On the possibility of a good life
1. A good life is worth living; conversely, a bad life is not worth living.
2. One should only procreate if one can have reasonable knowledge that their offspring will have a good life.
3. It has not been established what the possibility of a good life is. The most that may be said is that there are lives, and that some lives are better than others.
4. It is unlikely that such a possibility of a good life will ever be established, given the lack of consensus so far.
5. Therefore, is it not possible to determine if ones' offspring will have a good life that is worth living.
6. Therefore, there is a possibility that ones' offspring will not and in fact cannot have a good life.
7. Therefore, one should not procreate.
2. One should only procreate if one can have reasonable knowledge that their offspring will have a good life.
3. It has not been established what the possibility of a good life is. The most that may be said is that there are lives, and that some lives are better than others.
4. It is unlikely that such a possibility of a good life will ever be established, given the lack of consensus so far.
5. Therefore, is it not possible to determine if ones' offspring will have a good life that is worth living.
6. Therefore, there is a possibility that ones' offspring will not and in fact cannot have a good life.
7. Therefore, one should not procreate.
Comments (98)
I disagree. So the rest of it falls away.
:ok:
Embrace the suck!
But regardless, your objection fails to refute point 5.
Point 5 demands a necessary conclusion to allow it to hold true, which has not been specified. However, the fact that some people with 'bad lives' turn out to have children with good lives disproves this necessary premise.
And what of hope? Is hope not a consideration? For instance, the only reason many people with bad lives don't kill themselves is that nagging hope which runs contrary to all experience to date.
What are those?
Quoting darthbarracuda
And what are those?
For how long, is the real question
Quoting darthbarracuda
Humans, to my knowledge, thankfully, don't have enhanced abilities like the one you describe, so, you're a proud antinatalist it would seem. Good for you. Variety is the spice of life.
As to the rest.. uh, sure. Why not. You seem educated enough to raise a kid that doesn't grow into a malfeasance. Or even better, to fight the scourge of them. So why don't you.
Premise 1 here is too vague for a first premise, it allows too much wriggle room for your other premises to make a really effective argument. I think with more details premise 1 will fail and the argument collapse.
What is it that constitutes a “bad life”? How are you defining what a bad life is?
From the fact (if it is a fact) that a good life (however we might conceive of that) is necessarily worth living, it does not follow that a bad life is not worth living. Even if a bad life is defined as being completely devoid of any pleasure whatsoever for the one living it, and even if we accepted the stipulation that a life completely devoid of the slightest pleasure for the one living it is not, on that account alone, worth living, such a life may bring pleasure to others, making it worthwhile for other reasons.
I know. Premise 1 is vague, and that vagueness is what the rest of your argument depends on. Thats my point, this is an ambiguity fallacy that you are using in your argument.
Yeah... I can't get past premise one. What's a good life? What's a bad life? Also I'm not trying to be a dick but what does 'worth living' mean? Do you mean by this that if you have a bad life you may as well die (suicide, I presume)? I don't think it is possible to determine what a life worth living actually means except in the extreme. Some might think it would be superb to live as Mick Jagger, for instance. I'd rather be dead. :gasp:
So you want a percentage chance? Assume we can somehow do that. At what percentage change of having a good life does having kids become ok? 51%? 75%? 99%? 100%?
It’s not really uncommon in day to day life to be unsure of the chances something will hurt someone and to do it to them anyways.
For instance: Your whole argument can be repurposed to argue against sending people to school. Mostly just replace “life” with “school life” and “procreate” with “send kids to school” with a few more minor tweaks. Seeing as I doubt you consider sending people to school wrong, the argument must not be valid.
Worst part is it can also be used to argue FOR sending people to school by pointing out that not doing so is a risk, and that we need to be sure before taking risks with others. It just leads to paralysis.
1. See the problems that have been pointed out already. Good and bad are far too subjective to serve as a reasonable premise for a generalized statement.
2. Disagree. Of course it's in the best interest of a parent to give the best possible basis for their offsprings life - but ultimately having "a good life" lays in the responsibility of the child, just like I am responsible for having a good life for myself.
3. The good-life/bad-life problem applies here as well. Furthermore, the possibility of good life is not something determined by fate before birth. Circumstances dramatically affect us but ultimately it's our actions that lead to a good or bad life.
