Is Benatar's "asymmetry of pleasure and pain" wrong?

Question

I’ve some doubts regarding the epistyle of David Benatar's thought, the “asymmetry of pleasure and pain”. In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence he writes that:

Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things.

Everything is well explicated by his famous square

(3) the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas (4) the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

We can put it also this way:

a) (3) If the hypothetical person x will never be born, she can’t experience any bad things (and this is good).

b) (4) If x will never be born, she can’t experience the lack of good things. (and this is not bad)

So, there’s an asymmetry between good and bad that will always hangs on the side of bad things and “coming into existence is always a harm”. It looks very powerful and sound. But we can also put (a) more like (b), this way:

c) (3) If x will never be born, she can’t experience the lack of bad things (and this is not bad).

If we put the same specific weight on “good” and “bad” like he does, the asymmetry disappears. Later in the book he writes that

the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

But we can also state that "the absence of pain is not good unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a good thing". Have I misunderstood?

Answer 1

I have not read Benatar's book, so I'm likely missing subtleties, but the argument as presented here seems specious. Why would the absence of pain be good for a non-existent being? Pain and pleasure are contingent on experience, and experience is contingent on 'being-ness'. If no being exists, no experience can exists (no pleasure or pain), and no valuation can be assigned to non-existent experiences.

As I see it there are two cases here, which Benatar conflates. First is the case of the experience of the being itself, which (as I've already discussed) in contingent on the being having existence. If a being does not exist (is never born) then it cannot have experiences, and it cannot evaluate experiences it does not have. Second is the case of third parties (bystanders) who can look at the non-existence of a being and say "It's good that this being was never born, and thus will never experience pain and misery." But those same bystanders could just as easily say "It's bad that this being was never born, and thus will never experience pleasure and joy."

Now when Benatar says this:

The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things.

He is invoking the language of case 2 to talk about the absence of pain — i.e., he is implicitly invoking the concept of 'good for others' by leveraging an abstract universal — but he is invoking the language of case 1 to talk about the absence of pleasure. The asymmetry isn't in the experience; the asymmetry is in the logical paradox he's created by mismatching cases.

Answer 2

The whole argument seems to be based on the pre-supposition that existence itself has no value. As you already stated, if no-one existed, the question of pain and pleasure would be void.

This seems to me more of a religious than of a philosophical question. The Buddhist take seems to be that it is better not to exist than to suffer, while the Christian view is that existence (with the hope that pain will be healed at a later time in the suffering individual's existence) is of such high value that it is worth whatever temporary pain one might suffer.

Answer 3

"The whole argument seems to be based on the pre-supposition that existence itself has no value"

Incorrect.

Existence clearly contains

(1) pleasure is intrinsically good (value) (2) pain is instrinsically bad (value)

Whereas the absence of pain can be thought of as something relatively better/good about the counterfactual scenario (3) and the absence of bad (4) not bad (for anyone).

Sometimes I like to put it more bluntly to get the point across: You cannot possibly be worse off on account of absent goods in the counterfactual scenario, while existence invariably brings harms in its wake, so there is no advantage in coming into existence.

The diagram is really about comparison and relative advantages and disadvantages. The right side are relative values. Left side instrinsic values.

Please take note that this four quad offers an explanatory framwork, it is descriptive of four other commonly accepted value judgments and dissolves the "non-identity paradox". Rejecting any of the values generates explanatory problems.

Take note that this axiological asymmetry by itself is insufficent to reach the antinatalist conclusion (categorical ban on procreation), but it creates a first presumption against procreation, that is, there is no advantage in coming into existence, every exister is worse off. His second argument is about the magnitude of harm (among other things).

Also take note that the naïve weighing of (1) bads and (2) goods within existence - is not a comparison between existence and never existing.

David Benatar's book Better Never to Have Been is well worth a read, it presents a well defended challenge.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 4

Yes, it's wrong.

