Tally Up the Pain and Pleasure of Humanity

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I recently read a short story whose premise was that this universe is basically here for one purpose, created by a god-like entity so that a child of its race could grow up in it. This works in such a way that this child lives the life of every human being ever—from Jesus to Hitler, eventually it will be incarnated into every life that’s ever been lived, or will ever be lived. Presumably, the idea is that the accumulated life experience will help guide the child towards becoming a mature individual of its race.

Now, while I think the idea is somewhat interesting, I’m not really on-board with the ethics of doing such a thing. The reason is—and I hadn’t been clear about this beforehand—that I believe that over the course of history, there was a lot more suffering than good, and thus, raising a child in this way essentially means subjecting it to a great deal of (presumably preventable) harm. That is, it just doesn’t seem like good parenting to me.

I was wondering how universal this impression is. Am I just a pessimist? Has there, in fact, been more good than harm done to humans over the course of the existence of our species? Or is my ethical judgement mistaken—would it nevertheless be permissible to subject a ‘child’ to the kind of procedure described? Does this suffering ‘build character’?

Of course, there are all sorts of possible mitigating factors—things might look up significantly for future humanity, for instance, so that there is a large number of future lives dominated by pleasure rather than pain, tipping the overall scales. Furthermore, nothing is known about the god-like beings themselves, so subjecting them to our human ethical judgments may be questionable (they could thrive, in the long term, on what we experience as suffering). But these are unknowables, and in answering the poll, I’d ask you to bracket them, and go by what you think is right, based on what you know.

I’ve got a last question that won’t be on the poll, and which I’d like not to influence your polling decision; so, I’ll put it into spoiler tags, and I’d ask you to answer the poll before you read it (if you plan on answering at all, that is).

[SPOILER]Do you think that our assessment of suffering and pleasure should have any influence on our decision of whether or not to have children (human ones, that is)? Meaning, if there truly is more suffering in this world, then having a children would be, on average, more likely to subject them to a life of pain than one of pleasure. Does this speak against having children?

Of course, there’s again much room for discussion here. The likelihood that a child suffers or not is massively influenced by the parents’ social standing—their country of origin, for instance, but (regrettably) also their race, financial resources, and so on, which is why I didn’t want to simply poll on it. But since I’m myself of two minds regarding this issue—children may be more likely to suffer than not, but as a consequence not having children does not eradicate the suffering—I’d appreciate all input.[/SPOILER]

2

I think pleasure and suffering pretty much even even out, so, none of the above.

To anyone who claims to think that suffering clearly outweighs pleasure, I ask, why don’t you kill yourself then? Absent a firmly held belief in reincarnation, or some afterlife where you will suffer even more for being a suicide, it seems to me that anyone professing to believe that suffering clearly outweighs pleasure is in bad faith if they do not seek death, yet, in fact, very few people do seek death, and most do all they can to avoid it.

3

Especially talking about the entire course of human history, there is on balance more suffering I would say. Even today, nearly 3 million children die of starvation every year and that’s a rate that’s been falling. So in this one year alone, you are making your child die 3 million times of starvation as a child, about 6 million times under the age of 5 from preventable disease, be raped millions of times and so on. And that’s in this last year alone. Now look back 100 years ago and further. Life has often been short, brutal and painful. To intentionally make one person go through that is nothing short of monstrous.

4

I’m still thinking about the poll question (though, being a hopeless optimist, I’ll probably say pleasure), but the pain of humanity is different from the pain of an individual. I can say that the endless massacres, famines, wars, holocausts, and general misery that’s raged since the beginning of mankind outweighs the good, yet lead a comfortable life that’s quite enjoyable. You can be aware of the horrors that have gone/go on while not being directly affected by them.

5

As Octarine above pointed out, believing that there’s more suffering than pleasure over the course of human history does not entail believing that there’s more suffering than pleasure over the course of my life. But even in the face of such a belief, there may be reasons for not committing suicide: the simple fear of death, for instance, which is basically instinctual and may not be swayed by the intellectual belief that in the long run, you’d be better off dead; also, you might feel obliged to continue living for the sake of loved ones, or your children; you might consider the suffering noble, perhaps enduring it in the hope of achieving something in your life that could ease the suffering of other people further down the line; and so on.

Basically, that you should kill yourself if you believe that the suffering in your life outweighs the pleasure only holds if you additionally believe that the only reason for living, the only thing making it ‘worth it’, is to incur more pleasure than pain, which I think can be validly disagreed with; and as soon as you accept the possibility of valuing something else, then there’s no reason for suicide.

6

Pleasure and pain occur infrequently, out at the fringes of existence, which is mostly just trudging along in the state that Darwinian selection has left us dangling in, driven to survive within the context of the physical world in which we live.