimate hegemony of love in the midst of all this misery and apparent senselessness, if you deny our irremediable "captivity in dying beasts," (what a great line!) then you  display a lack of intellectual honesty.  Let's think about this.

The gist of Zapffe's s position as best I can make out from the fragments I have read is that our over-developed consciousness is an evolutionary fluke that makes us miserable by uselessly generating in us the conceit that we are more than animals and somehow deserving of something better than dying like an animal after some years of struggle. Giseles: "Evolution, he [Zapffe] argues, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a contemporary of the hunter, a deer misnamed the ‘Irish elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers."  A powerful image.  The unfortunate species of deer, having evolved huge antlers for defense, cannot carry their weight and dies out in consequence.  Similarly with us.  We cannot carry the weight of the awareness born of our hypertrophic brains, an awareness that is not life-enhancing but inimical to life.

Human existence is thus absurd, without point or purpose.  For human existence is not a merely biological living, but a conscious and self-conscious living, a reflective and self-questioning living in the light of the 'knowledge' of good and evil.  Human existence is  a mode of existence in which one apperceives oneself as aware of moral distinctions and as free to choose right or wrong.  Whether or not we are really free, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free.  Having become morally reflective, man becomes self-questioning.  He hesitates, he feels guilty, his direct connection to life is weakened and in some cases destroyed.  He torments himself with questions he cannot answer.  The male beast in heat seizes the female and has his way with her.  He doesn't reflect or scruple.  'Respect for persons' does not hobble him.  The human beast, weakened by consciousness, self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, reason, objectivity, and all the rest, hesitates and moralizes -- and the female gets away.

In short, man is a sick animal weakened by an over-developed brain  who torments himself with questions about morality and ultimate meaning and then answers them by inventing consolatory fictions about God and the soul, or else about a future society in which the problem of meaning will be solved.  Either pie in the sky or pie in the future to be washed down with leftist Kool-Aid.  The truth, however, is that there is no ultimate meaning to be found either beyond the grave or this side of it.  The truth is that human existence -- which again is not a merely biological living -- is absurd.  And at some level we all know this to be the case.  We all know, deep down, that we are just over-clever land mammals without a higher origin or higher destiny.  One who will not accept this truth and who seeks to evade reality via religious and secular faiths is intellectually dishonest.  Antinatalism follows from intellectual honesty:  it is wrong to cause the existence of more meaningless human lives.  It is unfortunate that the human race came to be in the first place; the next best thing would be for it to die out.

Many of us have entertained such a dark vision at one time or another.  But does it stand up to rational scrutiny?  Could this really be the way things are?  Or is this dark vision the nightmare of a diseased mind and heart?

There are several questions we can ask.  Here I will consider only one: Can Zapffe legitimately demand intellectual honesty given his own premises?

The Demand for Intellectual Honesty

Zapffe thinks we ought to be intellectually honest and admit the absurdity of human existence.  This is presumably a moral ought, and indeed a categorical moral ought.  We ought to accept the truth, not because of some desirable consequence of accepting it, but because it is the truth.  But surely the following question cannot be suppressed:  What place is there in an amoral universe for objective moral oughts and objective moral demands?  No place at all.

It is we who demand that reality be faced and it is we who judge negatively those we do not face it.  We demand truthfulness and condemn willful self-deception.  But these demands of ours are absurd demands if our mental life is an absurd excrescence of matter.  They would in that case have no objective validity whatsoever.  The absurdist cannot, consistently with his absurdism, make moral demands and invoke objective moral oughts.   He cannot coherently say: You ought to face the truth!  You ought not deceive yourself or believe something because it is consoling or otherwise life-enhancing.  Why should I face the truth? 

"Because it is the truth."

But this is no answer, but a miserable tautology.  The truth has no claim on my attention unless it is objectively valuable and, because objectively valuable, capable of generating in me an obligation to accept it.  So why should I accept the truth?

"Because accepting the truth will help you adapt to your environment."

But this is exactly what is not the case in the present instance.  The truth I am supposed to accept, namely, that my existence is meaningless, is inimical to my happiness and well-being.  After all, numerous empirical studies have shown that conservatives, who tend to be religious, are much happier than leftists who tend to be irreligious.  These people, from the absurdist perspective, fool themselves, but from the same perspective there can be no moral objection to such self-deception.

So again, assuming that human life is absurd, why should we accept rather than evade this supposed truth?

