Exhibit B
Posted on 10 June 2010
In my essay on Sophomoronology, I offered that the ideals, or the view of life, or the sophistry collage (I cannot call it a philosophy) I there called ‘Intellectualism’ included an emotional allure or intellectual addiction to death and images of death.
Here, as an exhibit in my argument, let me present this article by animal-rights advocate and pro-infanticide Carthegenian anti-ethics Ethicist Peter Singer, entitled Should This Be the Last Generation? In which he asks the question that only seems a conundrum worth pondering to sensitive, pallid, sickly, and trembling minds which must have some intellectual equivalent to addiction to laudanum:
Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?
Wow! What an interesting question! Oh, wait, no, excuse me. I mean stupid. What a stupid question. The question is stupid both on a logical and a emotional level.
Logically, it is a paradox to ask about the rights of the non-existent. To analyze life in terms of who has the right, or the power, to do something rather than whether that something is good and healthy is a leitmotif of the Intellectual, who despises notions of objective good, and is fascinated by power, and demands ever more rights to command ever more of the time and effort of the rightless.
On an intellectual level, it is like asking, “If you had never been born, could you sue your mother to enjoin her to bear you? Would you have standing to sue?”
On an emotional level, it is the same as asking whether you hate babies, hate your mother, hate life and happiness and twittering birds, and curse the day you first saw sunlight. It is a topic only of interest to the morbid.
The Intellectuals are morally retarded. Not mentally, morally. They must strain and groan and pull and push to make a moral calculation that to a sane man is rapid, obvious, and painless. Their consciences function either in reverse or not at all. What a healthy person calls good, the intellectual calls evil; and what repels a healthy person, the intellectual is drawn by perverse fascination. Once of these perversions is an appetite for death rather than life.
I say again, I was not discussing the psychology of Intellectuals, I was discussing the logical relation of the ideas one to another. Obviously whether an Intellectual wishes to go whole hog, and adopt all the ideas logically implied by nihilistic materialistic irrationalistic anti-human Christophobic anti-Semitic death-worship is up to him. There is no requirement when your brain is ruled by a collage of sentimental slogans rather than by a philosophy to organize your beliefs with an eye to consistency rather than comfort.
An Intellectual, by the specific and limited definition I am using only during these essays, is defined as a man who studies philosophy in order to arm himself against the complaints of his conscience, who uses airy abstractions to justify his sins rather than some other ploy.
Because the conscience is a pragmatic faculty to distinguish moral truth from moral error, the Intellectual must silence it.
This creates an incentive to regard all truth as relative and ergo illegitimate and non-binding. This in turn creates an incentive to regard all reality as optional. This in turn creates an incentive to be concerned, perhaps fascinated, with the ultimate enforcement of reality, i.e. the death that would visit the intellectual if he ever actually took his ideas seriously and tried to carry them out.
One type of Intellectual is a student of Hedonism. Now, how could Hedonism lead to a desire for death and self-destruction? Since there is neither wine nor women nor song in the grave, one would assume a Hedonist to wish to avoid it at all cost. That assumption is correct for philosophical Hedonism, but not for sophistical Hedonism. All depends on the honesty of the Hedonist.
A hedonist philosopher, an honest hedonist, reasons that the good consists of the pursuit of long-term pleasure rightly understood. Since to seek pleasure requires knowledge and wisdom, the hedonist philosopher values the pleasure of reading, reasoning, thinking and speculating. He seeks a life of contentment.
On the other hand, a hedonist intellectual, a dishonest hedonist, reasons that in order to justify his whoring and drinking and drug-use, he must preach that the pursuit of pleasure is the only known good in life. Since life begins in the pain of a baby’s wail and ends in the silence of the grave, with much unpleasantness inbetween, the dishonest hedonist wonders why life is worth living at all, since not every waking hour is a transport of ecstatic volcanoes of joy.
The dishonest hedonist is playing a game of ‘Chicken’ with death, trying to see how much self-destructive behavior he can indulge in before he destroys himself. Maybe he hopes the hollow eyesocket of the Grim Reaper will blink. Since the hedonist lives for this life alone, his mental effort is spent trying to avoid thinking about the Four Last Things. Trying to avoid thought is not good for your psychology or your philosophy. Far better to be an honest hedonist lost in bookish if melancholy meditation than a Peter Singer toying with notions of worldwide mass-suicide.
No logic can reach the dishonest Hedonist, since his interest is not discovering the truth or falsehood of the relation between pleasure and the good; his interest is in erect a convenient excuse. Perhaps the outrageous Innocence Smith from G.K. Chesterton’s MANALIVE could snap the dishonest Hedonist out of his death-obsession by shooting a revolver near his head, but I doubt a syllogism could do it.
