I’m not disputing that pulling somebody’s soul out of their body and then later putting it back in would be beyond the power of an omnipotent god. I’m asking if there are people who are saying this happens.
I feel we’ve been discussing the intent of the OP.
I think most people would agree that one living being can experience suffering caused by the death of another living being. So the topic is whether that suffering can be experienced in a situation where there are no living beings.
I can’t agree that suffering by the living can be extrapolated to a consideration of suffering by the dead, or that it is even relevant to the question.
If we can’t say as an axiom that suffering is limited to the living, then we sink into stipulating that some sort of afterlife must exist. Otherwise, what meaning can suffering have if there are no living beings? This isn’t even a form of animism; it puts suffering into an intrinsic force that exists outside of life.
You’re glossing over that you actually are assuming a different axiom, namely that bad and suffering are synonyms. But the OP was explicitly talking about a different sense of bad. Whether the dead suffer is besides the point.
The OP’s question seems to be some version of whether morals exist as platonic ideals independent of humanity.
Too bad that the OP has never returned to clarify. Since four people in the thread used “suffering” before me, I can only assume that they also made that interpretation, and even if they didn’t that was the trajectory the thread took and the posts I was replying to.
Can you point to the posts that interpreted the OP as about platonic morals?
I’d say my primary orientation toward morality is based on suffering. Will they, won’t they, and how much? It’s hard for me to believe in anything as intrinsically bad if there’s no suffering involved.
I think dying can be bad for the person that dies, but not death.
I think the thread title is absolutely in the Straight Dope All-Time Top Ten.
@Exapno_Mapcase …
I’m not @MrDibble but as I almost said in my last post, IMO anyone talking about an individual POV is utterly missing the OP’s philosophical point.
IMO …
The OP is asserting that Life as a universal phenomenon has value in the Universe, and the cessation of Life everywhere in the Universe would be objectively bad, leaving the universe an objectively worse place. And further that the death of any creature is bad, not for the individual’s sake, but for the loss to the Universe of the life that creature would have had if its death occurred later in time or never.
IMO this is the proposition he’s hoping for a debate over.
To which I would answer …
As an example of life myself, I’m fond of the idea that my life has value to me. At a larger scale, I’m glad our universe has Life on Earth at this present time.
But I utterly reject the idea that big-L Life has any inherent quality that could be described as good or bad. That’s sophistry, not good thought.
Now @Jackmannii just above indirectly points out that the OP’s title is about a very different topic than the OP’s post. In these all-too-common cases of title/post disagreement I prefer to ignore the title entirely. And to gently admonish the OP (poster) to try harder next time to not make a hash of it.
But if that’s your only consideration, it makes death a good thing, because it ends suffering. It means the best thing you can do for a person (or other entity) is to kill them painlessly. It makes Jim Jones the moral ideal. And that strikes me as very wrong.
A view that I addressed directly in my first post in the thread.
My vote that life has little intrinsic value to the universe is midway in the spectrum between the OP and the view that life intrinsically is evil and should be eradicated. I think some comic book villains have been assigned this philosophy, since it leads to deliberate destruction of life.
But it’s much older than that. Ironically, a cite I used in another thread from the online SF Encyclopedia is also applicable here.
[Robert] Cromie is best known for his third sf novel, The Crack of Doom (1895), which is set in the year 2000; the protagonist runs across a politically radical villain (the secret society he controls is vitiated by Feminism and other unacceptable beliefs) who dominates his attractive sister through Telepathy and has also developed a device to unlock the Nuclear Energy contained in matter. He plans to use his formula to destroy the world through a Manichaean conviction that matter is an occlusive evil whose effect on primal reality is to torture it. There is no doubt of Cromie’s intention: as he explains, the first use of atomic energy had, thousands of years earlier, destroyed the fifth planet and created the Asteroids; though hazily described; his use here of a nuclear device to end civilization marks the first occurrence of a theme which would dominate the next century (see End of the World). In a heavily plotted denouement, the protagonist alters the formula, so that only a South Pacific Island is evaporated, and all is saved.
I personally give this view no more credence than I do the OP’s.
I enjoy life, but personally as a Christian, I believe that pure love awaits us when we die.
Death often exacerbates suffering for those left behind. So we’re never going to be able to look at death in a vacuum. The death of one person has a ripple effect on everyone and everything around it. If a monstrous person dies, thus reducing suffering, for sure their death is a good thing.
The human animal is designed to not want to die, and often to view death as inherently bad, and that’s difficult conditioning to overcome, even for me.
Every person on Earth is in a position to decide if their life has sufficient meaning to counteract the suffering. So for living beings I think they should have the autonomy to decide whether their life is worth living or not regardless of what I feel about it. So I guess human autonomy also ranks up there for me.
But the question is whether it’s intrinsically bad for everything to die, and I believe the answer is no. There’s no real reason we have to be here as a species. We exist only for ourselves.
I have a problem with making suffering the main consideration. It’s an excessively negative, pessimistic point of view (maybe that’s a difference between a Christian vs. Buddhist worldview?).
