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I don't know a lot about Derek Parfit, but one interesting philosopher who claims to have solved Parfits' problems about population and moral theory is David Be

• scandox 3y ago
  The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti is another fun read advocating an orderly winding down of the human project. Personally I find all this moral arithmetic with pleasure and pain pretty strange. I think it's reasonable to exist for a few moments in eternity and see how it goes.
  • zvmaz 3y ago
    There's a serious moral problem with bringing human beings into existence and guaranteeing that bad things will happen to them, including death.
    • scandox 3y ago
      Well first of all I don't agree that death is a bad thing, personally. Second of all morality is not the primary concern of most individuals' existence, despite all the talk that goes on.
    • dlkf 3y ago
      No there isn’t
    • whythre 3y ago
      Why? Why does the bad inherently outweigh the good? I feel like this the philosophy of the mentally ill. My own life has not been perfect but I am glad to have been born and my children would say the same.
• skissane 3y ago
  Anti-natalism is a self-defeating philosophy. To continue in existence beyond a single human lifespan, it needs its opponents, and it needs to continuously succeed (generation after generation) in converting the children of its opponents. It will usually succeed in converting a handful, but never enough to overcome the built-in numerical advantage that the opposition has. It is never going to win, certainly not by convincing people.
  • zvmaz 3y ago
    Benatar is well aware that his philosophy will not be influential and will not lead to (significantly) more people not procreating. He just says that his arguments need to be said, and he just says them.
  • carrolldunham 3y ago
    I don't know what you're arguing here but that kind of reinforces anti-nasalism's point. It implies that 'natalism' persists only by meta factors and is therefore false/illegitimate in itself.
  • WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    That's not the point. You are confusing phylosophy and politics. Benatar isn't trying to start a religion and makes convert. He is carefully building an argument that if we consider an axiomatisation of ethics where causing pain is bad and getting pleasure is positive, it can be argued that life is actually a poor deal. That's interesting in and of itself because it both challenges how we view life and the fondation of ethics. You will never go far if you stick to a view where you have to either be for or against idea. Thankfully you can go beyond that. Parfit himself spent a significant part of his career unsuccessfully looking for an axiomatisation of population ethics avoiding the repugnant conclusion for exemple.
    • skissane 3y ago
      > That's not the point. You are confusing phylosophy and politics. I don't agree I am. On the contrary, there is a lot of philosophical debate on the relationship between pragmatism and truth – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/ – and I think what I'm saying makes sense if you assume a certain position in that debate (albeit one which I'd expect Benatar would reject) Obviously, in the short-run, the popularity of a belief tells us nothing about its truth. But what about the popularity of a belief in the very long-run, in the limit of future time? If we somehow knew that, as t approaches infinity (or the future extinction of humanity), believers in a proposition will inevitably outnumber its disbelievers, would that in itself be evidence that the proposition is true? Personally, I say yes. I don't know if Benatar has written anything on this topic, but I assume he'd have to say no, since yes implies the falsehood of his published work. > He is carefully building an argument that if we consider an axiomatisation of ethics where causing pain is bad and getting pleasure is positive, it can be argued that life is actually a poor deal I think it is interesting, but for the opposite reason he thinks – if consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least some versions thereof) produces that conclusion, to me that's another nail in the coffin of consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least those versions of it). > Parfit himself spent a significant part of his career unsuccessfully looking for an axiomatisation of population ethics I've read Reasons and Persons. I think his discussions of the theory of personal identity are very informative, even though I don't agree with his materialist/physicalist premises. His contributions to ethics fascinate me less, because I don't believe in consequentialism, and I doubt ethics is axiomatisable