Someone might not find their own life worth living but still not commit suicide because e.g. they don’t want their children to mourn them, they think that if they killed themselves they would go to hell whereas if they endured life they might eventually go to heaven, because there’s no reliable way of committing suicide available to them, etc.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
Yeesh, that’s grim. Okay, so if that’s a problematic standard, would you care to take a swing at the question? The idea of a ‘life worth living’ appears to be an important part of how we think about EA, but I’m not sure what it means.
Someone might not find their own life worth living but still not commit suicide because e.g. they don’t want their children to mourn them, they think that if they killed themselves they would go to hell whereas if they endured life they might eventually go to heaven, because there’s no reliable way of committing suicide available to them, etc.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
Yeesh, that’s grim. Okay, so if that’s a problematic standard, would you care to take a swing at the question? The idea of a ‘life worth living’ appears to be an important part of how we think about EA, but I’m not sure what it means.
Me neither. ISTR that EY puts the bar at “lives worth celebrating”, but that depends on you already having intuitions about which lives to celebrate.
(Personally, I think that a supermajority of human lives today are worth living/celebrating, but I’m not terribly confident about this.)