Marat

The thesis doesn't make any sense. Certainly we see many things in our dreams that we have never seen before, such as strange buildings, unique situations, bizarre creatures, etc., so what would be so special about faces that the only ones we could see in dreams would have to come from the store of facial memories?

Thanks for the interesting statistics. Though one problem with the quantification of the issue is that while most people's happiness with life may be worth, say, a +1000 on something like Bentham's felicific calculus of pleasure units, the unhappiness with life among the severely disabled, hideously disfigured, and horribly and incurably ill may be - 10,000,000 on the same scale, so just a few of them outweigh the many normals, thus changing the risk-benefit analysis in having children. There are also other situations where people have tragic lives, since they may become drug addicted or alcohol dependent, may ruin all their relationships with an uncontrollable temper, may be severely neurotic or psychotic beyond the effective action of medications, or may have staked everything on winning someone's affection, becoming a great pianist, getting into Princeton, or ensuring German victory in World War II, and never recovered when these ambitions failed. Unfortunately, most people never think seriously about the pluses and minuses of having children, and because it is a natural and socially endorsed thing to do, potential parents often seem uncritically to imagine that no further ethical questions can be raised against their choice. In my day job I see patients with polycystic kidney disease, which carries a 50% risk of passing onto the children a truly horrible, debilitating, and terrifying illness which cannot be prevented or cured, and which ensures early death. Nonetheless, potential parents who know that they carry this gene often cheerily announce that they have decided they will have children anyway since they "like to see the glass half full rather than half empty." Somehow it doesn't occur to them that their children may not view the choice that way, and their children's feelings cast a shadow over the parents' choice.

Have you considered an area like the intersection between math and philosophy in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mathematics? While it is true that the great expansion of this field was from the late 19th cent. to the early 20th cent., from Frege and Peano to Church and Goedel, there are still a lot of interesting possibilities to develop, especially given the interests you outlined in your post.

You raise a good point that since many people seem willing to risk severe harms to themselves for the sake of adding a little adventure or excitement to their lives, the fact that people are willing to increase their risks of tragedy just to gain a little more life intensity suggests that most would accept the dangers of living for the value of the experience. Another point worth considering is that since most people seem to be happy, it seems that the risk-benefit analysis of forcing life on someone else is very much in favor of going ahead with the risk. Finally, there is Kant's saying, that "your life does not have to be happy in order to have value." Perhaps the true goal of human existence is to realize some sort of value which has nothing to do with making yourself happy, so the fact that living creates an enormous risk of misery is not a good reason for declining to live in the first place, which would surrender the opportunity to achieve something of great spiritual, moral, or intellectual value, even if in the course of a life of suffering. The real problems begin when you realize that you are not making this decision for yourself but for someone else, who may not approve of your own risk-benefit assessment, but who will have to pay the price for that risk if it turns out badly. If you feel that there is a 60% chance that life will be happy for your future children and only a 40% chance that they will find their lives so miserable that they would rather be dead, but they are also trapped in life because they lack the courage to kill themselves, is that enough to go ahead and impose the risk on them? What about 50%-50%? Since all these estimates about the likelihood of children having a tragic life, about the tolerance of future children for misfortune, about their own assessment of the costs and value of life, etc. are purely intuitive, do we ever have sufficient certainty about the gamble we are taking for someone else to justify our plunging them into the consequences of that gamble without being able to get their permission first? It's apparent that I'm not a parent.

I have a pro-active defense against hangovers: I never drink! But since most of the negative symptoms of hangovers come from the dehydration caused by alcohol, the best remedy is to drink a lot of water before going to bed. Some people add an aspirin or some vitamin C.

