#1252 David Benatar - The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined for a 5th time by Dr. David Benatar. He is Emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of. Cape Town and today we're going to talk about his book The Human Predicament A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Question. So Dr. Bennettar, welcome back to the show. It's always a big pleasure to talk with you.

00:33 David Benatar: Thank you very much. Nice to be back. I can't believe it's the 5th time.

00:37 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, it is. The first one was almost 7 years ago.

00:42 David Benatar: Wow, wow.

00:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so to get into the topic and before we get into your book exactly or the questions you explore there, uh, I would like to start with this question. So from a Philosophical perspective, which I imagine will be at least slightly different from the way people commonly use these terms. What is pessimism and what is optimism?

01:16 David Benatar: I think there are different ways of using the term philosophically, and I do spend some time in the book clarifying how I use the term. And it does differ from the ways people sometimes use them. So, sometimes when people use the word optimism, they refer to an excessively rosy view, and they use the word pessimism to refer to an excessively dark view. And I want to disentangle the excessive part from the positive or the negative view. And so I describe optimistic views as positive views and pessimistic views as negative views, and then there'd be a separate question about whether they are excessively so or aptly so.

01:59 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Right, and so I mean what is the human predicament? What do you mean by that? And of course since it's the human predicament we're talking about here, how does it differ from the predicament of other animals or the animal predicament more generally?

02:27 David Benatar: The human predicament, I think, refers to the position we find ourselves in where, uh, life is hard, it lacks sufficient meaning, uh, but death is not a solution. And so you're really caught between a rock and a hard place. Once you've come into existence, you are now in a predicament from which there is no escape. It can be alleviated to some condi to some extent, but it can't be avoided. The human predicament has something, some distinctive features to it. Uh, FOR example, I think as far as we know, humans are the only creatures that are aware of, let's say, certain kinds of meaninglessness in their lives. Uh, HUMANS certainly are aware of their future deaths. Maybe some other animals are aware of that too, although we don't understand just quite the extent and the nature of that understanding. And so there are some features of the human predicament that I think are unique, but that doesn't mean to say that the human predicament is worse in all possible ways than, uh, all animal predicaments. Certainly, some animals, most especially those that we bring into existence in order to eat and which, uh, who, who are reared on factory farms, these animals have a quality of life that is much, much lower than many, many human beings' quality of life. And so that's a way in which their predicament is worse than certainly many humans, but perhaps not all humans.

03:57 Ricardo Lopes: Would you extend at least some aspects of this predicament to all sentient life?

04:07 David Benatar: Yes, uh, that, uh, that is the case. I, I think, as you will be aware from some of my earlier work that I think it's a harm to any sentient being to be brought into existence. And, uh, it's also a harm to cause a sentient being to cease to exist. That is to say, to kill a sentient being or for the sentient being just to die naturally. And so, there is a sense, yes, in which all sentient beings find themselves in a predicament, although the contours of that predicament will differ from species to species and individual to individual.

04:40 Ricardo Lopes: When it comes to this predicament we find ourselves in as humans, do you think that it is inevitable that people will get across it, that people will know at least to some extent that they are in this predicament. Or should we tell them and and I mean if do you think that people should know or should be told that they are in this predicament if they just so happen to not be aware of it for some reason?

05:21 David Benatar: I certainly think it's possible for people not to be aware of their predicament or at least not fully aware of it. Perhaps there's some level at which many, many people are aware of it, but they're go into denial and they try to find ways of denying it in order to cope with it. And I do, I think early in the book, engage in this question about whether once you go about puncturing people's delusions, Because that could cause a lot of subjective unhappiness. And My concern is that although it is better for the being who's in the predicament to not be aware of the predicament and be in denial about it, that can actually be quite dangerous in terms of other beings. So beings of that kind that are in those kinds of delusions, let's say are more likely to reproduce and therefore more likely to reproduce the predicament by creating more beings in that predicament. And they might be insensitive in some ways to the suffering of others because they're not fully recognizing the predicament. And so I think there's some value in Telling people about it, but I also think it matters how and when you tell them. Uh, I, I don't think that one should go up to people on the streets and try to spread the bad news the way some people try to spread the, uh, the good news. But I think writing a book that people can pick up or not pick up as they see fit, as they choose, uh, is among the acceptable ways to convey this message to people.

06:55 Ricardo Lopes: But do you think that there are perhaps cases or situations where it would be more moral for us to protect people from knowing about their predicament? I mean, I, I don't know. Perhaps there are some extreme situations where perhaps we can just let people. DELUDE themselves in a way or cope with their situation in ways that are positive for them.

