Let's Read: The Human Predicament (2017)

Benatar, David, The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die— obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space. It is not surprising that so many people ask: “What is it all about?” The right answer, I argue in this book, is “ultimately nothing.” Despite some limited consolations, the human condition is in fact a tragic predicament from which none of us can escape, for the predicament consists not merely in life but also in death.

Benatar is mostly famous for previously writing Better Never to Have Been (2006), another pessimistic book, but this book is not a sequel.

While the subject matters of Better Never to Have Been and The Human Predicament are very different, and while the arguments in the latter do not presuppose anti-natalism, they do provide further support for that view. 

Benatar is largely pessimistic. However it's good to define them carefully: 

For example, in chapter 6, I discuss and evaluate the view that an immortal life would be bad because such a life would become tedious. Is such a view pessimistic because it offers a negative evaluation of immortality, or does it count as optimistic because it says that the actual state of affairs— human mortality— is better? 

At least some writers have suggested that it is a pessimistic view. I find this usage odd and thus propose to use the terms “optimism” and “pessimism” as follows. Any view of the facts or any evaluation thereof that depicts some element of the human condition in positive terms I shall call an optimistic view. By contrast, I shall describe as pessimistic any view that depicts some element of the human condition in negative terms. (Thus, the claim that immortality would be bad counts as optimistic because it suggests that the fact of mortality is not as bad as we would otherwise think. If we were in fact immortal, then the view that immortality is bad would be pessimistic.)

Pessimism-optimism is a spectrum to be used to measure attitudes. You can be very pessimistic about meaningfulness, mildly optimistic about the possibility of using drugs to feel happier, and neutral about possibility of immortality.

Chap 1: Introduction 

... the human condition is a tragic predicament— one from which there is no escape... Life is bad, but so is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise— the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.

 Animals suffer a lot too. Humans have their unique ways to suffer though.

They can question the meaning of their own lives, and they can contemplate suicide. Thus, one good reason for focusing on the human predicament is that it has distinctive features that are worthy of examination.

Besides, writing about animal suffering is not gonna grab people's attention. After all, people seem completely unconcerned with the meaningfulness of their foods' lives.

Why talk about pessimism if it would make people feel bad?

... delusions are not innocuous. While they do indeed help people cope, they are also often dangerous. For one thing, they facilitate a reproduction of the human predicament by creating new generations that are thereby thrust into the predicament. In addition, many of the coping mechanisms are often (but not always) bound up with intolerant religious views that cause a great deal of gratuitous suffering— to blasphemers, homosexuals, nonbelievers, and even religious minorities, for example, who may be demonized and subjected to harsh treatment.

 I do not begrudge private delusions that enable people to cope— as long as these do not harm others. Even when they do harm others, attempts at delusion- busting may be both beyond the bounds of decency and also counterproductive. One does not enter into people’s houses of worship to tell them that they are wrong, or knock on people’s doors offering to share the “bad news” with them. One does not stop pregnant women on the street and excoriate them and their partners for creating new life. One does not tell young children that they are going to die and that mommy and daddy should not have brought them into existence. 

The following anecdote does not constitute an example of such excoriation. When Elizabeth Harman, who had written an article in response to Better Never to Have Been, told me in 2010 that she was pregnant, my response was muted. She then said that I would just have to be happy for her. I responded along the following lines: “I am happy for you. It is your expected child for whom I’m not happy.” 

However, writing a book is within the bounds of the acceptable. One contributes arguments to the marketplace of ideas, even though it is a marketplace that is hostile to pessimism, and so the pessimist is at a disadvantage. People’s coping mechanisms are so strong that the pessimist has a difficult time getting a fair hearing. Bookshops have entire sections devoted to “self- help” volumes, not to mention “spirituality and religion” and other feel- good literature. There are no “self-helplessness” or “pessimism” sections in bookstores because there is a vanishingly small market for such ideas.

Want some "self-helplessness" and "pessimism"? There is Depressive Black Metal!

