The Human Predicament, page 22
41. Perhaps it will be argued that although earth is teeming with life, humans are the only terrestrial species with sapient capacities. However, even if one thinks that this gives humans some special value, it is still the case that humans would have still greater terrestrial value if they were the only sentient beings (or some of a much smaller number of sentient beings) on earth.
42. Guy Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance,” 761.
43. Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11.
44. Ibid. , 12.
45. Ibid.
46. Kurt Baier advances a similar argument. He says that if life “can be worthwhile at all, then it can be so even though it be short. And if it is not worthwhile at all, then an eternity of it is simply a nightmare”; “The Meaning of Life,” in The Meaning of Life (second edition), ed. E.D. Klemke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 128.
47. Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions, 12.
48. Robert Nozick, “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life,” in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1981), 594.
49. See, for example, Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). Such authors do not typically draw attention to the narrower focus by labeling it as such.
50. Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 218.
51. Ibid. , 211.
52. See also Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (third edition) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 294.
53. Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? 217.
54. Christopher Belshaw, 10 Good Questions about Life and Death (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 124. Rejecting other possible criteria, he employs the same kind of argument at 112–113.
55. Guy Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance,” 760.
56. Susan Wolf, “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life,” Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997): 215.
57. Guy Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance,” 763.
58. Ibid. , 764.
59. Ibid. , 763. Guy Kahane recognizes that “such a verdict would be not only harsh, but also unfair,” but he does not abandon it entirely.
60. Tim Oakley, “The Issue Is Meaninglessness,” Monist 93 (2010): 110.
61. Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 117–136.
62. Dr. Frankl did not distinguish between meaning and perceived meaning, but it is clear that the meaning that keeps people going is perceived meaning.
63. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (third edition) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 109.
64. Ibid. , 84. He repeats the words approvingly at 109.
65. Ibid. , 104.
66. Thaddeus
Metz,
“The
Meaning
of
Life,”
Oxford
Bibliographies
Online,
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0070.xml (accessed June 9, 2010).
67. This formulation is neutral between the regret being “rationally required” and its being “rationally permissible.” The latter claim is less extensive but sufficient to justify those who are concerned about the absence of cosmic meaning.
68. Our absence actually would very likely have made a positive difference on earth. See David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-Natalism,” in Permissible Progeny? The Morality of Procreation and Parenting, eds. Sarah Hannan, Samantha Brennan, and Richard Vernon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34–64.
Chapter 4
1. I do not think that “survivors’ guilt” is an exception because that is not so much a positive good as the evasion of something terrible. However, there may be some exceptions, which is why I have qualified the claim with the word “tend.”
2. These findings are mentioned by David G. Myers and Ed Diener, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Scientific American (May 1996): 70–72. See also Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, and Willard L. Rodgers, The Quality of American Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1976), 25.
3. Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey, Social Indicators of WellBeing: Americans’ Perceptions of Life Quality (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), 334.
4. This evidence is reviewed by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown, “Illusion and WellBeing: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health,” Psychological Bulletin 103 (1988): 193–210.
5. I was previously under the impression that the evidence unequivocally supported the conclusion that positive experiences were recalled more than negative ones. However, I have subsequently learned that the findings are more complicated. Some indication of this is provided in the next note.
6. For example, it may be that negative experiences dominate immediately. However, at least in “non-dysphoric” people, they fade to a greater extent than positive experiences do, such that in the long run, there is greater recall of positive experiences.
Greater recall of the positive is clearer when this affects self-image. See Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Margaret W. Matlin and David J. Stang, The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Pub. Co., 1978); W. Richard Walker, Rodney J. Vogl, and Charles P. Thompson, “Autobiographical Memory: Unpleasantness Fades Faster Than Pleasantness over Time,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 11 (1997): 399–413; W. Richard Walker et al., “On the Emotions That Accompany Autobiographical Memories: Dysphoria Disrupts the Fading Affect Bias,” Cognition and Emotion 17
(2003): 703–723; Roy Baumeister et al., “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5 (2001), esp. 344, 356.
7. Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Shift in Advance Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 241–246.
8. Ibid. , 242.
9. Ibid. , 246.
10. Perhaps it will be argued that adapting to one’s paralysis does constitute an improvement in one’s objective condition. Some might respond to this objection by saying that it ignores the distinction between the objective condition—paralysis in this case —and how one subjectively reacts to the objective condition. However, one can reject the objection even if one concedes that a feedback loop is possible, such that one’s subjective assessment can, to some extent, actually affect one’s objective condition. More specifically, one can concede that the feedback loop leads to some improvement in one’s objective condition, but as long as one remains paralyzed, one’s objective condition is considerably worse than one’s subjective assessment may recognize.