The absurdist cannot coherently maintain that one ought to be intellectually honest, or hold that being such is better than being intellectually dishonest.  Nor can he hold that humans ought not procreate.  Indeed, he cannot even maintain that it is an objectively bad thing that human existence is absurd.

The fundamental problem here is that the absurdist cannot coherently maintain that truth is objectively valuable.  In his world there is no room for objective values and disvalues. By presupposing that truth is objectively valuable and that our intellectual integrity depends on acknowledging it, he presupposes something inconsistent with his own premises.

"You are ignoring the possibility that objective values are grounded in objective needs.  We are organisms that need truth because we need contact with reality to flourish.  This is why truth is objectively valuable."

But again this misses the crucial point that on Zapffe's absurdism, acceptance of the truth about our condition is not life-enhancing, not conducive to our flourishing.  On the contrary, evasion of this 'truth' is life-enhancing.

...............................

Addendum (2/25):  Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.

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"Pretty girls make graves." (Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958)

Admittedly, there is a certain tension between the quotation and the stone inscription.

 

Merton Quotes Evdokimov

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 308:

Evdokimov demands a virile ascesis, not simply gentlemanly retirement into leisure.  The monk does not build his monastic city 'on the margin' of the world, but instead of it.

[. . .]

He frankly regards monastic chastity as a refusal to procreate and to continue the existence of a society that has reached its term . . . .

These quotations are relevant to the theme of Christian anti-natalism, a topic to which I hope to return.  But first I need to lay my hands on Evdokimov's books.

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A tip of the hat to Karl White for bringing to our attention a 2012 issue of  South African Journal of Philosophy devoted entirely to the above-captioned topic.  Free online access!

A Problem of Evil for Atheists

Suppose you are an atheist who considers life to be worth living.  You deny God, but affirm life, this life, as it is, here and now.  Suppose you take the fact of evil to tell against the existence of God.  Do you also take the fact of evil to tell against the affirmability of life?  If not, why not?

In this entry I will explain what I take to be one sort of problem of evil for atheists, or rather, for naturalists. (One can be an atheist without being a naturalist, but not vice versa.)  For present purposes, an atheist is one who affirms the nonexistence of God, as God is traditionally conceived, and a naturalist is one who affirms that reality, with the possible exception of so-called abstract objects, is exhausted by space-time-matter.  Naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism.

Are the following propositions logically consistent?

a. Life is affirmable.

b. Naturalism is true.

c. Evil objectively exists.

1. What it means for life to be affirmable

To claim that life is affirmable is to  claim that it is reasonable to say 'yes' to it.  Life is affirmed by the vast majority blindly and instinctually, and so can be; in this trivial sense life is of course affirmable.  But I mean 'affirmable' in a non-trivial sense as signifying that life is worthy of affirmation.  This is of course not obvious.  Otherwise there wouldn't be pessimists and anti-natalists.  Let me make this a bit more precise.

To claim that life is affirmable is to maintain that human life has an overall positive value that outweighs the inevitable negatives.  Note the restriction to human life.  I am glad that there are cats, but I am in no position to affirm feline life in the relevant sense of 'affirm': I am not a cat and so I do not know what it is like 'from the inside' to be a cat. 

'Human life' is not to be understood biologically but existentially. What we are concerned with is not an  objective phenomenon in nature, but life as lived and experienced from a subjective center.  So the question is not whether it is better or worse for the physical universe to contain specimens of a certain zoological species, the species h. sapiens.  The question is whether it is on balance a good thing that there is human life as it is subjectively lived from a personal center toward a meaning- and value-laden world of persons and things.  The question is whether it is on balance a good thing that there is human subjectivity.

Now it may be that over the course of a particular human life a preponderance of positive noninstrumental good is realized.  But that is consistent with human life in general not being worth living.  If my life turns out to have been worth living, if I can reasonably affirm it on my death bed and pronounce it good on balance, it doesn't follow that human life in general is worth living.  Let us agree that a particular human life is worth living if, over the course of that life, a preponderance of positive noninstrumental value is realized.  To say that positive value preponderates is to say that it outweighs the negative.

The question, then, is whether human life, human subjectivity, in general is affirmable.  To make the question a bit more concrete, and to bring home the point that the question does not concern oneself alone, consider the question of procreation.  To procreate consciously and thoughtfully is to affirm life other than one's own.