Tony McC: While you might find your own life satisfactory despite some misfortunes, the problem in having children is that you are making a decision to run a huge risk for people you are ethically obliged to protect but whom you cannot ask for permission to commit them to the choice to be born. For yourself you might say that you would be willing to live even if you had only a 50% chance to have a decent rather than a wreteched existence, but can you legitimately take that gamble for someone whom it is your duty to protect? Think of the situation as though you were a lawyer in charge of administering a trust fund for a minor. Normally such funds are invested only in the most secure assets, like treasury bills, since this is considered to be what is required by your fiduciary duty toward a helpless person you must protect and who cannot be consulted in the management of his own assets. You would be disbarred if you risked those funds at Monte Carlo, even if your gambling was successful, since ethics requires that you act conservatively to protect the child. But when you choose to force life onto a child, what are the odds that the child won't prefer being dead given how hideous his life turns out to be, but he cannot manage to summon the courage to commit suicide, so his existence drags on in a frightful state of perpetual horror, perhaps existing paralyzed and blind on a bed in a hospital for his entire life. If the odds that the child will enjoy life rather than hate it are 60% to 40%, is that sufficient to permit you ethically to bring that child into existence without consulting it first to get its permission? What if the odds of a good life sink to 50%, or 40%? Where do you draw the line? Doesn't your ethical duty to be conservative in making decisions for a child under your trusteeship require you never to plunge the child into the extremely dangerous risk of having to live?

Since gambling gives you an equal chance with everyone else in the lottery, if you think that you are smarter or more skilled than the typical person participating in the game, then you are wasting your talents. But if you think you are stupider or less skilled than the average lottery participant against whom you have an equal chance, then playing gives you more relative social power than you would normally have in the rest of life, where intelligence and skill count. A professor at MIT I knew said he gambled as a type of 'negative insurance.' Just as he would pay a small amount of money every month to protect himself against the chance of rare but catastrophic events through his insurance policies, so too he would pay a small amount of money every month gambling to buy himself the unlikely chance of a huge benefit. Generally, though, since institutions which operate gambling establishments seem to make enormous amounts of money, the $1.00 lottery ticket you buy has to be worth only a fraction of the chance of the payoff, so gambling is just deliberately overpaying for things.

I think zapatos is on the right track. The entire nervous system evolved as a whole for the evolutionary purpose of making people withdraw from harmful effects on themselves, to pick away infected swellings, to pull out barbs, etc., but the nervous system cannot know whether it is giving its typically useful signals in useful situations, like taking a finger away from a hot stove or pulling out a thorn, or non-useful situations, like tooth-ache and cancer pain.

There has recently been renewed talk of torture being justified because it may have produced information which led to the killing of bin Laden. But is it technically necessary to extract information from resistant subject by such methods? Some have said that since people being tortured simply tell their tormentors anything they think the torturers want to hear, the information produced is always suspect. Also, the drug Scopolamine was used by the Germans during World War II as a preferred method of extracting information from those they were interrogating, since they found it easier to use and less unreliable in the results it yielded than torture. Another drug, Midazolam or Versed, which is today often used to calm patients during minor surgical procedures, causes people to babble freely about anything and everything, and under the influence of this drug they are quite suggestable and respond readily to questions posed. Another method which has some aspects of torture but is not permanently damaging and far less vicious is that used by the Puritans to extract information from suspects during Cromwell's rule. Since the Puritans were determined to obey the law which held that torture was illegal in England, they developed an alternative known as 'watching,' which involved keeping the suspect awake for a few days by having his keepers walk him around the room and keep him moving. (Thus forcing him to 'keep watch' through several nights in a row: thus the term 'watching.') It was found that after a few days of this treatment people would lose all inhibitions and freely reveal all sorts of secrets if interrogated. So if all these alternatives to actual torture by the infliction of pain are available, why do liberal states so often pretend that they are frankly confronted by the dilemma of either allowing torture of suspects to occur or losing the chance to obtain vital secrets from the enemy?

