On being glad of the world
1. In late November last year I engaged with one of the moral paradoxes in Saul Smilansky's book 10 Moral Paradoxes. I argued that what Saul presented as being a moral paradox isn't one. This led to an exchange of emails between us, an exchange which Saul asked me to post. I do so now, some weeks after the exchange occurred – the delay being due to the fact that I have needed, and haven't had, time to draft my rejoinder to his email responses to the original post.
2. First, a brief reminder of what is at issue between us. Saul thinks there's a paradox in the fact that one can be happy about one's own birth when there is a significantly bad event in the causal sequence that led up to it - the paradox being that one doesn't have to be sorry about the morally bad event. He qualifies this thesis by saying that it does depend on the scale of badness in the preceding event: if 'the magnitude of suffering, loss, and evil are too great', then one must indeed be sorry about it and this entails (so his emails now make clear he wants to say) that one must also be sorry about one's own birth. In my post I disputed the existence of a paradox where Saul identifies one: I argued that one isn't obliged to take a sequence of causally-linked events as a whole, either being happy about them or being sorry about them; one can distinguish within the sequence between what one is glad about and what one is sorry about. We do this all the time, non-paradoxically.
3. These, now, are the emails between Saul and myself.
Dear Norm
Thanks for writing about the 'Not being sorry' chapter from my book... I am afraid that I do think that I want to say the harder (and perhaps implausibly sounding) thing, namely that in ONE sense (the all things considered judgmental mode sense) if you are sorry about the Holocaust (as surely any serious moral person must be) you are sorry that you exist. Or, to put it in a way that may be more acceptable, you should prefer that the Holocaust not happen, even at the price of your not being born. I discuss this a bit towards the end of Jean Kazez's thread, here.
All the best, Saul
Dear Saul
I think that if you were right about this, as I don't think you are, most people would have to be sorry that they exist.
Best, Norm
Dear Norm
Of course (in some sense). But that might just mean that there are true and deep but tragic things that it is best not to think about. Given that we already exist, and cannot undo the Holocaust, we should wake up in the morning and be glad that we are alive, rather than think about impossible alternative histories. And why, after all, should we think about this too much (it is not as though we have the power to undo the Holocaust through time-travel, if only we had the willingness to sacrifice ourselves). But morally, one must be ready to say that the history of the world without the Holocaust would have been better, even though I would not have existed. While I am glad that I exist, surely my existence is morally trivial compared to the Holocaust. And that's the case for millions of others. Don't you agree?
With my 'sister' who died before I was born, and thereby is a condition for my birth (true story), it is (or at least seems) different. It would have been morally better had she lived and I not been born (since she was already alive), but not by a wide margin, and so I can be happy to exist even in the sense that entails that she would not. Similiarly, in the case where I walk around and a crazy gunman opens fire, but his bullets are stopped from reaching me by hitting two innocent pedestrians who happen to step into the line of fire: I may be not sorry that things happened as they did (in the sense that I would not prefer that they be saved and I die), although the death of two is morally worse than the death of one, even if the one is me. It is interesting that we seem to have this moral 'permission' not to be sorry about such morally bad states of affairs (while we are not permitted to push two pedestrians into the line of fire in order to save ourselves). But surely this doesn't transfer to something so morally enormous as the Holocaust.
What do you think?
I hope that you might present my reply and view in your blog, as from your previous post I appeared as an idiot who is just confused about things and lacks a real argument. Perhaps I am mistaken or there is a possible counter-argument, but my view makes good sense (and I still cannot see a convincing alternative).
All the best, Saul
Dear Saul
Apologies for the delay. It's taken me a while to catch up with things since my return [from Israel].
If you would still like me to post your reply on my blog, I am willing to do so, by posting the exchange of emails between us. But I would include a response from me to the email in which you ask me 'Don't you agree?' and 'What do you think?' - otherwise it would seem impolite of me not to have given you an answer to these questions.
On reflection, I also have some thoughts about your claim that I made you appear 'an idiot', about which I would have something to say.
Please let me know if you want me to go ahead.
