Suppose one were to accept the full implications of Benatar’s asymmetry argument: that it would be wrong to bring into existence any being that suffers in any, even a hypothetical person (“One Pinprick”) whose life of fulfillment and bliss consists only of one brief but discriminable instance of pain. (Some folks — including me in some moods — think that the implication that it would be wrong to bring One Pinprick into existence is a reductio of Benatar’s asymmetry. Though if it is such, it is as a practical matter a rather feeble one since no human being has ever had a life as good as One Pinprick and no human being ever will have such a life.)
Does Benatar’s asymmetry entail that it is wrong to bring any sentient into existence? Allow me to offer a tentative argument that it does not. Please and pain (or enjoyment and misery, or flourishing and suffering) seem pretty wired into the kind of things that we are. But there’s no necessity that the universe contain beings such as we are. We’re an accident: one slight bend sinister in the natural history of Earth and there’d have been no us at all. And I see no reason to think that pleasure and pain (or whatever) are part of the necessary furniture of the universe at all. The existence of each is also an accident.
Stealing an idea from David Pearce let us imagine a being — call her Unbreakable — who has an even better existence than One Pinprick. Unbreakable isn’t human, although she looks human and has human-ish goals. Unbreakable is capable of feeling things and has a utility function based on what she feels, but she doesn’t feel pain. Instead what she has is a pleasure gradient. When things go well (in terms her own goals) she feels ecstasy. When things go badly, say when she’s damaged in some way or her pursuit of her goals is frustrated, her enjoyment declines to something much more mild. Correctly tuned up, she works as hard to avoid damage and frustration as human beings do, but her hedonic experiences in doing so are vastly different.
Would it be wrong to bring Unbreakable into existence? (In our mad science lab, perhaps?) I very much doubt it.
There are a number of reasonable (I think) against the relevance of Unbreakable. At present I am not persuaded by any of them, but would be interested in hearing them (or any others) fleshed out.
- “Unbreakable is logically impossible, because you can’t have pleasure without pain.” A lot of people make this claim, but I’ve never really seen it fleshed out in a way that makes a great deal of sense to me. I (and most people) have certainly enjoyed moments of what seemed to be pleasure unmarred by pain. If persons have temporal parts, then we can easily think of Unbreakable as a string of such temporal parts.
- “Unbreakable is technically impossible.” Possibly, but what would that claim be founded on?
- “Unbreakable might be technically possible, but the likelihood of creating her is so remote and the project is so difficult that we shouldn’t bother. Better to just go extinct.” This argument strikes me as much better, although given some of the difficulties that antinatalism might face in its own right, it might not be as powerful an argument as some take it to be.
I am curious to see what other people think.
6 Responses to “Could there be beings that are not wrong to make?”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I (and most people) have certainly enjoyed moments of what seemed to be pleasure unmarred by pain.
I’m not sure that’s true, necessarily. Maybe “marred” would not be the right adjective here, but what about “enhanced”? It’s not like you were completely isolated from your past pain in those moments when you experienced genuine pleasure. How did you know to how to discriminate between your pleasure and, say, a neutral experience (assuming there is such a thing)? If we have temporal parts (which I am inclined to believe), these parts are influenced a great deal by our previous temporal parts. Temporal self-nurture, if you will. So the scale with which to evaluate your hedonic experience was passed down from countless generations of your previous temporal parts (and is also influenced by your expectations of what it’s going to be like to be your future temporal parts).
I highly recommend “Happiness, Pleasure and Judgment” by Allen Parducci. The contextual theory of well-being (with examples of empirical studies to back it up) presented in the book seems highly plausible to me. It’s quite easy to manipulate people into attributing either positive or negative valence to experiences that are widely regarded as neutral (such as smelling water) by exposing them to certain stimuli first (either exquisite perfumes or some really foul-smelling substances). Or you can just tell them the water is actually a perfume, and they will tend to find the smell pleasant (which, I suppose, supports the idea that imagination plays a huge part in our pleasurable experiences).
He also talks about the natives of some tropical island and the temperatures they are exposed to there. The highest temperature is within 10 degrees from the lowest, and yet the natives are highly sensitive to the slightest variations of their island’s climate, and complain of bitter cold or unbearable heat, depending on whether the temperature is on the high or low end of the spectrum. There is quite a bit of other empirical evidence discussed in the book, as well.
So perhaps it’s not that pleasure is impossible without pain, but that as long as humans are exposed to a range of experiences, they will assign negative valence to the lower end of the spectrum.So since it’s such a pervasive feature of the human experience, it is doubtful that humans would be able to understand or communicate with Unbreakable in a meaningful way. It is also unlikely that Unbreakable would have human-ish goals, at least as far as the actual subjective experience of goals is concerned. So it is unclear why humans would want to make Unbreakable sentient or how they would even be able to tell that she is, in fact, sentient.
I’ll take a look at Parducci when I get a chance. Thanks for the recommendation.
I can think of a possible ethics under which people might want to create Unbreakable.
Suppose they have two lexically-ordered ethical principles. The first is some version of “do not harm others” which, in combination with Benatar’s asymmetry, yields an injunction against creating new (human) people.
The second is some sort of quasi-utilitarian or welfarist principle that says that they should maximize the balance of sentient well- over ill-being in the world.
The two principles are reasonably plausible for a philanthropic antinatalist: it’s easy to think both that (1) we shouldn’t create new people but (2), for those people who do exist, we should make their lives go as well as possible.
Unbreakable is unusual in that, since she’s not subject to harm, her creation is not enjoined by the first principle, so people contemplating her creation would be required to evaluate her potential creation by the second principle. And she might pass that test very easily, at least with some subsidiary assumptions: (1) her own quality of life is amazingly high (so much so that she would not have reason to regret her coming-to-be) so it’s a good thing in itself and (2) if she comes to have the right skills and goals, her existence might benefit other people as well: maybe she’s an excellent musician, or chef, or likes having sex with lots of people.
This strikes as a plausible reason why humans would want to make Unbreakable, especially if they were total utilitarians.
As far as her benefiting other people is concerned, I guess I wasn’t sure why she would need to be sentient. She could be a [very sexy, very talented] p-zombie. But now that you mention it, her makers would probably think interacting with her would be more meaningful if she were sentient, even if it were impossible for her to empathize with human suffering.
On the other hand, though, it seems like lots of breeders would prefer their children to be fully programmable and lack a mind of their own.
Sister Y has a post up today relevant to “technical impossibility” objection above.
[…] necessary, even for that purpose? Perhaps a benign creator would have designed us to be Unbreakables, with a hedonic gradient that runs from little pleasure (if there is damage) to immense (if […]