Rivka Weinberg
speaker
609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2016
last heard Feb 2016
Rivka Weinberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Uh it
you know, absent pleasures are good and absent pain uh and I mean absent pleasures are not bad and absent pains are good and that can undergird some of his antinatalism and I don't spend a lot of time on that in my book.
I address it in another paper that I wrote because I don't think it's his strongest argument.
It's the best explanations view and you might think that his explanation is m less intuitive than the things he's trying to explain.
So I don't find that a very compelling argument.
Um but his his other line of argument is just that life is just bad for people, but they're too, you know, um Pollyanna to notice it.
Um and I I think that he is
assuming a kind of objective assessment of human well being that I don't know why he has a right to claim that.
What makes him a better assessor of someone else's well being than they are themselves.
He talks about adaptive preferences.
uh which uh which is a known phenomenon that we tend to you know be in order to make life n l more bearable for ourselves, we're gonna start we're gonna conform our desires to what we can have
Um and we're gonna conform our preferences to that what's to what's available to us or to what we're stuck with.
So let's say a woman in a sexist society might express uh a preference for her
status, but we are standing outside our society, know what she could have instead and know that this is not really good for her.
But when it comes to assessing um
the value of somebody's life in totality, we don't stand really outside the human condition.
We're right there with them.
And so I don't know why we're we'd be better placed
to make an assessment about whether life is worthwhile rather than the person themselves.
And that's sort of, I think, a fundamental flaw in Benatar's argument.
Showing 321–340 of 609 · page 17 of 31
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