Uh, I don’t think I claimed to have a solution for the problem that life entails suffering, just for how the existence of that problem impacts the moral/ethical decision to create new lives.
edit: I’ll check out the essay, thanks.
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My misunderstanding, then.
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Even if it lives a “life of ice cream,” as you put it, and never feels a moment of anything but contentment from birth to death, that’s not a benefit to the cat?
I get “creating pain is bad.” I get “not creating pleasure is neither good nor bad.” However, I don’t get “creating pleasure is not good,” and I certainly don’t get, “not creating pain is good.”
There doesn’t seem to exist within your morality the possibility of a moral action: only the lack of an immoral action, which becomes a moral inaction.
Generally, as both pain and pleasure are subjective, it has to be done retrospectively by the subject, who kind of has to exist to make that determination.
How so? You yourself have admitted that you have the choice to attempt to not exist anymore.
There are less gruesome methods of suicide. There is a growing movement in the world for the right to self-euthanasia. I don’t know if I agree if it should be available to everyone (especially to parents of dependent children), but certainly, if all that is left of life is suffering, then I don’t see why a person should be forced to suffer indefinitely.
I continue to dispute that creating someone who will certainly have bad experiences at some point is “harming” them.
Again from experience, no dispute there.
Every two seconds.
Appearing somewhere and asserting that only you can see clearly, while everyone else’s eyes are clouded, is not generally a successful tactic to win a debate.[quote=“Paul_Fairfield, post:56, topic:88344”]
But I believe that with enough intellectual fortitude one can look past one’s own sadness to see that really my own sadness at the idea is not justification for causing others to suffer.
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Again, shouldn’t it be a person’s own choice whether or not their existence is worth the suffering they endure?
I know the feeling.
Nah, not really. You’re never going to convince everyone, even if you’re 100% correct. And certainly not with your sales pitch.
If you can’t explain the crux of your own argument coherently, perhaps you do not understand it sufficiently. I’m not going to do your homework for you.[quote=“Paul_Fairfield, post:56, topic:88344”]
A few years ago, a twelve year old down the street from me died after 3 days in ICU with 3rd degree burns over 90% of her body. In your world, things like that happen again and again, forever.
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No, in my world, we improve humanity: biology, technology, and society, to the point where that no longer happens. We don’t just write the whole species off.
Nor does any of the good things that humanity does.
So, do you assert that the infinitude of people who might exist in the future will create nothing of value? Because those are also part of the cost of your world. Plus, you know, all of the repercussions of the actions you’ll have to take to enforce the sterility you’re imposing on the species.
And I agree, you shouldn’t feel sorry for people that don’t exist. But you shouldn’t feel good about them not existing, either. Their nonexistence is neither moral nor immoral: it’s amoral.
Only if the depression is untreated.
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You’re missing something here: people are talking about what it would be like to lose a child - not about whether it’s a good idea or necessary to have a child in the first place. The chasm between those two subjects is huge.
I’ve got a 13 year old daughter and I echo what other parents here are saying - having a child is like having exposed nerve endings for the rest of your life.
But if I’d never had kids, would I be ok with that? Yes, I imagine I would. Parenthood became important to me after the fact.
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I won’t read the linked article. I am not made of such stern stuff. Also, I have no children, so I can’t really empathize with the consequences of losing one.
Having said that, what is left but to go on; to continue living even when your heart refuses? They say that time cures all, but that is no consolation. In the end, one can only endure, living with pain and emptiness, and clutching to whatever happiness might yet present itself.
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Have you been reading Sartre? Or maybe you’re Russian?
Hope springs eternal. Giving in is simply loss.
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What, you don’t want fireproof skin?
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If I’m reading Zapffe correctly, it’d be ethical to allow Homo sapiens to continue reproducing only if their awareness of mortality were ephemeral and constrained to the grief and sadness felt when they lost a loved one.
I don’t agree with that. (It’s not coincidence that I chose a Fight Club GIF) At the same time, I think we (as in society) would be better off right now if we disavow the notion of ‘human progress’.
Which kind of progress? Biological, technological, or societal? Or all three?
Existential. We can’t purge humanity from ourselves and that includes the awareness that each and every one of us will die someday.