I am not seriously advocating self-helplessness. I think that there are some matters about which we are helpless, but even on a realistic pessimistic view, there are things we can do to meliorate (or aggravate) our predicament. Thus, when I refer, tongue in cheek, to self-helplessness books, I really mean an antidote to the psychological snake oil that is peddled, bought, and consumed in large quantities.

However, some pessimists actually do look for therapeutic self-helpless books. Because, as hard as it is to realize your helplessness, it's even worse to feel alienated in a sea of hopeful optimists. The human need for social connection can outweigh the need for hope.

A pessimistic book is most likely to bring some solace to those who already have those views but who feel alone or pathological as a result. They may gain some comfort from recognizing that there are others who share their views and that these views are supported by good arguments. I have received a vast number of communications in this vein in response to Better Never to Have Been.

Chap 2, 3: Meaning, Meaninglessness

Meaning of life is important, but what is "meaning"? How might we explain the question "what is the meaning of my life" to a computer, and what would it reply?

One’s thoughts then turn to the present and one recognizes that in time, all those currently living— including oneself— will have gone the way of those now interred. Someday, somebody might stand at one’s grave and wonder about the person represented by the name on the tombstone, and might reflect on the fact that everything that person— you or I— once cared about has come to nothing. It is far more likely, however, that nobody will spare one even that brief thought after all those who knew one have also died.

 Alternatively, just open a science book like Max Born's Atomic Theory, or perhaps an anthology. Look at the index of names, the bibliography. How many names are there? Who thinks about them?

Or just read some random obituaries!

Argument: Life is not a word, or a sentence, or a book. You can look up "life" in a dictionary, but not your life, therefore "What's the meaning of my life?" is not a valid question.

Reply: By "meaning", we can mean two other things: "importance", and "purpose".

There are multiple levels of meaning, each more difficult than the previous one:

Good news: most people can be meaningful at the level of individuals, by having true friends, for example. It's also easy to be meaningful at family level. A few can even be meaningful at national and humanity level. It's also possible to be meaningful for nonhuman lifeforms by changing local ecosystems.

Bad news: It's impossible to be meaningful at the level of the cosmos.

It is similarly difficult to get somebody to understand something when the meaning of his life depends on his not understanding it.

Might I add that it's even more difficult to get somebody to understand something when the safety of their children's lives depends on their not understanding it. 

Argument: God exists and that gives us cosmic meaning.

Reply: 

Many people have raised the objection that theism cannot do the meaning-endowing work it is purported to do here. For example, it has been suggested that serving God’s purposes does not suffice, as this makes people “puppets in the hands of a superior agent” or mere instruments to the goals of God. A related objection notes that not merely any divine purpose would give us the kind of meaning we seek. If we had been created “to provide a negative lesson to some others (‘don’t act like them’) or to provide food for passing intergalactic travelers who were important,” our lives would not have the sort of cosmic meaning we seek.

Besides, if God exists, why is there so much gratuitous suffering? Especially wild-animal suffering? Perhaps this God isn't that great. (Personally, I think there is an evil God.)

The beleaguered whale, trailing streams of blood from several wounds, is flanked on either side by three or four individuals. Two more swim ahead and three behind. A squadron of five killer whales takes turns patrolling under the blue whale’s belly, preventing it from diving. Three more swim over its head, discouraging it from raising its blowhole above the surface, thereby hampering its breathing. Dominant males lead sorties to rip off slabs of blubber and flesh. They have already shredded its tail flukes.

Argument: The meaning of life is to help other humans.

Reply: to what end? Helping can't be intrinsically useful, for we could help do bad things. Helping is in fact neutral. If helping other humans is meaningful, it is only because the existence of other humans is meaningful for some other reason. If life is otherwise meaningless, altruism can't make it meaningful.

The absurdity of basing the meaning of life entirely on altruism:

Argument: Just focus on what meaning you can get on earth okay?

Reply: Most people accomplish this by distraction, rather than any peaceful acceptance of their cosmic insignificance.

Argument: Life is internally meaningful, and that's all that matters. Thomas Nagel wrote

No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibition of the work of some painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove.

