Lee Hunts DESTROYS Carroll Wainwright! WRECKED!!!

Lee Hunts DESTROYS Carroll Wainwright! WRECKED!!!

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: or, Life Reviled is a self-published book that was released in the last few months. While it is a narrative, the story is moreso a frame for talking about anti-natalism, which is the philosophical position supposed by the author. I have a smaller review of the book itself posted on Goodreads; I will link to the review in the description. In this post, I plan on actually addressing the philosophy itself, as I found the discussion to be rather fascinating.

While I am arguing against a very pessimistic philosophy, this should not imply that I am an optimist in my own philosophy. I am an optimist in my personal life, which is what matters, haha—but I am pessimistic about reality and human nature and morality in my own ways.

Carrol Wainwright seems to recognize a contradiction between life itself and morality. He has chosen morality and thus rejected life. I technically took the precise opposite approach. I accepted life and rejected morality. I do not reject value itself. I have my own values and my own convictions, just as everyone does. I simply reject the ability to ground these assumptions. I actually touch upon these ideas in the first Arc of my fantasy series, so if you want to see my ideas in action, I recommending checking out Volumes I and II of The Paths We Have Taken in the description. Gimme yo munnies!

I will break up my response into parts: (I) I will start by articulating the assumed (and often unstated) premises of Wainwright's position—followed by the logical consequences. (II) Then I will address Wainwright's premises and consequential beliefs with occasional reference to my own. (III) Lastly, I will reserve the final section for scattered comments that don't necessarily fit into the rest of the post.

I

A

To start, I have to mention one complication. I want to take a more Analytical approach to my rebuttal. Maybe this will make the argument a bit less appealing to a wider audience, but I think such an approach will be important if I want my rebuttal to be as accurate as possible. This will highlight a key distinction between myself and Wainwright. His approach to argumentation has a more Continental slant.

In this, I am referencing Analytical and Continental Philosophy respectively. Simplifying to the extreme, Analytical Philosophy treats the discipline like a science, with clear and precise language, while Continental Philosophy treats the discipline like an Art, with linguistic flourishes through the gorgeous delivery of one's ideas. In the context of fiction, I understand the Continental leaning; indeed, I lean that way in my own fiction. But his apparent Afterword at the end of the book uses the same style, which I tried to avoid in my own Afterword. Put in short, I might not get his position exactly right. Wainwright never really specifies the basic premises of his position—doing so is a rather ugly way of communicating the position—so, I need to make that clear. It is really easy to "strawman" a Continental argument, whether it actually is a strawman in fact or not.

All the same, let us proceed. There are two possible ways I would articulate Wainwright's basic assumptions, one that is simple and deontological and one that is more detailed and consequentialist:

(1a) Morality is grounded on the idea of consent.

(1b) Morality is grounded on pleasure and pain.

(2) Life is heavily imbalanced toward suffering (pain) over pleasure.

(3) No one can consent to existing.

(C) We should voluntarily stop reproducing.

This is the basic set of unspoken assumptions that I can grasp from his arguments as the book comes to its conclusion. The argument is valid, as the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. And I think this is the most straightforward one, as it simply asserts what moral conduct is and encourages it accordingly. It is deontological in the sense that conduct matters more than the consequences of one's actions.

The chunky version of the argument adds two additional premises, alongside a modified conclusion:

(1a) Morality is grounded on the idea of consent.

(1b) Morality is grounded on pleasure and pain.

(2) Life is heavily imbalanced toward suffering (pain) over pleasure.

(3) No one can consent to existing.

(4a) The basic nature of reality is consciousness, of which humanity makes up.

(4b) The extinction of human life would end all existence.

(C) We should voluntarily stop reproducing to end existence itself.

Premises 1-3 seem more rock-solid to me. Premises 4a and 4b are a bit uncertain, which I will discuss below. If I am wrong about 4a and 4b, I think the simpler argument still covers the basic idea just fine. What matters for this argument is that it is consequentialist in nature. This argument is meant to produce positive outcomes, while the other is neutral on that.

B

For 1a, this assumption is the easiest to understand. Wainwright's arguments are all based in rationality. Everyone understands that lack of consent is immoral. Rape is the most obvious example. If someone does not consent to a sexual encounter, then this is readily understood to be evil precisely because of consent's lacking. If I stab a blade into your stomach without you asking, then this is also easily grasped as evil; and even if someone argues that it is evil independent of consent, most would say that the lack of consent makes it worse than otherwise. And if I take your property against your will, as before, most would call that evil, because your will was not taken into account; you did not consent. Via reason, you can conclude that consent is a moral necessity, as it is the ultimate reason why we call many obviously immoral things bad in the first place. Naturally, we must draw our beliefs out to their logical conclusions. You can deny that rape, murder, and theft are evil by denying consent, or you can claim they are evil on the basis of consent.