11. Richard A. Easterlin, “Explaining Happiness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100 (September 16, 2003): 11176–11183.
12. See, for example, Joanne V. Wood, “What Is Social Comparison and How Should We Study It?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 520–537.
13. For more on this, see Jonathon D. Brown and Keith A. Dutton, “Truth and Consequences: The Costs and Benefits of Accurate Self-Knowledge,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21 (1995): 1292.
14. One can soil oneself anywhere, and thus this qualification is necessary.
15. For a description of what this can feel like, see Patricia A Marshall, “Resilience and the Art of Living in Remission,” in Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, ed. Rebecca Dresser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94.
16. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (revised and expanded edition) (New York: Harper, 2009), xxiii–xxiv.
17. Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 15.
18. Ibid. , 17.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid. , 20.
21. Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 27.
22. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (New York: Twelve, 2012), 67. Did he mean the small of his neck?
23. Ruth Rakoff, When My World Was Small (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010), 99.
24. American
Cancer
Society,
“Lifetime
Risk
of
Developing
or
Dying
from
Cancer,”
http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer (accessed October 2, 2013).
25. Cancer
Research
U.K.,
“Lifetime
Risk
of
Cancer,”
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer—
info/cancerstats/incidence/risk/statistics-on-the-risk-of-developing-cancer (accessed October 6, 2013).
26. “Older” is a relative term. There are many children, young adults, and middle-aged people who suffer from cancer, but septuagenarians, for example, are more likely to get cancer than children, young adults, and the middle-aged.
27. I say more about this in chapter 5.
28. Philip A. Pizzo, “Lessons in Pain Relief—A Personal Postgraduate Experience,” New England Journal of Medicine 369
(September 19, 2013): 1093.
29. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 47.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. , 49.
32. Ibid. , 62.
33. For more on this, see David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-Natalism,” in Permissible Progeny? The Morality of Procreation and Parenting, eds. Sarah Hannan, Samantha Brennan, and Richard Vernon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34–64.
34. One rape victim observes that “imagining what it is like to be a rape victim is no simple matter, since much of what a victim goes through is unimaginable”; Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5.
35. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World,” in Complete Essays of Schopenhauer (Translated by T. Baily Saunders), Book 5 (New York: Wiley, 1942), 2.
36. However, even raising decent children requires plenty of hard work. There are so many ways of performing the task inadequately. The natural outcome of no parenting would be the adult into which a feral child grows, but any number of parenting mistakes can yield adults that approximate or are even worse than that outcome.
37. Some might argue that the achievements and greater wisdom of middle age outweigh the costs of decline by that stage. That is not implausible, but it would be even better if one had the benefits of middle age without the decline.
38. Henceforth, I shall not distinguish between desires and preferences as similar observations apply to both.
39. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (second edition) (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xv.
40. Abba Eban is reputed to have said of an adversary that “his ignorance is encyclopedic.” That insult is actually true of all of us. Abba Eban may have adapted it from an aphorism by Stanislaw Lec, who said, “Every now and then you meet a man whose ignorance is encyclopedic.”
41. By “above a minimum quality threshold,” I mean that the life is worth continuing. This is a lower quality threshold than that required for a life to be worth beginning. See Better Never to Have Been, 22–28.
42. Similar points can be made about moral goodness, aesthetic experience, and other capacities and traits.
43. Some might wish to sweep everything in this section (“Why there is more bad than good”) aside by adopting some version of a subjective account of quality of life. For example, if one’s life is as good as one thinks it is, and most people think that their lives have more good than bad, then most lives have more good than bad. One problem with such an account is that it allows no room for people to be mistaken. There are more sophisticated subjective accounts that attempt to address this shortcoming. For example, Wayne Sumner in Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996) has argued for an account that equates quality of life (or “welfare”) with subjective life satisfaction on condition that the satisfaction is both informed and autonomous. While not purporting to provide a sufficiently detailed response here, I can comment on the problem with this view. It fixes the required standards of “informed” and especially “autonomous” at a threshold that most adults of normal intelligence can meet. However, it is not clear to me why that should be the case. If there were a species that were as much more autonomous than us as we are than young children, they might well view the life satisfaction judgments of humans to fail the autonomy test (just as we think that young children fail the autonomy test).