Reply: Sometimes you just gotta take an outside perspective. After all, one important source of meaning of life is about overcoming limits.

However, the bigger existential questions are about whether the life as a whole has any purpose. To answer that question, it is not sufficient to point to justifications internal to the life. Consider an analogy. If one is playing a game of backgammon, it is entirely reasonable to make various moves. Indeed, one is not playing backgammon unless one is making (permitted) moves. There are justifications for this move and for that one. It is an entirely different matter to ask what the point of backgammon is, whether one should be playing backgammon at all, and whether one should pass it on to the next generation (by teaching it to children— or by creating children to whom one can teach it). Similarly, it can be entirely reasonable to relieve headaches and prevent harms to children and yet worry that one’s life as a whole— or human life in general— has no cosmic purpose. The absence of cosmic meaning may provide one with a reason to regret one’s existence or to desist from perpetuating the whole pointless trajectory by abstaining from bringing new people into existence.

Or, perhaps, consider some bureaucrats diligently processing paperwork everyday. Their work is internally meaningful, but might very well be meaningless when viewed on the whole.

Argument: Life is purposeful: we are gene's way to make more copies of genes.

Reply: Evolution isn't a person, and so it has no purpose. It is also dissatisfying to most people. Indeed, people typically regard that answer "our purpose in life is to create more life" as absurd. Also, people don't consider lives of those who manage to have lots of children as particularly meaningful on that account.

Argument: (Guy Kahane, Our Cosmic Insignificance)

1. We possess value.
2. If there is no other life in the universe, then nothing else has value.
3. If nothing else has value, then we possess the most value.
4. Therefore, if there is no other life in the universe, we have immense cosmic significance.

Reply: it might make us very unique, but uniqueness isn't significance.

Argument: Humans might become very powerful, able to move galaxies and such.

Reply: If such sci-fi fantasies can be done, then humans would be cosmically significant. It's an open question though: Even if we don't go extinct for a million years, it is quite possible that we might mess things up big time, meet some socio-technological barrier, and could never even colonize Mars, let along move galaxies.

Argument: We don't really need cosmic meaning anyway.

Reply:

The meaning we have from various human perspectives does not give meaning to the entire human enterprise. It does not provide a point to the entire species and its continued existence. If there is no point to the species and each one of us is but a cog in the machinery of a pointless enterprise, then there is a serious deficit of meaning even if our lives are not without some (terrestrial) meaning. The terrestrial meaning is good, but the absence of cosmic meaning is bad.

Chap 4: Quality

Life is meaningless. It's also unhappy. Even the best lives contain more bad than good. This chapter expands upon Schopenhauer's On The Sufferings of The World. 

However if life is so bad, why do we not feel like it, upon reflection? Benatar argues there are three reasons:

1. Optimism bias: people tend to remember and pay attention to good things in their past and their future, thus they feel like their life is better than it really is.
2. Habituation to bad circumstances.
3. Comparison with those who are having it worse.

I find points 2 and 3 dishonest and irrelevant. The problem is not whether life is objectively worth living, but rather, subjectively. 2 and 3 explain how people can feel like life is subjectively good even if it is objectively bad.

However, point 1 is very serious. In the words of Thomas Metzinger, suffering is the cognitive scotoma:

Maybe evolution has created self­-models that automatically expand their predictive horizons as soon as the present is boring or simply too unpleasant? Such a strategy of flexible, dynamic self­-representation across a hierarchy of timescales could have a causal effect in continuously re-motivating the self-­conscious organism, systematically distracting it from the potential insight that the life of an anti­entropic system is one big uphill battle, a strenuous affair with minimal prospect of enduring success. Let us call this speculative hypothesis “narrative self-­deception”. If something like this is true, one would also expect it to have an observable effect in academic philosophy and science as well. 