07:33 David Benatar: I agree. I think there certainly are. And one kind of case that comes to mind is somebody's on their deathbed, and they may be speaking to you about, let's say, their belief in the afterlife. And that may be bringing them some comfort in the moment. Uh, I think it would just be cruel in that moment to say, there are very good reasons for thinking there is no afterlife, and this is it. You're going to die, you're going to enter into oblivion imminently. That would just be cruel to say something of that kind. And there's really no good to be derived from. Breaking the news as it were, to somebody in that condition. It's not like their optimism is going to Do much harm to anybody else at that point. It's bringing them some comfort, and I think we should just leave, leave it alone.

08:15 Ricardo Lopes: So of course this question or these issues surrounding how our human predicament ties a lot to the meaning or lack thereof of our lives. So what does it mean for life to be meaningful?

08:37 David Benatar: Again, I think there's a lot of philosophical disagreement about what it is for life to be meaningful. Uh, I sympathize with those views that See meaning as having some purpose or point or significance. And so, typically that would involve having some impact, uh, pos and presumably a positive impact if what you're looking for is positive meaning, because there can also be a negative meaning. To have some positive impact on, on others that can make a life meaningful, and I do think that our lives can Generate some meaning. We can create some meaning in our lives. So I don't have so pessimistic a view that I think that meaning is entirely impossible, but I do think there are different perspectives from which one's life can have or lack meaning. And I think it's most likely to, our lives are most likely to have meaning in very narrow circles. So, almost everybody. Has some meaning to people adjacent to them, to their family members, to their friends. They have some, they, their life has some point with respect to people in those circles. There's some people for whom their lives have a broader effect, a broader meaning. Some people will have an effect on all of humanity, a positive effect on all of humanity. One of the examples I gave is Uh, so Alexander Fleming, who discovers penicillin, and this now has a very beneficial effect for millions of human beings. Even after he dies. And so those are ways in which lives can sometimes have very extensive, what I call terrestrial meanings. But I think that our lives never have any meaning from a broader perspective than that. In other words, if we adopt something like a cosmic perspective, no lives in fact have meaning from that perspective.

10:27 Ricardo Lopes: OK, tell us a little bit more about that. Uh, WHAT do you mean exactly by cosmic meaning and terrestrial meaning? Uh, HOW do you distinguish one from the other?

10:42 David Benatar: Well, terrestrial really refers to earthly meaning. So we are inhabitants of Earth, and as I said, we could have meaning with regard to just a few people in our immediate surroundings, or we might have a broader meaning, uh, that could be felt, let's say, around the earth. Now, there can also be degrees of meaning of this kind. So somebody might have a very small positive global impact, or they may have a very large positive, uh, global impact. But I don't think that there can be any meaning from a broader perspective. Now, not in principle. I mean, let's imagine that the universe was In was inhabited by other species on other, on other planets, and things that people did here had significance in those other planets. Well, then there might be some small quantity of, of positive cosmic meaning. Uh, BUT on the understanding that there are no sentient beings elsewhere, or at least that we're having no impact on those sentient beings elsewhere, I think that cosmic meaning is absent. Another possible way of having cosmic meaning is if there were a God. WHO would have a kind of cosmic perspective and if things that you do did matter to God, then that might be a way you could get it. I just don't think that there is a God who Uh, would give that kind of meaning to our lives.

12:02 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, I'm also an atheist, but I was wondering, since you mentioned that possibility, which I don't even think is a possibility, but anyway, let's consider it just for the sake of the argument. If there was such a God and created us as human beings as a special kind of creation in the universe, do you think that could imbue. Our lives with cosmic meaning.

12:33 David Benatar: Yes, it might be a small dose of it, depending on just how important this purpose was for which God had created human beings and also more particularly individual human beings because he might have a grand purpose for the species as a whole, and yet any individual human being is just a cog in that whole purpose, or it might be that God has some very important purpose for each individual. Now, it's very, very hard for me to fathom what that might be. Uh, BUT, uh, if there were such a thing, then I think that would be a form of cosmic meaning. There'd then be a further question about how significant it was, how big it is, how big the meaning is.

13:14 Ricardo Lopes: And and of course, there's uh we can establish a link here with religion more broadly. What do you think about what we could call, of course as atheists, perhaps other people would call it or use other terms, but what do you think about coping mechanisms that people resort to like the ones provided by religion which in their own subjective understanding provide their lives with meaning.

