Derek Parfit: The Perfectionist at All Souls
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
[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
I don't think there is a debate in the sense that one true proposition has to win over another one. You can build sound arguments for different positions based on varying premises.
I can't find flaws in what Benatar says. I don't entirely agree with his premises and it's easy to counterbalance them if you are so incline - you can take a religious angle and argue than eternal salvation counterbalance pain during life or a progressist one and argue that the suffering of the current generation are offset by their absence for the future ones - but I still find them valuable. From my point of view, it definitely is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of ethics.
> I doubt ethics is axiomatisable
I'm curious about how you propose we discuss and study ethics if you don't think it can be based on exposed principles.
I mean the idea that we should decide between competing sets of premises on their long-term practical prospects of becoming widely accepted is itself a premise we can consider. And having adopted that premise, we can use it to conclude that Benatar's conclusion is false. Which implies that the negation of that premise is one of Benatar's premises, even if not one he ever made explicit. And thus, we've actually learn something about the assumptions underlying Benatar's position.
> I don't entirely agree with his premises and it's easy to counterbalance them if you are so incline - you can take a religious angle and argue than eternal salvation counterbalance pain during life or a progressist one and argue that the suffering of the current generation are offset by their absence for the future ones - but I still find them valuable.
Maybe there are other ways of counterbalancing them. Population ethics seems to assume all relevant goods are fungible. If some of the relevant goods are non-fungible, the whole enterprise would turn out to be based on a false assumption.
> From my point of view, it definitely is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of ethics.
I never said his contribution was worthless. Sometimes, a person can make a valuable contribution even while being wrong–e.g. by helping to clarify the space of possible arguments, the lay of the land.
> I'm curious about how you propose we discuss and study ethics if you don't think it can be based on exposed principles.
Can we axiomatise history? Can we axiomatise psychotherapy? In both cases, I think the subject is inherently unaxiomatisable. But that doesn't mean it is impossible to approach rationally. We just have to accept that rigorous formal methods of deduction, which the term "axiomatisation" implies, while a perfectly appropriate methodology for some disciplines, has for others at best occasional applicability
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...
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