Best, Norm
Dear Norm
Thanks for writing and no need to apologise... And sure, I'd be honoured if you would post on my work. I didn't (of course) think that you wanted to make me seem like an idiot (a too severe term in any case), it just seemed to me that one might get this impression from the post. It is natural to interpret 'being sorry' as you did, and there are interpretations where clearly one could be sorry about (say) the Holocaust and happy that one exists. Emotionally we can have contrasting emotions (i.e. be ambivalent) even about the same thing, without contradiction. Moving on to the more judgmental aspects of 'being sorry', as related to preferences, we can of course be sorry about one aspect but not about a different one (again, no contradiction). And there is a counterfactual sense in which we can be sorry that things could not have turned out so that the good things (e.g. no Holocaust, and our existence) would be compatible. BUT, and that's where my argument comes in, there is ALSO a sense in which things are a package deal: you cannot have the good without the bad, it is either no-Holocaust and no you, or Holocaust+you. So if, OVERALL, we would prefer that the Holocaust would not occur (as surely we must, morally), then we therefore prefer the state of the world where we also do not come into existence; which means that, in this sense, we are sorry that we exist. So we are sorry that a much better state of affairs, which would have excluded both the Holocaust and (alas) ourselves, is not the state of affairs that materialized.
What does this all mean? That's something I am still thinking about. I don't think that we have to feel guilt about existing, for example (we are not responsible for the Holocaust). But I think that it is philosophically interesting that we end up having to be sorry about our existence, in this sense.
I just wanted to write a couple of sentences and ended up writing a whole story, but anyway, I hope this helps to clarify how I reached my odd conclusion.
Thanks again and all the best, Saul
Dear Norm
A further point which I think is important: GIVEN that the historical calamity (such as the Holocaust) occurred, it makes perfectly good sense to be glad that we exist. We are a continuation of Jewish life, and our living and living well works against the Nazi aim to eliminate Jewish existence. Every Jew born is, as it were, a poke in Hitler's eyes. And since we exist, we can make things better by fighting bad things... So one's existence can clearly be positive. But this does not challenge my argument, that we should in one sense be sorry that we (as well as the Holocaust, which was a condition for our existence), exist.
Anyway, just another point to think about. I'm looking forward to your post.
All the best, Saul
4. This, finally, is my reply to Saul's emails (and I will signal it to him as being that). Saul's 'in some sense' concession in his second email - his allowing that there is a meaning in which a person could be glad of being alive even if his or her birth would not have come about but for the Holocaust - settles everything, so far as I am concerned. If in a sense Rachel can be happy that she exists despite being sorry that the Holocaust (which brought her parents together) happened, then she need not be sorry she exists. She need not be sorry she exists, period. For, contrary to what Saul maintains, there is no alternative sense in which she does have to be sorry about it. Saul's two constructions suggesting that, as a morally serious person, she must be sorry - the constructions 'you should prefer that the Holocaust not happen, even at the price of your not being born' and 'the history of the world without the Holocaust would have been better, even though I would not have existed' - are neither of them equivalents for the thought of being sorry to have been born. The world would certainly have been better with no Holocaust and no Rachel than it has been with both it and her. To this Rachel may well agree. But she isn't bound to construe her doing so as a state of being sorry that she exists - unless, begging the question, you insist that happiness and sorryness attach to event-sequences as a whole without possibility of distinctions being made between different episodes or aspects of them.
To put the same thing differently, I am saying that what Saul calls 'the all things considered judgmental mode' is not the same mode as the one involved in judging whether to be sorry that one exists because of bad things that were the causal precondition of one's existence. If a moral agent, Rachel, were to have to decide whether to bring about the birth of someone else - Rachel t(w)oo - by means of causing several million deaths, then the first Rachel would be obliged by Saul's aforesaid mode. But, as who she actually is, Rachel can just do what we all do most of the time; she can be happy, and not sorry, to have been born, while regretting the Holocaust, even though the latter led to the meeting of her parents.
Incidentally, there is nothing in this way of looking at the world - the one I am saying is quite standard - which need obscure from anyone, stop them thinking about, the tragic aspects of human existence. The ability to make distinctions within an ensemble of circumstances or events in no way prevents you from seeing connections between them, including tragic connections.
I also think that if what Saul has argued were right, then no one could be happy that they existed. Never mind Jews whose parents met at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Maidanek. What Jew anywhere would exist today had there been no persecution of the Jewish people, throwing individuals hither and yon and so determining who should run into whom and what babies get born? Could any African-American be glad to have been born, with slavery in their background as a precondition? Is there, in fact, any good thing in the world that, given its causal interconnections with suffering and evil of one kind and another, can be freed from the burden of sorrow? But then we must be sorry about the world as a whole, and not glad of everything good which it contains - a reductio, in my view, of Saul's thesis. Or, on the other hand... we can be happy about the good, sorry about the bad, and hope to be able to change the balance between them.
I am, finally, bemused by Saul's suggestion that my post made him appear an idiot, whether intentionally or otherwise. I didn't deride him and I didn't deride his arguments. I engaged with him and with them, using counter-arguments that seemed, and still seem, to me persuasive. This is a standard philosophical procedure and, more generally, mode of respectful dialogue between equals.
