Every bullet except 5 in this list seems to boil down to the same, essentially utilitarian viewpoint. In order to come up with a plausible objection to the view as a whole I think one need only hold that morality as a whole is not (entirely) outcome-based. There are plenty of great theories of morality which reject utilitarianism and develop ways of thinking about morality more in line with our intuition that life ought not be completely extinguished. I also think that we don’t necessarily need to accept that a complete view of utilitarianism necessarily leads to the conclusion that life is inherently a bad thing. Suffering is without a doubt prevalent in the world, but there isn’t (and couldn’t possible be) any complete measure of suffering vs. pleasure that would be required to do the kind of utilitarian calculation required to follow this argument through to its conclusion. It may very well be that the pleasures of life outweigh the suffering.
Possibly_a_f1sh t1_jb743kd wrote
Reply to comment by SvetlanaButosky in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | March 06, 2023 by BernardJOrtcutt
Every bullet except 5 in this list seems to boil down to the same, essentially utilitarian viewpoint. In order to come up with a plausible objection to the view as a whole I think one need only hold that morality as a whole is not (entirely) outcome-based. There are plenty of great theories of morality which reject utilitarianism and develop ways of thinking about morality more in line with our intuition that life ought not be completely extinguished. I also think that we don’t necessarily need to accept that a complete view of utilitarianism necessarily leads to the conclusion that life is inherently a bad thing. Suffering is without a doubt prevalent in the world, but there isn’t (and couldn’t possible be) any complete measure of suffering vs. pleasure that would be required to do the kind of utilitarian calculation required to follow this argument through to its conclusion. It may very well be that the pleasures of life outweigh the suffering.