Yeah, not so much with the frequency...

Ok, so I'm going to take another crack at this... Starting with a response to a something I read this morning.

1. At PEA Soup this morning I found a rather bizarre argument, apparently found in a book by one Dan Benatar, which suggested that it would be better to never have existed at all. It is as follows:

(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence. More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.

The idea here being that there is an asymmetry between the two states, existence and non-existence, whereby non-existence contains some good (absence of pain) and no bad, whereas existence contains both good (pleasure) and bad (pain).

Now, it is entirely likely that the book being referenced here is substantially more nuanced than the argument being presented here. That said, this line of reasoning is so bad that I think it's worth dismantling whatever its significance. Let's start from the beginning: the presence of pleasure is good, the presence of pain is bad. How good? How bad? How much pleasure is there? How much pain? Is some pleasure qualitatively more intensely good than other pleasure? Likewise with pain? And I could easily go on in this basic line. In another direction, I'm tempted to ask why it is that we're so certain that pleasure is good and pain is bad in absolute terms. I know that from the apparently hedonistic viewpoint of this line of reasoning this is the same as to ask why we're so sure that good is good, and bad is bad, but nevertheless... At any rate, to blanket this by saying that there is a symmetry between good and bad in existence is maddeningly simple-minded.

Really though, I've buried that lead a bit here, because far and away the craziest bit is what goes completely unmentioned and unchallenged in the post I linked to above. Why the hell is the absence of pain good, even if no one experiences it, while the absence of pleasure is not bad? This is, basically, the crux of the entire argument and I can think of no sufficient explanation. It seems to substantially devalue pleasure.

I think it might be instructive to monetize this question. Let's say that the possession of money is, for the sake of this hypothetical, good. Further, the absence of money, and the obligation to pay someone money (debt) is bad. Certainly, it is the case that the absence of debt is good, we can agree on that. However, I think we can also agree that the absence of money, even paired with the absence of debt, is decidedly bad. The resulting neutral state (non-existence, for those not quite following the analogy) is therefore both good (absence of debt) and bad (absence of money) in equal measure. If you disagree, just try it some time, being broke, even in the absence of debt is decidedly bad.

Anyway, goofy argument, probably not worth that many words, but it's rare that I see something quite so retarded taken seriously, so there you go.