/lit/ - Literature

Posting a letter I just wrote to David Benatar proposing an alternative to his system of antinatalism based on a different set of fundamental utilitarian principles:

Hello Dr. Benatar,

I'm writing because I want to propose what I see as an alternative to your project of human nonprocreation based on what I see as a more accurate utilitarian system regarding pleasure, suffering, and any imbalance between them.

First, I would like to contest the imbalance you propose between between the absence of pain and the absence of pleasure. You state as a brute fact that absence of pain is good, yet absence of pleasure is neutral. Since these are stated as axioms that the rest of your system is derived from, I would like to question them, and provide similar but subtly different axioms that I believe produce a completely different system when elaborated from. When we consider what we are to take as brute facts, I think we have to be like Descartes and rely on introspection to see the unquestionable absolutes that the rest of our system are built upon. While in epistemology it might be "cogito ergo sum," the introspective truths that we have to rely on are that by experience of pleasure, we can subjectively and immediately feel that pleasure is a good unto itself, and that by experience of pain, pain is an evil unto itself. When we take these as the foundations, we realize that absence of either is not a good unto itself as your system claims, but rather is morally neutral. If pleasure is an inherent good, then absence of pleasure is an ethical zero point, and if pain is an inherent evil, then absence of pain is also an ethical zero point. So, when we take these axioms derived from direct introspection, we can see that the imbalance principle you propose disappears, and what becomes good is the maximal level of net pleasure, that is to say pleasure minus pain. This means that while your system would consider a state of 0 utils better than a state of 6 utils and 4 disutils, my system would find the state of 6 utils and 4 disutils preferable to the state of 0 utils, because there is a net positive of 2 utils. This is the main difference between our systems, and I believe that mine is better founded because it relies purely on the direct experience of pleasure as good and pain as evil as its only brute facts, as opposed to making claims about the absence of pleasure and the absence of pain as neutral and good based on what seems to me to be a deontological, rather than purely utilitarian reasoning.

My manifesto is this: pleasure is an innate good unto itself, pain is an innate evil unto itself, this implies that it is a moral imperative to maximize net pleasure, wherever or by whatever it is experienced, and that the ultimate way to achieve this end, that swamps all others by sheer magnitude, is to convert as much of the universe as possible into minds designed to experience as much pleasure for as long as possible.