Indeed, they might point to the very psychological traits I have mentioned and cite these as evidence that humans are either ill-informed or do not autonomously process all relevant information in determining their life satisfaction. It might be unreasonable to override ordinary adults’ decisions about how to lead their lives by appealing to hypothetical beings that are more autonomous, but it is quite a different matter to argue that ordinary adult humans’ subjective life satisfaction judgments can be fallible even though they have species-normal levels of autonomy.
44. It should be noted that although religious faith can be optimistic, it is not always so. There are pessimistic religious views too.
45. Perhaps it will be suggested that these pains are byproducts of the instrumental value of pain in other contexts. If that is true, then our lives would be better if pain were present only when it had instrumental value (that is, if there were no spillover into cases where pain has no instrumental value).
46. In the case of the reflex arc, pain typically accompanies reflexive aversive behavior, but the pain plays no mediating role.
47. This is, of course, a variant of the stoical motto “no pain, no gain.” Insofar as this motto is true, it is an unfortunate truth. (I am reminded here of the alternative motto for those less sanguine about pain: “no pain … no pain.”) 48. Among those who have offered this version of the argument: Thaddeus Metz, “Are Lives Worth Creating?” Philosophical Papers 40 (July 2011): 252–253; David DeGrazia, “Is It Wrong to Impose the Harms of Human Life? A Reply to Benatar,”
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (2010): 328–329.
49. It should be obvious that advocates of enhancement do not use the religious language I have included in scare quotes. I am using that language to highlight the parallels.
50. The qualification is important for the following reason: If human life is not worth creating in the absence of the enhancements, but the enhancements were of a sufficient magnitude to make life worth starting, it would be difficult to justify procreation if it would take a very long time for the enhancements to be brought about. The longer it takes to bring about the necessary enhancements, the longer people are creating lives that are not worth beginning.
51. Given the psychological phenomenon of comparison, such a life is likely to look much better to us than it actually is.
52. There are some transhumanists who claim that enhancements could lead to immortality. I discuss those claims in chapter 6.
Chapter 5
1. Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Jean Baptiste Le Roy, 13 November 1879,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, Vol. X (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 69.
2. Letter
to
his
brother,
Jeremiah
Brown,
November
12,
1859;
https://archive.org/stream/lifeandlettersof00sanbrich/lifeandlettersof00sanbrich_djvu.txt (accessed April 19, 2015).
3. If the meaning is to be positive, then one would have to add the condition that the soldiers whose lives are saved are fighting on the right side of a just war.
4. Epicurus, “Epicurus to Menoeceus,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1940), 30–31.
5. Epicurus uses the term “sensation,” but the hedonistic position is more charitably presented if we speak not merely of sensations but of all conscious states, including emotional ones. Thus, I shall use the term “feelings” to refer to the broader category of hedonistic states.
6. Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5.
7. Some versions of these views are more discerning about which desires or preferences, if fulfilled, count as intrinsic goods.
For example, they might say that only the fulfillment of “ideal” desires or preferences—those that one would have if one were fully informed and rational—are intrinsic goods.
8. Or at least that it is not irrational per se, for perhaps it is irrational to weigh continued life too heavily when balancing this good against the good of avoiding future suffering.
9. Those who think that prudential considerations are contingent upon one’s future existence do so because they accept the existence requirement, which is a different way of interpreting the Epicurean argument. I shall consider this interpretation in the section entitled “When is death bad for the person who dies?” What I say there about the existence requirement’s bearing on the deprivation account also applies to the existence requirement’s bearing on the annihilation supplement.
10. Psychological connectedness refers to “the holding of particular direct psychological connections” between earlier and later times, and psychological continuity refers to “the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness”; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 206. Professor Parfit has defended the view that it is psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity (“with the right kind of cause”) that counts (215, 281–320).
Although I have said that one can be concerned about one’s annihilation even if what counts prudentially is psychological connectedness or continuity, Derek Parfit himself claims to care less about his death as a result (282).
11. Frances Kamm, Morality, Mortality, Volume 1: Death and Whom to Save from it (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43–53. Professor Kamm raises Limbo Man in support of her “extinction factor,” which has interesting similarities to my annihilation account. (I learned of this after writing the first draft of this chapter, and thus her extinction factor was not an influence on my annihilation account.)
