Heinrich Heine, “Morphine.”

Groß ist die Ähnlichkeit der beiden schönen
Jünglingsgestalten, ob der eine gleich
Viel blässer als der andre, auch viel strenger,
Fast möcht ich sagen viel vornehmer aussieht
Als jener andre, welcher mich vertraulich
In seine Arme schloß – Wie lieblich sanft
War dann sein Lächeln und sein Blick wie selig!
Dann mocht es wohl geschehn, daß seines Hauptes
Mohnblumenkranz auch meine Stirn berührte
Und seltsam duftend allen Schmerz verscheuchte
Aus meiner Seel – Doch solche Linderung,
Sie dauert kurze Zeit; genesen gänzlich
Kann ich nur dann, wenn seine Fackel senkt
Der andre Bruder, der so ernst und bleich. –
Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser – freilich
Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.

Rendered into English by A.S. Kline:

There’s a mirror likeness between the two
Bright, youthfully-shaped figures, though
One’s paler than the other and more austere,
I might even say more perfect, more distinguished,
Than the one who’d take me confidingly in his arms –
How soft then, loving, his smile, how blessed his glance!
Then it might well have been, that his wreath
Of white poppies touched my forehead, at times,
Drove the pain from my mind with its strange scent.
But all that’s transient. I can only, now, be well,
When the other one, so serious and pale,
The older brother, lowers his dark torch. –
Sleep is good: and Death is better, yet
Surely never to have been born is best.

“Surely never to have been born is best.”

Over at the Onion, in an example of how grim humor is the one mode of talking about things about which you would otherwise be silenced, there is an article with the provocative title “Man Thanks God He’s Not Sexually Attracted to Children.”  The ficitonal subject of the article gives us this gist:

“Christ, what if I’d been born like that?” continued Farlow, thankful that—through what was essentially the flip of a coin in his DNA—he managed to grow up with healthy sexual tendencies. “Who knows? One weird gene from my mom or dad and my brain could have been wired in a completely different way and I’d be some sick individual who gets turned on by children.”

Following his initial feeling of relief, Farlow reportedly spent the next several moments shuddering at the possibility of going through every single day of his life fighting abnormal sexual urges that, if left unchecked, would result in years in prison and the loss of every shred of respect from his family, friends, and community.

Indeed.  But for the flip of a switch, the toss of a coin, a random event over which we would have no control, you or I, dear reader, might have been not the very nice people I am sure we all are, but monsters who have to fight horrible urges all the time.  We would be obliged to live lives that could not be but full of suffering for ourselves, or cause immense suffering for others (or, more likely, both).

And yet on my view of the world, my naturalistic, nihilistic view, it is hardly a surprise that there should be people such as pedophiles.  There’s no guiding hand behind the world, only blind variation and selective retention of the variants.  Evolution, in a word.  And the most important thing about evolution is that it does not care about you or anything else.  Even with outcomes that seem to be pretty clearly adaptations (like sexual desire), the process throws up variants that involve suffering for those who have them.  (Consider, if you will, a single mutation of the β-globin gene.  Get it in one allele, and you have superior malarial resistance — an adapatiation which allows the mutation to spread in certain populations.  Get it twice, and you will have very nasty and painful sickle cell disease.  To bad for you!)

Of course, the existence of the pedophile would seem to be a problem for people who have different views of the world.  Those of you who think that life has “meaning,” tell me please, what is the “meaning” of a life of the pedophile?   Those of you who think “everything happens for a reason,” what is the reason for the pedophile’s being born?  And what facts — what publically observable facts distinguish between my view that there is no meaning and no reason (other than bad dumb luck) for the existence of the pedophile?

Oh, and by the way, theists, if someone can thank God that they’re not sexually attracted to children, then why shouldn’t someone who is sexually attracted to children curse God?

This poster is making the rounds over at tumblr, and making them fast (it had 19,018 notes when last I checked, and of those perhaps 3,000 were added in the last few hours).

And while that might seem inflammatory, it does in fact express what happens when one tries to be philosophically consistent with the view — endorsed in the current (2012) platform of the Republican Party —  that an “unborn child” has a “right to life.”  One concludes that a woman pregnant as the consequence of rape must be forced to carry that child to term.

The practices endorsed in the illustration above might seem like satire, but the are the consequence of consistency. and their result is cruelty (as is so often the consequence of consistency in “moral reasoning.”)  I see no reason to concede that anyone willing to endorse a “no exceptions” rule for abortions has so much as the slightest shred of decency or humanity in them.

If the forced-birthers win in American politics, we will see practices like these and worse.  And don’t expect that they will stop there.  Expect this:  women of childbearing age will be forcibly pregnancy tested at points of exit and entry to the United States.  If pregnant upon exit and not upon re-entry (and no baby in tow), expect prosecutions for their presumptively having had abortions abroad.

On one of my tumblring missions lately I spotted this:

(Source the tumblr Nudity and Nerdery.) And I thought…how appropriate for me.  Few if any know my inner convictions who match my real name to my actual face, and yet here behind this Internet persona of Dr. Iago Faustus, I can over my network of sites bundle so my appalling, socially-unacceptable traits into one package.  Here my atheist, moral skeptic, soft antinatalist and (as we shall see) suicide-choicer self, and elsewhere my pornographer pervert self.

I may not love life, but I do love the Internet.

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.

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.

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as Brother Blackford has so eloquently explained to us recently.  I tried being a lover of wisdom once, but wisdom told me she would rather just stay friends.

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.