Why Give a Damn?
Where our philosophical debates are going.
This week, I’ve been re-reading Better Never to Have Been, a book by the South African Philosopher, David Benatar. The book begins with the following absolutely unequivocal passage (useful to imagine in Werner Herzog’s voice1):
Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.
Writing 15 years before the issues of population deflation would become a major public policy issue, Benatar offers a thoroughgoing anti-natalist case, including chapters entitled “Why Coming into Existence is Always a Harm”; “How Bad is Coming into Existence?” and “Abortion: The ‘Pro-Death’ View.”
One of my current preoccupations in writing is the sense that the only way to relate to our time well is with real philosophical ambition. I return to Benatar’s book frequently because it is such a useful acid test for the dominant philosophies of our time.
All of us on the Wisdom of Crowds masthead have significant disagreements with each other about most topics, but I do think we share a common diagnosis of our time. The liberal confidence of the post-war period created our world—from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to the European Economic Community. These were always, from the start, philosophical projects. They had common theories of what is good (human dignity) and of what had to be done to protect it (international coordination, economic freedom).
I think nearly everyone knows that that world is in crisis, but many people are madly trying to correct it at the technical level (we just need to get the systems right). What I think unites Wisdom of Crowds is our shared sense that this is a philosophical crisis, before it is a practical one. The liberal theory of what is good is under question. Perhaps it is possible to find resources to renew that liberal theory of the good, or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s worth renewing, or perhaps not. But in any case, the sooner we face up to the predicament, the better.
My sense is that most Americans feel the presence of the crisis. For many people, there is a quiet recognition that the earth feels not quite stable, even as you have to get on with your ordinary life. At the constructive level, I still think the conversation has moved astonishingly slowly. Three main factions solidified around 2016 and are still with us:
#endofhistory. Perhaps the majority of our national leadership continue to hold to the postwar sensibility amidst the political turmoil of the past decade. The response for example in Francis Fukuyama’s 2022 book, Liberalism and Its Discontents is to give a sensitive read of many of the causes of our social and political upheaval, but then when pressing for a solution in the final chapter, simply restates the core principles of liberalism, taking them to be fairly self justifying. Our discussion with Martha Nussbaum a couple of weeks ago is similar. In her book, she offers an under-argued account of why we should care about the goods that she thinks needs protecting (animal rights in this case), spending too much of the work proposing ideas at the level of practical implementation (rather than theoretical justification). This still seems very much like the dominant mood at the White House as well.
übermensch. There is a growing contingent of people who seem to be turning directly in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to save liberalism, they take themselves to be following Nietzsche (not carefully, in my view), in embracing a vision of the world in which everything is power and the chief virtue is to win.
turn home. The third option that has been increasingly attractive is to try to find some non-liberal, lower stakes way to ground life, whether in the form of more or less earnest religious critique, or through the reapplication of long dead philosophies.
Benatar’s book presents a challenge to all of these factions. To the liberals, he says: “Wait, why do you think anything—including humanity—is good?” (In this way it very much echoes the last podcast we released, a conversation with Alexander Lefebvre about liberalism as a philosophy for life. Shadi and Christine both emphasize the question “Why should you care about human life at all?”). To religious adherents, he presents a similar challenge: What grounds existence to the point that you think it is actually good? And to the Nietzcheans, he presses the idea that if there really is no primary Good, the best response is not to win the game of will over will at all. Rather, the solution is much more straight-forward: Non-existence itself.
The point of all of this is that we are engulfed in a philosophical crisis as much as a political one. The liberal society we live in was always a philosophical project. As those philosophical foundations show themselves to be more brittle than mid-century optimism suggested, we cannot avoid the crisis. Only once one has a theory of the good, can one discuss how to protect it.
But Benatar spots the sloppiness in all of this and I think his work sharpens dramatically the terms of the competition in which we are all, whether we like it or not, already engaged. Can anyone convincingly answer the essential philosophical question—why is it good for anything to exist at all?
A friend pointed me to this video last week in which, if I understand what’s going on, Werner Herzog is attempting to convince one of the world’s more notable marine ecologists that penguins not only get disoriented, but go mad to the point of committing suicide (Dr. Ainley seems skeptical). Despite Herzog’s failure to convince the good biologist, the video does highlight the still astonishing point that humans do commit suicide.
One thing that is starting to really irritate me about the way this debate plays out on your platform is that you don’t have any representation of — and you sometimes seem to have very little courtesy towards— the spectrum of non-theistic, non-nihilist answers to these questions. Damir is, if I understand correctly, the only nonreligious member of your main crew, and he doesn’t defend any form of nonreligious morality. Existentialism, semi-subjectivism, simple moral realism, and everything in between are largely either dismissed or outright ignored. This creates a serious gap in your ability to engage philosophers like Nussbaum and Lefebvre.
Lefebvre did a better job than Nussbaum in engaging with this lack on your part. I think this is because his work was already closer to the topics you wanted to discuss, whereas Nussbaum was dealing with an abrupt change of subject compared to the book she was discussing and had more of a sudden gear shift to try (and somewhat fail) to execute.
I hope you will send future guests to this post before talking to them. That way, they will at least know what to expect and can prepare somewhat.
If you happen to have any atheist/agnostic but not nihilist candidates that you were considering bringing on board, then that might also help you to better engage your guests. But you may be able to get away with simply being aware of this gap in your bench and trying to allow for it.
In any case, good luck with this project you’re outlining. Notwithstanding my recent frustrations with the execution, I think the underlying idea is thoroughly worthwhile.
Can anyone convincingly answer the essential philosophical question—why is it good for anything to exist at all?
It seems like this is well trod ground in the history of Western philosophy, going all the way back to the Greeks, no? It seems like what we have now is a teleological crisis - the remains of western Christendom have largely lost their sense of the good. Liberals inhabited this world where there was such a deeply implicit sense of the Good that they could chip away at its foundations.
A pure materialism has no telos, so of course it isn’t able to articulate any sense of the good. And there can’t be any true and stable happiness without a telos, so everything will appear to be harmful and bad.
For the Greek thinkers the telos was eudaomonia. They would have really scratched their heads at the idea that it were better not to exist, and I question the seriousness of anyone who espouses that view - after all, if it’s true, then why have you not sloughed off your mortal form and taken your blissful rest in self-annihilation?
It seems like eudaimonia is about as good as it gets without some higher abstraction -
To just throw up your hands and say none of it matters is the easiest thing to do. It requires no moral courage. Just the opposite. Nobody fights to be unhappy. Nobody longs to be in pain. That’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s our natural state. It’s a maniacal lack of appreciation for the fact of existence.
Yeah, life hurts and the universe doesn’t care about you. That’s the first lesson. Nobody is denying that. But to then never rise above the despair of that fact? That’s just blindness, weakness, and fear.