For premise 1b, Wainwright continually refers to the suffering in the world. Indeed, the only way that premise 2 makes any sense in the argument is by making this assumption. And the position is rather straight forward to the average person. We like some things because they give us pleasure, and we dislike other things because they are painful. No one wants to feel pain for its own sake. And if we endure pain, it is usually because there is some sense in which we can feel pleasure in the long term. Working out would be one example.

For premise 2, Wainwright says that pain massively outweighs pleasure in life. Wainwright never really argues for this. In the book, the main character just asserts it as if it is obvious. And in the podcast with Jason Fuhrman, he said that even if things are better today, he does not appreciate the amount of suffering incurred to get here in the first place. All the same, while his arguments in those two places are not terribly compelling to me, I know that there is some evidence to support the idea that people are more sensitive to pain than they are to pleasure. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is a good book that goes into depth about it. The research he touches on makes assumptions that might be problematic, but it is still worth taking seriously. And let's be real, I've thrown my back out before. The pain of not being able to stand or even sit up could never be balanced out by . . . anything . . .

For premise 3, this is one of those exceedingly unintuitive assertions that likely rankles people to the extreme. It hits you with an immediate red flag that you just know is wrong. But if you grant the position credit, then you have to conclude that your intuitive response is not a grounded position, or even an argument at all. I think his claim is worth considering. When you stop and think about it, you technically understand where the position comes from. You really can't ask your child whether what they want to exist or not.

From these premises, it is sufficient to conclude that we should voluntarily stop reproducing so that no additional life is brought into the world to suffer. The point is to not contribute to the overall pool of suffering. But there is a more radical argument that takes on additional premises talked about in the book. This will carry us to a more radical conclusion.

For premise 4a, this is also very unintuitive; I will consider it, anyway. Wainwright is arguing for a kind of panpsychism, where all of reality is consciousness, and we make up that overall existence. This is downstream of arguments that reality has no meaning without consciousness. "Percipient life was necessary for meaning and valuation. First the cosmos was made, then Man was made to make the cosmos. [. . .] Something had to be, and something had to be for the sake of advertence." This quote is rather hard to parse, but I think he is trying to make the point that humanity is not separate from the universe, that it is all one. Saying that the cosmos existed to create man, and then man to make the cosmos is blatantly circular, causally speaking—but I will steelman him and assume that this is a poetic flourish. He is merely saying that they depend on one another for existence; the parts are the whole.

For premise 4b, Wainwright suggests that since humanity is what makes up existence, as all existence is consciousness, then existence would end if humanity ends. This makes sense on its own, and is essentially an implication of 4a, which is why I numbered them as such. If quarks and electrons did not exist, then atoms would not exist.

Finally, for the argument overall, I can say that it is valid like the other one was. Which is only fair since I was the one who created the deductive argument, lol. If the premises are true, then we ought to voluntarily stop reproducing to end existence itself. As I mentioned before, this is a consequentialist argument because it focuses on the outcome of one's actions, rather than focusing on the act itself.

II

A

(1a) Morality is grounded on the idea of consent.

Arguments about morality are always organized through the use of reason, which is the use of logic. But I think it is important to establish what this actually means. People usually take it for granted, so I want to lay out the notion so we know explicitly when logic is being used and when it is not. This is not to "dis" Wainwright . . . despite the title of this post, lol. This is for the sake of the audience and my ability to communicate some of my criticisms without igniting misunderstandings.

a.

Logic is ultimately a truth preserving relation. It simply means that there is a relation between ideas (propositions); and that this relation describes truth moving from the premises to a conclusion. Further, the truth moves between the propositions necessarily. If the premises are true, then the conclusion is necessarily true; you must accept that the conclusion is true. This is why logic is given the authority that it has. It is not just something you feel is right. You can't just assert it. You establish it and people must accept it, barring irrationality.

And it is also worth mentioning that in the prior section, I outlined Wainwright's arguments. If premises 1-3 are true, then the conclusion must be true. There is a connection regarding truth between the propositions. That is a straightforward example, though the presentation style is admittedly not necessary for logical argumentation.

b.

Why is this relevant? Because I want to make a distinction between reason and intuition when addressing the point about consent. When people make arguments and refer to their logic, they are not usually using logic, at least in full. Their reasoning usually stops off at a point where people just stop asking questions and accept a particular belief because they are not willing to question it. Likely, they wouldn't dare to be seen questioning it, if only because of self-image and self-preservation, socially. They think this is logic, but it is ultimately intuition.

