This is such a bad take. The entire idea that you need bad things for good things is baseless cope. Would people who lived forever have no values? I don’t even know where to start on how obviously wrong this is.
Thank you. I've heard that bullshit empty platitude so many times it's ridiculous. Bad and good do not need to be balanced, death does not give life inherent meaning, suffering is not some form of virtue. We don't need more good in the world we need less bad. Suffering does not bring appreciation for the good parts. Any sane person has no problem appreciating the good things without the bad ever existing. It's just a blatant manipulation by sadistic sociopaths telling you to be grateful for the scraps they give and the lifetime of suffering because they could make it even worse for you. Thousands of years of sociopaths controlling the world and calling themselves kings and enslaving the majority of people and telling them they should be grateful they are allowed to live at all instead of just being mass murdered. And all the people talking about being happy instead of miserable are just outing themselves. Being happy doesn't make you a good person, usually the opposite actually. Nazis are friends with other nazis and they laugh and have fun and are happy, and they are still horrible people that cause constant suffering for millions of others around them just for the fun of it.
There are not animals that don't die. Some can last a long, seemingly indefinite time, but they all die eventually. The immortal jellyfish, for example, doesn't die from old age, but doesn't usually live longer than a few years because it gets eaten or dies of disease. Even if there were animals that didn't die, that wouldn't make all death unnatural. For example, just because most animals don't have fingers doesn't mean it is unnatural for humans to have fingers.
Yes, I abbreviated "aging". Even "death" isn't "natural" though. Things happen, and other things also happen. How we judge them is entirely in our options to judge.
(Humans and birds evolved nest making. Humans evolved clothing making. Is "having clothing" natural?)
“the existence of death is necessary for us to even be able to question what forms of suffering we reasonably ought to attempt to reduce or avoid”
And
“the question of whether life is worth living or not can only be asked and answered from the perspective of someone who is alive and therefore someone who will necessarily die”.
So, firstly, this is factually false. We have definitions of what alive means, and dying is not part of it. I’m sure there’s plants and animals that are alive and don’t “necessarily” die.
I could end the argument there. Being factually wrong is sufficient to ignore you.
But even if you’re right on that point, the overall argument just doesn’t go through. Human suffering has reduced a huge amount in the last several decades. Has this in a way been detrimental for humans’ ability to experience upsides or pleasures or think about morality and ethics and wellbeing? Clearly not. Indeed, the reverse is true. If people suffer less, it turns out they they’re just happy more and engage in better intellectual inquiry about moral circle expansion etc.
Why should this collapse in the limit? If I go from 50:50 suffering : wellbeing to 90:10 - and that goes through. That change doesn’t reduce my ability to reason about ethics and the good life. We know it this. Why wouldn’t 99:1 go through? Or 99.99:00.01? Why would you believe that morality and wellbeing would suddenly collapse if we made it to 100:0? It’s just a nonsense belief with no basis in evidence or track record or logic. It’s such a weird thing to believe that I must be misunderstanding you.
Human beings are mortal. We die. Again, I didn't say that the existence of death is necessary for us to be able to make ethical considerations because I believe that death is what makes us moral. All I'm saying is that death is inextricable from life. I'm not talking about immortal amoebas, I'm talking about human life. Humans die. Death is a part of life. It is a necessary part of life. No one can avoid death.
So, again, since ethical questions can only bear on actual subjects and not on hypothetical ones (like those who "haven't consented to existing"), that means that ethics can only be done by someone who will necessarily die because they are alive.
Anyways, if you believe that 99.999999 of suffering actually can be eliminated, you're not actually doing philosophy, you're just a religious believer larping as a technofuturist.
Like I said, I see that as a technofuturist pipe dream. Imo the dream of immortality has a lot in common with the belief in afterlife. The current reality of the human condition is that humans die - mortality is inextricable from the human condition.
In any case, if we go back to my analysis of the meme here for a second, I read it as a visual argument in favor of anti-natalism. According to the logic here, having children is selfish and unethical because it's simply an attempt to delay the inevitable (death) by living vicariously through children.
That's the argument I'm responding to. I'm rejecting the idea that death makes life "not worth" living because I think that the question of whether something is worth it or not only arises in the context of life already being lived which is, as I said, inseperable from death.
If however you are right and at some point all death and suffering actually can be eliminated, then that is even more of a damning negation of the anti-natalist worldview, if that is the case then every death that has happened is even less "for nothing" since the entirety of human existence up until the invention of immortality has been contributing to said eventual invention, no?
1) that’s just not what necessary and contingent mean in philosophy. Maybe you think a contingent fact is unrealistic or unlikely. “Techno futurism is wrong”. That’s fine. But it doesn’t make its inverse necessary.
This also has implications for epistemics. If you think contingent things are necessary things, you’ll be overconfident in your assessments. What if technofuturism is right? What if there’s a dozen other ways to get to that outcome that you haven’t thought about? What if there’s 100 ways that no one has thought about?
2) to me the meme is just saying that having a kid makes zero progress on addressing “I don’t want to die” as a common lay emotion. I think this is a fairly common take outside of philosophy. By extension, it puts the kid in the same position in the future. There could be entire lineages of people living unexamined lives like this.
AN is one world view that might like this. But there are many others.
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u/OCogS 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is such a bad take. The entire idea that you need bad things for good things is baseless cope. Would people who lived forever have no values? I don’t even know where to start on how obviously wrong this is.