[1] https://academic.oup.com/book/32901/chapter-abstract/2766430...
Personally I find all this moral arithmetic with pleasure and pain pretty strange. I think it's reasonable to exist for a few moments in eternity and see how it goes.
Second of all morality is not the primary concern of most individuals' existence, despite all the talk that goes on.
Benatar isn't trying to start a religion and makes convert. He is carefully building an argument that if we consider an axiomatisation of ethics where causing pain is bad and getting pleasure is positive, it can be argued that life is actually a poor deal. That's interesting in and of itself because it both challenges how we view life and the fondation of ethics.
You will never go far if you stick to a view where you have to either be for or against idea. Thankfully you can go beyond that. Parfit himself spent a significant part of his career unsuccessfully looking for an axiomatisation of population ethics avoiding the repugnant conclusion for exemple.
I don't agree I am. On the contrary, there is a lot of philosophical debate on the relationship between pragmatism and truth – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/ – and I think what I'm saying makes sense if you assume a certain position in that debate (albeit one which I'd expect Benatar would reject)
Obviously, in the short-run, the popularity of a belief tells us nothing about its truth. But what about the popularity of a belief in the very long-run, in the limit of future time? If we somehow knew that, as t approaches infinity (or the future extinction of humanity), believers in a proposition will inevitably outnumber its disbelievers, would that in itself be evidence that the proposition is true? Personally, I say yes. I don't know if Benatar has written anything on this topic, but I assume he'd have to say no, since yes implies the falsehood of his published work.
> He is carefully building an argument that if we consider an axiomatisation of ethics where causing pain is bad and getting pleasure is positive, it can be argued that life is actually a poor deal
I think it is interesting, but for the opposite reason he thinks – if consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least some versions thereof) produces that conclusion, to me that's another nail in the coffin of consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least those versions of it).
> Parfit himself spent a significant part of his career unsuccessfully looking for an axiomatisation of population ethics
I've read Reasons and Persons. I think his discussions of the theory of personal identity are very informative, even though I don't agree with his materialist/physicalist premises. His contributions to ethics fascinate me less, because I don't believe in consequentialism, and I doubt ethics is axiomatisable
Fun to run across an earlier line of inquiry here, in Parfit.
And a code I strongly believe in. Orienting yourself to best help the future, perhaps even futures beyond your time. As the Greek proverb goes:
> A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
If there is any technological progress, then future people collectively will be much richer than us, and so they will be able to solve their problems much more easily than we can. Even problems they inherited from us - those should be trivially cheap for them to solve in a few hundred years.
I see it as "they owe us" (for enabling their existence at all) rather than "we owe them".
And if there isn't any more technological progress, then there won't be many future people.
Our obligations to present people, to enable them to have their own self-determined futures, seem far more important to me.
Makes me feel slightly less bad about abandoning my first attempt at reading this very dense book. I was trying to read it in short bits (the book is split into quite short sections but with a big apparatus of parts, chapters, sections and so on with implied cross referencing) during a busy time.
I'll try again over the summer in a more concentrated way.
No recourse to spirits or pills though...
How to Be Good: The Philosopher Derek Parfit (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)
Why anything? Why this? (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315746 - Jan 2017 (77 comments)
Derek Parfit has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304873 - Jan 2017 (38 comments)
How to Be Good: Derek Parfit's Moral Philosophy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273495 - March 2016 (16 comments)