4. See 3
5. See 2
6. See 3
7. See 2
1)I think what he is saying is that a parent would want his child to have a good life. You don't need to define a good or a bad life, all you need to accept is that there is a good life and there is a bad life, you only need to acknowledge their existence. As for what is a good life? The answer to that question is in a further point.
2) Now he argues that one should only procreate if they can guarantee that their child will life a good life with certainty.
3) Now, @darthbarracuda argues that it is impossible to know what a 'good' life is. The most a person can say is that some lives are better than others, like we can say that Trump live a better life than a slum-dweller in Africa does, but that doesn't mean that Trump lives a good life. We know that Trump lives a good life but not whether he lives a good life or not.
4) He now argues that such a proper definition of a good life won't ever come because people would not and probably never agree on a definition of "good" life.
5) Since there will never be a uniform standard of 'good' and 'bad', therefore it is impossible to determine your child will live a 'good' or a 'bad' life.
6) I am not exactly sure what he means by this line, so just be aware of that: What he probably is saying that if you cannot know whether your child will live a good live there is a possibility that he might live a bad life.
Now what I don't understand is what he means when he is saying," [...]in fact cannot have a good life."
Just that is the part that I don't understand but if we accept what he is saying to be true then,
7) One should not procreate because he argued, above, that the only time one should procreate is when the parent is sure that his/her child will live a good life. Now he has shown that it is impossible to know whether your child will have a good live and even further that, "ones' offspring will not and in fact cannot have a good life." So now, we lose all our incentive to procreate and thus it is wrong to have children.
Sure!
Quoting darthbarracuda
So, I actually think this kind of argument has the broadest basis and appeal in terms of arguments for antinatalism. I'll make a distinction between AN arguments that are universally true (of all humans) and the statistical- those that are at least true some of the time (for some humans).
It is harder to prove the universal- that causing any amount of (unnecessary and non-trivial) harm for a future person is wrong (even though I think there is a very strong defense of this ethical premise). However, it is much easier to prove the statistical. At least SOME humans will have bad lives. Combining the fact that you can't know whether your child will be in the "bad lives" category, and the premise that it is not good to create unnecessary, non-trivial suffering on another's behalf, it would seem that the lack of knowledge of the conditions/circumstances/experiences/evaluation of the future child, should make one refrain from bringing this situation about for another person. I know Benatar is not loved in these parts, but his point about the asymmetry is pertinent. Even if a "majority" claimed to live good lives, the absence of their good lives doesn't matter, morally. The tragic is the activated "bad lives" not the prevented "good lives". Prevented harm seems to always be good while prevented good seems to matter not a penny since that seems to be only relevant when "that" person actually exists (and is deprived).
@darthbarracuda
This would not work if you are not a utilitarian. Using people's suffering (by knowingly creating a life that could be bad) for this kind of ends would be wrong to a deontologist, period.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think @darthbarracuda is saying that it can be subjectively defined. Whatever is bad to that person is bad. If that person thinks their life sucks, then it sucks. I am working on a definitional model for what an objective "harm" might look like, but for the sake of DB's argument, subjective definition would work. The container of what makes a "bad life" needn't be more than what is experienced or evaluated by the person with the "bad life".
As for Tom Storm's idea about "worth living".. It would seem that since DB is dealing with the idea of procreation he is really intending to say, "worth starting".. A bad life (one that is subjectively so let's say), was not worth starting for that person. So your critique is just a confusion on this or an intentional ignorance of sorts to derail the major point.
But you know my response and probably something @darthbarracuda might say (not sure).. that starting a life is one of the only cases where amelioration doesn't come into play (ameliorating a greater harm/imposition/burden with a lesser harm/imposition/burden). Hence why I try to use the idea of "Not creating the conditions of "unnecessary" non-trivial harm on another's behalf."
@darthbarracuda
Why would subjective/objective affect the argument? Either way it works for what bad entails.
Quoting Hermeticus
But the ability not to even "play" the game of "living a good life" is not on the table (lest the painful prospect of suicide). And not all things are in the child's hands.. Genetics, cultural practices, contingent circumstances of disposition, disease, cause/effect, etc.. Either way, even IF it was ALL up to the child and they simply made bad decisions, the outcome is the same (bad life).
Quoting Hermeticus
Says you.. But again see response to 2.
I didn't read this first before I started making arguments.. I could have just said "read I love Chom-choms point 1!
Quoting I love Chom-choms
Yep..