Although Osama bin Laden was certainly a villain (it's no coincidence that he looks just like the villian, 'der Grosse Nikolas,' in the famous German children's story book, 'Strewelpeter'), by international law someone suspected of being a terrorist has a right to be arrested with no more force than is reasonably necessary to subdue him so he can be taken to trial, and he cannot simply be executed. From all accounts it looks as though the U.S. simply intended to murder him, given the capacities of the force which was sent, the speed with which they acted in shooting him, and the misrepresentations about him 'reaching for a gun' which were made by the official U.S. spokesperson after the incident. Now bin Laden's daughter, who was evidently an eye-witness of his killing, is telling the Pakistanis that bin Laden was actually captured on the ground floor of the building and executed on the third floor. But there is certainly a whole lot to this story which is missing. For example, how was it possible even for stealth helicopters to land so close to Pakistan's main defense college with no one there noticing? How was it possible for the Navy Seals to shot up and set fire to bin Laden's compound, as well as explode their downed helicopter, without attracting any attention from the neighboring defense college personnel? Why didn't bin Laden and company simply flee the compound at the first sound of the helicopters, rather than being captured in situ, unless there was already some up to now unspecified ground force already in place to block their escape? My guess is that no international law issue will be raised about the violation of Pakistan's air space and the foreign military expedition on their soil by the U.S. (cn. Bulgaria's declaration of war on the U.S. in 1943 for its overflight of Bulgarian territory en route to bomb the Ploiesti oil fields, or Argentina's protests before the U.N. about Israel's seizure of Adolph Eichmann from its territory) because Pakistan was itself helping the U.S. with its mission. They may well have provided the blocking force that kept bin Laden and friends in their compound, ordered the defense college personnel not to respond to anything unusual that night, and guaranteed the safety of the helicopters flying over the border. The reason no one is saying anything about this is because Pakistan fears that its own population, containing many Muslim extremists and some al-Quaida members, would be outraged.

Are you suggesting that the Navy Seals may have been invoking a defense of necessity as their warrant to kill him? Would the further loss of life they were preventing then be the risk that some of the Seals would be killed by those in the compound if bin Laden's friends could take advantage of the delay in arresting him properly to attack the U.S. forces? Or would it be the risk that the Seals themselves would have to kill more people in the compound if they could not complete their mission quickly because they were delayed in arresting bin Laden? Either way, it would seem to fail the ordinary domestic tests of the defense of necessity, since the necessity would be one caused by the fault of the person invoking the defense, which negates it. If the danger was that bin Laden would go on to kill other people if not immediately killed rather than arrested, that seems unlikely, given that he was confronted by sufficient force to subdue him. Another condition of the defense of necessity is that the danger averted be immediate, and future killings by bin Laden would have been rather speculative and distant. Since the U.S. proudly inflated itself and pronounced to the world that it was intervening in Libya under U.N. Security Council auspices to protect civilian life according to international law, the attitude that the U.S. now adopts in saying, "Aw, what does international law matter now that we got bin Laden?!" just looks hypocritical.

International lawyers are now objecting to the U.S. execution of bin Laden on the grounds that his killing does not meet the technical requirements of action against an enemy commander in war. First, they say, there are strong indications that bin Laden was no longer acting in a role of command and control over terrorist forces, so while he was a criminal for his earlier acts and could legally be arrested to face trial, he was no longer actually an enemy commander who could just be shot unless he actively signalled his surrender. Second, they add, an enemy commander has to be killed in the theater of war for the action to be covered by international law, and the area of Pakistan in which he was living was not an active war zone. So while Eric Holder holds on to his assertion that this was the killing of an enemy commander in war, the rest of the world doesn't hold that view.

Feminism always likes to say that rape is not a crime of sexual frustration but a crime of violence. Otherwise women might be indirectly blamed for it by having created an artificial shortage of sexual partners by withholding sex so as to augment their social power by generating a 'sex economy' where none would naturally exist. But if our culture treated sex as just some perfectly natural, ordinary biological function, like breathing or eating, which all properly socialized people gladly cooperated in providing and sharing when and where needed unless they had some very good reasons for withholding cooperation in a particular situation, then it would simply never occur to anyone to use sex as a weapon. After all, no one corners you on a dark street in a seedy section of town and threatens to talk you to death, or keep singing tunes from 'Oklahoma' until you scream, since doing those things is no big deal -- if a little odd and anti-social.

While the presence of evil in contrast to good no doubt adds something to the experience of good, I'm not sure that evil passes the cost-benefit test, especially given our human predisposition to concentrate more on what goes wrong than on what goes right. Even though the contrast with potential evil might increase the intensity of our experience of the good by say 10%, that evil itself has a negative impact much greater than 10% of the good we experience. The endorphins would be present in our experience of happy things to give us pleasure even if there were nothing negative to throw them into greater relief, so I'm not really sure we can find an excuse for evil. Evil also often has the effect of negating our chances of doing anything creative to overcome it, so the enjoyment of the challenge is frequently missing from the experience of misfortune. People who become unemployed often cannot find a new job, so instead of life giving them a challenge and thus an opportunity for creative response, it simply buries them in an empty existence from which they cannot escape. Challenges themselves can lead to failure and thus further misfortunes even where there is an option for creative response to them, so a challenge cannot really compensate for what goes wrong. You see enough images of young hemodialysis patients screaming so loudly that the window panes rattle when their new fistula is needled for the first time to connect them to the dialysis machine, or whimpering like beaten dogs and begging the nurses to stop since they would rather die than endure the pain, all the while knowing that that pain will be repeated three times a week for the rest of their lives (barring a transplant, which is becoming an increasingly rare luxury), and you just shrink back from the indescribable horror of life and wish that no human had ever lived.

