I wrote this light-hearted little ditty in response to a post on the NYT's philosophy blog, The Stone. In his post, "Should this be the last generation?", philosopher Peter Singer discusses the moral ramifications of bringing children into the world when we know they will suffer in their lifetimes. So here's what I wrote:
Is life worth living? Is existence a boon or a burden?
I live in Colombia, and from our neck of the woods this debate seems a bit odd. Though I'm not well-versed in the great philosophers, I'm sure someone at some point must have argued that life is self-evidently worth living, because if life were decidedly, unequivocally miserable, we would have long ago (perhaps before the start of recorded history) seen a spate of suicides committed by rational people who calculated that the pain of life invalidated the pleasures, for them and for any potential progeny. And Mr. Singer's claim that “we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence” is also suspect. I think that the implicit reason most people have children is that they think life is wonderful, and they want to share that wonder with other people, not just those already around them but also new people that can spring forth from the very wonder and love they experience in life. This reasoning is sometimes explicitly stated by potential or expecting parents, and I imagine many religions and philosophies (I know it's the case for Catholic theology) have an articulated, explicit argument for the goodness of existence and hence procreation.
Singer makes at least a tangential nod to the difference of standards of happiness in different cultures by mentioning “the standard of life experienced by most people in developed nations today”. One could read in Singer's above-quoted fragment an implicit conviction that life is better in the rich world than elsewhere, which is obviously an arbitrary, sort of chauvinistic assertion (though widely spread in the rich world). I understand the logic of restricting the discussion to the rich world that many prominent thinkers (and the readers of the NYT) might be most familiar with, but a cynic could say that Singer won't even consider the adequacy of the standard of life in the Third World, because it can't compare to the great life people have in the US and Europe. Given the subject matter of this column (whether existence is worthwhile), we could thus infer that while the answer is a toss-up for the richies, there's no doubt that we in the Third World should go to the nearest tree to hang ourselves and end our deprived lives and unsatisfied consumer desires! Such a parochial, rich world attitude would be quite misled, because life is pretty okay in the rest of the world too. I can't speak for a destitute country in Africa that might have many objective indicators (life expectancy, infant mortality, malnutrition, etc.) that would seem to support the affirmation that life is truly worse there than in other places. But in our country, Colombia, many objective indicators of quality of life and happiness are equal to or better than in the US or Europe, despite our average income's being much lower.
Most striking to me in this column are the implicit assumptions in Schopenhauer's and Benatar's arguments. First off, they imply that human happiness is based on the satisfying of desires. This is not necessarily so, though maybe in a wealthy consumer society it seems obvious. But it could reasonably be argued that life and happiness are not merely the ratio of desires felt to desires met, a tally of toys and fun things we have acquired or experienced relative to our appetite. If this were the case, then Schopenhauer and Benatar would indeed have a point—the desire to consume (whether one is consuming manufactured products or life experiences) is infinitely greater than what can actually be consumed or accessed in a lifetime, and the satisfaction of “consuming” something (be it a toy, a Happy Meal, or a milestone in life) disappears quickly. But in my personal experience, most of my happiness is not due to consuming products or life experiences.
Most of my satisfaction comes from just existing, eating, working, thinking, talking with my friends and family, seeing the things around me (see Nicholas Kristoff's NYT column on appreciating life's little details after having survived a cancer scare). When I pursue some grand goal, the process and the pursuit is at least as satisfying, and certainly more durably so, than the final achievement itself. So maybe someone like Schopenhauer, with his posited existence of a futile striving for fleeting ends, could be happy if he simply knew how to enjoy the striving that occupies most of our time, as opposed to the ephemeral reaching of ends. It's simply not fair that Schopenhauer should impose his apparent malaise and effete inability to enjoy life on the rest of us, declaring unequivocally that life is futile. A concrete example of process trumping the goal is my marriage. Marrying my wife was a joyous, fun, brief occasion. But what I remember and appreciate most now, well after the wedding itself, is our relationship leading up to our wedding, the preparations we made for the wedding, the decision to get married, etc. And of course I continue to enjoy our marriage, day to day, without necessarily fulfilling any concrete goal beyond simply trying to be a good husband and loving my wife and accepting her love.
