Monthly Archives: August 2012

A lot of what Faustus thinks is true

Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg has a book out which I like rather better than such Gnu Atheist books by the likes of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.  It’s called The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:  Enjoying Life without Illusions.  Rosenberg doesn’t bother rehashing arguments against the existence of God; he begins from the (correct) premise that atheism has won the argument, indeed, that atheism pretty much won the argument by the time David Hume published his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  But like Hume, he understands that religion persists not because it’s any kind of good theory about the world but because it has roots in human nature.  Rosenberg is thus writing for a minority which is small and likely to remain permanent:  those who accept atheism and wish to really explore its implications.

Following Garrison Keillor’s comic radio-drama hero Guy Noir Rosenberg poses a series of “life’s persistant questions” and the answers thereto, which Rosenberg suggests fall out of taking serious the proposition that the world just is what our best scientific understanding says it is.  If anyone wants to know what Faustus believes, they could do a lot worse than looking up these.  Here are the questions, Rosenberg’s answers, and my glosses upon them.

Why am I here?Just dumb luck.Quite true, although it is important not to conflate dumb luck with goodluck.Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.I believe it was Montaigne who said that you shouldn’t worry about dying; when the time comes for that, your body will take care of that for you.

Question Rosenberg’s Answer Dr. Faustus’s gloss
Is there a God? No. Which is a bit of a shame in a way, since there would be something magnificently heroic about having a God to stand up in defiance against, but the world is what it is.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. Which is a bit depressing for me, since I’m not as good at math as I’d like.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. Unless “achieving heat death” counts as a purpose.
What is the meaning of life? Ditto. I guess this is true, although I must confess I always found the notion of the “meaning” of life to be so vague as to border on meaningless.
Does prayer work? Of course not. I mean, do grow up.
Is there a soul, is it immortal? Are you kidding? Again, this comes as something of a relief when you think about it. Because if you could live forever you could suffer forever.
Is there free will? Not a chance! I’ve never understood how anyone (at least since Newton) ever could have thought that free will could fit into the universe.
What happens when we die? Everything goes on pretty much as before, except us. Not a comforting thought, really, if you feel distress at how things other than yourself were going on before. But a comforting one if you are distressed about how you were going on before.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Professor Rosenberg’s way of putting this is a bit of a joke, but I take his point.
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. I take it that this is basically Hume’s answer to the question of why one should be moral, and it’s the only one that ever made much sense to me.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes. True, though we all can’t help but have opinions.
What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it: it will find you when you need it. I guess this means that I don’t need it that much.
Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing. Another thing that’s painful to admit, given how much I enjoy history. But I guess I have to confess that I can’t find in it anything more than a costly and recondite form of entertainment.
Does the human past have any lessons for our future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with. I’m intellectually doomed. My degree is from a social science department. Guess all I can do is enjoy the ride down.

If this sort of things is as much your cup of tea as mine, do read Professor Rosenberg’s book. Or, if you want something shorter, consider listening in on this hour-long interview at American Freethought or this video discussion with his colleage Owen Flanagan.

“I wish my mother had aborted me.”

If you ever find yourself in an argument with a forced-birther (an honest term I use in preference to the dishonest euphemism “pro-lifer,”) you may have had drawn on you something they think of as an absolute, knock-down, clincher checkmate rhetorical question “What if your mother had aborted you?”  Sometimes, when dealing with a blackmailer, the best response is simple defiance, and the response to this question is an instance of such.  Just look them in the eye and say steadily and firmly “I wish she had.”

Perhaps for some of you this response — if you are so bold as to venture it — is just a clever way of telling an annoying fanatic to fuck off.  About myself, though, I think there is an important sense in which it is an honest response.  If my life really is, on balance, suffering, then surely I would have been better off never having been, and having been aborted would have been one path to that result.

Of course, there are certain things you just can’t say in many contexts, and perhaps the “I wish she had” response is one of them.  You will bring a lot of hate down on yourself — complete with accusations of filial ingratitude and insistence that you need to se a therapist — if you venture to say certain forbidden things, and this might be one of them.

So it is with a certain delight (that I read a recent short essay by Lynn Beisner in the Guardian in which the writer comes right ought and says without hedging or hesitation “I wish my mother had aborted me.”  Ms. Beisner is mostly motivated by an understanding of the difficult, suffering-filled life of her mother, whom she obviously loves and whose suffering she wishes could have been prevented, and might have been, had her mother taken a different path in life and not given birth to — and had to care for — a child she was not ready for.  But Ms. Biesner also has an understanding of her own life as filled with suffering, and grasps further the key philosophical truth that non-existence is not an evil.

Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.

The story of mother and daughter is heart-rending, but a must read if you wish to take mortal matters seriously.  In all, it left me with strangest feeling of philosophical exhiliration mixed with human sorrow.

Soft Antinatalism II – A bound on having children

In a prior post, I argued for the claim that it is better never for a hypothetical person called Brief Inconsolable never to be brought into existence.  In this post, I’ll move that suggestion forward bit and suggest that it would be better for any person can be expected to have a life that is on balance, suffering, which operationally would seem to mean any person who, as a statistical matter, could be expeted to have a life determined to be on balance suffering by the Break-Even Heuristic.