Biological systems can become more complex but any biologist would balk at describing such developments as ‘progress’.
Society can make progress, much as I sometimes argue with myself that it can’t (and sometimes that other part of me wins). Not fighting each other? Being accepting (or failing that, tolerant) of people from different faith or culture? Contentment? 1 These are things that seem to be on an upward swing—at the moment. There’s no reason to believe that societal progress isn’t cyclical and that civilizations before us have been within equal reach of these same ideals.
I agree with Zapffe in that technological development is progress only when it helps us to become a spiritually richer society.
1Juuuust kidding.
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Well, that’s some faulty math right there. If X is zero, I’ve yet to meet the cat that would turn down the opportunity of ice cream guaranteed every day and absolutely no chance of torture. That’s not a wash; the way you’ve presented it, that’s a cat’s ideal existence.
This argument is frankly goofy. It rests on the idea that any chance of pain or unpleasantness, however slight, makes life not worth living, and foisting that life on another being an immoral act. Nobody’s gonna bother to invest much effort in convincing you that your own life is or isn’t worth living; that’s up to you. And if you think life’s too horrible to warrant breeding, then nobody’s going to encourage you to do otherwise, if only for the benefit of your unborn kids. (My own opinion, and it is not an uncommon one, is that a minimum requirement for being a parent should be actually wanting to raise kids in the first place, even in this flawed world of ours.)
It is a poor imagination indeed that can only find motivation for continued life in a biological imperative.
That “clear logic” rests on suspiciously shaky and simplistic assumptions. Any ten-year-old can recognize what pain, suffering, hunger, want, disease, overcrowding, violence, and misery are, and why we try to avoid them. That same ten-year-old can recognize that Not Being Born In The First Place handily avoids each and every one of them. I’d already heard the anguished cry of “I never asked to be born” from my daughter before her ninth birthday. In that moment, she might have even meant it.
Upon calmer reflection later on, she recanted. It’s tough to remember all the myriad joys of life, the hugs and the surprises and the reunions and the new loves and the milestones and the eureka moments, when you haven’t gotten quite enough sleep and your daddy is insisting it’s time to find your shoes and get to school. Every day is a roll of loaded dice. Sometimes the roll is loaded in one’s favor (if one is, for instance, white, or male, or wealthy, or any other advantageous factor) and sometimes one’s dice seem predisposed to snake-eyes, but there is still always the element of random chance. You might pick up a winning Lotto ticket. You might get hit by a falling piano. You might try to survive one more day in your war-torn village and successfully dodge all the bullets only to slip on a fresh dog turd and crack your skull open on a miraculously ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. You might try to get through yet another day of reading your favorite comic books in bed with your favorite boyfriend in the best bedroom of your favorite mansion when your manservant Standish interrupts you to tell you that that bit of wastepaper stuck to your Gucci loafers from last night was indeed that winning Lotto ticket and would you like to donate it to the indigent poor, split it among the household staff, or just put it all up your nose?
We all know that every day is filled to bursting with a million possibilities, most of them not even remotely like these, and while it’s true that there is a strong motivation for those with the dice weighted in the snake-eyes direction to hope for justice in an afterlife, there’s good reason beyond biology for most people to want to try again tomorrow. Is it not a bit simplistic to resort to the reflexive axiom that “wanting to survive is pro-survival”? Does it make the least bit of sense that that’s the only reason people want it?
I mean, think about it: plenty of lifeforms have evolved to die immediately after they have reproduced, or shortly after they have ensured the immediate survival of their own offspring. Why don’t humans die off at, say, menopause? Once their children are grown, aren’t the parents simply in competition with them for resources? Why do the majority of seven billion people want to wake up tomorrow morning, especially since so many of them live lives of pain and misery?
There are a lot of reasons, and not all of them come down to fear of death, or a need to reproduce or to look after one’s offspring. Not all of them are in spite of the pain, but are rather proactive reasons that embrace the magic and wonder and sheer pleasure of life.
It’s truly a bummer you have trouble recognizing that.