And this is exactly what Wainwright does with the notion of consent. It is the most often repeated appeal when arguing that life itself is evil. You did not consent to existing, therefore life is immoral. And then the idea of suffering being so prevalent is supplementary. Consent is the primary moral claim. Wainwright even refers to existence itself as a form of rape, because consent is so bound up with the idea of rape.

Wainwright never actually justifies the idea that lack of consent is immoral. It is simply an assertion that he takes for granted. And this is understandable for obvious reasons. After all, who the hell is going to deny consent as a value? As stated above, no one would dare to be seen questioning the claim if only because of self-image and self-preservation, socially.

That is what I will do, however.

There are multiple reasons, and the first is incredibly straightforward given the groundwork already laid. Wainwright never justifies the claim. He only relies on intuition, and intuition is not actual grounding. You can act on consensus, but you can't claim the authority that logic has until you establish an actual truth preserving relation. His argument is completely arbitrary, even if you find the asserted claim appealing.

Further, other things can then be appealed to with intuition. I can say that life has value. Basically everyone will agree with that. I won't justify it. I will just say that it's obvious and laugh off anyone who disagrees. And I will get away with it. The second that Wainwright points out my lack of argument, I can just say that he has no argument for consent. He might reply that lack of consent is obviously wrong to everyone . . . And you know where this is going.

Neither of us would have the authority of logic, as I have laid it out. Both are just arbitrary assertions based on intuition.

c.

The second reason to be taken here is the notion of value pluralism. Going back to Plato, there is often this implicit assumption that moral frameworks have to be grounded on a single value that every other claim depends on. Libertarianism, for example, bases the whole of its morality on the NAP or on some notion of consent. And value pluralism goes against this monist view of morality. It rejects the idea that there is one value as the basis of all values, suggesting that there can be many foundational values that have different weightings and which can intersect, demanding some kind of resolution.

In other words, one can declare consent to be one of many values, alongside others that might override consent in specific contexts. Taxes are an obvious example, where roads and law enforcement (and benefits they bring) override consent in that specific context.

The reason this matters is because we can often fall into false dichotomies where we ask ourselves, is consent moral or is it not?, when there are more nuanced positions in between to be evaluated. One might argue that life is worth it, and that its value overrides consent in that particular context.

d.

Another significant critique of Wainwright's claim about morality and consent is that morality is ultimately about control. When you claim that something is immoral, that means you want that behavior to be controlled in some capacity. The exceptions are usually the behaviors that don't outrage us as much, or are the behaviors that are constrained because of other convictions running crosswise. I know some people who think that football is immoral because it is injurious, but they aren't going to legislate against it; they also value choice, so they control their own behaviors and refrain from taking totalitarian action. Further, they still influence things where they can. Their children are apparently not allowed to play football.

Even when freedom or consent is the foundation of morality, control is still necessary to establish those norms in society. Checks and balances are a good example. Essentially, you have to control the controllers. Someone's freedom has to be taken away, or their consent violated, in order to establish the relevant norms.

And I think this kind of matters when the story ends with the main character killing her own baby, her own father, the cocksman, and the whole human race. Her baby did not consent to living, but nor did it consent to dying; her father did not consent to dying; neither did the cocksman. Worse, her actions allow the red death to continue along its course, essentially damning humanity to extinction. None of this was done with the consent of those affected. The likely response would be something approximating the NAP (the non-aggression principle), but the whole of humanity did not aggress upon her (neither did her baby), only her father and the cocksman.

Apparently, the idea is to voluntarily stop reproducing, but put simply, that moral stance is meaningless without enforcement that necessarily violates someone's consent.

 B

(1b) Morality is grounded on pleasure and pain.

I flat out reject this premise. This is by far the hardest one to explain, but I will address it by referencing a portion of my own philosophy: Value is a subject/object relation.

The first step is asking yourself what value is. This is a rather odd question to ask, as we talk about value all the time. It is similar to the question of "truth" however. We talk about truth on a regular basis. But when we talk about what truth is, the same question crops up. What is truth? And then the rest of your life is consumed by philosophical bullshit; either that, or you give up. Then you're condemned to dance about the penumbra of its meaning, arguing only about supposed implications of the term. The problem with this is that it assumes that our established usage of the term is coherent. "My personal truth" and "the truth is out there" are inconsistent, yet they are both in common usage.

a.

The best way to answer the question about value is to look at the some of the possible answers to get the mind working.

One definition of (objective) value is the idea that it is an intrinsic property of the thing being evaluated. One might say that water is intrinsically valuable, suggesting that value is a property of that thing; just as wetness is a property of water, value is as well.