Perhaps the foremost theoretical “blind spot” of current philosophy of mind is conscious suffering. Thousands of pages have been written about colour qualia and zombies, but almost no theoretical work is devoted to ubiquitous phenomenal states like boredom, the subclinical depression folk­-psychologically known as “everyday sadness“ or the suffering caused by physical pain. 6 Pain qualia are frequent examples, but suffering is rarely mentioned, because in philosophical debates pain qualia often are barely more than a stand-in, easily replaceable by other allegedly prim­itive forms of sensory consciousness. As Sascha Fink has pointed out, however, the sensation of pain and the emotional affect of unpleasantness are as distinct as hue and saturation in colour experience, and pain and suffering are clearly metaphysically independent mental phenomena, although they are similar in structure and formal object, and tied together by evolutionary ancestry.

Even daily life is filled with mild pains that we could really do without. Imagine a particular kind of afterlife by a rather uncreative God. You just died, and God is showing you your entire life, cut into moments of about 3-5 seconds each. You may pick as many of those moments as you want. They would be put into an "eternity playlist". Your afterlife would then be a random replay of all those moments.

Not very creative, but better than nothing.

Metzinger reported an experiment where some volunteers at his university would get random SMS messages on their phones, and they would think back to the previous moment and report on whether that moment is worth putting into the "eternity playlist".

For many, the result was surprising: the number of positive conscious moments per week varied between 0 and 36, with an average of 11.8 or almost 31 per cent of the phenomenological samples, while at 69% a little more than 2/3 of the moments were spontaneously ranked as not worth reliving.

What is even more interesting is the reaction. Participants were genuinely surprised and immediately tried to explain it away, revealing that they were under the influence of the optimism bias.

The results were however striking: first, the initial surprise the low scores caused in all participants and, secondly, what could be interpreted as a consequent attempt to explain the phenomenon away. Indeed, “explaining away” a prediction error, in this case, may simply consist in an updating of one’s conscious self-­model, preferably in a way that allows one to reduce introspective uncertainty by dampening and suppressing future “unexpected news” of this type. Many participants immediately started to develop more or less intricate “cognitive confabulations”, trying to make their own self­-assessment appear not so bad after all: “Happiness certainly is not the most important thing in life, I am writing a doctoral dissertation that will make a contribution to the knowledge of mankind and epistemic progress certainly adds more value and meaning to my life than momentary hedonic valences or even their life­time average!”; “Most of my moments are neither good nor bad anyway, they are just neutral!”; “Life­time average value is philosophically irrelevant, it is only the peak experiences and our memory of them which make a life a good life!”; “What really counts in life are the larger time­-windows, not decontextualised phenomenal snapshots!” And so on.

Benatar offers some glimpses of all the bad things that life can do to us:

Burn victims, for example, suffer excruciating pain, not only in the moment but also for years thereafter. The wound itself is obviously painful, but the treatment intensifies and protracts the pain. One such victim describes his daily “bath” in a disinfectant that would sting intact skin but causes unspeakable pain where there is little or no skin. The bandages stick to the flesh and removing them, which can take an hour or more if the burns are extensive, causes indescribable pain. 16 Repeated surgery can be required, but even with the best treatment, the victim is left with lifelong disfigurement and the social and psychological difficulties associated with it. 

Consider next those who are quadriplegic or, worse still, suffer from locked-in syndrome. This is sheer mental torture. One eloquent amyotrophic lateral sclerosis sufferer describes this dis- ease as “progressive imprisonment without parole” because of the advancing and irreversible paralysis. Dictating an essay at the point when he had become quadriplegic, and before losing the ability to speak, he describes his torments, which are most acute at night. When he is put to bed, he has to have his limbs placed in exactly the position he wants them for the night. He says that if he allows “a stray limb to be misplaced” or “fail to insist on having [his] midriff carefully aligned with legs and head,” he will “suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.” He invites us to consider how often we shift and move during the course of a night, and he says that “enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable.” He lies on his back in a semi- upright position, attached to a breathing device and left alone with his thoughts. Unable to move, any itch must go unscratched. His condition, he says, is one of “humiliating helplessness.”

