If humanity is defined by suffering, then what’s to be valued about being human ? To me, arguments like this make being human look like something bad; something that should be eliminated from the universe.
They also look to me like a classic example of turning a necessity into a virtue. Pain, and suffering, and age and death for that matter are things we’ve been unable to avoid, so we’ve collectively convinced ourselves that they must be good things. We’ve done so to such an extent that many oppose any attempt to fight them.
Nonsense! The value of humanity is derived from how we cope with the adversity. Ingenuity, the will to overcome, hope, empathy and Compassion all come from our coping mechanism. We try to avoid the pain and that necessitates these qualities in humanity.
The idea that you can eliminate the suffering and we’ll keep the rest is silly.
Why care about anyone else if you don’t have any anxieties to relate to others? Why strive to do better when you are already happy? Why hope for something better when you’re sitting on your own personal cloud? No need to worry about the future no need to care about it no need to prepare for it.
Sure, end pain, keep life going, stop war but artificially induce bliss? That is not about ending suffering
Without these qualities you end up with stagnation and death. This is what these “Bioethical Abolitionists” are looking forward to.
Let’s be honest here. This is about some misanthropic group trying to eliminate a species they don’t care about but wrap themselves in the guise of compassion towards humanities’ suffering.
If I were to suggest aborting Jewish fetus’s to prevent these unborn children from experiencing future anti-Semitism or that we should drug all black citizens into apathetic bliss so they won’t have to worry about poverty in segments of their population, what do you think my actual motives really are?
If these people were truly suffering they really wouldn’t have the free time to come up with this garbage.
We have those qualities because they are built into us, not because of adversity. Suffering doesn’t develop character; it produces selfishness. The more you suffer, the more you tend focus on on your suffering and ending it, regardless of the cost to others.
That’s why you would have to rewire or recalibrate ( for lack of a better word ) people to an extent, and not just give them a drug. But as I pointed out, even we normal humans can still be driven to seek greater happiness when already happy. We don’t freeze and turn into zombies the moment we aren’t suffering, unlike your scenario.
Yeah, sure. And do you have any actual reason to believe this ? Or is it just the flipside of your “Suffering is Good !” mantra ? That if they oppose suffering, they must be genocidal lunatics ?
Strawmen.
And how do you know they aren’t ? Are you claiming that everyone who suffers is pro-suffering ? And if so, why do people demand painkillers ?
How about some consistency here!
You say the positive qualities are built in and not because of the adversity but that the negative ones are created by it. Nice try but you can’t have it both ways.
First I did not say suffering was good. Those are your words. I believe it has a utility value. It can be either good or bad. you want to deal in absolutes go ahead… just don’t ascribe that line of thinking to me.
Now as for our friends philosophy, let’s look at the relevant part part of the quote
EMPHASIS HERE "RATHER THAN A LONGING TO REPRODUCE"
This philosophy is not about easing or ending suffering in the philanthropic sense you may believe it. It is a nicer packaged version of voluntary extinction.
I don’t. Fair enough. I’m willing to admit I threw that out there in disbelief.
Wow! You throw out the word strawman when I substituted race for species discussing the OPs two ideas (By his threads) and then toss out this dandy. Please direct quote where I say people who suffer are pro suffering?
I am constantly amazed at how people automatically figure someone is automatically diametrically opposed to an idea they refute. It is not black and white. I said myself, we should work on reducing the amount of suffering but I won’t say it needs to be rewired away.
There are many degrees between. Suffering isn’t just long drawn out physical pain. It can be grief, it can be loss, it can be the feeling of being discriminated against, it can be temporary, hell it can even be embarrassment.
I’m not really for a world where we sat there merrily when we lose a loved one. Yeah, grief is painful but that doesn’t make it a bad thing.
For something like this, “often” isn’t good enough. Would you trust the Bush administration with a program intended to directly manipulate your emotions?
Maybe they could successfully implement such a plan against a hostile populace, but it would be a lot easier to do so against a populace that shares your fatalism.
It’s difficult not to sound like I think suffering is a good thing. In fact, it sucks - but I don’t see how it can be escaped without some kind of separation from reality.
Evolution has wired us to preserve our genes, sometimes even at the expense of our own lives. There’s a species of ant whose soldiers will literally explode themselves to attack their enemies with their acidic guts, to preserve the genes she shares with her sisters. Salmon die shortly after spawning, after they’ve served their “purpose.” The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is an excellent explanation of this phenomenon.
I think having children is virtually always a selfish act. At least in this day age, with 6.7 billion human beings on Earth, it’s not done out of some altruistic desire to preserve the human race. Why make a new human being except out of a narcissitic desire to create a person in ones own image? One online calculator I’ve found says it costs an estimated $136,000 to raise a child in a city or suburb in the west to the age of 18 ( this excludes the cost of college). Do you realize how many children in Africa you could feed and put through school with that kind of money? I’m betting several. But of course, they don’t matter as much because they’re not your child!
