“But you avoid clarifying your position: how can both giving and taking life be harmful?”
Why would you think they are mutually exclusive? Do you want to be killed? Do you want to grow up in a world that can’t support its population? Does it really need to be explained, Mr. Murder kids if they’re miserable as a favor to them???
You’re restating my point as though it’s self-refuting, but “murder people who are miserable” is just describing euthanasia, and that’s not generally thought of as a moral wrong. Can you give me another example of something that it is morally wrong to inflict on someone but also morally wrong to relieve them of?
This is the chain of reasoning:
1. It’s wrong to reproduce because life is bad.
2. Life is bad.
3. Relieving people of bad things is good.
Therefore
4. Relieving people of life is good.
That seems a valid deduction, but I am saying it’s unsound because 1 is false. I take you to be saying it’s not a valid deduction, is that right? Where does it go wrong?
Don’t worry about it. You don’t know logic, so don’t bother. Have a nice day.
Objection! Filibuster.
What are you basing this off of? Just because he said some things you don’t agree with or what?
Right, that’s the tension. And I think implicit in that claim is that relieving people of life is morally wrong because life is good. But that conflicts with a claim that procreation is bad because life is bad.
There may be ways around that problem. Benetar’s asymmetry argument is one attempt I know of from a utilitarian perspective, which holds that pleasure and pain are asymmetric in their application to prospective people. I find it question-begging, especially if it’s to avoid the conflict I’m pointing out, but it has its intuitive appeal.
Anyway, I’m not a utilitarian. My claim in this thread is that reproduction is a moral good because good is definable by reference to the evolutionary role of our moral instincts, and since our instincts evolved because they led to us reproducing, the act of reproduction itself must be a moral good. But I’m still not sure how to deal with the objection raised here.
His belief that his list of points constitutes a “valid deduction”.
I suspect your actual objection is that my argument is unsound, rather than invalid. But if you think some inference is invalid, by all means point to it.
I think it is a valid deduction my dude. It makes perfect deductive sense to me.
I’m not the brightest person around, but surely one of the main challenges in Benatar’s argument must be attributing value to non-existence. Since non-existence means there is no one to experience or be deprived of anything, attributing value (good or bad) to non-existence can be problematic. Benatar attempts to navigate this by claiming that the absence of pain is a good thing even if there is no one to experience this good, while the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is someone to experience deprivation.
Or am I completely off centre?
.
Turning negatives into positives… to suit his weary Self?
Doctors typically don’t kill people to save them from terminal illnesses. They usually medicate them with pain killers and such and let nature do its course as the last resort.
However, if you think it follows that “murder” is the right course of action because it will “relieve” people of life, then by all means follow your conclusion. If it deductively follows from the argument as presented, then it must be the right thing to do.
You do know that there are extremely miserable people in this world. Why are you not “murdering” them? Are you an immoral (or else amoral) person? Are you sure it deductively follows from the premises (if the premises are arranged in a valid form and are sound)?
Would you put your argument into a valid form for me? I’m not seeing all the steps or how you are jumping from term to term.
For example, the following would be a valid argument (among various other formulations as well).
If A, then B
A
Therefore B (edit: sorry had that backwards prior to my edit just now correcting it, my bad)
However, your first premise doesn’t seem to be an “if/then” premise. It appears to be missing steps somewhere (if it is indeed a valid argument). And the term “murder” doesn’t even show up in the premises, so I’m wondering how it is a “valid” argument?
Note; I am not saying that reproduction is morally wrong, only that it is morally neutral or not necessarily morally good in and of itself.
If (L)ife = (B)ad, then (R)eproduction = ~(G)ood
L = B
therefore R = ~G
If R = ~G, then (M)urder = (G)ood
R = ~G
Therefore M = G
I was wrong. If the above is the formulation being used, then it is a valid argument. However, I do not believe that murder is good, therefore, my contention is indeed, as you say, that the premise that murder is good is not true and therefore the argument is unsound (unless you can demonstrate to me that murder = good is true).
I agree my statements weren’t formal logic. I have to clear up some things I was unclear/confusing/unfair about before I address your formalization (which is correct given the ways I was being misleading), and then I’ll give some thoughts of where it leaves us if you’re interested to continue.
Let me start by clarifying a point of language that you point out. I’ve variously referred to an act as “sav[ing someone] from hell”, “murder”, “removing [someone] from hell”, “destroying [life]”, and “relieving [someone] of life”. I think there’s a rhetorical difference between these, so shifting between them causes confusion. I intended them to describe the same act, something like ‘killing someone’.
Calling that “murder” was inflammatory, I confess that was my intent in using it. It was poor form and I regret it, I apologize, and I’ll do penance by trying to dig us out of the hole I put us in.
I didn’t use “murder” in my pseudologic because it implies not only an act, but a moral valance; it’s a wrongful killing. I mentioned euthanasia earlier (also inflammatory), and it has a similar trait with the opposite moral valence: it’s a kind of good killing. “Relieve of life” isn’t much better, but it follows the generalized formulation, “relieve of [something bad],” and that felt sufficiently neutral. I just mean killing someone, ending someone’s life.
