Worthwhile post. I wrote on some similar topics to this from an existential point of view and I come to a similar conclusion to you. Although I would say importantly that human nature has to be relevant to morality because humans have to be assumed to start doing morality. That's important to realize and it means there can never really be an anti-human ethic because ethics can only come from humans, who exactly is total annihilation good to when there are no judges left to judge. The argument that we are just coping about life being good is insane, what objective standard are you measuring life by, the way rocks judge us?
I don't agree with it, but I think this is Benatar's view:
Reasoning about procreation, the absence of pain (if we create nobody) is good and the absence of pleasure is not bad, whereas the presence of pain (if we create somebody) is bad and the presence of pleasure is good. Since creating nobody is better pain-wise and on a par pleasure-wise, we should never create new people. It would wrong them to do so.
For lives that do--wrongly--get started, we actually get trapped by the relationships we form, because if we rationally decided to end our lives, we would cause tons of suffering.
A lot of this stems from an overly expansive reading of suffering into day-to-day life where it doesn't exist, in my opinion. He finds it in places it isn't there.
Yes, I'm familiar with this argument. I wasn't really meaning to address it because it just relies on the arbitrary utilitarian premises. I would take this argument moreso as being against bentham's bulldog's position than mine. I also think that this is ridiculous and even more arbitrary than the standard claim of "feeling good is good" because it is not at all necessary that the absence of pain should we weighed greater than the absence of pleasure on the philosiphic calculus. This is really an emotional argument imo because is you rationally considered whether you would want to go from -5 utiles to 0 or from 0 utiles to 5, this should be an equal choice (both ways gaining +5). Unless we further complicate our nonsense with some diminishing return graph that is also an arbitrary assumption.
I share the intuition that human suffering is bad, but I think people in Benatar's camp are reductionist suffering-utilitarians, so utils just measure how well you're avoiding pain, sorrow, and various bad things. I don't think they want to weigh pleasure/flourishing/goodness at all, which clashes with other intuitions I have
Worthwhile post. I wrote on some similar topics to this from an existential point of view and I come to a similar conclusion to you. Although I would say importantly that human nature has to be relevant to morality because humans have to be assumed to start doing morality. That's important to realize and it means there can never really be an anti-human ethic because ethics can only come from humans, who exactly is total annihilation good to when there are no judges left to judge. The argument that we are just coping about life being good is insane, what objective standard are you measuring life by, the way rocks judge us?
I don't agree with it, but I think this is Benatar's view:
Reasoning about procreation, the absence of pain (if we create nobody) is good and the absence of pleasure is not bad, whereas the presence of pain (if we create somebody) is bad and the presence of pleasure is good. Since creating nobody is better pain-wise and on a par pleasure-wise, we should never create new people. It would wrong them to do so.
For lives that do--wrongly--get started, we actually get trapped by the relationships we form, because if we rationally decided to end our lives, we would cause tons of suffering.
A lot of this stems from an overly expansive reading of suffering into day-to-day life where it doesn't exist, in my opinion. He finds it in places it isn't there.
Yes, I'm familiar with this argument. I wasn't really meaning to address it because it just relies on the arbitrary utilitarian premises. I would take this argument moreso as being against bentham's bulldog's position than mine. I also think that this is ridiculous and even more arbitrary than the standard claim of "feeling good is good" because it is not at all necessary that the absence of pain should we weighed greater than the absence of pleasure on the philosiphic calculus. This is really an emotional argument imo because is you rationally considered whether you would want to go from -5 utiles to 0 or from 0 utiles to 5, this should be an equal choice (both ways gaining +5). Unless we further complicate our nonsense with some diminishing return graph that is also an arbitrary assumption.
I share the intuition that human suffering is bad, but I think people in Benatar's camp are reductionist suffering-utilitarians, so utils just measure how well you're avoiding pain, sorrow, and various bad things. I don't think they want to weigh pleasure/flourishing/goodness at all, which clashes with other intuitions I have