I never said it ws done for some altruistic desire to preserve the human race. But is is done because we are wired to give of ourselves in the raising of children, if done selflessly (IMHO) leads to great happiness and fulfillment.
Not only are they not your child, but you don’t even state that they will be raised by a loving parent, just some school system. I firmly believe that parents who raises a single child in selfless love does more benefit for the world then any school system could ever hope to.
A well designed chemical cocktail and a highly sophisticated form of virtual reality should solve all our problems. We could dispense with these imperfect bodies and simply plop our gray matter into the appropriate computerized receptacles.
I anticipate that not only would this be voluntary but it would also be costly, thereby making it unlikely that it would be imposed by the government, unless the receiver has broken applicable laws, of course.
In another thread it was asked, “Why doesn’t ET call us?” The answer should be obvious: intelligent beings eventually lose interest in such endeavors. Why go to the bother of exploring the material world when the virtual one is so much more satisfying?
I disagree completely with the premise of this thread. I’m going to begin by explaining why I disagree with what is written in the original post, and then work my way through later posts as I get the time.
That’s certainly not included among what most people would understand by the words “evolutionary theory”. Quite plainly, human beings do quite a lot of things that do not maximize reproduction. Some minimize reproduction. It has, of course, been theorized that behaviors which seem to contradict the theory are actually byproducts of genes chosen to maximize reproduction, but there’s zero evidence to support this. In fact, none of the genes which supposedly compell us to reproduce have ever been found, much less the genes which produce byproducts that make us do other things. And it’s not like we haven’t been looking.
Again, this is a theoretical assertion with no evidence in its favor and much evidence against it. Some human beings have been quite happy, happier than scientific materialists are generally willing to accept. And certainly many of these people did so precisely because they refused to view themselves as purely biological beings.
Once again, the evidence just doesn’t support what these people want to believe. SSRIs are not a cure-all for depression; nothing is. I don’t imagine that any professional would suggest tackling major depression solely with drugs. It has to be drugs coupled with therapy at the very least. Yet in reality, a real cure for depression has to look at the patient’s human side, rather than just their chemical side. The reasons for depression may lie in their current situation, their future plans, their family, their friends, their job, or any other serious aspect of their lives. Neurochemical factors and genetic disposition may play into it in some cases, but they’re never the whole thing.
For example, when I suffered depression in graduate school, it came about because I didn’t see any purpose for what I was doing in graduate school. The cure came by leaving school and getting a real job. Now in my case I did take a drug for a time, but neither I nor my psychiatrist would think for a second that the drug solved the problem by itself.
In short, there’s no basis for what these people claim.
And I would not. As I’ve stated above, it’s all based on pseudoscience. All that time and money would go down the drain while producing little or nothing of use. The human race has already found out a great deal about human happiness: what causes it and how it is best achieved. Unfortunately, strict materialists are bound and determined to ignore most of what has been found, because it does not mesh with their world-view. Because of this, they lock themselves out the true path to happiness.
I fully agree with what Oakminister has said in this thread. The types of things that you’re advocating are a major threat to human freedom and fulfillment. Historically, strict materialists have typically been the ones most opposed to freedom. Just ask anyone who lived under the Soviets, Nazi Germany, Red China, or Fidel Castro. (Anyone who survived, that is.) In America, the belief that the brain is a strictly physical system that can be controlled by purely physical means has lead to some very bad programs. Eugenics, lobotomy, and electroshock therapy are probably the best known. But in those cases and in others, those who wanted to improve the human condition by biological/chemical means showed no respect at all for human freedom or choice. The same is likely to be the case for future materialist programs.
There has never been a case where a new technology was equally in the hands of all human beings simultaneously. It has always been the case that each new technology is controlled by a few. A handful of rulers, executives, or bureaucrats decides what will be manufactured, when and where, how it will be distributed, and who will control it. If it were possible to manufacture the sorts of things that you imagine–I don’t think it is, but this is a thought experiment–a small group of people would control the technology. If history is any guide, that small group would be overwhelming white, male, secular, wealthy, highly educated, and urban. Hence it would be applied in ways that reflect the prejudices of people who are white, male, secular, wealthy, highly educated, and urban.
Quite frankly, when a ruling elite says “we want to eliminate suffering”, they usually mean “we want to eliminate thinking that we don’t approve of.”
I’m with you here. Suffering is not only necessary for great works of art, but for all areas of human achievement, ranging from political activism to philosophy to personal introspection. If you list the great achievers of human history, you will not get a list of cheery, upbeat persons. You will get persons who were driven by a deep-seated need to improve themselves and their world.