If you think that the 'absence of pleasure' is merely 'not bad' then you are simply failing to imagine a pleasure which is equal in magnitude to your imagined pain. A standard-issue human brain might be evolutionary adept (and indeed in good tune) when conjuring this prejudiced mistake - as living in fear is an evolutionary stable strategy.

But if you imagine that the worst-worst might be merely losing a dollar, and the best-best might be simply finding a dollar (yay!), we can easily see that there is no difference between existing in a day where you 'lost-then-found a dollar' versus not existing in that day at all. If the two magnitudes are equal then there is no weight to the idea that not existing would be, in any way, 'better'.

And that's a pity - because antinatalism can be more effortlessly justified on the basis that Darwinian life is a zero sum game. That is to say, if new life manages to win some pleasure in its competitive environment, somewhere a loser is surely paying the price in the natural currency of pain.

Answer 5

sorry this is both an attempt to answer at least subjectively and a question.

perhaps i am misunderstanding here, but when looking at the scenarios it appears to me that something is missing. maybe a discounting of the value of life itself. it seems to me i could make a similar grid with whether the existence of life is good, possibly because this is subjective?

presence of life | absence of life
(good)           | (not bad)

even still these seem very subject because of the ambiguity and subjectivity of as an example if deprived of stimulus people will often hurt themselves for their own pleasure. terrible things can come from pleasure and wonderful things from pain. it's very different from the typical discussion i hear of with wellbeing/suffering/pleasure that i prefer and then i can do the following:

suffering            | absence of suffering
(bad for wellbeing)  | (not bad for wellbeing)
----------------------------------------------
pleasure             | absence of pleasure
(bad for wellbeing)  | (not bad for wellbeing)

i only really have heard of this through CosmicSkeptics channel. i very much value his reasoning and would like to understand how someone given the above comes the conclusion it may be better to "press a red button" that ends everyone to end all suffering. even though it is only a discussion in theory in leaves me a bit unnerved that rational people like this can feel "backed into a corner" to the point where they would push this button.

perhaps others won't agree with me but at least for me even when my life is somewhat painful there is still value to me in just living. perhaps that is my own evolved bias to live and because overall the net sum of my life has been positive.

i am very new to this topic i apologize for responding in ignorance.

Answer 6

This philosophy sounds to me like total nihilism founded on an irrational hatred of reality.

But in any case, that the absence of good and bad--rather than just good and bad--are even included here is bizarre. Assigning a moral evaluation to the absence of something in particular, rather than to something in particular or just to nothing, seems arbitrary. If regarded in isolation independent of all context, the absence of pain would be the same thing as the absence of pleasure (or of anything else). It would be nothing and nothing has no identity. How can something that is nothing have moral stature?

And why is the absence of pleasure just neutral if pleasure is good? That makes no sense. That's just a bias for pain against pleasure in terms of significance. Further, how could anything be good or bad for someone who isn't alive? Moral values refer to the one valuing (from an egoist standpoint at least, which as far as I'm concerned is the only coherent conception of morality). That's what makes them valuable.

Answer 7

I feel that is incomplete when we have 4 choices the table is really more long for the eight cases.

1. X Exist and presence of pain
2. X not Exist and Presence of pain
3. X Exist and no presence of pain
4. X not Exist and no pro presence of pain
5. X Exist and presence of pleasure
6. X not Exist and Presence of pleasure
7. X Exist and no presence of pleasure
8. X not Exist and no pro presence of pleasure

With this I will put numbers, let's say that 1 to good, -1 to bad and 0 to (not bad) he argues that is this

1. -1
2. 1
3. 1
4. 0

for the result, we can see the sum of exists vs no exists and he argues that exist is a 0 and no exist is a 1 so better not exists. Even if we agree on these numbers (I don't) that is not the end of all history cause we forgot the rest I will put the rest of the numbers thinking that exists is better always that there is no pain, or that pleasure is always better even if none exist.

