All ethical arguments are based on intuition, and here this one is doing a lot of work: “we tend to underestimate the quality of lives barely worth living”. To me this is the important crux because the rest of the argument is well-trodden. Yes, moral philosophy is hard and there are no obvious unproblematic answers, and yes, small numbers add up. Tännsjö, Zapffe, Metzinger, and Benatar play this weird trick where they introspectively set an arbitrary line that separates net-negative and net-positive experience, extrapolate it to the rest of humanity, and based on that argue that most people spend most of their time on the wrong side of it. More standard intuitions point in the opposite direction; for not-super-depressed people, things can and do get really bad before not-existing starts to outshine existing! Admittedly “not-super-depressed people” is a huge qualifier, but on Earth the number of people who have, from our affluent Western country perspective, terrible lives, yet still want to exist, swamps the number of the (even idly) suicidally depressed. It’s very implausible to me that I exist right above this line of neutrality when 1) most people have much worse lives than me and 2) they generally like living.
And whenever I see this argument that liking life is just a cognitive bias I imagine this conversation:
All ethical arguments are based on intuition, and here this one is doing a lot of work: “we tend to underestimate the quality of lives barely worth living”. To me this is the important crux because the rest of the argument is well-trodden. Yes, moral philosophy is hard and there are no obvious unproblematic answers, and yes, small numbers add up. Tännsjö, Zapffe, Metzinger, and Benatar play this weird trick where they introspectively set an arbitrary line that separates net-negative and net-positive experience, extrapolate it to the rest of humanity, and based on that argue that most people spend most of their time on the wrong side of it. More standard intuitions point in the opposite direction; for not-super-depressed people, things can and do get really bad before not-existing starts to outshine existing! Admittedly “not-super-depressed people” is a huge qualifier, but on Earth the number of people who have, from our affluent Western country perspective, terrible lives, yet still want to exist, swamps the number of the (even idly) suicidally depressed. It’s very implausible to me that I exist right above this line of neutrality when 1) most people have much worse lives than me and 2) they generally like living.
And whenever I see this argument that liking life is just a cognitive bias I imagine this conversation:
A: How are you?
B: Fine, how are–
A: Actually your life sucks.