13:49 David Benatar: So, I do think this is part of the explanation of the enduring feature of religion is that it does provide a coping mechanism, and one of the coping mechanisms that it can provide is the sense that your life has a purpose beyond the immediate. And perhaps even some cosmic meaning. That I think is certainly something that would attract people to religious ideas. I am not of the view that religion is the sole preserve of, uh, delusions. In other words, I think that there are plenty of secular delusions, uh, secular optimistic. Mechanisms that people try to employ in order to make their lives feel better or more purposeful, and I would be equally critical of those.

14:36 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, YES, and will, I will ask you about those more secular theodicies in a bit, but, uh, and then I, I mean, and this is because also I'm interested in, uh, evolutionary biology. I I interviewed, uh, and interview many evolutionary biologists on the show. And sometimes we hear from them that life as a as a sort of purpose and that purpose is linked to reproduction and that in a way makes life meaningful. What do you think about that kind of argument?

15:19 David Benatar: I think that is one of those circular theodicies. So, first of all, the word purpose, uh, presupposes some purportive agent. And if you take a strict interpretation of these evolutionary psychology views, there's no purportive agent that is endowing us with any of these attributes. There's just a mechanical process that's going on. Uh, AND it may be that we, in some sense, fulfill the purposes of our parents. Who either wittingly or unwittingly spread their genes, uh, and created us. Uh, BUT that doesn't look like the right kind of purpose. In other words, people who are wanting to know what is the meaning of life. And you would say to them, well, it's your parents or your parents' genes mechanism for for for spreading. That's the purpose of your life, is to keep that gene pool uh alive and uh, and, and, and active. That's not the kind of thing that, uh, that people are looking for when they want to know what their lives have meaning, and I think they're quite right to want a lot more than that. The philosopher Robert Nozick did imagine that perhaps there's some scenario in which our purpose is to provide food for intergalactic travelers. In other words, they would, intergalactic travelers would feast on us. Now, that could be a kind of cosmic purpose, but it doesn't look like a comforting one. In other words, if you're toiling in life and you're struggling to know what the meaning of it is and somebody would reveal to you that it is, that your body will eventually become food for intergalactic travelers, you don't say, oh, OK, well, that makes it all worthwhile.

16:53 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, and I don't know if you agree with this point I'm about to make or not, but when it comes to this argument coming from Biologists and evolutionary biologists, more specifically, when they say that the purpose or your purpose is to propagate your genes, I mean to disseminate your genes, I also have, I guess, two different problems with that argument. The first one. To do with identity, so it's not like we ourselves are our genes. There's a difference in terms of identity between what we are as humans and our genes. We can't just reduce ourselves to our genes. And the other problem I have with that is. THAT are they really your genes because half of them came from your mother, the other half from your father, and you can go back generation after generation, and I mean those genes do not belong to one person exactly. I mean what do you think about that?

18:10 David Benatar: It reminds me of the quip about a chicken being an egg's way of making another egg. Uh, SO I don't, look, I'm not a scientist. I don't know all the details. My sense is that mitochondrial DNA does, uh, continue through the maternal line, so that might remain, uh, consistent. Uh, BUT I'm just not sure how much those technical scientific questions need to be answered in order to, uh, address the con the claim that's being made. I think it's sufficient to say that even if we had that kind of purpose, That would not be the desired kind of purpose. That isn't what we're looking for when we seek our lives to be meaningful. Of course, the problems are going to be greater if it's just scientifically invalid, but even if it's scientifically valid, it's not providing us with, uh, the kind of meaning we want and need.

19:03 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so this is another argument that I sometimes hear from biologists, particularly that sounds like a a semi-religious argument. That because life in the universe seems to be so unlikely and particularly intelligent lifelike like we are, that it has some meaning that our lives have some meaning because of that. What is your reply to that kind of argument?

19:40 David Benatar: Well, I do engage a view like that in the book and, uh, respond to it in in quite some detail, but I don't think that rarity is, uh, the, is what is what can give something value by itself because all kinds of terrible things can be rare, and they don't become positively valuable just because they're rare. So, I, I'm just not impressed by an argument of that kind. I think it is a kind of desperate attempt to find some meaning, but it's, uh, it's not doing what it's meant to do, I don't think.

20:09 Ricardo Lopes: And do you think that when we are evaluating whether life is meaningful or not, we can just ignore the cosmic perspective and focus exclusively on the terrestrial perspective.