Added Later:
I should have read the comments. Here is Exhibit C:
Unfortunately, we still need enough humans to take care of the cats, dogs, horses, etc. Other than that, humans are nuisances. Recommended by 164 Readers
And Exhibit D:
. . by not having a child, or children, I am not only reducing the ‘resource footprint’ of my family by the children I am not having, but also by all of the children that my own potential children might have had, and so on.
It just really annoys me when a friend with 1, or 2, or 4 children tells me I should eat less beef and less seafood, and more vegetables, as doing so would be better for the environment. Reducing my own personal choices is certainly going to be less important than generating entirely new consumers of resources. If you have even one child, please stop sermonizing about conservation to your child-free friends. They have just conserved a full person’s share of resources, by not having a child.
Ironically, a favored darling of the Intellectuals happens to be Darwin who might opine, if asked, that an inheritable trait which created set of beliefs which created an incentive toward self-sterility was not a trait likely to be favored by natural selection. If Intellectualism were an inheritable trait rather than a spiritual sickness, it would expunge itself through evolution.
I submit to my atheist friends that even if Catholicism happens to be utterly false, monstrous, and absurd, it would be in your long term pragmatic self-interest to promote the faith, on the grounds that Catholics hold it to be a God-given duty to increase and multiply and fill the earth, and therefore Catholics are more likely to maintain the population base needed to sustain civilization, not to mention sustaining the tax base of productive citizens needed to pay into Social Security; moreover families with babies are more fun to be around than an equal number of self-centered, prunishly selfish, childless and death-worshippers.
The prunes (see above) hold human life (including yours, my dear atheists) to be of no account, except perhaps as a stable hand to feet the pets.
…………………………………………………..
In case you are wondering, Exhibit A, meant to show that my analysis of Intellectuals as condescending, smug, and arrogant gasbags was correct is here.
Well. As you know, we disagree on some fairly fundamental axioms, but I’ve got to agree with you on this one. Human life is meaningful by the only standard that matters; therefore, wiping it out would be a monstrous crime. Done.
I would suggest that such a question is not intended to be a serious investigation – presumably, anyone who actually believed it would be quietly working to make humans extinct, rather than drawing attention and opposition – but rather is a sort of performance-art piece. Its purpose is to gain status by showing what sort of orthodoxies its poser (pun intended!) dares to challenge.
“Well. As you know, we disagree on some fairly fundamental axioms, but I’ve got to agree with you on this one. Human life is meaningful by the only standard that matters; therefore, wiping it out would be a monstrous crime. Done.”
I am delighted we can find common ground. In an earlier thread, I suggested that even people whose axioms differ can find one axiom in common, and deduce what is in common from that. If, for example, anyone could propose to show from the axiom “Human life is meaningful by the only standard that matters” that chastity in marriage was necessary, or even advisable, to protect, preserve, and bring joy to human life, that argument would be one you and I could discuss rationally.
Your exhibit-A link does not work for me, but seems to be intended to point to a comment of mine. I suggest that this is the action of a man who hasn’t yet thought of an answer to arguments raised, so he’s going to point and laugh for a bit while he’s thinking. Is this the sort of courtesy you would wish to be shown, if you were a guest on my blog?
I believe exhibit A is me, or at least JCW said I was in the other thread, and, in fairness (if I’m still exhibit A), I started with the pointing and laughing, and, further, in this instance, it wasn’t just JCW who deserved it.
You are correct about the ‘exhibit A’ remark, and I sit corrected. I apologise for jumping to conclusions. Still, here is the result of right-clicking the link and doing ‘Copy link location’:
“http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/06/exhibit-b/Do you agree that this distinction between final causes and mechanical causes is true? No. Which is likely the essence of our disagreement.”
where I’ve stripped out the confusing %20 that translates to spaces. I trust it’s clear why I thought this was to my address. :placating smile:
While I’m proud of being Exhibit A in any argument our illustrious host advances, I’m more than happy to share the honour
Exhibit A was the comment by WF that distilled my entire ten page essay on Sophomoronology down to a one-line ad hominem: “http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/06/sophomoronology/comment-page-1/#comment-44530″
I will look at the link.
It’s not a stupid as it would seem at first glance. There must be a reason we are commanded to be fruitful and multiply, dispite the fact we are all born with Original Sin.
I was under the impression that the command to be fruitful and multiply was given before original sin arrived.
Perhaps. It just seems very odd that we be commanded to do what comes naturally. I am hard pressed to think of a previous era where this commandment would be anything other then a truism.