But let's say that I were to concede that all happiness truly does come from satisfying desires, and we could fit my claims from the prior paragraph into that mold. For instance, one could argue that even my enjoyment of everyday life is based on satisfying desires: “I feel like taking a shower now. I want to eat some ice cream. I desire to talk to my wife about the news.” Maybe it's fulfilling these little quotidian desires that allows me to enjoy just existing. But this framework also would disprove Schopenhauer's and Benatar's theses (but from a different angle), because if most of our desires are simply the little desires that help us decide what to do next (shower, eat, take a walk, go to work), then the majority of our desires are easily satisfiable and hence bring us happiness. Without getting into a Bentham-style accounting and counterweighing of standardized pleasures and pains, I think it would be obvious that if my day is a succession of little, satisfied desires, then even within Benatar's model of happiness's ultimately deriving from fulfilled wishes, the constant stream of satisfaction in my daily life would override my large-scale but infrequently-felt frustration at not being an astronaut. This would make my existence a net enjoyable experience.
We read, “To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person”, but that is just a supposition, a prejudice predicated on the supposedly inherent misery of life. Like Schopenhauer's sulking, this seems to me less a philosophy of arriving at the universal traits of life, but rather the mopey rant of someone with a public pulpit and a penchant for argumentation. As for his naïve nihilist's assertion that anyone not sharing his point of view is a Pollyanna, I think it's clear to most thinking people that self-absorbed, unfounded pessimism is no less silly than self-absorbed, unfounded cheeriness.
While Singer correctly notes that “everyone will suffer to some extent” in a life lived, it is not at all reasonable to assume that that suffering outweighs, overrides, or negates the pleasures that a person experiences. Or those that a person provides to others. People are not just solipsistic, morose psyches capably of little else than suffering or feeling pleasure (at least not where I'm from—I've never lived in Manhattan!); we also provide pleasure and pain to others. We create, we affect the world at the same time as we are affected by it. I assume that if human existence is sometimes miserable, it is due usually not to natural, external forces but to conditions created by other humans. If this is the case, then it is precisely humans that can improve life for others and for themselves, that can “fix” in their own little ways the occasional unpleasantnesses of human existence. So again, without getting too Benthamesque, perhaps the question shouldn't just be if the misery of the world will make a newborn suffer, but if that newborn, through its future actions or through its mere existence (which has value for those close to the child), will have an effect on the suffering or the misery of others. These positive effects of a newborn child affect not only other newborns and future Earth-dwellers, but those who already exist. So Singer's idea of avoiding a next generation to ease future suffering ignores that the next generation can itself ease present suffering.
I think that on this point we might see the largest divergence between a thinker of the rich world, steeped in a consuming, world-diminishing society, and a Third World thinker. Without getting too much into the themes of the environmental impacts of human existence (which Singer has wisely left out of the present discussion), one can still argue that a child born in the rich world has a pretty high likelihood of contributing to misery in his own country or others far away (through his consumption of goods produced under poor labor conditions, through his contribution to pollution and global warming that falls heaviest on us in the tropical countries, etc.). But the average Third World dweller, for instance, consumes few resources beyond his fair share, doesn't pay taxes to a government that wages war on other countries, produces many of the things he consumes, etc. So for a peasant in Colombia, who has the common sense to know that life is worth living and the generosity to bestow life on another, there is little need to wring his hands about the ill effects the child will bring to the world. Perhaps the cited philosophers would do well to explore this quaint conviction that people can create and improve the world as much as they can destroy. And the rest of us can try to conceive and raise children that see existence as a gift and that live accordingly, working to enjoy life and improve the world more than they degrade it.
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