Quoting I love Chom-choms
Great analysis. You made a good point that I didn't emphasize, which is that @darthbarracuda was emphasizing the epistemological not knowing of what even a good or bad life even is.
Your response to this was: "Yea but that's trivial imposition". And now we're trying to determine what exactly counts as trivial or non trivial imposition.
I just find it really curious that any time I reply to you it's all "stop arguing for the sake of arguing you debate class bot" but here you are restating the same response...
No, it's just that we don't all see the world in simplistic 'worth living' or 'not worth living' arbitrary categories, nor do we all see a clear way in which to determine these ideas except by more extreme examples.
But I just explained how it isn't "Worth living" but "worth starting" (on another person's) behalf.
The main point was that if you can't know the good or bad of the future child, then don't create those conditions of bad for the child, if it's a possibility and not known. Not a hard premise. You are trivializing a perfectly understandable point.
But it should apply, I think.
At least for me, a life worth living is based on what I want to do in my life and I think that every person has to have something that they desire. If that desire is fulfilled then it is a life worth living and if it isn't then it is not a life worth living.
The only argument to this that I can think of is that some people may not know what they desire, you know, like in stories when a guy takes revenge to "fill the hole" inside him but after he takes revenge, he feels empty.
So, for that guy, before he has killed his target, a life in which he kill has target is worth it but after he killing the enemy if he is asked whether his life was worth it, then he would think that it is not.
That seems non-intuitive. Care to explain?
Actually, you may be trivializing things by turning life into a shallow assessment of 'not worth starting' or 'worth starting' - which from my perspective can't readily be made.
But you're already entering this discussion from foundational perspective of antinatalism, so life not worth starting is underwritten in your worldview. No wonder you accept the points made so readily. I am approaching this thread in good faith and I see it differently. We don't have to agree. That's perfectly fine. I am not unsympathetic to the overarching position, just not via this syllogism.
I understand your point but I'm not in agreement. I take the view life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. The conceit of expecting life to provide what you desire (an archaic word)) is not something I share. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
I never really understood what this meant. Please explain.
If I had to guess then it would be that those other plans may be something a person desires, and that what happens as he is trying to get that is life. If that is the case then it similar to my argument that a person might not know what he desires.
If it was me that learned that what I desire, I won't get throughout my life then I would most definitely not want to be born and I am sure that you would disagree.
That is OK, but please explain your reasoning for, "why do bother to live?"
I would rather not be born because I know that what I want, or maybe what I think I want, I will never get but I don't kill myself because of that suspicion that what I think I desire may not be what I actually desire and that someday I will know what I desire. That is what I currently think, I feel like I haven't expressed my feelings clearly, this whole think fells like it is full of loopholes but I assure you this is what I feel and think.
So, please answer my question, "What do you live for?"
It means life just happens and that's the point, while plans are kind of futile.
Quoting I love Chom-choms
Not sure what you mean - I live and enjoy the rough and the smooth.
Quoting Janus
We don't need to evoke 'great artists' - think of the long suffering parents who work hard in menial jobs getting ill health, postponing all their own pleasures, perhaps dying young so that their children can study and become useful transformative members of a culture - doctors, pharmacists, researchers, teachers, whatever. Pretty common. Self sacrifice has traditionally been seen as worth living for.
:up: You're right of course; the suffering artist is just an extreme example.
More examples of misguided utilitarianism. Sacrificing yourself so you can sacrifice your child on the alter of society, wasn’t morally considering the child as a person. Rather it was considering the child as worth. The fact still remains that a person should never be foisted into unnecessary harm because anything otherwise is using them and overlooking their dignity for some goal (whether that goal be socially popular/ respectable to hold or not). No good is missed by any nonexistent person. No obligation is present. Certainly better to never foist unnecessary harm on another. This is where moral consideration is in this case of procreation.
One does not possess the knowledge nor power to ensure one's child's good life, because of the many factors that are beyond the parents' control.
Therefore procreation cannot be a moral act.
One does not possess the knowledge nor power to make one's intentions come about, however just those intentions may be. It is down to fate and chance.
1. It is necessary but not sufficient to have a justified true belief that one has a good life in order to have a good life, i.e. the justified true belief that one has a good life is a necessary aspect of actually having a good life, for a good life that is unrecognized as a good life is absurd.
