Your boss is a dictator over your life, personal capitalism

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First of all I never brought up the issue of happiness which is irrelevant to me. About a week ago I was heating up some cooking oil and an accident splashed a good deal of it on my left hand. It was a very painful experience but very interesting and huge blisters now cover my left hand and it has not anymore the burning pain but a low continuous ache which is rather disturbing but the hand is healing nicely. I found the experience quite interesting. Not happy but merely one of those things encountered in living and in no way does it interfere with my interest in remaining alive. To say that my personal experience has no relevance is pure idiocy. Morals are not involved. Our biological mechanisms are designed to maintain our lives and to reproduce and pleasure is frequently (but not always) accompanying these procedures. When life becomes unendurable for an individual and there is no way to escape the misery except death then I have no argument against suicide but both you and I have to judge the worth of our lives on the basis of personal experience even to the point of judging the values of other's lives. My son was a quadriplegic from the age of three due to an automobile accident and he lived thirty years with the assistance of an artificial respirator and went through horrible medical crises at regular intervals but his life was, nevertheless extremely worthwhile to him before he died. My wife is currently undergoing a metastasis of cancer throughout her bones and skull and she is fighting to stay alive and finding enjoyment in the process. Do not give me any crap about my personal experiences being invalid. I fully know the value of life.

I don't think most people consider happiness "irrelevant" in terms of measuring the value of something.

Umm... actually no. Saying otherwise is pure idiocy when someone makes an argument about something being objectively true as I think Enamdar claims he has. Now, you can say it is relevant for you, and fine, I accept that, but we aren't talking about you, we are talking about philosophy.

Well, Enamdar made a moral argument, therefore moral considerations ARE involved to some extent, either to analyze or reject the entire process for another argument. Just ignoring an argument is just a matter of caprice and complaining when you are called on it is similarly dishonest.

Umm... this isn't about the value of my life or your life, and in fact, this is not even a question that is strictly about suicide, this is a philosophical question to be dealt with through a prioristic concerns that is unlike a matter of pure experience.

Sand, I will continue to give you crap about your personal experiences being invalid. Why? Because they are. They are completely important to you, they may be illustrative of principles, but you and your experiences are not a relevant statistical analysis(I don't think many relevant statistics would exist for this question but they could) or a philosophical argument or even a basic intuition and are not in a language that can be given any universality, and as such, in this context, you have not said anything of value. Now, I am not going to say that your statements have no value in any context, but in this context it is perfectly correct to consider these things invalid, just as it is relatively invalid to argue the other side by saying "I hate myself. I want to die. A priest raped me from the age of 3 and then a communist assassin killed my family at the age of 7. And no life can ever be valuable because life is so horrible!" So yeah, those hypothetical experiences are invalid, and on the same methodology, yours are too.

Your proposal that philosophy is an abstract not measurable by real life experience is the worst piece of nonsense I have come across recently. All philosophy must be tested against how individuals encounter real problems in real life.

A priori
–adjective
1. from a general law to a particular instance; valid independently of observation. Compare a posteriori (def. 1).
2. existing in the mind prior to and independent of experience, as a faculty or character trait. Compare a posteriori (def. 2).
3. not based on prior study or examination; nonanalytic: an a priori judgment.

To judge the value of being alive it is essential to take into account the experience of being alive and suppositions based on whatever a priori cloud cuckoo land nonsense dreamed up are idiocy.

Well, Sand, there are a few problems. 1) Life experience is difficult to measure in an objective manner. 2) Not all issues directly relate to real life experience either 3) You are an individual, but saying that your particular perspective is a good sample of individuals is questionable.

Umm.... Enamdar's question is the value of being born, not of being alive. And your personal experience of being alive is not sufficient to answer the question, as at our most empirically minded drive, we would need an unbiased sample of individuals, and at our most cynical, we might question whether this could be objectively possible.

Sand, actually I would counter your assertion by instead claiming that the sky is blurple. Suppositions based upon whatever "a priori cloud cuckoo land nonsense dreamed up" are better than EVERYTHING that you have given, as at least this nonsense is something that can be questioned, altered, addressed, improved, taken down, etc, based upon something, logic, that most people agree to the validity of. Frankly, we aren't all Sand on wp, so unless you would like to defend the "a priori cloud cuckoo land nonsense dreamed up" idea of solipsism, where only your perspective is valid, which is worse than anything Enamdar has supposed, the fairer method is to address arguments on their own grounds, as usually that is fair enough to dismiss a good number of them.

Primarily you are judging the value of life on a pleasure principle which totally ignores the basic nature of living things. Pleasure and pain are directive instigations for reaction to circumstances which may be pleasurable or unpleasant and do not constitute a valid basis for the total value of life itself. There is no morality in basic life. It is an organization of material to accomplish the simple purposes of maintenance and reproduction. You are assuming life values on that peculiar knob on the top of your neck driven by survival directives of pain and pleasure. Many life form do well without that odd nervous innovation and the values of life continue quite well. It is a prime value in itself well outside the tickles of its nervous system.