Now the U.S. is being hit by a wave of criticism for its apparent 'execution' of a wanted person whom it should have sought to subdue, arrest, and bring to justice according to international law, which must certainly have been possible given the disproportion of force available to the U.S. in this situation compared to a lone, unarmed person's capacity for resistance. Among those criticizing the U.S. action as a possible violation of international law are: Cecilla Malmstrom, European Union Home Affairs Commissioner; Reed Brody, counsel of Human Rights Watch; Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; Louise Doswald-Beck, Professor of International Law at the University of Geneva, Institute for Graduate Studies; and Alan Dershowitz, Professor at Harvard Law School. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said the killing of bin Laden was "quite clearly a violation of international law." It doesn't do much good for America to puff itself up as the defender of human rights around the world and then violate them when it suits its own interests.

When we had benign, enlightened, absolute monarchs like Frederick II of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Austria, or Catherine the Great of Russia, resources could be directed rationally according to risk-benefit analysis to produce the greatest utility. But it is perhaps part of the price we pay for democracy that governments have to allocate resources to appeal to popular hysteria rather than to genuine need. Although the War on Terrorism is paid for by governments rather than by the private sector, we have to ask why governments are so willing to spend their own money on the basis of such irrational cost-benefit analyses. Perhaps it is because the governments we are talking about are those of capitalist societies, where the basic logic of the entire society is that rational utility does not matter as much as preserving established rights (i.e., my gold-plated swimming pool cannot be seized to pay for a poor person's cancer therapy, since I have a private property right to my gold, so the utility of using it to help the cancer patient doesn't matter). So if a terrorist violates the rights of the public, that is viewed as disproportionately important compared to the actual cost-benefit analysis of the value of addressing or preventing the violation.

If people were as relaxed about cooperating sexually with each other as they are about giving directions to lost strangers, which would be the case if we simply de-mystified sex and treated it as any other natural interest, then there would be no motivation for rape. For example, there seem to be many garrulous people -- espeically old people sitting next to you on a bus, for example -- who want to talk with strangers even though strangers do not want to talk with them. But since cooperating in someone else's desire to talk is not culturally regarded as a big deal, most people politely converse for fifteen or twenty minutes with the person addressing them and are willing, if a bit reluctant, to extend the favor. There are no 'conversation rapes' in our society, in which a person drags you into the alley, holds you at gunpoint, and forces you to discuss with him the events of the day whether you want to or not, simply because we don't regard conversation as a sacred commodity whose supply has to be restricted. Similarly, if the default position of our social mores was that it was just polite -- if you could and you had no serious reason for objecting to it -- to have sex with any stranger who wanted to sleep with you, then the demand for sex would lack all of the urgency we see it assume in a society like ours where a massive and artificial shortage of sex partners is deliberately created and maintained, and the supply for sex would probably easily match the demand. If there were occasions when the supply was insufficent, the demand would not prompt rape because everyone would know that sex was in principle not restricted and would always be available later or elsewhere. It is also important to recognize that the current limit in the supply of sexual partners is in large measure artificial, produced by cultural mores which encourage people to think that they should refuse to cooperate with sexual overtures from others unless an elaborate set of rituals extending over a considerable time period has first been complied with.