2. There is no complete conception of what a good life is, but only partial representations of what may be considered a good life, and such a complete conception will probably never be known, i.e. a complete conception of what a good life is will forever remain a mystery.
3. Therefore, it is not possible to have a justified true belief that one has a good life.
4. Therefore, it is not possible to have a good life.
5. One should not procreate if one's children will not have good lives.
6. Therefore, one should not procreate.
Playing from devil's advocate perspective.. Can't someone just say that whatever a person thinks is a good life, is a good life for that person? They will say the evidence for their justification is their own sense of self-satisfaction with life. Thus they think their child will also have this sense, and thus be vindicated that having children is permissible if someone can have a sense that they can attain the good life.
I guess they could utter that, but I would expect there to be various contradictions and absurdities in the proposition itself, if it were to be analyzed. Just like if I say that whatever I think is true, is true (even though it might not actually be true).
Gotcha. There is a sort of justification regress then? So someone can say, "Happiness is an immutable subjective feeling" and someone can always say, "How do you know this is what happiness is?" and because of this uncertainty, other than their subjective notion or feeling, we can never really know if a person born is happy or not as there is no standard one can even compare that is justified.
I don't think there has ever been a single coherent idea of what a good life is. There are partial representations of a good life - pleasure, virtue, accomplishment, etc - but there has never been and there never will be a complete idea of what a good life is. My view here is that, because we cannot ever know what the good life is, we cannot ever have it.
I would think those of religious faith and those who accept the tenants of secular humanism would be aligned here in holding that human achievement is of the highest order. Whether that view arises because you view humanity as a divine extension or you hold it just as a matter of fundamental principle, it must therefore follow that there is no such thing as life not worth living.
The sacred can never be worthless.
Won't most people equate the "good life" with them "liking life"? Thus if they "like life" they are living the "good life". I guess the question becomes, "Does the threshold for having children need to be that they have some certain definition of the 'good life' or simply that they subjectively think the are living a "good life"?
I think this would entail absurd conclusions. Firstly some degree of subjective satisfaction with ones' life does seem to be essential to having a good life worth living, I can't imagine being tortured for your whole life would really be worth going through. There would need to be some sort of redemption.
Yes I agree.. I am running into this question about what constitutes "objective harm" so the flipside.. You are trying to figure out (and not getting an answer) "objective happiness/good life".
Just curious, do you think "objective harm" also runs into this problem, since everyone's notion is different in slight ways?
So being devil's advocate again.. what would make the person's life not a good life even if their experiences were from a machine? What makes anything except subjective point of view matter? Thus, "Life is good" from the experience machine just means for that person, "Life is good". Again being REAL devil's advocate here.
The absurd conclusions arise from a failure to posit meaning into existence. Nihlism is inherently absurd.
This may be a wee bit off topic, but I agree. Who in their right mind, male or female, would want to date someone who doesn't?!
And conversely, just because people think they have a bad life doesn't mean they do.
But the same cannot be said of a bad life. Since it is not sufficient to believe that one has a good life to have a good life, it must be possible to believe that one has a good life, but in fact have a bad life. But since it is necessary that one believes that one has a good life in order to have a good life, if they fail to have this belief - for instance, if they believe they have a bad life - then they do not have a good life.
See this diagram I sketched:
You wrote that what a good life is will forever remain a mystery. So when you say that "A good life is worth living; conversely, a bad life is not worth living." you're uttering nonsense, in the sense that you do not know what you are talking about. Of course, then you only attack the first part, but it's only logical that if having a good life is impossible, because we can't know what a good life is, then, conversely, having a bad life is impossible too, because we can't know what a bad life is.
So, all that would be fine if it didn't sabotage your own argument and I would even agree that good and bad are nonsensical in this context. Meaningful/meaningless is a better pair of terms when it comes to justifying life. If one thinks his life is meaningful, then it's justified and it was worth having. Unlike good/bad, it's clear to me if my life is meaningful or not. It's not even a matter of knowing/not knowing if my life is meaningful. Not anymore than knowing that I'm in pain. It's nonsensical to question whether I know or not if I'm in pain. Even more nonsensical is for someone else to question it.
I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of my argument. I said a complete representation of a good life will forever remain a mystery. This does not preclude the possibility of knowing partial representations of it, such as, that a good life is worth living.
Quoting hairy belly
Again I don't think that's charitable and I sense you have not understood my argument. When a bad life is conceived as that which is not a good life, then if a good life is impossible, all lives are ipso facto bad lives.