Although there are signs of the hedonic treadmill working, it works better one way: joy is habituated quickly, but pain is habituated slowly, and incompletely. According to Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being (2007), the joy of marriage wears off in 5 years, but divorce, unemployment, and disability results in permanent decreases in life satisfaction:

However, even raising decent children requires plenty of hard work. There are so many ways of performing the task inadequately. The natural outcome of no parenting would be the adult into which a feral child grows, but any number of parenting mistakes can yield adults that approximate or are even worse than that outcome.

 

Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There are people who have an enduring sense of contentment or satis- faction, but that is not the same as chronic pleasure. Moreover, discontent and dissatisfaction can be as enduring as content- ment and satisfaction; this means that the positive states are not advantaged in this realm. Indeed, the positive states are less stable because it is much easier for things to go wrong than to go right 

All these are not really news, even for psychologists. See Bad is stronger than good (2001)

The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.

Once a desire is satisfied, it gives way to more desires.

Some pains are so prevalent that we ignore them. They still exist, though. A slave might never dream of a better life than a slave's life, but it would still be a bad life. This is why life sucks more than we think.

It is not surprising that we fail to notice this heavy preponderance of bad in human life. The facts I have described are deep and intractable features of human (and other) life. Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is. Their expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of human life off that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us in this and other ways.

Human life would be vastly better if pain were fleeting and pleasure protracted; if the pleasures were much better than the pains were bad; if it were really difficult to be injured or get sick; if recovery were swift when injury or ill- ness did befall us; and if our desires were fulfilled instantly and if they did not give way to new desires. Human life would also be immensely better if we lived for many thousands of years in good health and if we were much wiser, cleverer, and morally better than we are. 

Secular theodicies: justifying human suffering without invoking God. Those fail for somewhat similar reasons.

• Many pains are simply pointless. While the pain associated with kidney stones might now lead somebody to seek medical help, for most of human history, such pain served no purpose, as there was absolutely nothing anybody could do about kidney stones.
• If pleasure is not simply the absence of pain, then pain is unnecessary for appreciating pleasure. Someone who has never tasted bitter things will still enjoy sweet food.
• It would be great if pain is merely persuasive, rather than hurtful.

Argument: if we can live such ideal lives, we wouldn't be humans anymore. 

Reply: That's an excellent argument for why being human sucks and why I want to be posthuman! 

Indeed, to shock us out of the status-quo bias, consider a human-like species called Homo infortunatus

... have an even more wretched quality of life than most humans have, but their lives are not devoid of all pleasure and other goods. Now imagine that a pessimistic philosopher among them observes how appalling their lives are. He points to how much better things could be. For example, instead of living only thirty years, they might live to eighty or ninety. Instead of being in an almost constant state of hunger, they might get hungry only between three regular meals a day. Instead of being sick every week, they might suffer illness only annually or even less often. In response to such observations, the optimistic members of the species— a vast majority—would object that if their lives were better in those ways, they would no longer be infortunati. That observation, even if true, would not detract from the claim that the quality of life of the infortunati is wretched. There is, after all, a difference between asking how good the quality of life of a particular species is and asking whether a much better life is compatible with being a member of that species. Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

Such arguments in general might be called "goldilocks" argument: human beings are just right, not too long-lived, not too short-lived, not too smart, not too stupid, not too social, not too asocial... One technique to reduce the status quo bias is the The reversal test: eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics (2006). Suppose for example we have a drug for improving IQ by 10 points. Should it be made legal? Subsidized? Many would be against that because it would somehow make people less human. However, suppose instead we have humans losing IQ by 10 points per century. Should this be stopped?

Disaster! A hazardous chemical has entered our water supply. Try as we might, there is no way to get the poison out of the system, and there is no alternative water source. The poison will cause mild brain damage and thus reduced cognitive functioning in the current population. Fortunately, however, scientists have just developed a safe and affordable form of somatic gene therapy which, if used, will permanently increase our intellectual powers just enough to offset the toxicity-induced brain damage. Surely we should take the enhancement to prevent a decrease in our cognitive functioning.