20:30 David Benatar: I think you can do so. The question is to what extent you ought to do so. Uh, I'm certainly not recommending that people spend all their time dwelling on the absence of any cosmic meaning. I think that's gonna be a recipe for making your life more miserable and for your inability to generate whatever kind of terrestrial meaning that you can. So, I think it's entirely reasonable to be aware of and attentive to the absence of cosmic meaning while you do whatever you can to generate the meaning that you can generate.

21:01 Ricardo Lopes: And of course I mean I guess that at least partially you've already answered this question, but someone might ask why should we even care about whether life has any meaning or not? I mean, can't we just live without asking or caring about that question?

21:26 David Benatar: So, what I find strange about that question is that It seems to be a kind of sour grapes response because once a kind of meaning is impossible, then they say, well, let's just not bother about that. But it's in the nature of meaning that we tend to think that more of it is better than less of it. So, let's imagine that the only meaning in your life was what you meant to, let's say, a sibling that you have. Nobody else in the world cared about you. Nothing else that you did mattered to anybody. It was only to a single person. And you wanted more than that. You wanted your life to be more meaningful than simply to one other person. They'd say, well, that's entirely reasonable, and if you can generate some of that additional meaning perhaps by entering into other relationships, doing other things that are valuable, then you ought to do that. Uh, BUT why should we draw the line at desired meaning at the point where it, it ceases to be possible? Uh, THAT drawing it at that very convenient point looks like sour grapes. It looks like saying, whatever is beyond my reach, whatever I can't actually obtain, no longer is desirable to obtain. And there's something that seems to be defective about that. If you think that more meaning is better than less meaning, then there should in principle be no limit. Now, maybe you can have too much of a good thing, maybe that's possible, but I've not seen anybody have that with regard to meaning. You could have too much dessert. In other words, you have so much dessert that it now ceases to be a good thing and becomes a bad thing. But meaning doesn't seem to be of that kind. The, the more you can get seems the better and certainly much more than most people do get.

23:12 Ricardo Lopes: So I, I want to get now into a topic that you also explore in another one of your books, Better Never to Have Been, which we've already talked about on the show. But of course when we talk about the human predicament we have to talk about quality of life, suffering, and so on. So which aspects do you think are the ones that we should evaluate when it comes to our quality of life as human beings?

23:46 David Benatar: I'm not sure I'm understanding your question exactly. Are you asking me about the relationship between quality in life and meaning of life, or are you asking me what constitutes quality of life?

23:56 Ricardo Lopes: I'm asking what constitutes quality of life.

24:01 David Benatar: So, I don't have a settled view on that. Uh, IN both those books, I did examine the three most popular kinds of views about what constitutes quality of life. The one is a hedonistic view, which thinks that it consists purely in positive mental states and the absence of negative mental states. And, uh, then there are desire satisfaction views that think the quality of life. IS dependent on the extent to which your desires are satisfied. And it is important to say here that we're not speaking there simply about subjective satisfaction. It also includes the objective satisfaction of your desire. When something that you want, you actually get, whether or not you know that you've got it. And the third kind of view is what's called an objective list theory. Where quality of life depends on the extent to which you have all the things on the objective list of goods and lack things that are on the objective list of bads. And the argument that I make in both those books is that irrespective of which of those views you have about quality of life, we should think that the quality of our life is much worse than most people think it is. So, the specific question you're asking me is not one that I think I have to answer in order to make the point that the quality of our lives, is much worse than we think it is.

25:22 Ricardo Lopes: And why I mean, on what grounds do you argue that our quality of life in general is much worse than people tend to think it is?

25:35 David Benatar: Well, it does depend on which view of quality of life you take, but if we take, for example, the hedonistic view, I think there's good reason for thinking that there's more pain than pleasure, and some of the data points for reaching that conclusion are that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. That there is such a thing as chronic pain, but there's no such thing as, uh, chronic pleasure. So these are the kinds of considerations that I think we can employ. They don't give us a precise reckoning of how much good and bad there is, but they do provide us with good reason for thinking that there is, in the course of a lifespan, more bad than good. That doesn't mean to say there's more bad than good now, but Uh, over a lifetime, there would be.

26:23 Ricardo Lopes: But don't you think there's at least. To that to some extent these kinds of judgments about quality of life and about there being more good or bad things in life, more suffering or more pleasure, are subjective.

26:49 David Benatar: Well, that kind of argument is most plausible on the hedonistic view because that does reduce quality of life to subjective states. But even there, I think it's quite clear that people can be mistaken. Uh, AND there's good psychological evidence for suggesting that they are. You, you might not be able to be mistaken about whether you are now having a pleasurable or a painful state. But if you're asked to recollect the pleasures and pains of the past, there's good evidence that people tend to recall more of the good and under-recall the, the bad. And that's gonna make their assessment now about The historic levels of good and bad as unreliable. And you can be mistaken as a result. Sorry, go ahead.