Quoting hairy belly
Well, I would say that meaning in life is necessary for having a good life, but it's not obvious to me that it's sufficient. Meaning would belong in the subjective category, and according to the diagram above, there would also need to be objective features present to make a life a good life.
You're free to disagree with this, but I think it would absurd to if you thought about it more.
You can spin it however you like, the fact remains that what you tried to do is exclude the possibility of a good life based on our inability of forming a good enough conception of it. If you don't remember this, here it is:
"2. There is no complete conception of what a good life is, but only partial representations of what may be considered a good life, and such a complete conception will probably never be known, i.e. a complete conception of what a good life is will forever remain a mystery.
3. Therefore, it is not possible to have a justified true belief that one has a good life.
4. Therefore, it is not possible to have a good life."
Your "partial representations" are not enough for forming a JTB and a JTB is (according to you) a presupposition of recognizing a life as good. Therefore, the reason that we can never recognize a life as good is that we can't have a good enough conception of it.
Again, spin it however you like, that's what your argument says, so I don't think that my interpretation is uncharitable.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I'm not sure you understand the arguments. When two terms have definitions that depend on each other, then, if one of the definitions is untenable, the other one is ipso facto untenable too.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You clearly don't understand what is being said. Meaning is not necessary for having a good life. It is necessary for having a meaningful and therefore a justified life. No need to bring the "good life" in this, since it's such a failure of a term.
Well, I wrote about a few things I find problematic about your approach. If you got nothing out of it, then there's probably zero reason to repeat it. More generally, I find all of it rather contrived, but that's what usually happens when you begin with a conclusion and then you embark to find ways to justify it. Kinda like when you have a kid and then a contrarian challenges you on your shallow motives.
So, if I'm given zero reasons as to why a JTB is necessary for a good life, then there's not much the rest of it is gonna do. As I've hinted, I find this being absurd to the point of being funny, like asking someone evidence that they are in pain or that they are content. Before declaring that a JTB is necessary for a good life, you should explain how utterances like "I have a good life", "My life is shit" etc are descriptive and not expressive, you'd have to show that they are about belief and knowledge rather than emotion. For all I know, when I say "My life is shit", I usually mean "I feel like shit" and that has zero to do with belief or knowledge. Sure, when challenged, many of us try to justify or give evidence for things that have nothing to do with these. That's common. So, when someone comes and tells me that "shut the fuck up, your life isn't shit, look the kids in Africa", I might be tempted to provide "evidence" as to why my life is "objectively shitty" despite not being an African kid. Which, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not my life is shitty aka I feel like shit. If anything I might feel worse for being such a privileged crybaby.
Anyway, the point is simple, you haven't shown why "the good life", or whatever, is a matter of belief and not emotion. Cause if it's not about belief but about emotion, then your whole idea is a category error or however you philosophically inclined people call it.
Okay, so you disagree with the initial premise. I never argued for it, that's fair. I did not include the possibility that utterances about life might be expressive rather than descriptive. If having a good life is not dependent on believing that one has a good life, then my argument fails, no question about it. But that's obvious. It is odd that it took you this long to make that point.
So do you have a good argument as to this expressive/descriptive distinction? It seems fairly obvious that a good life doesnt entail recognition of it, especially when one accepts life can be objectively bad or good.
Whats your case for a good life requiring belief that that life is good?
I started off with the assumption that it seemed obvious that it does entail this recognition, though it seems not everyone agrees.
Consider the proposition: "Stacey has a boyfriend named Paul." It would seem that, in order for Stacey to have a boyfriend named Paul, two things would need to be case: there exists a man with the name Paul, and there exists a belief in Stacey that this same man is her boyfriend. If either one of these is false, Stacey does not have a boyfriend.
With that example in mind, consider the proposition: "Stacey has a good life." If there does not exist in Stacey a belief that she has a good life, then she does not have a good life. See the diagram I posted above.
In general, it seems reasonable to say that a good life is a species of things that require for its existence both objective and subjective components, and furthermore that one of the subjective components is the belief that this thing exists.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Quoting darthbarracuda
These two statements are not analogous. The first is a statement about objective facts, the second you intended to to be statement about Staceys belief about her life which is subjective.