Many years later it is found that the chemical is about to vanish from the water, allowing us to recover gradually from the brain damage. If we do nothing, we will become more intelligent, since our permanent cognitive enhancement will no longer be offset by continued poisoning. Ought we try to find some means of reducing our cognitive capacity to offset this change? Should we, for instance, deliberately pour poison into our water supply to preserve the brain damage or perhaps even undergo simple neurosurgery to keep our intelligence at the level of the status quo? Surely, it would be absurd to do so. Yet if we don’t poison our water supply, the consequences will be equivalent to the consequences that would have resulted from performing cognitive enhancement in the case where the water supply hadn’t been contaminated in the first place. Since it is good if no poison is added to the water supply in the present scenario, it is also good, in the scenario where the water was never poisoned, to replace that status quo with a state in which we are cognitively enhanced.

Chap 5: Death 

Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not.

Epicurus

But actually, not only is all the bodily pain of the dying process bad, death itself is also bad. There are multiple reasons:

1. Death doesn't make life more cosmically meaningful.
2. The spectre of death distracts us from attaining the little local meaning we could get.
3. Annihilation is itself bad, unlike Epicurus claimed. Existing is good.

I argue that death is bad for more than one reason. One reason is that death deprives one of the good that one would have had if one had not died when one did. The other reason is that death annihilates one—irreversibly ending one’s existence. It follows from this that even when death is not bad, all things considered, because it deprives one of insufficient good to outweigh the bad one will suffer, it is nonetheless still bad in one way. It still annihilates one.

Benatar basically argues that pure existence is good in itself. The bad of death might be outweighed by the good (as in an euthanasia), but death is always bad in at least one aspect: it stops existence.

Benatar argues that the Epicurus viewpoint is fundamentally wrong, because it depends on hedonism (that is, we should only care for increasing net pleasure), which has its problem, such as the "cheating spouse problem".

One common response to this component of the Epicurean argument is to dispute the hedonistic assumption and claim that feelings do not exhaust the list of what can be intrinsically good or bad. Consider the following example: Your spouse is unfaithful to you by having sex with somebody else. This is done without your ever learning of the infidelity. (We can imagine either that you are sufficiently naïve and gullible or that your spouse is superbly cunning in his or her deceptions.) Moreover, your spouse, who maintains the usual sexual relations with you, is meticulous in the use of barrier contraception with the extramarital partner in order to protect you from sexually transmitted diseases that might otherwise be acquired from the other party. 

It seems to many people that your spouse’s dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings.

Besides, why do we mourn? Because even if life is not worth living and cannot give any more pleasure, there's something bad about being nonexistent. Annihilation is bad in itself.

Perhaps what we are mourning after the death is the fact that the person became so badly ill that death deprived him of no good. However, mourning on that basis would also be implausibly timed. The peak of that mourning should have been while he was suffering and it became clear that death would deprive him of no good. That is when it was really bad. When the person who had been in that situation dies and is released from his suffering, the time for celebrating would have arrived— that is, unless the death, although preferable, nonetheless was a serious bad. That bad, I suggest, is the annihilation of the one who died. It is a bad feature of death even when death is the lesser of two evils. In other words, even when death is the least bad option, all things considered, there is still something lost.

Sometimes Benatar gets pretty funny:

A terrorist has an Epicurean tied down. He forces a gun into the Epicurean’s mouth and keeps threatening to pull the trigger. If the threat is acted upon, it will kill the Epicurean instantly. Either (a) the Epicurean remains true to his belief that “death is nothing to us” and sits there unperturbed, or (b) he is unable to conform his emotions to his beliefs and is filled with anxiety, perhaps to the extent that he soils himself.  

In (a), the Epicurean is committed to thinking that it makes no difference to him whether the attempted terrorizing is followed by the pulling of the trigger. The death would not be bad for the Epicurean. Although it might be bad for the Epicurean’s loved ones, because the Epicurean will be dead, the impact of his death on his family should make no difference to him either. In (b), the Epicurean is committed to thinking that it would be bad for him if the terrorist did not pull the trigger, because if he is not killed, he will suffer all kinds of post- traumatic stress. 