I’m not so sure I agree (though I’m not sure what you mean by “is in a position to”: is morally entitled to? is physically able to? has all the requisite wisdom and information and perspective to?). In particular I wouldn’t say that someone who is temporarily under the influence of mind-altering substances or excessively strong emotions or mental illness is in a position to make that decision.
If suffering (or anything else) is inherently bad, then surely it’s possible for things to be inherently good. And even if life itself is not inherently good, being alive is a necessary precondition for things that are.
This I think is the key issue for me, and the point of fundamental disagreement. I do think that the badness of something depends on a conscious experience of it (or at least of its impact.) I fail to see any workable definition of ‘badness’ that doesn’t require the experience of a conscious mind. Even if you’re inclined to say “God decides what’s good or bad, and it remains good or bad even if there’s no humans around,” then… God’s consciously experiencing it.
In answer to the “your opinions?” prompt, I am generally pro-nonexistence and generally antinatalist. I think the experience of death can be bad, and usually is - it’s frightening and often painful. But I don’t think being dead can be any worse than not being born, and I don’t think it makes sense to imagine that the universe is full of the infinite suffering of every hypothetical being that ever didn’t-exist.
I do think existence has been a net negative and that that’s the way of it for most humans who exist and/or have ever existed. My biological programming makes ‘turning myself off’ a very difficult thing to accomplish, but that doesn’t mean it would be a bad thing. I’ve tried a few times but it didn’t take. (I’m fine right now, not at any risk. Just being as frank as I think the question deserves.) But if you gave me a button that would retroactively remove me from existence, I’d push it without hesitation.
As a thought experiment - I’d like to reframe antinatalism as a question of consent. Imagine I had a six-sided die. If I roll this die, something happens to you, the reader: On a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you receive a crisp $20 bill. On a 6, you get slapped in the face. Do I have the moral right to roll the die? I think most of us would answer “no” - even if the harm is small and the odds of harm are small, it’s not a decision we can make for someone else - only the individual can assess the risk of good outcome vs. bad and make that call.
I see creating a new human as essentially the same. You’re rolling the dice for them, wagering that the good they experience outweighs the bad - and I don’t think that’s a decision that one can ethically make for someone else.
I’m just here to say this is the sort of shit I pondered TOO much when I was younger and trying to figure out if I should be “christian” or not. I was raised in a hell is fire & brimstone church and thought about what would happen when I die…like the second after. Now that I think all of that is a fairy tale, I believe death is not bad for the person that dies. You die, it’s over. No more worrying, no more hurting, no more caring. I guess that actually does sound a bit like heaven to me.
Lol no. The Buddhist interpretation would be that there are plenty of ways to extinguish suffering without death. And that death is neither good nor bad in the absolute sense. It’s not negative or pessimistic to want to reduce suffering in the world. It’s the most proactive way to live life that I can imagine.
I think the OP, likely unwittingly, poisoned the well by mentioning anti-natalism.
Where I’m actually coming from is not that kind of rhetoric but my thoughts about people who kill themselves after committing mass shootings, as the guy who recently shot ten people at my local park did. I once remarked that I am angry when these people don’t face accountability for their actions, and someone said, well death is the worst consequence, and I don’t agree. Death is not accountability. Death is no problem for the person who is dead.
I don’t think one size fits all when it comes to death. I think my sister was sad to say goodbye to all those she loved, but was very happy that her enforced isolation was over and she could once again touch friends and family. She made her peace with the end of life business and remained in good humor to the end.
But still, your focus here is all on suffering (“…to extinguish suffering…”; “…to reduce suffering in the world”).
I don’t think there is anything I could say that would satisfy you, any more than you could satisfy me with regard to the core tenets of Christianity.
In response to a childhood full of trauma and a good chunk of my adulthood suffering due to mental illness, I have lived my life deeply interested in the problem of suffering. I remain deeply interested in it. I find certain explanations more satisfactory than others. I find certain modes of meaning more satisfactory than others. I find my life’s meaning in attending to the problem of suffering. Surely there are other considerations besides suffering as we live our lives in general, but I don’t feel a need to enumerate them all, because the question in the OP is incredibly easy for me. Questions of whether or not people in the world should be euthanized or allowed to kill themselves etc. are not easy for me to answer. I answered the question that is easy to answer, using a heuristic that is easy to apply.
There’s no good or bad. Evolution has imbued me with some feelings that help the survival of my species, and I’m pleasantly sentimental about those feelings.
I’m got some empathy and wince when someone gets injured. I’ve got a powerful inclination toward survival, and often feel sad about the deaths of others.
I’ve got team spirit, and root for most cute life forms. Dogs, trees, dolphins, flowers. I hope my team has an enduring and astonishing run, and — impossible as it seems — endures past the death of the sun, and even battles entropy to a … standstill.
But again, those are all just feelings that have been useful for human survival. If we’re all eradicated by an asteroid next year it’s neither good nor bad.