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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Does life matter?

Does life matter? Surely there's no more important question in ethics. 

1. According to nihilism, including antinatalism (which is a paradigm version of nihilism), it's better not to exist in the first place. And that's not just a hypothetical position to fill out the logical continuum of possible views, but a live option. Nihilism regards human existence is irredeemably tragic. 

2. According to Epicureanism, existence and nonexistence are equivalent. Prenatal and postmortem nonexistence are interchangeable. Although nominally heathen, the Epicurean view of life and death, as well as the nihilist, are essentially atheistic. We're on our own. 

It would be interesting to see a debate between an Epicurean and a Christian annihilationist! An Epicurean doesn't think oblivion is bad. 

There are some people who say postmortem nonexistence is significant in a way that prenatal nonexistence is not. They only agree with one side of the Epicurean comparison. 

3. Here's one way to view the issue: Suppose you're the proud father of a teenage son. I offer you $10 million to step into a time machine and contracept his existence. If you take the offer, you will travel back to point shortly before he was conceived, and do something to preempt his conception. 

I doubt most fathers would accept the offer. For one thing, they couldn't stand to lose their son. But over and above that, they couldn't bring themselves to do that to their own son. To deprive him of existence. 

Yet on the time-travel scenario, by taking that preemptive and retroactive action, the father made it the case that his son had no existence to begin with, for the new timeline replaces the original timeline. It's as if he never existed. He has no counterpart in the new timeline. And the father may or may not remember the original timeline (depending on how we detail the thought-experiment).

On Epicurean grounds, his nonexistence is insignificant. Yet I expect most fathers would balk at the prospect. 

And that's germane to the question of whether God, if there is a God, ought to intervene more often to prevent evil. Is that a reasonable expectation? 

Problem is, whenever God intervenes, that's analogous to a time-traveler who changes the past to change the future. Which doesn't mean that God never intervenes. But there are tradeoffs. When people imagine a better world, an improvement over the status quo, they men

4 comments:

  1. Respectfully, Steve, when you presented the hypothetical of the time machine and contracepting the son's existence (in a previous discussion), what I wanted to ask was, why are these losses not considered to be offset by the equal losses of not having people come into existence who otherwise would have (in a scenario under which the son would not). You argue that an alternative world in which God saves all would cause the tremendous losses of precluding the existence of many people who exist in this world. But what about this world's hidden but equal losses of all the people who would have existed in that other world but do not exist in this one? Every time a couple uses contraception, are they not agreeing to contracept the existence of whatever son or daughter might have been born? You are right that, once the child exists, it becomes unthinkable for the parents to somehow go back in time and preclude his existence, but this speaks more to our limitations then to the actual point, in my opinion. That's all I have to offer on the matter. Thanks.

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    1. If nonexistence is a deprivation, as some philosophers plausibly argue, then contraception is an agent of existential deprivation. That observation is distinct from the ethics of contraception. I'm stating a counterfactual truth.

      There are winners and losers whether a couple does or doesn't contracept. Both scenarios generate futures in which some people exist who otherwise wouldn't exist or some people won't exist who otherwise would exist.

      I'm not saying one future timeline is necessarily better than other. Rather, each timeline has incommensurable goods which can't be duplicated in the alternate timelines. So there's no best possible world.

      However, I don't think there's any metaphysical constraint God creating a plurality of timelines. A multiverse in which many different world histories are realized.

      You're raising questions which I've covered in detail in other posts.

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  2. Thanks for your reply, Steve. Trying to comprehend and weigh all the factors is beyond me, but that doesn't stop me from trying. Have a good day!

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    1. The larger context is the argument from evil. Atheists contend that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, then he ought to intervene more often to prevent evil.

      There are different ways of responding (which are not mutually exclusive). One way is to point out that divine intervention has a snowball effect. Preventing evil prevents second order goods. Preventing evil makes the world a better place in some respects, but worse in others. There's no single world that captures all the goods without the precipitating evils.

      A world in which God prevents the Titanic from hitting the iceberg is better for some people but worse for others. We can imagine discrete improvements, but that's shortsighted because just about every event has multiple consequences for good or ill.

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