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Letters
Letters
Life is a Political Act • More Wisdom of Lovers • Alfons Grieder • Still Questing • Paradoxically Yours – Or Not • Self-Censorship vs Insensitivity • Shooting Sartre Full of Holes • Buddhist Phenomenology • Freed Speech • Are Philosophers Stoned?
Life is a Political Act
Dear Editor: With regard to the article ‘The Goodness of Existence’ in Issue 149, are the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain the only criteria upon which the goodness or badness of human existence is to be judged? What if you experienced a life full of pleasure but your way of living directly (or indirectly) contributed to the pain of others? And what about the continuation or extinction of humanity itself? Any honest listing of the damages that an individual can inflict upon the environment would need to place procreation at or near the top. So procreation is not intrinsically good as the article concludes. Rather, limiting the number of humans is good when viewed from the perspective of not exceeding critical planetary boundaries. It’s even better to limit the lives in question when they create unsustainable carbon footprints while depleting finite resources and contributing to ecological overshoot, resulting in climate catastrophe.
When industrial civilization collapses, the article’s conclusion that ‘existence is always a benefit rather than a harm’ will surely seem dated.
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