Suppose that one's life has been on balance good up to the point of one's procreating.  Should one be party to the coming-into-existence of additional centers of consciousness and self-consciousness when there is no guarantee that their lives will be on balance good, and some chance that their lives will be on balance horrendous?  Would you have children if you knew that they would be tortured to death in the equivalent of Auschwitz?  Note that if a couple has children, then they are directly responsible for the existence of those children; but they are also indirectly responsible in ever diminishing measure for the existence of grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc.  If life is not affirmable, then it is arguable that it is morally wrong to have children, life being a mistake that ought not be perpetuated.  If on the other hand life is affirmable, then, while there might be particular reasons for some people not to have children, there would be no general reason rooted in the nature of things.

2.  Is life affirmable in the face of evil?

More precisely:  Is life affirmable by naturalists given the fact of evil?  There is a problem here if you grant, as I hope you will for the sake of this discussion at least, that natural and moral evils are objective realities.  Thus evil exists and it exists objectively.  It is not an illusion, nor is it subjective.

The question could be put as follows:  Is it rational to ascribe to human life in general an overall positive value, a value sufficient to justify procreation,  given that (i) evil exists and that (ii) naturalism is true? 

If naturalism is true, then there are unredeemed evils.  Let us say that an unredeemed evil is an evil that does not serve a greater good for the person who experiences the evil and is not compensated for or made good in this life or in an afterlife.  Thus the countless lives of those who were born and who died in slavery were lives containing unredeemed evils. In many of these countless cases, there were not only unredeemed evils, but a preponderance of unredeemed evil.  Whatever these sufferers believed, their lives were not worth living.  It would have been better had they never been born.  If naturalism is true, then those sufferers who believed that they would be compensated in the hereafter were just wrong.  Their false beliefs helped them get through their worthless existence but did nothing to make it worthwhile.

Here is an argument from evil for the nonaffirmability of life:

1. Human life in general is affirmable, i.e., possesses an overall positive value sufficient to justify procreation, only if the majority of human subjects led, lead, and will lead, lives which are on balance good.

2. It is not the case (or it is highly improbably that) that the majority of human subjects led, lead, or will lead such lives:  the majority of lives are lives in which unredeemed evil predominates.

Therefore

3. Human life in general is not affirmable, i.e., does not (or probably does not) possess an overall positive value sufficient to justify procreation.

It seems to me that a naturalist who squarely and in full awareness faces the fact of evil ought to be a pessimist and an anti-natalist.  If he is not, then I suspect him of being in denial or else of believing in some progressive 'pie in the future.'   But even if, per impossibile, some progressive utopia were attained in the distant future, it would not redeem the countless injustices of the past. 

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Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such.  Here is the part I want to focus on.  The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle.  I've ommitted the responses of the Woody Harrelson character.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in  evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Sorting through this crap is as painful as reading the typical student paper.  Where does one start with such a farrago of Unsinn?  But here goes. The main points made above are these:

1. The emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness in human animals is an accident, a fluke of evolution.

2. We are each under the illusion of having, or being, a self when in fact there are no selves.

3. We have been programmed by nature to suffer from this illusion.

4. The honorable thing to do is to deny our programming, refuse to procreate, and embrace our extinction as a species.

Each of these theses is either extremely dubious or demonstrably incoherent, taken singly, not to mention the dubiousness of the 'is'-'ought' inference from (3) to (4).  But in this entry I will address (2) alone.

'There are no selves' is what our anti-natalist means when he say that everybody is nobody.  For it is a Moorean fact, undeniable even by our anti-natalist, that every living human body is some living human body or other.  He is not denying that plain fact but that these living human bodies are selves. 

Performative Inconsistency

Now 'There are no selves,' if asserted  by a being  who understands what he says and means what he says, is asserted by a conscious and self-conscious being.  But that is just what a self is.  A self is a conscious being capable of expressing explicit self-consciousness by the use of the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.'  Therefore, a self that asserts that there are no selves falls into performative inconsistency.  The very act or performance of asserting that there are no selves or that one is not a self falsifies the content of the assertion.  For that performance is a performance of a self.

The claim that there are no selves is therefore self-refuting.

Assertion is a speech act.  But we get the same result if one merely thinks the thought that one is not a self without expressing it via an assertive utterance.  If I think the thought *I am not a self,* then that thought is falsified by the act of thinking it since the act is the act of a self.

The point can also be made as follows.  If there are no selves, then I am not a self.  But if I am not a self, then I do not exist.  Perhaps some living human body exists, but that body cannot be my body if I do not exist.  What makes this body my body is its connection with me.  So I must exist for some body to be my body.  My body is my body and not my body's body.  So I am not identical to my  body.  I have a body.   'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. If I exist, then I am distinct from my body and from any body.