In order for your two statements to be analogous the “happy life” of the second statement would have to be referencing objective components/qualifiers of a happy life. As soon as you do that it completely undermines your point because then Staceys subjective opinion about her lifes happiness isnt determinate of Staceys happy life.
If thats your case for a good life requiring recognition of it being a good life I think it falls short sir.
Not sure I follow, my point was that both Stacey having a boyfriend and having a good life depend on objective and subjective components.
Well I asked for your case for recognition of life being good required for a good life and you responded with your Stacey scenarios which I pointed out doesnt really support that recognition of life being good being required for a good life.
Now you are saying that you weren’t trying to make that case but rather a point about subjective/objective components.
So assuming there was a miscommunication I want to ask again, whats your case fir recognition of a good life required for a good life?
Yeah, I wasn't able to follow your objection, can you clarify it?
Lets make sure Im not confused about what youre saying first.
For ease of reference, P1 = “recognition of a good life is necessary for a good life”
First you used
"Stacey has a boyfriend named Paul."
With an accompanying explanation. You then used
Quoting darthbarracuda
With accompanying explanation. I read the intention of the two examples as an attempt to establish that if you accept the logic of the first then you have to accept the logic of the second since the two examples are the same in regard to P1. In other words, you wanted to show that your two examples are analogous in order to establish P1.
Is that correct?
Yes. Just as Stacey must believe that Paul is her boyfriend in order for Paul to be her boyfriend, Stacey must believe that she has a good life in order for her to have a good life. That is my claim.
Ok, so my point was that those two examples are not analogous. The first references facts, part of which is what “boyfriend” means by definition. The second references opinion, not facts. The two examples are not like and therefore acceptance of the first does not entail acceptance of the second.
Stacey is in pain. Is that a fact or an opinion?
[quote=The Washington Post]Currently, an astonishing 45 percent of the 6 million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended.[/quote]
I guess those who really cares about the future of their children are in the minority; if people were serious about the future prospects of their children, wouldn't pregnancies be a meticulously well-planned affair? Too. we're talking about what the conditions for children are in the apotheosis of modern civilization (the USA) - not as good as I'd thought/hoped. Just imagine what the situation must be like in the developing world?
The population explosion only means one thing - the slice of the resource pie each child can lay claim to gets smaller and smaller, a breaking point is then reached and civilization will collapse.
Quoting James Riley
Going God mode, eh?
That's what God must've thought when he sent his son, Jesus, to earth. Astonishingly, Jesus' life was, I suppose, what they call a divine plan and surely must've covered every eventuality (the crown of thorns and the crucifxion too) from womb to tomb.
[quote=Lewis Carroll (Alice In Wonderland)]“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as she spoke.[/quote]
So yeah, it's as @schopenhauer1 alluded to earlier, if the value of something is entirely subjective, then there won't be any sense in which we can say as a matter of fact what the value of this thing is, if we're expected to provide something beyond subjective states.
But anyway, if having a good life is an opinion, it would seem that someone would have to hold that opinion, e.g. Stacey has to believe she has a good life in order to have a good life. It would be objectively true that Stacey has a good life, if and only if she subjectively believes that she has a good life (and nothing else). Just like for it to be objectively true that someone is in pain, they would actually need to feel pain. Having a good life would come down to whether or not someone thought their life was good.
The question I would ask then is, if a good life is based on opinion, then what factors influence this? How does one come to determine whether they consider their life to be good? My hunch is that this will involve things that are common factors across people. Things like: not feeling a lot of pain, accomplishing one's goals, having meaningful relationships, etc etc. Which I think gives some credence to the view that one might be mistaken in their opinion.
By opinion, did you mean an expression, like something that cannot be true or false? As in, Stacey saying she has a good life is not a real proposition but just a vocalization of her current satisfaction with life? Because that just does not seem correct at all, as evidence by the fact that we often make decisions based on the assumption that it is not just an utterance but has some degree of truth, like when we euthanize old dogs. We euthanize them because we judge it to be the case that their lives are very bad.
That there is so much disagreement, confusion and mystery surrounding what it means to have a good life, that any steps to clarify it require a great deal of effort, that one usually has to be taught how to live a good life, all of these things seem to demonstrate that a good life is not common and is by no means given, but more importantly, that life is something that has to be fixed in a certain way for it to good.
There is the question about what makes a life good. But there is a deeper question, which asks what the value of having to ask this question is - i.e. is it a good thing that we have to ask the question about what makes a life good?