My claim is just that if life is bad, then ceteris paribus the ending of someone’s is a good – whatever else the killer does, when we tally the moral sum of their act, the end of a life is in the pluses column.
I’ll use M=G when addressing your formulation, because there’s a different point I’d like to make, but then I’ll say more about what going from M(urder) to K(illing) might also change.
The 4th statement should be “If L=B then M=G”; L=B implies both R=~G and M=G.
This arguably strengthens your position slightly, because ~(M=G) only implies ~(L=B), and it could still be the case that R=~G.
With that change, your formalization mostly captures my argument (such as it was). My first statement contains your first two statements.
L = B → R = ~G
L = B
And from that I pulled my second statement
L=B
Which, now that you’ve formalized it, is much clearer.
My third statement is an attempt at a general principle that seems widely accepted: stopping bad things is good. But, as corrected, your fourth statement is more straightforwardly the claim, and better for a first iteration:
L = B – > M = G
And since we’d already taken L = B as a given, from that I conclude M = G in 4.
The point being that, since we agree ~(M = G), we should conclude from this that ~(L = B) by modus tollens.
First things first: since M = G is more inflammatory than what I’d defend, do you even take issue with what I’m trying to present as a contradiction? That is, I’d still claim that L = B implies that death is good, so for any act that causes a death, the death weighs in favor of the act. Is that as clearly wrong to you as M = G?
I also think you’ve weakened your position, from, “Having children in hell is a moral wrong inflicted upon those children,” to “it is morally neutral or not necessarily morally good in and of itself.” I think ~(L = B) is compatible with the latter claim, so this may avoid my argument. But I’m not sure how life being bad implies that reproduction is morally neutral. There may be value in disaggregating reproduction, into the act of creating life and the various circumstances that might affect the net moral valence of the act. Similar to my claim with murder (but without the intent to inflame), the fact that a new human results weighs in the pros column, even if on net other factors make it wrong (e.g. my earlier comment about the 50th mouth meaning the first 49 starve).
Formalizing was helpful for me, I appreciate the push and I’ll try to formalize future iterations.
To me choosing whether or not to have a child is a moral decision, however, there isn’t a one size fits all answer for whether or not a person should have children. For some people I think the moral thing to do is spare their children from the world. That’s what I did. Others probably ought to have children because they can raise them well and create good children.
So I’m not sure what you mean by “reproduction is a moral good”. But just having a baby to be a good person doesn’t apply to everyone equally, if that’s what you mean by it.
To be clear, I don’t think reproduction is the only or ultimate moral good. Moral goods often conflict, and need to be balanced against each other.
Consider a similar moral claim: “Giving to charity is a moral good”. I think that’s less controversial than the claim I made here, so maybe you accept it.
In any case I hope it clarifies the type of claim I intend. Even if giving to charity is good, that doesn’t entail that starving yourself or your family and giving the money to charity is good. It also doesn’t follow that robbing a bank and giving the proceeds to charity is good. It is one among a collection of possible moral goods and moral wrongs. So it’s entirely consistent to say “giving to charity is a moral good, but I shouldn’t do it because doing it would entail moral wrongs that outweigh that moral good”.
Likewise, it seems consistent to say “reproduction is a moral good, but it is often not possible to reproduce without causing moral wrongs that outweigh it.”
So I agree that it’s not one size fits all, but in deciding whether the size fits, the reproduction itself weighs in favor.
So, in other words, all other things equal, a person “ought” to have children. Is that correct?
And if a person is perfectly healthy and capable of raising good children, then they ‘ought’ to have children as a moral imperative and if they don’t, then they are behaving immorally? Is that correct?
Good questions, and hard.
I would not go as far as the latter, saying that someone is behaving immorally if they don’t have kids. For example if a person could cure cancer but only by remaining child-free, they aren’t behaving immorally if they don’t have children.
But I think I agree with the former: if that person could cure cancer and have kids, they ought to. “All other things equal” is doing a lot of work there, I admit.
I take it you are a utilitarian, is that correct? As in utilitarianism, a functional morality is a consequentialist moral system, so it balances the many consequences of an action to find the net effect. And as in utilitarianism, that process is often messy and uncertain. A functional morality should also recognize a distinction between instrumental and ultimate moral goods, and I think reproduction is an instrumental moral good.
But reproduction is much closer to the ultimate goods in functional morality than in utilitarianism. In utilitarianism, if having a child makes a person unhappy, that could be enough to outweigh the moral good of creating the child. In functional morality, subjective experience isn’t the ultimate moral good, so that isn’t the case (unless the unhappiness is such that it makes child rearing and/or cancer curing impossible). And reproduction seems much closer to the ultimate moral good of functional morality, since whatever function morality evolved to fulfill must have been in support of (or at least compatible with) reproduction.
That is my understanding as well, but I don’t buy it even as a utilitarian argument. I agree it has intuitive appeal, but I think that’s because human intuition tends to favor the avoidance of the bad over the good – cf. loss aversion.
But thinking it through helped me realize that the moral patient of a functional morality is not individuals at all: from a functional morality perspective, the child is a continuation of the collective, and the collective is the moral patient.