Curiously, though, this does not imply— for the Epicurean— that pulling the trigger would be good, even though the earlier that he is killed, the less of the terrorizing he will have to endure. Just as Epicureans cannot think that death is bad, so they can- not think that death is good (or even less bad). If death cannot be bad because one no longer exists and can no longer experience anything, then for the same reasons, death cannot be good. 

These are very big bullets for the Epicurean to bite (at point-blank range). There are people who say that they accept these implications. We could put them to the test, but it would be unethical to do so (at least if I am right).

Digression: the problem of shitty death

Have you ever noticed that when people die, they tend to shit and piss their pants? I call this the "Problem of Shitty Death". People don't really think about it very much, but the undertakers and the nurses definitely know this. It is particularly ridiculous that this fact is only ever brought up against people who want to suicide as in "it will be dirty and messy".

Ironically, suiciders are the ones who are most able to address the problem of shitty death, by fasting for several days and refusing water a day before death. Cocaine and morphine can be used to invigorate the body during this period. In contrast, it's those who unfortunately did not die by planned suicide that would shit their pants when they die.

But mention the problem of shit on Veteran's Day or someone's grandmother's deathday, and you will be booed.

Fundamentally, the question is this: does shitting their pants make their deaths less or not? If it does, then well-prepared suiciders are commendable. If it doesn't, well, that's pretty funny!

End digression

Benatar enters a long discussion about exactly When is death bad for the person who dies?

Consider the case of Meg breaking her leg. The broken leg is bad for Meg from the time she breaks it until the time it is healed or, to be more accurate, until the time when any other effects of the injury have also vanished. However, in the case of death (and posthumous harms), the answer to the timing question is not straightforward.

• Subsequentism: death is bad after death has happened.
• Priorism: before.
• Eternalism: always.
• Concurrentism: at the moment of death.
• Atemporalism: it's meaningless to try to put a time on it.

At what age is death the worst?

Theory 1: the earlier the worse, because the more life is lost.

Objection: that would mean that abortions are more tragic than death of a child. This is definitely against normal human intuition.

Annihilation is the sort of misfortune that, absent any overriding consideration, is best delayed as long as possible. This is because it is not the sort of misfortune that one can “get over,” for the obvious reason that (unlike diamonds, which are only for a very long time) death really is forever.

On 

There is a tendency to admire those who manage to retain their composure in such circumstances and stare death in the face. This tendency may be explained in part by an implicit acknowl- edgment of just how difficult that is. However, it is difficult to escape the thought that praise of such stoicism is also aimed at discouraging those who cannot face death the way we like to see it faced— namely, “bravely.” Seeing people fall apart in the face of their imminent death, or the threat thereof, only highlights our own mortality and makes us extremely uncomfortable. 

Chap 6: Immortality

This chapter is surprisingly hopeful.

I argue that though immortality would indeed be bad under many circumstances, one could imagine conditions under which the option of immortality would be good. The fact that we lack the option of immortality under those conditions is part of the human predicament.

 The conditions are:

• Eternal youth
• Freedom to suicide
• Enough fun and repeatable activities (such as geometric research) to avoid eternal boredom

Benatar then shoots down a few basic objections such as "inherent meaninglessness" "inherent boredom" "lack of ending".

Chap 7: Suicide

Suicide is a rational response when life gets too bad. It's still always tragic, since death is always bad in at least one aspect: it stops existence.

I shall examine suicide as a response not only to the worst conditions in which people sometimes find themselves, but also to less severe conditions that might nevertheless be reasonably judged to make life not worth continuing. These include less drastic physical conditions, psychological suffering of varying degrees, as well as lesser indignities, including (at least for adults) dependence on others for the performance of basic tasks such as feeding and bathing oneself. I shall also discuss suicide as a response to meaninglessness in life.

 The arguments are typical enough that I am not bothering to summarize.

It would be cruel to wish that the optimists’ faith be tested, but it would be nice if optimists could test pessimists’ faith by being as nice as they can be to them.