Another definition of (objective) value is that it exists in some abstract realm sans space and time. Proponents point to mathematics and to logic overall, suggesting that this is an aspect of reality to which statements can correspond to in order to declare them as "true."

A final example that I will give is the idea that pleasure and pain are good and bad respectively, which is Wainwright's position. They argue that any rational argument about what is good or bad will ultimately ground out on these assumptions. That pleasure is good, and that pain is bad.

And all of these are arguments suggesting that values can be grounded objectively in one way or another. They are grounded on objective properties in objects or situations in reality; or they are grounded on abstract entities that exist in a kind of platonic realm; or they are grounded through the use of reason, suggesting that the ultimate assumption our reasoning makes is that pleasure is good and pain is bad.

b.

I disagree with all of these positions, but I will get to the details regarding the last one in a little bit. What matters is that these positions establish what values are, rather than vaguely taking them for granted. Personally, I think that values are a subject/object relation. They describe how a subject is connected to an object.

A "relation" is a rather broad concept, but it is rather simple in terms of its meaning. A relation simply describes the connection between two things. That is all. "The cup is on the table" is a spatial relation, and it describes the connection between the cup and the table. "A hand is a part of a human" is a part/whole relation, and it describes the connection between the hand and the human. "An unmarried man is a bachelor" is a logical relation, and it describes the connection between an unmarried man and a bachelor (as concepts).

And a value is a subject/object relation, and it describes the emotional connection between a subject and an object. I specify "emotional connection" because there are many ways in which a subject and an object can be connected; I am talking about the emotional connection.

Another way to put it is that value is how we feel pleasure and pain in relation to some object.

The best way to understand this is by comparing it to one of the positions I mentioned above. I am not saying that pleasure is good, and that pain is bad. That position places pleasure and pain on the object side of the relation: I (subject) evaluate the pleasure (object) as good; I (subject) evaluate the pain (object) as bad. My position places pleasure and pain on the subject side of the relation. I feel pleasure (subject) in response to the hamburger (object); I feel pain (subject) in response to the stubbed toe (object). My definition of value basically answers the phenomenological question, what is it like to positively evaluate something? Pleasure. What is it like to negatively evaluate something? Pain.

Pleasure is the act of positive evaluation itself, as it is experienced from the first-person perspective.

This is not an empty semantic point. There is a profound implication.

For one, saying that pleasure is good and that pain is bad is a vacuous statement. It is like saying pleasure is pleasurable. Or valuable things are valuable. The point is that we should stop taking for granted that pleasurable things ought to be pleasurable. Why should they be pleasurable? If I had a zone implant in hand and was able to invert pain and pleasure such that cutting was now a pleasurable thing, would that make cutting okay? Saying that pleasure is good and that pain is bad does not answer the problem of morality. It simply kicks it back a step, asking why we should feel pain and pleasure in response to the things that we do in the first place.

My position does not suffer from this problem, instead bringing the two problems together as functional equivalents. "What is valuable?" means "What should I feel pleasure in response to?"

c.

The final thing to mention is the main implication of value being a subject/object relation. This means that value is inherently tied to someone who can experience pain or pleasure. The only way to establish that something is valuable is by presupposing a person who has feelings in relation to that thing.

More importantly, we cannot escape our own perspective. Even if there were a god, or if there were properties of value in objects like water, or abstract value in the platonic realm beyond, our perspective cannot be escaped. We necessarily evaluate that god first, and choose to follow him or not. His declarations can only follow that first step. Wainwright himself understands that a god is not necessarily moral, at the very least.

C

(2) Life is heavily imbalanced toward suffering (pain) over pleasure.

Does pain override pleasure? As I stated above, this is supported by research done and shared by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow: people are more sensitive to pain than pleasure. But this is not the same thing as the claim that pleasure does not justify the pain. The former is descriptive, while the latter is prescriptive. Only the latter can be used to justify saying that life is not worth it.

Who decides whether life is worth it? The response is as simple as this rhetorical question. The main character herself states repeatedly that it is not worth it. She won't have children for that reason. But it is worth asking whether any of her potential children were given a chance to decide what values to prioritize in the first place. In a way, they aren't given a chance to decide whether life is worth it in the first place. They don't consent to existing, but neither do they consent to not existing.

Which more or less leads to the last premise of the shortened argument.

D

(3) No one can consent to existing.

Both of the positions articulated in the previous section are seemingly nonsensical. The problem is that evaluation presupposes life. If I am right about the nature of value, then pleasure and pain are necessary preconditions for evaluation. Not only that, but life itself is a precondition. For all of Wainwright's attempts to use the value of consent to undermine life, as we don't consent to life, life itself is a precondition for his moral convictions in the first place. That we can be outraged by lack of consent, or anything for that matter, is because of life. And this could be argued from to claim that life is worth it.