So if I am not a self, then I do not exist.  But the thought that I do not exist is unthinkable as true.  Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if 'I' picks out merely a momentary self.  (I am not committed by this line of reasoning to a substantial self that remains numerically the same over time.)  So we have performative inconsistency. 

This reasoning does not show that I am a necessary being, or that I have or am an immortal soul, or even that I am a res cogitans in Descartes' sense.  What it shows is that the self cannot be an illusion.  It shows that anyone who carefully considers whether or not he is a self can attain the certain insight that he is at least as long as he is thinking these thoughts. 

Soviel Schein, soviel Sein

There is another way of looking at it.  If each of us is under the illusion of having a self or being a self, then who is being fooled?  To whom does this false seeming appear?  There cannot be illusions in a world without conscious beings.  An illusion by its very nature is an illusion to consciousness.  So if consciousness is an illusion, then it is not an illusion.  The same holds for the self.  If the self is an illusion, then the self is not an illusion.

There cannot be Schein (illusion) without Sein (being).  "So much seeming, so much being."

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Pessimism and Anti-Natalism in True Detective

True Detective is a new HBO series getting rave reviews.  This bit, I am told by Karl White from whom I first learned about the series,  is from the first episode.  It's good.  I'll leave it to you to sort through the sophistry of Rust's spiel.

Here is some  TD dialog about religion.  I'll say this about it: it is well done and stimulates thought.

The scriptwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, is a very interesting cat  who abandoned a tenure-track university gig to try his hand at writing for TV.  It takes balls to give up security for a long shot.  Especially when you have a kid. At that point nothing-ventured-nothing-gained risk-taking begins to taper off into irresponsibility.  If I had had young children I wouldn't have quit my tenured post. Conservatives are cautious and responsible, fiscally and otherwise. 

Pizzolatto earns a place in my Mavericks category.  Bio and interview here.    Excerpt:

Do you think part of the reason why television had so much appeal for you was that you knew you’d be able to reach an audience? Everyone has a TV in the living room. Not everyone reads literary novels.

That’s a great point. I think, with myself, growing up in rural Louisiana but having TV—TV jumps all these class boundaries. For a kid to even have a disposition to be willing to sit down and read literary fiction and not regard it as a waste of time—that requires a certain amount of cultural influence and education.  But TV sneaks in, no matter what. I really like that. And the idea that you could put your heart and soul and every bit of yourself into it, the same way you could a novel, and stay there and make sure it was done right? That was all appealing.

That reminds me of my old entry, Books and Reality and Books, which begins:

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

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Kierkegaard: Some Extracts with an Anti-Natalist Flavor

My 1995-1996 Turkish Journal contains quotations from, and commentary on, some of S.K.'s journal entries.  Unfortunately, I don't have complete bibliographical data, just the entry numbers.  What sent me back to my Turkish Journal was London Karl's request that I dig up Kierkegaardian passages that smack of anti-natalism.

S. K. on Women, #4998.  ". . . there is a moment in her life when she deceptively appears to be infinitude herself -- and that is when man is captured.  And as a wife she is quite simply -- finitude."

S. K. seems to be alluding to the Platonic-Augustinian idea that woman (man too in Plato) can be either a deceptive appearance or a sort of reminder of Transcendence, a waker-upper from our Cave-like amnesia. (Anamnesis doctrine).

S. K. #5000.  ". . . Christianity and all more profound views of life  take a dim view of the relation to the opposite sex, for they assume that getting involved with the other sex is the demotion of man."

A problem for S. K.  If the human race ought to come to an end, if procreation and propagation of the species is better not engaged in, then where will the souls come from to share in the divine life?  Or does S. K. believe in the pre-existence of souls?  Cf. #3970 where S. K. seems to endorse pre-existence.

Again the tension of Platonic-Gnostic and Jewish-Aristotelian elements in Christianity.

But, given problems like these, would it not be absurd to give up the quest for metaphysical truth and sink into a mundane existence?

S. K. #5003.  To marry a woman is to be finitized and mediocratized by her. [A paraphrase, apparently, not a quotation.]

S. K. #5005.  "Man was structured for eternity; woman leads him into a side remark."

S. K. 5006. "An eminently masculine intellectuality joined to a feminine submissiveness -- that is the truly religious." 

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