27:40 Ricardo Lopes: Uh NO, I was just going to ask you, but can't the opposite also happen, for example, if someone suffers from depression, can't they have the opposite kind of bias of perhaps er remembering more the bad aspects of their. Lives are interpreting them as bad as opposed to the good aspects of their lives.

28:06 David Benatar: That's certainly possible, and I do recognize that. I've said as much. I think there are people who have too dark a view, who are too pessimistic, who are depressed out of proportion to reality. In other words, they're more depressed than reality should render them. Uh, BUT I just don't think that's the dominant view. The psychological evidence suggests that most people are susceptible to an optimism bias, but that's not to say that there are not many people who have the opposite bias. They've got too pessimistic a view.

28:37 Ricardo Lopes: So you think that and now talking from an objective perspective that in human life there is more bad than good.

28:51 David Benatar: I do think so. The claim you've just made is ambiguous between human life as a whole and any individual human life, but I do think that it's true on both of those interpretations.

29:02 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, uh, let me ask you now about, uh, what in the book you call secular theodicies or particularly secular optimistic theodesis. Like for example, saying that bad things in life are necessary or more specifically that bad things in life are necessary in order to appreciate the good things. I mean, do you think that bad things are really necessary in life for for for those kinds of purposes that people refer to?

29:46 David Benatar: Well, I think there's an ambiguity there in the necessity. So one question you could be making is, given the psychological construct of people, they're not going to appreciate the good things unless they have the bad things. But another interpretation is to say, could there be a kind of being that was not so psychologically constituted? In other words, a kind of being who could appreciate the good things, uh, without experiencing the bad things. So, those are two interpretations of the necessity condition. That you've mentioned. And I wanna say, really on I, it, it, it, if, if you require suffering in order to experience, really experience the good, it would have been better if you'd not been that kind of being. And so, this is a worse kind of existence than a kind of existence where you don't need to have the bad things in order to experience the good things. I also wonder, even on its own terms, whether we need to have quite as much suffering in the world in order to produce the good things. It seems sort of a little perverse if you've got to have Mass starvation and poverty and millions of people dying of cancer and people taking their own lives because they're so depressed that you've gotta have all of that evil in order for you to be deriving satisfaction from your first, uh, helping of dessert.

31:07 Ricardo Lopes: Right, right. What about the secular theodicy that claims that there are constraints on how good a human life can be while still being a human life?

31:24 David Benatar: I think that that fetishizes the importance of a life being a human life. So, let's think, let's say about longevity. We, we live much longer than mice do, even in, in the wild. And A mouse's lifespan is really rather short. It's a year or two, as I recall. MAYBE slightly mistaken about that, but it's something like 1 year or 2. And you can imagine a kind of Murian philosopher saying, well, you shouldn't really be judging the quality of mice, mice, mice's lives by human standards. You shouldn't be pointing to those humans that live for 70, 80, 90 years and saying, look how bad it is uh to be a mouse because we wouldn't be mice if we lived much longer. Now, of course, there's one question about whether we, whether they really wouldn't be mice because if they had all the other features of being mice, but somehow they could live for much longer, my money would be that they are still mice. But even if that alteration in lifespan meant some kind of alteration in the species, but these beings actually lived longer and better lives, I would say it's much better to be a trance mouse than a mouse. And I would say something similar about a human being, that if extending our lifespan while not increasing the amount of evil within one's life, you know, there's, the amount of harm in one's life, if you could do that, if you could go on for youthful vigor for 500 years rather than youthful vigor just for 10 or 12 years, then I think that would be a better thing even if we cease to be distinctly human.

33:05 Ricardo Lopes: So do you have an opinion on transhumanism and the suggestion that perhaps we could try as best as we can to eliminate suffering from human life? Do you think that if we could achieve such a goal, it would contribute to the betterment of our human predicament?

33:35 David Benatar: I think it would be better if we could reduce suffering in either human lives or if human lives were to alter into some kind of transhuman or posthuman life. But I do think that these pictures are very often another form of secular theodicy, secular optimistic theodicy, because I strongly suspect that they are. Excessively optimistic in what they think can be achieved.

34:03 Ricardo Lopes: And uh you know, no, go ahead, go ahead, sorry.