“I think that riding the bus is virtually always a selfish act. It’s not done out of some altruistic desire to reduce greenhouse gases. Why ride the bus except out of a selfish desire to hijack the bus and keep it for oneself?”
Once you find the error in that chain of logical reasoning, you’ll have found the error in your own attack on child-bearing.
Indeed, why do people have babies? Because they believe that having babies is a net positive, taking into account its effect on the baby, the parents, and everyone else. Chesterton was good enough to lay out the argument for babies, so I won’t bother repeating it.
Fallacious reasoning again. Any time we spend money on anything, we could instead have sent that money to starving children in Africa, and yet we don’t. Does that mean that spending money is always a selfish act? Obviously not. In order to live, it is necessary to spend some resources on ourselves and the people around us. It is not selfish to do so. Resources spent raising our children are no different from resources spent on anything else.
But for many patients, the therapy is limited to very short sessions (10 to 20 minutes) once a month or even less. In those cases, the shrink is not trying to help the patient work through problems such as the ones that you had. The psychiatrist is checking to see how the medications are affecting the patient and making any changes needed.
Sometimes all that is needed is the medication. Until SSRIs came along, about the only thing that had much effect on my depression was eclectric shock treatment. That was in the early 1960s. But prozac changed everything for me. It took almost six weeks to work, but when it did, I felt like I was fully myself for the first time in my adult life. That was in 1989.
The important thing is that I felt normal – not jolly or happy or blissful. This was not a rewiring of my brain into something that it wasn’t supposed to be. This was a repair and restoration. I would always choose to be fully functioning and that includes my brain.
If the option were to change me into a state of bliss all the time and other people were going to continue to suffer, I wouldn’t take it.
There are some people who are born without the ability to feel physical pain. They do a lot of damage to themselves physically without meaning to. They bite their lips and tongues. They burn themselves easily. They have a lot of broken bones. Nerve endlings are there for a reason.
But…if everyone lived in bliss, who’s going to complain?
Even if I can’t get you to concede that making a new human is selfish, perhaps I can get you to say that it would be more altruistic to not make a baby and adopt one isntead?
The problems you’ve cited above are not due to materalism per se but ideology. Blind, unwavering ideology is the cause of most of the suffering humans inflict on other humans. Whether that be belief in the inerrancy of the State, or a belief in a God. Unjustified belief, held in spite of evidence to the contrary, is what causes this misery.
Would it change your opinion if the abolitionist program is purely voluntary?
If it does become successful, I think virtually everyone would want to sign up for it once they see how joyful and free from suffering the first volunteers are. It would not be neccesary to coerce anybody.
Somewhat related to the other points that have been made, but how would such a thing work? Surely you’ve heard a young child throw a screaming tantrum when their parent wouldn’t buy some toy they wanted. If an adult screamed like that you’d think they were surely losing limbs. Surely much of this difference is due to some learning process, comparing the severity of current suffering to past suffering and acting accordingly. Near as I can tell we don’t come with any pre-installed mechanism for measuring absolute suffering.
That given, how could we ensure a fine enough resolution on the low end of the scale (of amount of suffering) to discriminate between two bad events? It seems to me that the only way we might accomplish what you want is to create such an absolute scale of suffering and happiness. But then what would happen to a society where everyone knows, really knows what it would be like to suffer as much as anyone has ever suffered? What would happen to the happy side of the scale under such conditions?
No, because many programs of social improvement start out as purely voluntary but don’t stay that way. In the 19th century there was the temperance movement, which prodded people to voluntarily give up alcoholic drinks. But as time went on and not enough drinkers obeyed voluntarily, it morphed into the prohibition movement. More recently, the anti-tobacco movement started out as purely voluntary in the 50’s. But once again, as the movement gained power it started imposing its will by force. And I believe we’re seeing the start of the same process in the regulation of food.
I don’t doubt your honesty when you say that you want the abolitionist program to be voluntary, but I highly doubt that it would stay voluntary. Other people would eventually decide that the abolition of pain is so important that imposing it by law is acceptable.
That, of course, is a prediction. I predict otherwise.
It’s worth noting that we already have chemical means to activate the brain’s pleasure centers. They have names such as marijuana, heroin, and crack cocaine. Most people choose not to use them. Why? Because hitting the brain’s pleasure centers with chemicals is not what most people want to do with their lives.
When a person becomes addicted to a drug, their entire existence shifts to focus on that drug. Everything else becomes secondary and eventually vanishes, including family, friends, education, long-term health, progress, personal development, fulfillment, and even personal hygiene. In short, it leads to a disgusting and pathetic version of human existence. Small wonder that most people don’t want it.