The pain example makes the exact same mistake. That is not a like example. A like example would be asking about how much pain. Whether she is in pain is a fact, how much the pain hurts is subjective.
Your last paragraph was just repeating the same mistake so clearly I have failed to make my point.
It looks like you moved on in your next post so Ill leave it at that.
I am going to see this similar to the "Happy Slave" scenario. A slave is put in the unjust situation of being limited in freedom, but is somehow subjectively happy. Is the slave living the "good life"? If we were purely taking into account subjective attitude, then yes, absolutely. However, we don't judge situations by this alone. If we have all the relevant information, we use other criteria beyond subjective feeling like justice, rights, freedoms, consent, capacity, and a host of other relevant matters we deem important. Clearly the slave isn't allowed to live up to his full human capacities, his rights are being violated, and the situation itself is overall an injustice. These are things that don't necessarily constitute a good life, and they are relevant to the situation of being a human and being born into life.
The same goes for antinatalism. You can have people subjectively feel good they were born, but were still "forced" into an often harmful, inescapable game of life which was an injustice. There can be totally relevant non-subjective factors that relate to the "justness" or "rightness" of a moral/axiological situation. Surely having a just/fair life is something that factors into a good life, for example. Someone who is allowed full capacities versus someone who is not, let's say.
For what reason can it not be said how much the pain hurts, as a matter of fact?
Indeed, though one objection, and I mean no offense, but wrapping a word in quotes makes it suspiciously imprecise. Either someone is forced to live by having been born, or they aren't; "forced" is questionably ambiguous, IMO.
Because it is subjective, there is no fact of the matter that applies to everyone.
But see isn't this your argument. I am making the case in another thread that life is indeed a "forced game". Whether or not the contestants are happy playing it or not, the injustice lies in forcing another to play the game of life at all (or opt out and commit suicide). You are arguing that people will never come to a conclusion as to what the objective side of a "good life" is, just like you are arguing over my forced game argument now. Thus it points to more evidence that people can never know "the good life" or if they have it.
All your argument needs is the recognition of doubt as to what a good life is. My argument is a little harder to prove because now I have to demonstrate via analogies, anecdotes, generalized logic of what a game is, and what forcing a game onto someone is, and how this is indeed an injustice in all cases. I think the evidence is strong but it requires more robust argumentation. Your argument simply needs to meet the threshold of "there is doubt".
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah, my argument rests on the absurdity of someone having a good life when they don't recognize it as such. The very possibility of doubting the goodness of life ipso facto demonstrates that life is not intrinsically good; only those with the privilege of understanding the good life can have a good life, and the rest are shit out of luck. It is as the Buddha said in the Dhammapada:
The irony is that the "good life" is characterized by the deep understanding that life is not good.
Just as the common skeptical objection to religion posits that, because there are so many different religions that are mutually exclusive to each other it is more likely that all of them are wrong than one of them right, it can be said that every attempt to define what a good life is has failed to accomplish just that. Who is right? The Stoics, the Epicureans, the Christians, the Buddhists, the Transhumanists, ...?
After years of reading this sort of literature, I have come to the conclusion that, while many of these traditions can be helpful in alleviating burdensome parts of life, no single tradition has been successful in demonstrating that actual possibility of a good life.
For life in general to be good, it should not be necessary to read all of these books to learn that this is the case. The process of doing so is not a search for answers but a search for a solution, as life is not a question but a problem/predicament to be fixed. Only when life is viewed as an essentially burdensome problem does the search for solutions make any sense.
I mean perhaps reading all those books you mention could help. They likely wouldn't hurt.
As for me, it looks to me as if the "answer" to the issue is straightforward, in a sense. Life is very complicated. If it were easy, then all we would need is to find that one book that gives you the solution to this problem. Thousands of years later, there is no clear answer.
If an issue persists for this long, it implies that there are too many variables. We can speak of good tendencies or habits in quite general terms. But beyond that, every person is an entire world to themselves.
Quoting _db
I take this to say that our tendency to write these books etc. reveals that life is "an essentially burdensome problem", but I fail to follow the causality here. Maybe we are constantly looking for meaning out of the sheer pleasure of doing so? Maybe we are doing it simply for aesthetic value? Maybe what we really like about it is to "disprove the old ways", to get those 15 minutes?
