The Optimism Delusion - David Benatar responds to Richard Dawkins.

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Kramdar

Viva June (Hilariously ironic name for an antinatalist, by the way): How you came to the conclusion that I claimed a non existent entity is capable of desire is mind-boggling. I claimed only that a non-existent entity has the potential to manifest into a being capable of desire. If you have any knowledge of the creation of sensate people from insensate gametes, this will be self-evident to you.

My apologies for misrepresenting your views. What I should have said was that in your argument the absence of everything includes the presence of potentiality, which is still incompatible with the metaphysics of antinatalism as I understand it. So, while I admit to wording my reply poorly, I think my critique remains sound. The example of gametes does nothing to refute it, as gametes exist in their own right prior to any growth into personhood. That said, I accept that you may not share my metaphysical intuitions, and that it would be pointless for us to just keep delineating our differences in ever finer detail.

Moving on, I too think the syllogism is flawed, not for the reason you mention, but rather because it fails on formal grounds (the second premise is too weak: it establishes a necessary condition where a sufficient condition is required). Ignoring the anachronism of propositional logic in a classical syllogism, a more correct version would be something like the following:

(i) suffering is undesirable;
(ii) subjective experience entails suffering;
(iii) therefore, subjective experience is undesirable.

You're of course free to dispute either premise, and I realise you have done so at length many times over, but do you still believe the argument has internal flaws?

I will respond to some of your other criticisms at a later time. For now let me say, in case my overbearing manner is contributing to your exasperation, that I appreciate your posts and hope to see more of them.

[Kramdar]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

(i) suffering is undesirable; (ii) subjective experience entails suffering; (iii) therefore, subjective experience is undesirable.

Existential fallacy.

Yes, both of the premises is true, but (3) does not necessarily follow, because for something to be desirable or undesirable, the weighing of the relative benefits and disadvantages has to be taken into account.

For instance, it may be undesirable to make a 2 mile journey to the sweet shop. But what if it is more desirable to eat a sweet than it is undesirable to journey to the sweet shop? Then, overall, it is desirable to make the journey to the sweetshop.

Equally, while (2) is true, it is not the whole truth. Subjective experience entails a great deal more than just suffering.

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Kramdar

Existential fallacy.

How so? Just to clarify, (i) is intended to be categorical, as in "all suffering is undesirable". Don't get me wrong, I may well have messed it up; I actually can't even tell for sure. Serves me right for touting my eroded knowledge of formal logic.

That said, your refutation seems to me to hinge on extra-logical considerations. Saying that extenuating circumstances make subjective experience worthwhile is sensible, but it does indicate a willingness to compromise on the issue of suffering. So, to some extent you disagree with (i). Which is fine, but it renders the argument unpersuasive, not invalid (and I do accept that the argument may be invalid anyway, just not for this reason).

[Kramdar]

I really don't know how to phrase it better than I did in my previous post.

An easy way to look at it is this:

Yes, (1) is not completely correct, as it fails to take into account masochism. But that's splitting hairs.

There is nothing really wrong with (2).

It is (3) that is the problem.

See, as you know, a syllogism works like this:

A is B.
B is C.
Thus, A is C.
(I know this is a simplification, but you get my point.)

Now, (1) states 'Suffering *is* Undesirable'. Nothing wrong there.

(2) states 'Subjective experience *entails* suffering'. Hmm. Getting slippery here, but it's still valid logic.

Now, here's the rub. (3) cannot have followed from (1) and (2) unless (2) stated 'Subjective experience *is* suffering', and not 'Subjective experience *entails* suffering'.

The particular affirmative ("Some of subjective experience is suffering") implied by the word 'entails' is not sufficient to establish the universal affirmative "subjective experience is undesirable".

Now, by "entails" you may have meant "subjective experience *requires* suffering", but the syllogism still fails, because the required suffering in this case does not encompass all of subjective experience, and is therefore not a universal conditional (i.e. "All subjective experiences entail suffering").