34:08 David Benatar: Uh, THE reason why I think that is because if you prevent some kind of problems, I think new problems are very likely to come in their wake. So, if you think about the great success that the developed world had for a while in curtailing infectious diseases, so people weren't dying, let's say, in infancy from infectious diseases or in in young adulthood, but then they started dying of other things, cancer and degenerative diseases, and If we manage to cure those, then I think we'll find that people start dying of something else. Because mortality and decay and degeneration, these are all just parts of the physical world, and I, I think that Many of these people have just too optimistic a view about how much that can be eradicated.

34:56 Ricardo Lopes: So do you think that I mean, even if we could eliminate as much suffering as possible from human life, even that wouldn't make it worth starting, that it wouldn't make it worth creating new humans.

35:22 David Benatar: That I think is true because I think that there would still be considerable suffering and so it would never be in somebody, never actually be in somebody's interest to be brought into existence. But that's not to say that I'm opposed to our doing what we can do to make lives better, because that's certainly going to have value for existing people. Uh, I would question though, the kind of utopian pictures that are often presented to us. I just think that they are very unlikely to be true. The, the future will tell whether I'm right or whether they're right. I, I'm not denying for the record that some improvements can't take place. I just doubt that death can be eradicated, that disease can be eradicated. These are very ambitious projects that I think are unlikely to be deliverable.

36:08 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, let's talk a little bit about death because of course it's one of the aspects of our lives that is, uh, I think, or at least for the time being unless there's a future, uh there's a future, I don't know exactly when where we will, we will not have to deal with death anymore, but uh why does death matter for our predicament?

36:39 David Benatar: Well, on my view, uh, death is bad. In other words, life is bad, but so is death. And that's one of the features that creates the human predicament. It's either the rock or the hard place. Now, of course, not all philosophers have this view, and there's an ancient philosophical tradition, the Epicurean tradition, which just denies that death is bad for the, for the being who dies. And if that view is correct, well, then it's The predicament is not of the kind that I'm suggesting. It may be still that it's hard for people to take their own lives, but there would be, in a sense, a cost-free exit. But I think that that epicurean view is mistaken, not in a provable way. It's not that I can give you. What's called a knockdown argument to show that the Epicureans are wrong, but I think on a balance of considerations, which I do examine in the book, we should reach the conclusion that death is bad and that it's a pretty serious bad. That's not to say that death is, is always the worst thing that can happen to you. There are fates that are worse than death. And I think that sometimes death is going to be the lesser of two evils, but it always comes at serious cost to the being who dies, even if that cost is sometimes less than the cost of remaining alive.

38:01 Ricardo Lopes: But assuming that there's no afterlife, there's no life after death, um, and I think there's of course very good reasons to assume that. Do you think that uh death would be bad just as the process itself, there is the the moment you go through death, that would be the bad thing about it. And then what comes after, since there's nothing to experience, no suffering, also, of course, no pleasure, but that isn't bad in itself or is the whole thing bad.

38:49 David Benatar: This is what the debate with the epicurean rests on, and the epicurean does say, precisely because you will not experience anything after death, that it can't be bad. The suggestion is that because you aren't there when you die, when you're dead, it, it can't be bad for you. And the challenge of those wanting to respond to the epicurean is to provide an explanation for how it could possibly be bad for you if you no longer exist. And the most common form of that argument is what's called the deprivation account. What that says is that the antemortem person, that is to say, the person who existed before death, is deprived of the goods that he or she would have had if life had continued, uh, but is deprived of through, through death. And of course, a lot, much more needs to be said about the deprivation account. It needs to be qualified in various ways, but I think we can make sense of it. Now, we, we do need to acknowledge that Ceasing to exist and also coming into existence are very unusual kinds of cases. They're not the usual kind of cases. Normally, when something harms you, you exist in both of the possible scenarios, and then one of these scenarios is worse than the other one would have been. And the question is, how do you deal with these unusual cases? Do you Try to force them into. Your ordinary concepts, or do you recognize that because they're unusual kinds of cases, you need to adapt your concepts to the unusual case? And my view is that we should take that latter path. We should not presume that Uh, the unusual cases have to fit our usual concepts. If we need to alter our concepts in some way to account for unusual cases, then that's probably the wisest thing to do.

40:45 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm, BUT if I understood something that you said earlier correctly, then there are at least a few situations where death is not as bad as going on living because of the kind of situation that people or a particular person finds themselves in.