1. -1
2. 0
3. 1
4. 1
5. 1
6. 1
7. 1
8. 0

The last number is 0 cause no exist is not good or bad per se, also if there is no pleasure then no matter if you exist or not. With this we get an interesting number that exists is a 2 and no exist is 2... wait ... is a tie. Well honestly I'm semi surprised but we get symmetry again (i thought I had to change his numbers). Basically exist and no exist is independent of feel pleasure and pain. so with good values in all 8 options, we get symmetry between exist and no exist.

Answer 8

Thought about this and I realised why the asymmetry argument isn't convincing to me. It is because I don't measure the meaningfulness of conscious experience in terms of good and bad experiences. Consciousness is subjectivity itself, it is by definition and character meaning, and then after that the experiences within it can be good and bad. So bad experiences, unless they have some upside, may not be worth having, but that does NOT mean they are part of some equation measuring up the worthiness of the consciousness having them. If consciousness has value then that value isn't necessarily subject to change dependent on it's contents. Now you can absolutely have an argument about whether or not consciousness is worth having at all, but for me the goodness or badness of it's content would probably never be considered a justified factor in such an argument. In other words if lives are worth living or creating isn't really about the amount of suffering involved. I'm still open to other arguments for why life isn't worth living or starting though.

Answer 9

Ok it took me a few days but I think I finally got it. From what I read and listened to, Benatar is doing an extremely bad job (for me) at explaining this asymmetry properly... I think this is because he's mixing that with the existence/non existence issue and that completely overshadows the asymmetry concept. So I came up with my own simple analogy which I believe is much simpler to explain the asymmetry. It's still completely debatable but at least now I don't find it utterly non-nonsensical anymore!

Here goes and feel free to add details/variation/questions, I try to keep it very simple first in hope you can get the idea instinctively.

A - You walk on the street and pass by a total stranger, you can think that not harming him without reason is a good thing. B - While the stranger you come across might give you 100 bucks and you would find that good! you don't think it's a bad that he doesn't.

so A illustrates instinctively that the absence of BAD is GOOD. Indeed we think it's a good thing we civilized people's behaviors. and you don't need to think about the person itself that feels secure or anything, you can just consider a town you'll never go to and think that after some reforms the mayor changed the streets from a place where people would attack each other to a quite secured place and you would find this good.

And so B illustrates the absence of GOOD as not being BAD (I was confused with Benatar since you could interpret not bad in his formulation as "not that bad"...). While definitely you find any act of benevolence toward you or from you to others as a good thing, you don't consider NOT doing it as doing a BAD thing.

Voilà, hope that also helps you and if you think it missed the point let me know! I believe a lot can be said and made more explicit but that does the job illustrating the asymmetry and not confusing people by adding the issue of existence in the middle!

thanks!

Answer 10

I'd say it falls through since not all pleasure is good and not all pain is bad. If pleasure was identical to good then the sentence "good is good" would be equivalent to the sentence "pleasure is good". But those sentences are not equivalent, so pleasure is not identical to good. In short, the ethical framework that underpins this argument is wrong, or at least not totally correct.

Answer 11

To me, the Asymmetry is quite intuitive, and it's that notion that Benatar is trying to appeal to. However, his formulation can get in the way. Some have seemed to have come away with the impression that Benatar is simply stipulating the asymmetry into existence. So, yes, you could turn it around and say instead that the absence of pain is not good and the absence of pleasure is bad. But according to this prior notion of asymmetry he's trying to appeal to, this other way around would simply be incorrect.

The following once occurred to me as a way to illustrate the intuitive notion that Benatar means to appeal to: Let's say you want to turn the heat up not because you're uncomfortably cold, but because it feels more cosy to you (pleasure). However, if you turn the heat up I will feel uncomfortably hot (pain). To begin with, we are each in a neutral state of neither pleasure nor pain (0/0) If you turn on the heat, we will be at (1/-1). But this (intuitively) is a worse state overall than we began with. If pain and pleasure were symmetrical, there would be nothing to decide between (0/0) and (1/-1). But because the lack of pain/discomfort is good and the lack of pleasure is not bad, there is an asymmetry.