@enamdar - my immediate (and slightly odd) response would be to quote Neo in response to Agent Smith in Matrix Revolutions "because I choose to". If the only outcome of such a moral stance is that all humanity should be immediately destroyed then I don't really think much of it, nor does it seem a workable ethical stance.

It is a tough question though. I think you've covered that pain and pleasure are inextricable parts of existence, so seeing as all morality and ethics are for those who do exist (in that it presupposes a subject as opposed to a non-entity), is it correct to base morality on these? It always seemed a bit of a no-brainer that any sentient animal will avoid pain (arguably this is why we feel pain, an evolutionary response to danger, harm etc) and so on, so why is it helpful to construct a moral/ethical stance on this?

Like Sand, I agree with point #1 but not point #2. Whether or not the good of life is enough to compensate for the pain is a highly individual and subjective decision made on a person-by-person basis by the person living the life. There are people who commit suicide and they have clearly decided the good is outweighed by the bad. However, these people are apparently far outnumbered by the non-suicidal people who treasure life even in the face of its pain, such as Sand's family. They are relevent examples because they are part of the majority of humans who have decided that yes, it is worth it.

I don't agree with #3 or #5, mainly because I don't agree with #2. I agree with #4 but it's somewhat beside the point, once you disagree with #2,3 and 5.

You cannot value life on an abstract basis. Any life at any moment is filled with an intricate mix of pleasure and pain much of which is interpretable only in terms of values perceivable on a scale only known to the individual involved. The saying "no pain, no gain" has some value here although it obviously does not cover all situations. To blatantly declare the wishes of an unknown nonexistent individual is as asinine as declaring the will of a god that has never declared its intentions in a verifiable manner.

1)No pleasure or pain constitutes a state without morality.

2)A universe devoid of morality is less moral than one characterized by morality.

3)Causing the universe to be more moral is moral

4)Generating beings capable of being pleased or pained, and of causing pleasure or pain generates morality

5)Generating morality causes the universe to be more moral

6)Humans are beings that are capable of being pleased or pained and of causing pleasure or pain

therefore it is moral to generate humans

Unfortunately, morality is not an absolute.

Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") has three principal meanings.

In its first, descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct or belief which is held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong. Morals are arbitrarily created and subjectively defined by society, philosophy, religion, and/or individual conscience.

Morality is a human construction and humanity plays a negligible role in the universe.

If the ecology that supports all life on the planet is threatened by human overpopulation and active destruction of this ecology by humanity then creating an excess of humans (whatever its morality) is prime stupidity.

Of course, not being sentient, the universe has no morality and especially the morality of an insignificant glob of matter circling a sun of no significance whatsoever.

Thank you, I wouldn't have gotten that out of Sand as I kept on getting the feeling that he was trying to avoid even addressing the argument rather than attempting to address a particular instance.

I don't think your rebuttal handles point 2 though, simply because if it is subjective, then there is still an ability to perform harm to an individual by having them live.

I also still disagree that Sand's family is *that* relevant, as people who live painful existences and want to continue them, while existing, may also be spurred by additional factors, as there are multiple elements in the value of a life, and genetics could be a significant factor. If depression was in Sand's genome or his wife's then the entire experience could have a different bent to it, or even if there was another gene involved making the individuals more stubborn for life or something.

In addition, I think the suicide metric isn't a great metric simply because I know of people who have expressed suicidal interests but who claim to hold back for altruistic reasons, now, the thing is that these altruistic reasons wouldn't exist unless the person existed, so really, to say that, they have already claimed that non-living is better than living, they just haven't made an action because there is more problematic for a statement. In addition, I would imagine that there are certain aversions to self-harm that cause the suicide rate to be lower, and these aversions to harm do account for failed suicide attempts. Suicide rates are also generally understated, simply because circumstances can prevent the true manner of death from being recorded, and sometimes the method of suicide is a high risk activity, not a bullet to the head or loads of pills. As well, in a survey in 1991 of the high school population, self-reportedly, 8% of that population had made a suicide attempt. That is nothing to sneer at, particularly given that the number of the original population that makes a suicide attempt will likely increase as that goes on. (Yes, I know that teens are considered a higher risk group, but I doubt that people suddenly stop making suicide attempts at a certain age, and there is no reason to suppose it will always be the same people)

I think 3 isn't a terrible point, because creating a creature that you know will be born into terrible conditions is just something to be considered morally questionable, and usually parents try to avoid having children that suffer harm. I mean, point 3 is basically the theistic problem of evil applied to human life.