41:16 David Benatar: Correct. So, let's take that deprivation view. So, if the, the badness of your death depends on the extent to which you are deprived of future goods, we can well imagine people, because there are millions of such people whose quality of life has degenerated to the point that they cannot reasonably expect any future good. So their death doesn't deprive them of future good. All it does is deprive them of future bads. And so then you might say that death is the lesser of two evils for them. Uh, NOW, my own view about the badness of death is that it doesn't rest only on deprivation, uh, that another reason why death is bad is that it annihilates us. That is to say, it brings an irreversible end to our existence. And my own view is that that is a bad in itself, so that even when you are deprived of no goods by your death, You are still annihilated, and so it's still an evil, even if it's the lesser of two evils because continued existence would bring you so much pain and suffering.

42:20 Ricardo Lopes: And do you think that immortality, if it would be possible, of course, uh, could be better?

42:29 David Benatar: So again, as you, as you've intimated, the immortality is a deeply hypothetical scenario. I just I think it's impossible for us to be immortal, but I think under appropriately described circumstances, the possibility or the option of immortality would be better than enforced mortality.

42:54 Ricardo Lopes: And, um, how, OK, so, uh, what about, for example, uh, the fact that, uh, the suffering that we experience in our uh limited lives. Would probably exist, we would probably experience it forever because we would be immortal and also the possibility that some thinkers, some philosophers raise of us reaching a state of complete boredom.

43:32 David Benatar: Good. So, those are the kinds of concerns that people raise. Let me take them, well, let me take them in reverse order. The, the boredom argument was a famous argument advanced by Bernard Williams, and there've been a number of philosophical responses to that, which I think plausibly suggests that if you had enough diversity of interests so that you could move between them, you could Having one kind of hobby for 20 or 30 years and then move on to something else for a couple of decades and then, if you had sufficient variety that you wouldn't get bored. Already, in existing lives, having a diversity of activities can stave off boredom, and I don't see any reason why in principle, this couldn't go on for a, uh, for a longer time. Perhaps the more pressing objection is the one about our lives containing suffering, and so, if we went on forever, then there'd just be more and more and more of it. Uh, AND here, I do think it depends on how bad you think the annihilation factor is. Uh, SO if you think that either annihilation is not part of the badness of death, or you think that there's only a very minor interest in not being annihilated, then that's more readily going to be overridden by suffering and the need to avoid that suffering. But the more weight you put on the badness of being annihilated, the more suffering it's going to take in order to defeat that interest. And I, I don't have a solution to this. I can't prove to anybody about how bad I think annihilation is. I, I do think that our ordinary views are that annihilation is pretty bad. It's possible that those views are mistaken, but I think it's, uh, unlikely that, uh, that annihilation is not bad at all. So we can, we can sort of haggle about the details if you accept the principle that annihilation is bad. But that I think is where you're gonna get variation. In terms of how much suffering makes makes it worth not continuing a life.

45:36 Ricardo Lopes: So of course there's a very sensitive and delicate subject that we have to address here. Related to death and earlier we've already mentioned that there are most certainly situations where it's better for people to die than to go on living because of their the awful situation they find themselves in. Um, DO you think that suicide is always irrational, or do you think that there are instances where suicide might be, uh, justified?

46:22 David Benatar: So, one does need to be careful in speaking about this topic because I do think that many people who are suicidal are irrationally suicidal. OK. Uh, BECAUSE I think what they're doing is they're either underestimating the quality of their own life, or they're underestimating how much they mean to other people, or what they could contribute to the world. I've certainly known people who have eventually taken their own lives, of whom I think this is true. These were very bright, talented people who had lots to contribute, and they had insufficient sense of their self-worth. They were underestimating, clearly underestimating the quality and the meaning of their lives. And so, one has to be very careful when one makes the claim that sometimes suicide is rational and morally acceptable, that many of the people who have suicidal instincts will assume that they fall into that category. And I don't want anybody to have that misperception. Of course. I, I think the kinds of cases where, where suicide is rational is when people really are an extremist, when they're suffering from some kind of Terminal conditions. It's not only terminal conditions, but I'm gonna focus on the clearest kind of cases where continued life is just going to bring suffering, and the only way to avoid that is to be sedated to the level of minimal consciousness or unconsciousness, and so there's really no good to be derived from, from continued existence. And when that's on the horizon, I think that one can have discussions about rational suicide. When you've got formalized procedures, when you've got, let's say, countries that legalize medical assistance, I think important protections get put in place, because people can now get the assistance that they need, but they've also got to go through some kind of process to get that assistance. And I think getting that external perspective, having your own sense of the quality of your life tested as it were, by people who need to convince themselves of the justification in in assisting you, uh, that's a good kind of corrective to people who might be too readily, uh, throwing up their hands. And so, I want to be very sympathetic to people who feel that the quality of their lives is so bad that death is better for them and they want to take their own life, but at the same time, I want to caution them against Possible mistakes that they're making and the, the, the, the enormity and the finality of a mistake of that kind. And so I do think that people can profit from an external perspective, from speaking to other trusted people, confidence, who can speak to them without betraying them.