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Kramdar

I really don't know how to phrase it better than I did in my previous post. An easy way to look at it is this: Yes, (1) is not completely correct, as it fails to take into account masochism. But that's splitting hairs. There is nothing really wrong with (2). It is (3) that is the problem. See, as you know, a syllogism works like this: A is B. B is C. Thus, A is C. (I know this is a simplification, but you get my point.) Now, (1) states 'Suffering *is* Undesirable'. Nothing wrong there. (2) states 'Subjective experience *entails* suffering'. Hmm. Getting slippery here, but it's still valid logic. Now, here's the rub. (3) cannot have followed from (1) and (2) unless (2) stated 'Subjective experience *is* suffering', and not 'Subjective experience *entails* suffering'. The particular affirmative ("Some of subjective experience is suffering") implied by the word 'entails' is not sufficient to establish the universal affirmative "subjective experience is undesirable". Now, by "entails" you may have meant "subjective experience *requires* suffering", but the syllogism still fails, because the required suffering in this case does not encompass all of subjective experience, and is therefore not a universal affirmative (i.e. "All subjective experiences entail suffering").

Reading this has intensified the gnawing feeling I have of having made a mistake somewhere, but I'm still not convinced you have the right error. Mainly, I suspect the argument is downright senseless because it's a mixture of syllogistic and propositional logics. That is, it's probably not even wrong. And now I will stop talking about it before I embarrass myself further. (Although, for the record, I would be happy to reword it into something like: (a) suffering entails harm; (b) subjective experience entails suffering; (c) therefore, subjective experience entails harm. The unspoken premise being that harm is undesirable. It may be a weaker claim, but it amounts to pretty much the same thing in my view.)

[Kramdar]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

(a) suffering entails harm; (b) subjective experience entails suffering; (c) therefore, subjective experience entails harm. The unspoken premise being that harm is undesirable.

A good attempt, but this is insufficient to establish the credo of antinatalism that "Subjective experience is an objective Evil that must be eradicated from the world."

The problem is not that you're mixing syllogistic and propositional logic (I don't see any propositional logic here, if you mean the P ---> Q type). In fact, the problem is not your syllogisms at all. It's in trying to logically establish subjective experience as an objective Evil. To my mind this is a Sisyphean task.

Let me create a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the difficulties of your task:

Say we intend to establish that suffering is an objective Evil.
We must first establish that there exists an objective value system by which suffering and everything else can be measured. A Morality-meter, if you will.
Let's be generous to antinatalists and assume there is in fact a Morality-meter at work in the universe, and that the total Morality of the universe has a numerical value.
Now. Let's say we successfully determine, using logic, that the happiness from each life adds 1.5 to the Morality-meter and the suffering subtracts 2. Suffering negates happiness, so an average life subtracts 0.5 overall from the total Morality value of the universe.
Since -0.5 is a negative number, we come to the conclusion that life is Immoral, and know that if we continue to allow people to be born, the total amount of Morality in the world will get more and more depleted.
So the logical thing to do is to stop procreating.
Or is it?
What if the calculations are incomplete?
After all, if there is a Morality-meter, there must be objective values for everything we have not included in our calculations. Let's say we realize that experience has a value of 1 -- that is, every life's experience adds 1 to the Morality-meter.
We now know that a life adds to the Morality-meter 1.5 points from happiness and 1 point from experience, and subtracts 2 points from suffering, equaling +0.5 points overall.
Therefore, since we now calculate that each life contributes a positive number to the Morality-meter, it turns out that it is actually more Moral to procreate than to not procreate.
Antinatalism therefore becomes Immoral because it stops the unborn from manifesting and upping the Morality-meter.
But even now the calculations are not comprehensive. In order to know for sure whether antinatalism is Moral or Immoral, we have to enumerate all the positives of existence and weigh them against all the negatives of existence (or positives of non-existence). And we'd never ever be sure that we'd counted everything in our calculations.

Yes, this whole hypothetical situation rests on many assumptions, but the biggest assumptions are all ones I've borrowed from antinatalism.

Namely:

• Things have an objective value.
• These objective values are knowable and can be organized hierarchically.
• Suffering has a negative value greater than the highest positive value.