The idea that life is lived on a “Welp, I was born anyway and now I’m here so I guess I’ll make the best of it” basis alone is not a good enough reason to live, in and of itself. If that’s all it was, then you could make a valid argument that all we’re doing is wasting resources and birthing babies into a life with a high probability of painful pointlessness.
But everyone here arguing with you, and everyone insisting on getting up every morning with a smile and relishing the prospect of a growing family and rolling up their sleeves with eagerness to make the world a better place, all those people know why they do what they do, and they know it’s not because they’re not smart enough to recognize the perils and pitfalls that lie in their path. You’d like to think that you have it all figured out logically, but if you have, then you’ve given up and accepted a ten-year-old’s logic.
A ten-year-old might tell you that a bee-sting is the worst pain he’s ever felt, and if you try to describe a bad papercut with lemon juice in it, or a table saw accident, or a kidney stone, or childbirth, that kid might think that there’s no way possible any human could endure such pain.
But every human alive has had a mother, and the vast majority of those mothers have felt labor pains, and if those pains were truly unendurable, nobody would have any younger siblings. That’s suffering. Is it worth it? Many mothers would respond with a “Hell yes!” My own mother did it seven times, and didn’t regret a single one of her beloved kids. All seven of those kids underwent some form of pain and suffering in their lives. All of them would leap at the chance to roll those dice again, even if they got the same or worse outcome.
For most of us, I’d say we find life a worthwhile endeavor, which is why relatively few of us give up on it voluntarily.
If I had more time and inclination I’d start nattering on about how a philosophy founded entirely upon the maxim “do no harm… and I mean not even the tiniest amount of discomfort… ever!” is entirely fatuous and simplistic and disconnected from reality, but I do have better things to do at the moment. Maybe I’ll revisit this later.
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It’s worth a read if you can muster your courage.
I couldn’t, sorry.
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By biological “progress” I mean primarily fixing the defects, cognitive and otherwise, inherent in our DNA. The unnecessary blind spot on our eyes, the inability to change our minds when presented with new evidence, cartilage that can regenerate, teeth that grow back, and, of course, creating infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Society seems to wax and wane with its education. The Internet is the greatest tool for finding and compiling knowledge that has ever existed. I’m optimistic that as knowledge becomes more democratized, society will keep moving forward.
Spiritually richer how?
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Nature doesn’t care about your defects. Evolution, while colloquially used as a synonym for progress, is a stretch of biological revisions driven by the need to adapt. Adaptation, not optimization, is Nature’s creed.
I forgot to clarify that when I use the word ‘spiritual’ I’m talking about one’s inextricable relationship with and place within life, the universe, and everything. I’m not suggesting any sort of mind-body duality or a ‘soul’ or anything like that.
Personally, I feel a sense of awe from all that’s been discovered by astrophysicists and cosmologists. Whatever technological advancements were required to make that happen, I’m grateful for them.
If medicine would focus on technology that could increase the quality of life rather than longevity, that too would be a welcome development.
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I lost my second baby when he was three weeks old & son number one was 2 & a half. He had a rare genetic disorder and I’d had a normal pregnancy up until he was born.
Anyway, people die, children die, life’s short however long you live & death is part of that. Make the most of your existing relationships while you can.
Agony advice courtesy of Callanyveg very late on a Friday night after a heavy going week at work.
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The Shakers felt the same way. They aren’t doing so well these days.
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There’s a huge difference between building a life for yourself, with just what you need and want, and building a life for a family, trying to provide everything they need and want. People build their entire life around family - better housing, with enough room for the kids (and to get away from them), a car suitable for a family, a job with some stability and good insurance, and most importantly of all a daily routine that includes and fits everyone in the family, shared traditions and in-jokes, etc. To lose that which you had based every aspect of your life around along with one whom you had shared it with would be devastating. Like having the foundation beneath your life knocked out from under you.
So I would say the major difference between “Why is life worth living if I lose my kids?” and “Why is life worth living if I never have kids?” is that in the latter case your whole life isn’t resting upon that foundation, so it can’t be knocked out from under you.
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Bravo, sir!
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You don’t agree that “the author of the piece feels that the loss of their children would make them lose their connection to the world”?
What is really going on here? You’re swinging at imaginary windmills.
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