Hunter-gatherers keep their population down by breast-feeding for long periods and in some cases by infanticide. The latter is also not unknown in agricultural societies. One can induce abortions without modern technique, too. The advantage of modern contraception is that it’s cheap and reliable enough to be used for casual sex; if you just want to reduce the pregnancy rate by say an order of magnitude, there are lots of older methods.
Incidentally, if you don’t assume any divine inspiration, the purpose of the commandment is clear as crystal: Produce more warriors for the next war, lest the tribe be destroyed. A very practical commandment, to be sure, especially for a nomadic tribe invading settled lands, whose army consists basically of every fighting-age male (that is, twelve to sixty) and which runs a genuine risk of being destroyed as a nation every time it fights a battle. (And brags about it when it happens to an enemy tribe. Not many Amalekites around these days.)
Ignoring the fact that your first set of “Just So” stories are contradicted by your second set, the question remains; Why a commandment to do something so self evident? There’s no commandment to “Eat while you can!”, for example.
If abortions can be induced by pre-modern methods, why did people practice infanticide under circumstances where any child would have been killed? Some cultures kill any new baby if the last one was still breast-feeding; some cultures require that mesalliances let no child live. In both circumstances, why did the women go through all the inconvenience of labor if they could have procured an abortion? Obviously, if feasible, it was still vastly either ineffective, or difficult, or dangerous.
Value is the product of valuation. Human beings give value to nature. A world without human beings has nobody to value it at all.
And Hedonism is openly advocated to the reason for this:
And this comment is a little — wrong-headed.
How on earth can something that is not alive die?
Perhaps the intention is rather that you are certain to create a death, but you are not certain to create an experienced life – a sentient life, if you like; a life where the living being knows it’s alive. This doesn’t really rescue the argument, since it’s not much of a tragedy if a nonsentient being dies, but at least it does not directly contradict itself.
Ah, so you think that if someone killed you in your sleep that would not be a tragedy? Or, at any rate, not much of one?
I would prefer that over being shot while awake to understand what was happening. Aside from that, you obviously don’t really believe that I was referring to sleeping humans when I said ‘nonsentient’, so what’s with the snark?
Yes, you were. You just didn’t realize it. “the living being knows it’s alive” — well, you don’t when you’re asleep. Why didn’t you think about sentient life and realize that?
And why on earth does it matter that you would prefer it to being killed while awake? The question was whether it was not a tragedy, or at any rate, not much of one.
I believe it is Sophocles who says the best thing for a man is never to have been born, but dying young is second best. . . .
This person clearly agrees with you and is joking, right?
Never underestimate the ability of people to exceed satire.
Be that as it may, in this instance it’s obviously a joke.
Not necessarily a joke. I thought the PETA “sea-kittens” campaign was a parody created by someone mocking PETA, but it turned out to be true.
Never underestimate the hatred of some humans for our own species. Domesticated animals do need to be tended, otherwise their lives will be very short and nasty indeed. So some people may well feel it necessary to have enough humans to act as caretakers until (presumably) the animals can be re-introduced to the state of nature, and then let the humans die off.
I suppose anything’s possible, but it seems pretty clear that it much more likely a joke than not.
“Reducing my own personal choices is certainly going to be less important than generating entirely new consumers of resources. If you have even one child, please stop sermonizing about conservation to your child-free friends. They have just conserved a full person’s share of resources, by not having a child.”
I call her out. I am childless and have many friends who are childless, some by choice and some by circumstance. Every single one of us has a home at LEAST as big as those of our friends with children, which we heat and cool. (In fact, our heating use is probably higher, since 5-6 people in a 1200′-square house tend to generate more heat than a couple or a singleton. We travel more. We generate more waste because we eat out more and tend to eat packaged food more than our friends who, because of their children, must be thrifty with their resources.
In fact, if all us childless/child-free people reduced our “own personal choices”, it would have JUST AS much importance as other people not having children. However, it’s a bit like pointing out to technophile “greenies” that a surefire way to reduce coal-burning electric plants would be to reduce our own personal electricity use by getting rid of our computers, DVRs, Ipods, etc. No one wants to go THAT FAR.
I must say, Mr. Wright, that I got more out of your essay more than Dr. Singer’s sophomoric ruminations. And I do use the word “sophomoric” in earnest. I recall his call for people to live on a fixed income and share the wealth with others. I believe the sum was $30K. Of course, Dr. Singer didn’t begin with his household. When a reporter called him on it, he said that he would when others did.
