The five minutes between being awake and asleep are, perhaps, the most productive for my thinking. I have struggled a lot to come to a clear understanding of Benatar's argument of asymmetry when thinking about born and potential children. I have come to believe that a graphical i.e. mathematical representation of his argument is the clearest.
Here is how things stand for all the living:
As we can see from this matrix, the conclusions are clear: If you are already living, it is good to feel pleasures and not feel suffering, while failing to escape suffering and having to go without pleasures (which for biological systems such as humans really equates to suffering) is bad.
Now, for analyzing of the unborn I propose to use a simple technique - multiplication with a minus, since they are not living yet/ever. Lets see where adding a negative multiplier to the previous matrix takes us.
The first implication we get is, unsurprisingly, that adding a minus multiplier to this value matrix has inverted it, similarly to the line of thought that if life is good, being dead/unborn is therefore bad. Lets examine this, however.
An immediate eyesore for me is the "absent suffering" quadrant. While technically the analysis says it is Bad (and we can only arrive at this conclusion by a stretch and if we maintain a holistic view of the relationships between the quadrants), I really can not commit myself to thinking and saying wholeheartedly that I resent not having a million more children on Earth whenever there would be a chance for them to "not suffer". And Benatar's argument takes this but one step further and points out the similar situation in "present pleasure" quadrant for the unborn, where the analysis shows a minus. He says that it is fallacious to "resent not having a million more children on Earth to feel certain pleasures." I certainly have never had to sigh under my breath whenever I experienced a joyous moment for thinking "oh, I wish we could increase the population so those new people can experience similar joys". And I am told my thinking (or lack thereof) is in step with a vast majority. But there is one more consideration. It is asking: "Are the unborn really "hurt" from missing out on joy?" Being a Bright, I tend to rephrase this question as: "Are rocks really "hurt" by lacking the consciousness to appreciate the joy, of, say, love?" By what we can extrapolate from our understanding of the world, no, they are not. It is therefore unlikely that a million billion unborn, potential beings look down on us from a form of heaven and go: "Look at them having all that fun! We could be having it too, if only they had more babies whose bodies we could quicken!!"
This discussion has illustrated that if we were to somehow evaluate the "hedonistic value of life" and it turned out to be a positive value, it would not imply that every unborn child loses out on exactly that amount of pleasure. Quite the contrary, the unborn have all the perks of suffering avoidance on by default. This is especially relevant since I am convinced that the "hedonistic value of life" is never a positive value (for a single person for himself) thus evading suffering is more important than to be able to experience joys, in which not being born is the ultimate strategy.
Discuss!
Here is how things stand for all the living:
As we can see from this matrix, the conclusions are clear: If you are already living, it is good to feel pleasures and not feel suffering, while failing to escape suffering and having to go without pleasures (which for biological systems such as humans really equates to suffering) is bad.
Now, for analyzing of the unborn I propose to use a simple technique - multiplication with a minus, since they are not living yet/ever. Lets see where adding a negative multiplier to the previous matrix takes us.
An immediate eyesore for me is the "absent suffering" quadrant. While technically the analysis says it is Bad (and we can only arrive at this conclusion by a stretch and if we maintain a holistic view of the relationships between the quadrants), I really can not commit myself to thinking and saying wholeheartedly that I resent not having a million more children on Earth whenever there would be a chance for them to "not suffer". And Benatar's argument takes this but one step further and points out the similar situation in "present pleasure" quadrant for the unborn, where the analysis shows a minus. He says that it is fallacious to "resent not having a million more children on Earth to feel certain pleasures." I certainly have never had to sigh under my breath whenever I experienced a joyous moment for thinking "oh, I wish we could increase the population so those new people can experience similar joys". And I am told my thinking (or lack thereof) is in step with a vast majority. But there is one more consideration. It is asking: "Are the unborn really "hurt" from missing out on joy?" Being a Bright, I tend to rephrase this question as: "Are rocks really "hurt" by lacking the consciousness to appreciate the joy, of, say, love?" By what we can extrapolate from our understanding of the world, no, they are not. It is therefore unlikely that a million billion unborn, potential beings look down on us from a form of heaven and go: "Look at them having all that fun! We could be having it too, if only they had more babies whose bodies we could quicken!!"
This discussion has illustrated that if we were to somehow evaluate the "hedonistic value of life" and it turned out to be a positive value, it would not imply that every unborn child loses out on exactly that amount of pleasure. Quite the contrary, the unborn have all the perks of suffering avoidance on by default. This is especially relevant since I am convinced that the "hedonistic value of life" is never a positive value (for a single person for himself) thus evading suffering is more important than to be able to experience joys, in which not being born is the ultimate strategy.
Discuss!
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