No one can consent to existing. But no one can care about consent without existence. Worse for him, morality itself is contingent on life. The only reason he can evaluate anything is because of his own life. And the only reason morality even matters to anyone, even on a subjective level, is because of life itself.

E

(4a) The basic nature of reality is consciousness, of which humanity makes up.

(4b) The extinction of human life would end all existence.

I won't take time trying to debunk panpsychism, as I think it would only pad this post out and risk strawmanning him. What matters most is whether it is right to include these assumptions.

The two points above are necessary for a more consequentialist approach to anti-natalism. Premises 1-3 apply merely to actions, regardless of their consequences to life as a whole. With these two new premises added, it allows for some kind of solution to life's predicament. One reason to adopt it is because it brings the point about panpsychism in the picture, which is part of the novel.

But there are problems with including it, as well.

Wainwright and his main character suggest that nonbeing could never be. At one point, Wainwright seems to suggest that to create is an absurd notion that he is only mockingly using. Everything that exists could only ever exist. To not be is impossible. "You could not ideate a lack even of dimension of time. It was simply and utterly unimaginable. And if it could not be imagined, then it stood to reason that it could not be." Would voluntarily choosing not to create life be the exception? Or am I simply mistaken? I don't know.

The problem is premise 4b, which is contradicted by the suggestion that nonbeing is impossible. If it is impossible, then Wainwright's ultimate goal is pointless.

There are also problems regarding other sentient beings and whether they have to be killed off, or if they can consent to any solution. The more I talk about this, the more I think Wainwright only supports the simpler argument, and I was just reading into the book a bit too much. But alas, this is the problem with Continental writing.

III

In this section, I will address a scattering of points that I couldn't work into the wider framework of this post.

A

At one point Wainwright makes the following argument: the potential of an afterlife is why you don’t kill yourself. You can't escape non-being because you have no notion of whether there is a life to follow. Non-being does not mean death, it means never being alive in the first place.

But what about uncertainty of life itself? Maybe life isn’t so bad. What if your understanding of life is just a simulation that makes you more grateful for your real life once you reenter it. For example, what if there is a demon tricking you into think that this awful reality is the real one? What if there is a scientist? Etc. And they are going to eventually pull you out of their simulation and bring you into a much better world with less suffering overall. Ridiculous, sure, but so is the notion of an afterlife, epistemologically speaking. Both are utterly unverifiable. In any case, the possibility of an afterlife is enough to dismiss suicide as a choice; presumably, then, the possibility of a trickster demon should be sufficient to convince you that reality might not be as bad as it is. Wainwright's arguments about consent are almost always bound up with arguments about suffering in the world, so I think this matters.

I think there are two possible positions one can adopt in response to this: 

1. We don’t know if we are being tricked by the demon, but subsequently can’t believe our actual lives are as bad as it seems.

2. We do know whether the evil demon is there, at least in terms of likelihood, but can also reason the likelihood of an afterlife.

And I don't think Wainwright is amendable to either position.

B

I mentioned before that in the podcast with Jason Fuhrman, Wainwright claims that things progressing over time doesn't mean that much, because of the suffering incurred in order to get here. I mentioned that it wasn't very compelling. This is because of the question of who said that. Wainwright said that, but did he ask those people throughout history? Many of them, especially with regard to their own children, suffered for the sake of progress—precisely to make life easier for their children. Should their lives be reduced to mere suffering . . . especially if it is a reason to justify taking their lives away from them?

C

By the end, it is clear that Wainwright has a glass half empty outlook on life. This is such a cliche, so let me clarify. There are places where you could look at the same circumstance and see it as a positive or a negative, and each are completely arbitrary. This is most plain in his argument about memories. He suggests that good memories become bad because they are lost. But people can relish positive memories: a friend does something that makes you laugh, for example. How many times have you shared a funny story with people? Further, you can have profoundly negative experiences that become hilarious in retrospect: just ask anyone to recall experiences from when they were a teenager. I just get the impression that Wainwright is looking for reasons to see life in a negative light.

IV

So that is about it. Technically I could go on. And in previous drafts, I did. But I didn't want this to ramble on too long, so I cut a bunch of sections. Either way, this was fun to write. I hope you enjoyed the post and the deep-dive discussion.

Video: https://youtu.be/jcs8WTDHt5U

Book Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6060399410

Volume I: https://a.co/d/4RQKlVC

Volume II: https://a.co/d/dh7FOHy

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