When it is asked, 'Why can't couples control their id?' the response has to be, 'Why adopt an institution that requires people to do anything so contrary to their spontaneous impulses that they have to suppress them?' While monogamy seems to have been the predominant arrangement in society for a long time, this need not establish that it is the best system. It may just have arisen from the ancient form of society in which each person was assigned a highly specific role and required to remain within it: a serf could never ride a horse in battle, a noble could never sell his land, a priest could never do manual labor, etc. Thus women and men were also strictly segregated into separate roles, and since men and women were not generally allowed to interact outside their families, within which marriage was forbidden because of incest rules, people could only form sexual partnerships with one specially and elaborately selected person from the other gender group. But now that the sexes freely intermix all the time, pair formation doesn't have to be so difficult and ritualized, so monogamy has lost its former cultural basis. There are tribes in Southern India which have practised polyandry, with one woman having several husbands, and in the Islamic world men have been allowed to have four wives or even more in special circumstances, depending on their ability to afford to support them all financially. Most animals are also not monogamous, including our closest primate relatives. The general rule of a positivist ethos has to be that if something is difficult or frustrating, we should demand that it rigorously demonstrate sufficient utility to outweigh its costs before we decide to continue the practise. Monogamy seems to create a huge happiness deficit in society, both among those who observe it and suffer lives of sexual frustration, and in partnerships where the ideal is violated with emotionally disturbing consequences. It seems likely that it would be easier to train people not to develop a disposition toward sexual jealousy than it is to preserve monogamy.

Though of course, if you never exist in the first place you are never confronted with the difficult question of evaluating whether your life has sufficient meaning to outweigh the variety of horrors all existence is exposed to. An interesting related question is whether you can have a duty to protect from harm a child who is not yet born, since this is a non-existent entity, and as such cannot be defined as having interests, rights, or even as being your child rather than just any potential person. The answer seems to be that we generally recognize a duty to future generations of humans who are not yet born, in the sense that we feel obligated not to burden them with an excessive national debt or to impose on them the damage we have profited by inflicting on the environment. So from this it follows that there can be a moral duty to people as yet non-existent. Even if human fate were equally balanced between pleasures and horrors (and I don't see how it can be, since death, the ultimate horror, is certain, while no comparable pleasures are as certain), then life would still seem a net displeasure, given that we are instinctively primed to focus on threats and pains more than we are primed to emphasize pleasures by our selective attention. Another problem for most people when they approach an assessment of the positive versus negative aspects of life is that society quite deliberately disguises the full intensity of the horrors people suffer, so it presents a false, propagandistic, sanitized, Disney-World image of what the balance between pleasures and displeasures really is. There are more novels and films about romance than about cancer; it is simply presupposed without much serious analysis that suicide is always just a symptom of mental illness rather than a rational choice in a hideous existence; more attention is paid to weddings than funerals; and polite society talks about successful careers but not about disease, despair, and death.

While it would certainly be legitimate for you to choose for yourself to bear the risks that your life might turn out to be terrible, but to take the gamble on existing anyway because you believed that it was more likely to turn out to be a tolerable or even a good experience, but the ethical dimension changes when you are making that decision for someone else, especially for someone to whom you owe, by both law and culture, the highest duty of care to protect them from harm, your children. If you are a lawyer with a fiduciary obligation to a client, say managing funds held for him in a trust, you violate your fiduciary duty if you take the trust money and stake it all on a 50-50 bet because you feel lucky and would have made that bet for yourself with your own assets. A fiduciary obligation, that is, a high duty of care exercised for someone who depends on your protection, prevents you from taking risks for them which are in any way dangerous. So imposing existence on future children who may turn out to find their life an intolerable burden which the irrational instinct to live traps them into continuing violates your trusteeship duty, unless it is a very safe bet. However, as I suggested in the OP, it seems that it is not. So it would seem to follow that people are ethically obligated not to have children.