He’s also opined regularly on the intrinsic non-value of people with various disabilities. However, he’s admitted on more than one occasion that he himself has no idea about the actual potential of a child born with a disability.
It’s made me wonder if, as a tenured professor who must keep his name current, he isn’t asking some high school sophomores for column topics. I can well imagine a group of 10th-graders opining, “Kids suck! And little retards suck shit! You should be able to kill them before they grow up! Or their moms could kill them. That would be kinda cool.” (An ethics topic a few years ago.)
Or a sophomore wearing a Planet of the Apes shirt: “It would be really cool if monkeys had rights and could sue the shit out of people. Plus they could live next door and throw their shit at the retards on their way to school.” (Animal rights essay.)
And now, of course, he’s been talking to those depressed sophomores known as “emo”. “Life sucks. Everyone should die. But it’s sucks to kill people, so they should just party till they die and not have kids and shit.”
Can’t remember where the link was (as usual) but I did read an online article by a disabled lawyer (since deceased) who recounted her experiences arguing with Peter Singer.
He admitted that okay, she seemed to have an adequate life, but it would still have been preferable if she hadn’t come into existence because she could never have the same life as an able-bodied person.
I didn’t know whether to be appalled or impressed that at least he’s consistent about what he says.
Every time Singer speaks, I think of this C&H comic:
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/03/18/
I was surprised to find that Singer DIDN’T advocate sterilizing mankind at the end of the article. At the same time, the question seems intended perniciously, and spending all his time on the benefits of sterilization and almost no time on the ‘proof’ for keeping all of us alive tends to move the balance of the argument a lot more in the direction of, to quote Metallica, Kill ‘Em All.
The Hebrew tribes were neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers, but in any case my theory about the commandment does not necessarily contradict their using the primitive methods of contraception that I mentioned. It is rather a common pattern in the Old Testament to find the Hebrews doing anything but what they are commanded to do! You would very likely get a classic case of public and private incentives being misaligned; the tribe prospers if it has a lot of warriors, even if they’re armed with clubs, but the individual patriarch prefers a few sons to whom he can leave a substantial number of goats. So the public religion, naturally, tries to reinforce the public incentive over the private one. And somehow the arguments in favour of the free-market outcome would fail to make it into the public record, just like the old mother-goddess they found in the very oldest Hebraic archeology sites, worshipped apparently as an equal to Yahweh.
What do you mean there’s no commandment to eat? “And you shall eat and be satisfied, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you” Deut 8:10.
FWIW, the Orthodox Jewish interpretation of the command to be fruitful and multiply is technically only mandatory for men.
Doesn’t look like a command to eat to me. Looks like a truism (You shall eat and be satisfied) and a commandment to thank God for his gifts. Given thanks is something we must be commanded or trained to do, for it is not natural at all.
Modern neurology has shown what Aristotelians always knew: moral behavior must be practiced and habituated into a “second nature.” http://www.pni.princeton.edu/ncc/PDFs/Neural%20Economics/Cohen%20%28JEP%2005%29.pdf The part of the title where is says: Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion is what we used to call Interactions
Between Intellect and Will.
Of course, the virtue (lit. “strength”) that connects the intellectual virtues with the moral virtues of the will is called “prudence.” And that’s the first thing to go after the triumph of the will.
The good is that which is in accord with our nature. Since the nature of human beings is that of a rational animal, the good is that which is in accordance with reason.
The intellectual virtues are:
1. Understanding (the habit of principles)
2. Knowledge ["science"] (the habit of proximate causes)
3. Wisdom (habit of ultimate causes)
4. Prudence is what orders our behavior to proportionate means to attain what our intellect has apprehended.
The moral virtues are:
1. Justice (regulates our acts independently of our dispositions as regards what is due or not due to another.)
2. Temperance (which we call on if we are drawn by passion toward an act contrary to reason)
3. Courage (which we call on if we are impeded by fear or sloth from acting as reason says we ought)
The triumph of the will elevates the passions or appetites above the intellect. If it feels good, do it. That requires us to disconnect Prudence, which breaks the link between the will and the intellect. The neural patterns originating in the cortex will then have a tough time of it. As Tommy Aquinas once put it, those who neglect the higher goods eventually wallow in the lower, and we now see that this results in an impaired reasoning ability, which is against our nature as rational animals.
* * *
FWIW, the Orthodox Jewish interpretation of the command to be fruitful and multiply is technically only mandatory for men.
Cool. Of course, the number of horny men is irrelevant to population mathematics. A village of 100 women can have at most about 100 births per year, no matter how vigorous the men of the village are.