49:18 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, no, no, those are definitely very important things to say. This is, uh, of course, as I said, a very sensitive topic, uh, but, uh, let me just ask you one more question about it, by the way, uh, do you think, do you think that we should morally condemn people who put an end to their lives?

49:44 David Benatar: Usually not, because I, I think it takes a lot to end one's own life. There's got to be an enormous amount of subjective suffering there, and whether or not that was based on a misperception of reality, I think we should be sympathetic to To the condition in which people found them, found themselves. Now, there can be circumstances where I think that a suicide and I'm I'm using the term suicide as a noun to refer to the person who takes their own life. I don't like the word the the the the verb commit suicide, but it suggests, uh, some kind of uh moral wrong.

50:24 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, it sounds almost like a crime,

50:27 David Benatar: right? Well, it dates it dates from the time when suicide was a crime. And so just like you committed murder, you committed suicide. Uh, IT'S very easy to fall into that kind of language, but I do try to avoid it. So, there are circumstances when the suicide, the person that who kills himself or herself, is paying insufficient attention to the interests of others. Uh, SO I'm thinking, for example, about the Jeffrey Epstein case. Where he took his own life and thereby deprived his victims of The kind of closure that they needed through a trial and uh again, I'm not underestimating the mental state in which he must have been, uh, but at the same time, it wasn't his only his interests that counted there and sometimes somebody can prioritize their own interests ahead of the legitimate interests of other people.

51:19 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so how do you think people should deal with their predicament then? I mean this human predicament and all the facets of it that we've been talking about. Uh, WHAT can we do about it at the end of the day?

51:44 David Benatar: Well, that is a difficult question because one is in this predicament and there's no real escape. I do consider a number of strategies. These are really typologies because I think that possible coping mechanisms really exist on a spectrum. Uh, BUT, uh, two broad kinds that I refer to are a, uh, pragmatic optimism and a pragmatic, uh, pessimism. And the way I characterize the pragmatic optimism. IS that you just sort of ignore the bad parts and you Completely obscure that from your consciousness and you focus only on the good as a way of, of coping. And my worry with that strategy is that it's likely to also result in the kinds of harms that excessively optimistic people are more likely to commit, including Producing more people in the human predicament, because if you're really filled with the joys of life and you think this is all a wonderful enterprise, you're much more likely to be producing more children who are gonna find themselves in this predicament. And so what I recommend instead is a kind of a pragmatic pessimism. And so, you remain pessimistic in the sense that you fully acknowledge all the bad things about the predicament. Uh, BUT what you do is you don't dwell on them. You distract yourself from them. So instead of denying them, uh, you distract yourself from them. That means you'll reflect on them occasionally. You'll, you don't lose perspective. But you're not dwelling on them so much that you actually increase the amount of misery in your life, in the lives of the people around you. Uh, THEY don't, it doesn't inhibit your ability to create as much meaning as you can. And so, the broad kind of strategy that I would recommend is that pragmatic pessimism.

53:34 Ricardo Lopes: And do you think that um through recognizing that we all find ourselves in this predicament and all the suffering that goes associated with it. Through compassion and through moral acts of, for example, helping other people, trying our best to alleviate the our human predicament, I mean our own and the one of other people that we could. In a limited way give meaning to our lives.

54:22 David Benatar: I do think those things, yes. Look, I don't wanna be one of those people that has a sort of unqualified endorsement of compassion because I think that sometimes compassion can be misplaced. Uh, SO, sometimes people are doing so much damage to the people around them that our appropriate response to the damage doers. Shouldn't be primarily one of compassion. We can have that strand to our thinking, but it may be that what we need to do is prioritize stopping them from doing the harm, uh, that they're doing. Uh, BUT, uh, yes, I think that compassion is a way, if, if done appropriately and with the, in the right measure and Correctly directed is one way in which we can improve the lot of others and thereby also generate some meaning in our own lives.

55:15 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so Doctor Bennett, let's end on that note then, and the book is again The Human Predicament, a Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, and of course I'm leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And look, thank you so much again for coming on the show. As I said at the beginning, this is already our 5th conversation, and I'm always, it's always for me a huge pleasure and honor to talk to you.

55:48 David Benatar: That's very kind. Thank you for inviting me again. I always enjoy speaking with you.

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