Post by brimstoneSalad » Sun Jul 03, 2016 2:59 am

consequences

RVGN wrote: Do you contend that suffering outweigh our contentment for those of us lucky enough to experience chronic happiness?

David Benatar wrote: I do think that the bad outweighs the good in even the happiest lives. The reason why this seems so strange is that (most) humans have psychological traits that lead to their underweighting the bad and thus thinking that in their lives as a whole there is more good than bad. The most prominent of these traits is an optimism bias, but there are others too.

objective

David Benatar wrote: Second, while the misjudgement may make lives less bad than they would otherwise be, it does not follow that the quality of life is as good as it is misjudged to be. It is still possible for life to be worse than one thinks it is. The concern about adaptive preferences applies here too.

RVGN wrote: When someone contends that the pleasure in their lives outweighs the suffering, many antinatalists might remind them of the optimism bias and suggest that they could be incorrect in the assessment of their own wellbeing. This seems to make the claim that suffering outweighs pleasure practically unfalsifiable, and therefore suspect.

Is there any way that someone could satisfactorily disprove the antinatalists’ ‘suffering outweighs pleasure’ theory?

David Benatar wrote: We can then point to a host of facts about the good and bad things in life. Here we should recognize some important empirical asymmetries that support a pessimistic conclusion. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived but pain is much more enduring. The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Injury is swift but recovery is slow. These are but a few examples. All these claims can be assessed against the facts. They are not unfalsifiable.

David Benatar wrote: I do have a pessimistic view, but that, I argue, is what the evidence warrants.

One of the most powerful actions you can take in combating depression is to understand how critical the quality of your thinking is to maintaining and even intensifying your depression—and that the quickest way to change how you feel is to change how you think. Often enough you can't control how you feel, but you can always control how you think. There's an active choice you can take—if you are aware that changing your thinking is important.



It's not an accident that cognitive therapy is one of the most researched and practiced of depression treatments. It is based on the fact that thought-processing errors contribute so much to depressed mood.

Benatar would likely jump to reject the above point based on his rejection of consequentialism. This goes beyond the article, but Benatar is apparently some kind of a deontologist: which helps explain his obsession with the dogma of "consent" (aside from its use as a practical heuristic as I explained).Deontology is untenable as a means to do anything in the world, because as it rejects that the ends can justify the means, all actions are immoral since all actions involve conflicts of interest and violate duties on some level. It provides no metric by which to weigh good against bad.This thread covers a discussion on deontological positions in detail: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=785 Virtue ethics are not an alternative, just as "rule consequentialism" is not distinct from consequentialism itself. Virtues are typically held to be virtuous because of their good. In other cases, as in deontology, they're just arbitrary assertions. It's not a third option.Benatar doesn't understand what a bias is, but he's certainly subjected to one.If I like chocolate, and I say "I like chocolate" that isn't my bias talking: that's my experience of liking chocolate.If I like chocolate, and I read two conflicting studies on the objective health effects of chocolate, and for no reason I find the study favoring chocolate more credible: that IS my bias in favor of chocolate talking.A bias is subjective feeling or experience that affectsperception or belief of facts. A subjective feeling with respect to itself can not be a bias: it's just a feeling, and when we're talking about feelings people are their own best sources.When a person says, "yes in fact I am happy, and the positive value of the good things in my life outweighs the negative value of the bad things in my life for me" that is not a bias, it's just a fact (assuming the person isn't lying).When Benatar says something like, "No they don't, in fact your life is terrible" that is a bias -- his bias.Optimism bias certainly is a real thing, it just isn't and can't be applied to what he's talking about. It only manifests in belief about objective metrics of the world: test scores, how much your peers actually like you, etc.In addition to his irrational pessimism bias about the world, Benatar is little doubt subject to an optimism bias of his own about his works and career: he probably thinks he's doing important grown up work in philosophy, and that he's contributing in some meaningful way to ethics. He probably imagines he isn't a laughing stock among real philosophers, and that he is regarded positively by intelligent people (intelligence which he likely measures based on how much they agree with him).When we talk about informed consent and idealized interests, if divested of these delusions it is entirely possible that more people would regard their lives as not worth living, but this is an empirical question that would call for an empirical answer.If cured of his own delusions, would Benatar immediately ascend to the top of a tall building and step off the edge, or would he redidicate his life to undoing all of the harm he's done to the world? I wouldn't hazard a guess on that, I don't know the man.The bottom line is that "optimism bias" doesn't exist as such, or isn't what Benatar thinks it is, and can't be used to override a person's personal experiences. A person's values and subjective experiences are their own, and it's nobody's place -- certainly not Benatar's -- to tell them otherwise. Sure, one can correct their factual misconceptions and see if they will reevaluate things, but by no means can one make assumptions about how that will turn out without evidence.Unless unwillfully misinformed in some relevant way, the value of one's life is precisely what one judges it to be for oneself, and no less. Value comes from within, not some external calculation about the amount of pleasure and pain somebody has experienced, and not from David Benatar's biased opinion. WE decide what holds value for us and what does not, both negative and positive.We don't live for pleasure and pain, and to the vast majority of people it's obvious that those things have no value in and of themselves.Consider the pleasure pill thought experiment:You have before you a pill which will dull all pain to nothing and give you euphoric pleasure for the rest of your life, and your body will be taken care of until its natural end in a hospital.Do you take it? Is pursuit of hedonic pleasure and avoidance of pain all that your life amounts to? If so, then you'd be obligated to take the pill and surrender anything and everything else your life might have meant.Our lives are NOT a sum of pleasure and pain, but a sum of values, or realizations of and failures to realize our interests and have our preferences met. Values are what give value to life, not the firing of arbitrary nerve signals that happened to be labeled "pleasure" or "pain".The people you may regard as suffering in miserable conditions but are happy none the less are happy because they have found value in their lives, while the young and wealthy CEO who is free of any meaningful physical sufering and has all of his hedonic interests met may jump off a roof because he has none -- value comes from values, and only those who hold them can give them meaning.It's not just unfalsifiable and suspect for that reason, it's also irrelevant. These questions make the assumption that the only thing that holds value is hedonic pleasure and pain, which is empirically false and can be easily demonstrated so by asking a few people using the pleasure pill thought experiment above.Benatar assumes that these things can be meaningfully compared on some objective scale. How does breaking a leg compare to the joy of holding your newborn baby for the first time? Does he think we should count the number of times nerves fire? Measure the voltage?No, the assertions are not falsifiable, and they're based on premises that are just flat out false. It's like the claim that chocolate is objectively more delicious than vanilla. It isn't. These qualities only have value relative to the value metrics individuals hold and give them.Due to his pessimism bias. A pessimism bias can operate with or without causing clinical depression; in his case, his ego and sense of self-importance probably holds him aloft.A pessimism bias in a depressed person manifests as false empirical beliefs about reality. Like that people at school hate him/her, or he/she is thought to be ugly and laughed at by others in private. Kind of like body dysmorphic disorder in an anorexic: no, you aren't fat, you are suffering from a form of mental illness and delusion.It can be hard to say the depression caused the pessimism bias: it's more likely the other way around or that in many cases depression isn't clearly defined and simply IS a pessimism bias.This is why depression is so well treated by therapy. Helping somebody see reality is the best cure for most depression.However, people can be chemically depressed and still find life to be valuable and worth living. And even if not, they can understand in particular that the feelings they have are due to neurotransmitter deficiencies, and that others live lives of positive value to them.There is a strong correlation between pessimism and depression, and it's a reasonable concern to have.See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200107/depression-doing-the-thinking