I’ve never understood this evil of never having been born.
Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life, I would point out. If the animals we eat are not suffering terribly each moment, that means they have good moments or great ones where they are happy to be alive; enough of these to counterbalance death, and their life is a net gain to them.
One is free to argue that their death or portions of their life are so cruel and filled with suffering that their lives are not actually a net gain, but this is a difficult argument to make and implausible except for a few cases. (For example, veal.)
More intelligent animals (humans) usually judge their lives worth living even under conditions of outright torture and rarely commit suicide; if that is so with all their tastes and aspirations and expectations, why would we expect less intelligent animals to have higher standards?
Vegetarianism aside, does this mean that you promote the increase of the human population as much as possible?
Besides the utilitarian questions, there are practical factual questions—eg. how much does economic growth depend on the demographic transition and holding down the human population?
Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life,
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].
Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree with sfb (sibling to this comment), although I wouldn’t classify your statement as an error (as sfb seems to do). It certainly doesn’t match my values, however. (I find the Repugnant Conclusion truly repugnant, and happily its hypotheses are not met.)
Anyway, I hope that the party was enjoyable (if you went).
Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life, I would point out. If the animals we eat are not suffering terribly each moment, that means they have good moments or great ones where they are happy to be alive; enough of these to counterbalance death, and their life is a net gain to them.
One is free to argue that their death or portions of their life are so cruel and filled with suffering that their lives are not actually a net gain, but this is a difficult argument to make and implausible except for a few cases. (For example, veal.)
More intelligent animals (humans) usually judge their lives worth living even under conditions of outright torture and rarely commit suicide; if that is so with all their tastes and aspirations and expectations, why would we expect less intelligent animals to have higher standards?
I don’t know. It’s an active question (which actually I think Hanson has discussed in the past because wealthy 1st Worlders could reproduce a lot more than they do): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Besides the utilitarian questions, there are practical factual questions—eg. how much does economic growth depend on the demographic transition and holding down the human population?
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].
Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree with sfb (sibling to this comment), although I wouldn’t classify your statement as an error (as sfb seems to do). It certainly doesn’t match my values, however. (I find the Repugnant Conclusion truly repugnant, and happily its hypotheses are not met.)
Anyway, I hope that the party was enjoyable (if you went).