Most likely, these are only a few of the reasons that we "search for solutions". As others here have said, it's about people in the end. Is it all fake, then? Are we "getting somewhere"? I don't know. That's the heart of the matter. Some people say the journey matters more, so the question is moot. Other people say you need a goal to orientate yourself. As far as goals go, finding the good life seems like a fair choice. Yes, it's been done before. But not by you.
With all due respect, this is a terrible argument.
Premise 1 reduced the value judgement of lives to a dichotomy. On what basis? Can't there also be mediocre lives? I also agree with James Ridley, a bad life may still yield decent things. Many artists for example, like Vincent van Gogh arguably suffered enough to constitute a bad life. Should he never have existed? What if the person who cures cancer once and for all also had a bad life? Many people who suffer will often choose to suffer over not existing, there is a certain privilege, and honor in even getting to look at the sunrise. Would you rob this of the human beings yet to be (without asking them)?
Premise 2 is heavily contingent upon premise 1.
Premise 3. According to many religions there are rather measurable boundaries for a good life. It is true that they (and other, non-religious sources) present different, perhaps conflicting views about what constitutes a good life, but won't you consider the possibility that
a) There are multiple ways for a life to be good, not just one. There are multiple ways to travel from New York to Los Angeles, each with pros and cons with respect to cost, travel time, and safety. Does the existence of multiple paths make it impossible to travel from one place to the other? No.
b) The differences between different kinds of good lives are trivial. Even the stringent Catholics I grew up with often acknowledged that other religions were still doing things that contributed to fulfillment. I think it's also possible to do many of these things without religion.
Also if some lives are better than others, might it not be worth comparing the differences between these lives, and making an attempt to articulate the basis on which you qualify lives as better or worse than each other? Instead of doing what you do in premise 4, and basically make it a condition of your argument that it is not worth investigating the truth of premise 3.
Besides all this, from the outset, you limit your analysis to weather a life is good or bad. This is my biggest sticking point. What about words like fulfilling, honorable, interesting, vibrant, creative, productive, dignifying, enriching, challenging, variable, or enlightening (for instance), instead of something vague like good or bad? In myths, religions and stories, the human condition is often essentially articulated as a struggle. There is the clash of will against fate, the challenge of coming to terms with mortality, the question of integrating into a society or pursing one's own bliss, many similarly substantial and interesting questions that are powerful to explore can take place even if they are (somehow) qualified as something vague like "bad".
Don't you see? Like even if we just accept your argument can't we just make it in the opposite direction with equal merit?
1. A good life is worth living; conversely, a bad life is not worth living.
2. One should procreate if one cannot have reasonable knowledge that their offspring will have a bad life.
3. It has not been established what the possibility of a bad life is. The most that may be said is that there are lives, and that some lives are worse than others.
4. It is unlikely that such a possibility of a bad life will ever be established, given the lack of consensus so far.
5. Therefore, is it not possible to determine if ones' offspring will have a bad life that is not worth living.
6. Therefore, there is a possibility that ones' offspring will not and in fact cannot have a bad life.
7. Therefore, one should procreate.
Hopefully seeing your argument like this will help you see more of its errors. Like how between points 4 and 5 you just jump from it being "unlikely that such a possibility of a good life will ever be established" to saying that it's just "not possible to determine if ones' offspring will have a good life". What is the basis for this conclusion? Other than it sounds like you just want it to be true.
Again, I mean this with all due respect. Life can be difficult sometimes, I'll grant you that.
"A monk who with tranquil mind has chosen to live in a bare cell knows an unearthly delight in gaining a clearer and clearer perception of the true law."
(Dhammapada 373 / Müller & Maguire, 2002.)
I agree with the overarching idea that we should strive to reduce unnecessary needs, since that's probably the best way to attain an ineffably positive state of contentment that has immense worth.
Unlike religions, which seem to have differences on various matters, most people do seem to value their lives due to things such as love and beauty. The way they manifest themselves can certainly be different, which, in my view, only adds to the beauty of life. As you said, I do think that one can say one should procreate if a good life is likely. I don't think that ending all opportunity of the positives for the sake of preventing the negatives is justifiable. I do agree that life can be terrible in many circumstances, which is why I hope that we can work together to address issues such as rising inequality. We should also rethink mindless procreation, and also consider effectuating ideas such as a liberal RTD and transhumanism. Hope you have a wonderful day!