Why should it be better not to have been if your life were on balance, suffering?  Consider this:  there is no suffering in non-eistence.  You did not exist for a vast amount of time before you were born, and you did not suffer then (which is how, I think, Schopenhauer can refer so easily to the die Selige Ruhe des Nichts, “the blessed calm of non-existence.”)  If you think about how you rationally make decisions in your own life, the only thing that generally justifies unpleasant experiences (assuming no net harm or benefit to others) are the promise of good ones of sufficient magnitude in the future.  (And so we do things like diet, exercise, undergo unpleasant medical tests, work at unpleasant jobs, etc., in hopes of avoiding worse if we do not do these things).  But in a life that is on balance suffering, there is a surplus of suffering that isn’t compensated for by anything.

What is more, brining someone into existence means almost invariably harming them, becaue we know that they are going to suffer in their lives.   A good person does make others suffer, unless again there are benefits that somehow outweigh that suffering.  But if someone’s future life is going to be on balance suffering, then by definition this will not be the case, at least for that person.  (Let us leave aside complicated matters here such as the benefits that might accrue to other persons from a given person’s existence.)

In another earlier post, I suggested that I think that my life is in many ways much better than most people who have ever lived, but at the same time that I thought, though an application of the Break-Even Heuristic, that my life was on balance suffering.   Some startling conclusions follow from these premises if they are correct.  One is that I believe that it would have been better for me if I had never come into existence.  Counterintuitive though it may seem, this is pretty much exactly what I do think bout myself.  Another, nastier conclusion is that I think it would also be (at the very least) better for most people if they had never come into existence.  (Better for them each considered as individual human beings, not better for other people, or “humankind” or any other such abstract entity.)

And thus I find that I am an antinatalist of sorts.  My antinatalism is a bit different from the sort that David Benatar defends.  Benatar has a view on which coming into existence is always a harm and never right,  He notes (correctly) that every human life, even those that go very well, has at least some suffering in it.  Many people have a view — call it the “Make-Up View” — on which the good things in life, at least if there are enough of them, somehow make up for the suffering and make life worth living.  Benatar rejects the Make-Up View, arguing that there is an asymmetry between good things and bad things in life.  The absence of bad things is always good, but on his view the absence of good things is only bad if there is someone for whom they are a deprivation.  No person, no deprivation, only good.  If there is a person, there is always bad.  The good things in life are on Benatar’s view not an advantage to people who actually exist over people who do not exist.  People interested in the technical details of Banatar’s argument are urged to consult his book on the subject, especially Chapter Two, therein.  I can’t really do the argument justice here, but I can note that it does have a curious, and I think significantly counterintuitive implication of its own, which is that it would lead us to conclude that even superlative lives would be best unbegun.  Consider a person we’ll call One Pinprick, who has a wonderful, joyous life except that one on single sunny summer afternoon out of thousands in her life, as she reaches to pick a rose she pricks her finger and it stings a little.  That’s the extent of One Pinprick’s life’s suffering, but on Benatar’s view, it would have been better even for her never to have been.

That makes Benatar a hard antinatalist indeed!  I am by contrast a soft antinatalist, as I am at least open to the possibility that there are lifes good enough to be started.  I just don’t think that I have one, or that most other people do as well.

Soft antinatalism I — Brief Inconsolable

We don’t normally think of bringing new people into existence (i.e. through having children) as a bad thing.  Some thinkers — the most prominent of whom is probably the South African philosopher David Benatar, who lays out a comprehensive antinatalist case in his boo Better Never to Have Been:  The Harm of Coming into Existence — disagree.  These antinatalists think that it is wrong or almost always wrong to have children.  Can the Break-Even Heuristic help us think about whether we should be antinatalists?

Let us start with a boundary case, that of Brief Inconsolable.  Brief Inconsolable is a wretched baby girl who, if she is conceived and born, will live only twenty-four hours in horrible pain.  She cannot be comforted, even by parental love, nor can she be paillied.  All she will ever do is cry in misery and then die.

It seems rock-solid obvious to me that anyone who wanted to conceive and give birth to Brief Inconsolable, for just about anything within the range of ordinary reasons that sane people might give for having children (we shall set aside science-fictional cases in which Brief Inconsolable’s birth is somehow necessary as a means to avert some horrible catastrophe) is acting wrongly.  Very wrongly.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t see anyone who would knowlingly bring Brief Inconsolable into existence as anything other than a monster.

I should perhaps offer a point of clarification:  I am not (here) offering an argument that Brief Inconsolable ought to be aborted or euthenized, only that she should not be conceived.  If you want a supporting story around Brief Inconsolable to make this clear, imagine this: suppose that every decade Earth is visited for a month by the Black Comet.  The Black Comet gives off radiation which cases any child conceived during its visit to be born as a Brief Inconsolable, but otherwise has no ill effects on people already existing.  John and Mary are a fertile couple contemplating having a child, and the Black Comet is visiting.  They have every reason to believe that their attempts at conception are just as likely to be successful next month after the depature of the Black Comet as they are now.  Should we condemn them if they do not postpone their attempts at conception until next month?  Yes.

If you share my intuition that it is wrong to bring a Brief Inconsolable into existence — and I don’t think that many people, then we have a limiting case that shows that it is at least somethings wrong to bring a new person into existence.  The question then becomes whether there are other expected lives, less dominated by suffering than than that of Brief Inconsolable, which it would be likewise wrong to bring into existence.  This question wew shall consider in posts in the near future.