A sleeping human does not know it is alive, but it will do so if you shake it awake. The line between sentience and nonsentience is so thin here that it is basically non-existent. I was not applying the criterion “sentient at that moment” but “sentient in general”.
I suspect, however, that the actual problem you’re having is that you think I was using this as a justification for abortion. I wasn’t, as it happens. But I wish you’d have mentioned your real objection earlier, without the snark. It’s possible to discuss these things in a peaceful manner, you know.
Being killed in one’s sleep is less of a tragedy than being killed while awake, the reason being that you do not experience the terrible fear of imminent death. Thus the preference directly informs the degree of tragedy.
Sigh. I say “Methods A and B were both possible”, and you come back with “So why didn’t everyone use B?” as though it were a deadly objection. The answer is, for a variety of reasons. A premodern abortion is not necessarily much safer than going through labour. It may require the cooperation of the mother, unlike infanticide. People may have objections to hurting an adult while being willing to expose an infant to whom they have formed no emotional connection. The mother may not be the one making the decisions, and thus the risk of labour is not so relevant to the decision-maker. The desirability of the child may depend on its sex, and so you have to wait until you know whether it’s a boy or a girl – in this case only infanticide is practical. There are a huge number of reasons why people might prefer abortion in one set of circumstances, and infanticide in another; why would you expect otherwise?
In any case, this is not so relevant to the argument I was making, which is that premodern peoples could still control their birth rate, just not so easily and cheaply as we do. What is your real goal here? Why are you arguing, what is it you are trying to show?
Babies are also “sentient in general” — the process is merely slightly different.
Therefore anything that can be said about a baby can be said about a sleeping person.
I don’t necessarily disagree. It would perhaps be useful to recognise that sentience is not a binary quality which one either has or hasn’t, but a matter of degree. A dog is more sentient than an oyster; a human child five years of age is more sentient than the dog, and also more sentient than it was a few years earlier; an unborn child three months after conception is about as sentient as the oyster, although unlike the oyster it is becoming more sentient every day; and a sleeping human is less sentient than the same human awake.
(Well – in most cases. Some humans are a lot more intelligent when dead to the world than when nominally awake, although admittedly sentience and intelligence are not the same.)
“Is a world with people in it better than one without?”
Well, there’s plenty of worlds with no people in them. Mars, for one. Is that a better world?
This is a meaningless question. He says “Let’s put aside what we do to other species.” Fine, let’s look at those worlds in our solar system that have no life. Are they better or worse than Earth? That’s like asking “How square is yellow?”
(Myself, I would be against terraforming Mars, but a lot of that is sentimental – there’s only one Mars and I think we shouldn’t change it to make it habitable for us, not without very pressing or good reason. But that doesn’t mean I think that a habitable Mars – a Mars that could be life-bearing – is wrong in itself.)
Being killed in one’s sleep is less of a tragedy than being killed while awake, the reason being that you do not experience the terrible fear of imminent death.
But it deprives you also of the great thrill of defending yourself.
All that lives seeks to continue living. Try pulling up a weed. Therefore, life is a good.
That which possesses life is better than that which does not because it possesses more goods.
Therefore, a lifeless world has fewer goods than a living world, and is not therefore “better.”
Peter Singer may be all you say, but he sure writes well. He’s got you beat there. Rhetoric is all, mon ami!
Actually, that was a low blow. There’s nothing wrong with your writing. Somehow, however, I find Singer’s style more appealing. It’s a subjective judgment that has to do with your use of abstract and Latinate words and your adjective heavy style.
Actually, I apologize. There is nothing wrong with your writing. I was making a subjective judgment. Singer’s writing just appeals to me more. Yours is a bit Latinate for me, and, to my ear, its rhythms jerk along like a glacier piling up a moraine of greco-roman adjectives and nouns. Actually, it’s a lot like my prose, which I hate. I never could write well, really, and probably never will.
“Peter Singer may be all you say, but he sure writes well. He’s got you beat there. Rhetoric is all, mon ami!”
Low blow or not, you are right that logic is defenseless against wit.
The world will follow the wit. Only the lonely philosopher follows the logic… and who know where that might lead? Sometimes a man discovers his whole life was false. Truth is a cold and an unforgiving goddess.
“Truth is a cold and an unforgiving goddess.”
Indeed.
Finally had a chance to go over this a little.
I have heard (I tried looking for a source, but couldn’t find one), that the Stoics regarded Reason as the soul of creation (or some other such thing…it has been a long time since I looked into this). Human beings, inherently rational, are naturally close to this.
Also, the Jews regarded us as partners with God in creation.
I find the contrast between these and Peter Singer’s views interesting.