Anyone over the age of 20 knows that life can be horrible. The one thing we fear most -- death -- is what is most certain to happen, and everything we do in life is overshadowed by that awareness. From an early age on we start to experience a gradual slide into death as we decay before our own eyes in the process of aging; a dead 20-year-old who has been lying in the sun for three days looks better than a living 80-year-old, so the mask of death is something we have to wear even in life. Human existence is not only burdened by grief, frustration, injury, disease, and conflict, but also, our awareness augments the power of every evil by anticipating it, ruminating over it, remembering it, and regretting it. And this is just speaking of the average fate. For a child born with spina bifida, polycystic kidney disease, progeria, and the like, life can be pure torture. Since we suffer from an irrational, instinctive drive to continue living just for its own sake, no matter how hideous life becomes, sensibly escaping life by suicide is often not an option where it should be, and in any hospital at any given time there are countless patients clinging to a life which simply tortures them, but too paralyzed by an irrational instinct to live at any cost to be able to escape. Add to this other especially unfortunate lives, such as those in dire poverty, marred by drug addiction, oppressed by imprisonment, burdened by psychosis, tormented by loneliness, and we have to admit that human existence can be truly terrible. But as future parents we have to acknowledge that we owe the very highest fiduciary duty of care to our future children, if any. It is widely accepted that parents must do everything possible to avoid harming their own offspring. Given that duty, how can we have children and thus impose life on our future offspring -- without being able to consult them first to know if they want to bear the risks of a potentially horrible existence? They may lose out on some happiness if they are never born, but our fiduciary duty to them is not to harm them, and they can't be harmed if they don't exist. It also won't do to say that they can always rescue themselves from an especially horrible life by suicide, since instinct often prohibits people from electing that option, even if they want. A further problem which arises when people have children is that the need to turn suddenly from self-development and personal growth to guiding the development and growth of infants tends to stall the parents' personal development, so that they never become any more mature. So not only do they risk injuring their children by imposing life on them, but they also risk warping their own development. Add to this the problems of overpopulation on the environment, greenhouse gas emissions, etc., and it seems that the duty to be safe and not risk the dire unhappiness of future children born into a tragic fate is an overriding motivation to remain childless.

Having the state offer bounties for the discovery of various new treatments, given as a single cash award to the discoverer, rather than as continuing patent rights, has been proposed as a method to reduce the costs of drugs. This was how Britain stimulated scientists in the 18th century to try to discover a reliable method to find longitude at sea.

To respond to the OP, we have to enquire first whether monogamy is itself a valid institution. Since both males and females have a desire for sexual variety, and the lack of a variety of sexual or even romantic partners can destroy the vitally important source of pleasure that sex is, we have to wonder what can justify society insisting on monogamy as a socially organizing principle in the first place? If we could train people from childhood not to be sexually jealous, then it would be possible to give all adults the benefits of sexual freedom with none of the pain associated with sexual possessiveness. This seems a great improvement over current usages. In primitive communities with less well-defined partnership formations, the entire village assumes responsibility for bringing up the children, which may help children grow up to be more sociable, more cooperative, and less afflicted by the specific neuroses of their own biological parents, since they would be free to drift from one member of the community to another, spending more time with those who were more sane and supportive. A vast revision of legal usages would be required, but the final legal structure required to support polygamy need not be any more elaborate, inefficient, or conflict-generating than that now in place to sustain monogamy.

The Ancient Greeks, who were apparently largely unfamiliar with the Hebrew idea of God, even though it had been developed about 1000 years before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle lived, often spoke of 'God,' meaning the first uncaused cause of the universe, or some principle serving as guarantor of the validity of justice in the world, or as informing the world with his sustaining power. They also didn't get to this idea via any superstitions about miracles or any particular historical contingencies like his appearing on a mountain and passing down information about himself at a specific time and place, but just derived it from what they thought were the logical implications of nature and justice. Is this the sort of thing you mean?

Heidegger said that you can tell a person knows he is mortal just by the way he drinks his morning coffee: it has a certain imperative quality to it that it would not have if he knew he had infinite time ahead of him. It is sometimes argued that everything would lack value if we knew we had infinite time ahead of us, since there would never be any point in doing anything well, since it could always be repeated at no significant loss of time. Since many existentialist philosophers have argued that it is essential to the type of beings that we are that we know ourselves to exist in dialectic with an ultimate and approaching limit to our available time, then to ask whether 'we' could ever be immortal seems to state a paradox, since if 'we' were immortal we could no longer be ourselves in any meaningful sense, but just some other sort of beings put in our place. Already in a normal human life we can notice that as major personal events start to happen for the second and third time, life starts to lose its vitality and meaning. Certainly being alive at 40 has nothing like the same interest, curiosity, and intensity as being alive at 20 when so many things are emerging for the first time. It is likely that active life extending much past age 80 would become tedious and oppressive, since we lack the breadth of mind and depth of spirit to continue to find meaning in events past that point. This is why endless posthumous life in heaven seems a false promise.