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J. Goard's avatar

Back in ancient times, when I was an intern at Cato, an esteemed scholar argued against utilitarianism by saying: "It tells us we should allow the Holocaust to happen for a net benefit of a dime!" Tactless whippensnapper me immediately said something like: "Come on, that's just a verbal trick that hopes we ignore the meaning of 'net'. It expects us to feel the huge wrongness of preferring a dime (gross) over stopping the Holocaust, when what we're really talking about is having to choose between two Holocausts. Why wouldn't we choose the one that's slightly less bad?"

For similar reasons, I distrust people's intuitions (even my own!) about "lives barely worth living". I think we use that expression and similar ones in natural language to describe lives that actually aren't worth living. (But we don't say that, because it's taboo.)

I'm far from an antinatalist, but I think Benatar is partially correct, to the extent that there are many more net negative lives than we ordinarily admit, or, to put it another way, if we were to observe a bunch of lives that are *actually* barely worth living, this wouldn't strike our intuitions as repugnant at all.

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AuronS's avatar

For the counter to the alternative at 3.3, I'd simply invoke the asymmetry between pleasure and pain (the weak version, not the one that commits you to anti-natalism).

Intuitively, the absence of pain is good even when that absence means the being having not existed. But the absence of pleasure is not bad when that absence means the being having not existed, because then there is no one to begin with that'll suffer from not being brought into existence. It's not a wrong committed on anyone because there isn't anyone.

To make it more concrete, one would see as a moral wrong to bring into existence someone that will lead a miserable life, in a way one wouldn't towards refraining from bringing into existence someone that will lead an amazing life.

So, A is better than Z because it's better for everyone in A. As for the additional people not present in A, not existing is not a moral wrong relative to happily existing.

But in the objection Z* where people in A have slightly better lives, and a high enough number of additional people who lead torturous lives are introduced, Z* isn't preferable to A. Because with regards to pain, not existing IS actually a moral good relative to miserably existing.

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