5 is just derived from all of the previous points, so if you reject one of the earlier points, you should reject 5.

Hmm... I think the problem I see with this argument is the issue of "moral" meaning "moral rules" and "moral" meaning "good".

1 is a premise that I see little reason to accept, if only because morals are abstract entities and can be conceptualized in different manners, however, there is no reason I see to say that morals are strictly related to pleasure and pain. After all, lets say that one creature exists, it feels pleasure or pain, I don't think there is much reason to say that any level of morality exists, and would think that more warrant for morality may be with a number of creatures that feel neither pleasure nor pain but are sentient and interact.

If the former, then 2 is a tautology, however, in the latter, 2 is not a premise I see much reason to accept.

3 is a premise I likely will not accept, as there is no reason why moral rules are greater than no moral rules I think.

The final conclusion stands somewhat against our way of looking at breeding I think, as most modern people don't feel a moral need to have children unless they are religious. Usually family planning is more important.

These are your points.

1) Life necessitates pain

Life necessitates all sorts of things, pain being only one of them and it certainly does not dominate all other things that they be neglected of consideration in making a judgment for the value of life. Your statement implicates that life is a continuous torture of such a degree as to reject living altogether. Not only is it invalid, it is, for the overwhelming number of lives , complete bullsh it.

2) The good of life isn't necessarily enough to compensate for the pain

What is that "isn't necessarily" supposed to mean? You're not talking abstracts here, you are summing up the lives of the entire species and you have no way to make that statement valid or invalid. It's totally meaningless.

3) Creating something that may suffer net pain is an evil act

Creating something that does not feel pain means creating something that cannot distinguish between a menace and a pleasure. People with defective nervous systems that cannot sense pain damage themselves horribly and don't survive long. Another asinine proposition.

4) There is no moral obligation to create life, even happy life

Morals are highly variable and are derived from all sorts of standards which have no consensus. More babble.

5) Therefore creating life is evil

Since no valid standards have been established and even the meaning of evil is debatable the whole business is total bosh.

You are pointing to normative issues, which are neither here nor there factually. The axioms on which I have premised morality as I have applied the concept in my counter argument to Benator’s argument are no less factual than those assumed but not proven by Benator. My argument is no less valid, nor any less factual than Benator’s, so while any given person might normatively valuate each and find they subjectively preference one over the other, there is no objective grounds for claiming one argument is more true than the other.

This to me is sufficient to demonstrate that one can disagree with Benator’s conclusion since there does exist an argument that is equally as valid, and no less factual than Benator’s, and which arrives at a conclusion contradictory to Benator’s.

I've read David Benator's book and I simply can't see how anyone can disagree with his conclusions if they follow his main argument with a clarity of thinking philosophers should be prepared to cultivate.

If two arguments are equally sound, but arrive at contradictory conclusions, neither argument cannot be reasonably disagreed with while retaining clarity of thinking etc.



Please see above.

1 does not say anything about "dominate" but rather just says that a certain aspect necessarily will exist. Why? Well, all life dies and dying is painful. My statement implicates nothing like what you suggest at all, so reading in additional ideas into a premises is absurdity on your part.


"isn't necessarily" means that logically, it is possible that a being can be brought into existence that has an existence that was not worth the suffering to it.

I am talking abstracts here. There is no summation of the lives of the entire species. "isn't necessarily" is inherently an abstract statement.


Sand, physical pain isn't the only pain, there is also emotional/psychological pain, and it is hard to claim that people with defective nervous systems don't experience that. In any case, we create things all of the time that cannot distinguish between menaces and pleasure, such as hammers. There is nothing wrong with making hammers, computers, water bottles, watches, etc, despite how much they can be damaged.


The argument is a moral argument, based upon the idea that ethics exists and is rational. So, no, not babble.


Umm..... valid standards were imposed in premise 3. Also, anything is debatable.

Sand, although many can be glad that you know what words are, I think that your analysis is weak because you seem to not express good reading comprehension, or even any knowledge of context or what you are rebutting. I doubt you even know much about the philosophy of ethics, despite trying to address it on some ground. As such, you prove very little, and your best counter argument is what you gave for premise 4, however, that is so underdeveloped that it is hardly acceptable.

1. Your comment on one boils down to: Life is painful because it does not last forever therefore it is better not to exist.

Evidently your perception of nonsense is quite poor.

2. How can a non-existent being judge the worth of anything? How can you impose your sense of values on a theoretical and undefined being. More garbage.

3. Your comment that hammers are sentient is rather beyond anything I expected even from you.

4. The idea claimed that ethic are rational has no basis in fact.

5. No valid standards were proposed in 3. You are delusional.

Unleashing avalanches of nonsense is no criteria for you ability to comprehend what you are saying.