Now, the things I've spoken of above are only some of the problems with trying to establish objective Morality through logic. See, the fundamental assumption of antinatalism -- that "Suffering is undesirable" -- has a black swan: masochists. Though I said this was hair-splitting before, you must remember that, by Popper's law of inductive categorical inference, even a single counterexample is enough to falsify a universal statement. And, as an aside, I personally know two people who get sexual pleasure from being severely beaten.

I guess what I'm trying to say, Viva June, is that proving that antinatalism is objectively Moral is going to take much more than a syllogism.

Since you, as an antinatalist, believe there is such a thing as a Morality-meter, you must logically demonstrate this to be true.
You must then demonstrate that you have logically determined the objective impact of suffering on this Morality-meter, as well as the impact of all other objective values associated with existence and non-existence.
Then you must show that the objective negative value contributed by suffering outweighs the sum of the objective positive values contributed by happiness, experience, love, variety, freedom, charity, and all other positive aspects of existence.
If this can't be done, antinatalism cannot be logically proven to be Moral, and could even be Immoral, as it would be *objectively* denying the unborn of those positive qualities of existence that, together, may outweigh the negative quality of suffering.

(I'm gonna be visiting this thread very rarely from now on as it's starting to bite chunks out of my time, so if you do reply to this post, it may be some time before I reply back.)

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Kramdar

I guess what I'm trying to say, Viva June, is that proving that antinatalism is objectively Moral is going to take much more than a syllogism.

Yes, it will probably require three or four.

To counter your proof by counterexample, I would split the hair further and point out that masochists in fact experience pain as pleasure (a phaenomenon explained more fully by Rob Halford in 1982).

The lack of objective moral standards is a problem for antinatalism inasmuch as it's a problem for any kind of ethics. I can't lie and say I have a way around it, but then again the problem doesn't bother me much. Also, note that to me and many others the absence of objectivity provides support for the antinatalist conclusion, along the lines of Zapffe's tragic pessimism (which is orthogonal to Benatar's): in a universe with no metaphysical guarantees for things like morality, conscious life is bound to result in existential despair sooner or later, hence conscious life is best avoided.

[sundog]

FACT: For some life is unendurable torture.

FACT: Anyone alive may end up being unendurably tortured.

QUESTION: If such unendurable torture can be avoided, without there being any significant deprivation involved in that avoidance, would not to do so not be deeply immoral (according to you)? If not, then why?

Seeing as to how there's no suffering or deprivation of any kind in non-existence, procreation strikes me as obviously immoral. It perpetuates serious suffering - sometimes in the form of unendurable torture - for inexcusably selfish reasons, or at least for no good reason.

That most people find their life "worthwhile", or say that they do, doesn't change this; the reason being that, had they never been born, they wouldn't have been deprived of their "worthwhile" lives. "Worthwhile," that is, as long as they're not the ones who are unendurably tortured.

"Most people do not regret their very existence. Many are happy to have come into being because they enjoy their lives. But these appraisals are mistaken... The fact that one enjoys one’s life does not make one’s existence better than non-existence, because if one had not come into existence there would have been nobody to have missed the joy of leading that life and thus the absence of joy would not be bad. Notice, by contrast, that it makes sense to regret having come into existence if one does not enjoy one’s life. In this case, if one had not come into existence then no being would have suffered the life one leads. That is good, even though there would be nobody who would have enjoyed that good."
- David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.

To drive home the point, which is obvious to some of us, that No Life is preferable to Life, consider this thought experiment:
(I suggest turning off the sound for this one. I find the music truly unendurable.) 

ZARGARG NEEDS YOUR HELP! - YouTube

Do you vote 'YES' for Zargarg to populate the planet or 'NO' for him to go back to his efforts of trying to construct a square-shaped triangle?

I know what Scopenhauer would have voted:

"If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state." - Arthur Schopenhauer.

[Nemonymous]

Well, assuming, as angel's advocate, that the unborn might conceivably be pre-consciously thrusting voluntarily for existence, every move that those of us already existent make, even trivial or unconscious ones, by 'butterfly effect', might affect the threat or promise reality-wide of the unborn being born or staying unborn, i.e not only affected by the single conscious decision of one couple to procreate or not to procreate.

Risk is dangerous. and everything about life seems to entail risk, even the risk of assuming that the unborn don't want to be born.