Death good

I/T (Animals)
There is an ethical imperative towards environmental destruction
Sittler-Adamczewski 16
Thomas M. Sittler-Adamczewski (University of Oxford). “Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals.” Journal of Practical
Ethics. OXFORD UEHIRO PRIZE IN PRACTICAL ETHICS 2015-16. December 2016. JDN. http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-
vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/

wild animals have worse lives than farmed

Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that

animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a
top priority. I consider objections to the argument, and discuss which courses of action are open to those who accept the argument. Many consequentialists are vegetarian because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. Some consequentialists may be

ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe

vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. More precisely then,

that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to
come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical consequentialist vegetarians1 believed that animals have lives that are unpleasant but still

if vegetarians were to
better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows. I will argue that

apply this principle consistently, the suffering of wild animals would dominate their concerns,
and would plausibly lead them to support reducing the number of wild animals , for instance
through habitat destruction or sterilisation. If animals like free-range cows SUFFERING IN NATURE, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also
have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced
idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme suffering like starvation, forms of

dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm
animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them In birds, (Tomasik 2009).

diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as
depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination,
staggering, tremor and convulsions While a farmed animal like a free-range cow (Michigan Department of Natural Resources).

has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death a wild (stunning sometimes fails),

animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear
predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering Wild (Tomasik 2013).

animals do experience pleasure One reason to suspect that on

significant , for instance when they eat, play, have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity.

average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive
strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of offspring starve or their

are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might

have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for
the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals. A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken)

I restrict my count of wild animals to those at least as complex as chicken or small fish,
(Tomasik 2014).

which vegetarians clearly believe do have moral weight. Using studies of animal density in
different biomes, Tomasik estimates conservatively that there are at least [60 Billion] 6*10^10
land birds, [600 Billion] 10^11 land mammals, and [60 trillion] 10^13 fish. Animals in each of these categories alone are several times more
numerous than livestock. If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living, and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of
animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’ (Dawkins 1996) If they accept the premises so far,

consistent vegetarians should focus on preventing the existence of as many wild animals as
possible , since even a small reduction in the global number of wild animals would outweigh the
impact of ending all livestock production. For example, they could reduce animal populations by
sterilising them, or by destroying highly dense animal habitats such as rainforests. It may even be the case that vegetarians
should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer wild animals per square kilometre than other biomes such as forests (Matheny and Chan 2005, 585). Of course, to the extent that it is more
difficult to reduce wild animal populations than farm animal populations, vegetarians should focus more resources on the latter. But it seems implausible that it would be over a hundred times more difficult to achieve the same proportional reduction, which is what would be needed to reverse

There could be some simple ways, for instance, for vegetarians to reduce
my conclusion that wild animal suffering dominates.

habitat sizes: supporting the construction of large parking lots, or donating to a pro-deforestation
lobby. In the final paragraph, I touch upon the issue of how most effectively to reduce wild animal suffering.

Life Is A Living Hell For All Nonhumans

Dawkins, 1996:
Richard Dawkins (selfish geneticist). River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life. Basic Books (August 23, 1996).
It is better for the genes of Darwin's wasp that the caterpillar should be alive, and therefore fresh, when it is eaten, no matter what the cost in suffering. If Nature were kind, She would at least make the minor concession of anesthesizing caterpillars before they were eaten alive from within.

Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it

But Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it.

affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when
they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not
unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene's chances of being propagated into
future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that
gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death The total - as many of them eventually are.

amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the
minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive,
many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured
from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and
disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an
increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

The tiniest risk outweighs the aff by orders of magnitude.

Tomasik 14
Brian Tomasik (Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators, programmer for Microsoft Bing, grad. Swarthmore College). “The Importance of
Wild-Animal Suffering.” 22 March 2014. http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

I personally believe that most animals (except maybe those that live a long time, like >3 years) probably
have lives not worth living, because I would trade away several years of life to avoid the
pain of the average death, and this is assuming that even their lives are net positive (which
is dubious in view of cold, hunger, disease, fear of predators, and all the rest). However, this
belief of mine is somewhat controversial. I think the claim of net expected suffering in nature
needs only a weaker assertion: namely, that almost all of the expected happiness and suffering in
nature come from small animals (e.g., minnows and insects). The adults of these species live at most
a few years, often just a few months or weeks, so it's even harder in these cases for the happiness of life to
outweigh the pain of death. Moreover, almost all the babies that these species have die
(possibly painfully) after just a few hours or days of being born, because most of these species are r-selected -- see Type III
in this chart. Of course, it's not certain that minnows/insects can feel pain at all, but they may be able to.
Even if the probability were, say, 0.1, they would still dominate everything else in expected
value.
 I/T (Humans)

Life is meaningless and suffering is inevitable; nuclear winter means fast timeframe
extinction and nirvana
Dolan 02
(John Dolan, PhD in the writing of the Marquis de Sade from UC Berkeley, professor and essayist, “The Case for Nuclear Winter,” April 21,
2002, http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6495&IBLOCK_ID=35)

There are no nihilists any more. That fact is the most damning evidence of a great betrayal which has happened in the last half century. In 1945 the Bomb gave us the option of quitting
, when

this dirty, rigged game of Darwinian strip poker , we learned that not one of the anti-life artists meant what they said. In a few years, all the anti-life art of the early twentieth century vanished.

They saw that

The artists who had made their careers documenting the horrors of life on earth and denouncing the cycle of animal existence yelped away like scared puppies the moment a real chance to end the suffering appeared.

magnificent mushroom cloud and instead of falling down to worship it, they ran to the nearest church or Christian Science Reading Room

ran to hug the knees of GAIA, the bloody mother.

or Socialist meeting hall. After convincing thousands of adolescents to kill themselves in the name of holy despair, these sleazy careerists

They Chose Life -- the swine! Go ahead, pick a culture, any culture! Any culture you can name, during any historical period you choose, will furnish hundreds of examples of anti-life rhetoric which was taken very, very seriously

-- up until the moment when it actually meant something. Take, say, Europe in the nineteenth century, that cheery and bustling period. OK; here's its greatest philosopher on the subject: "If you imagine...the sum total of distress, pain and suffering which the sun shines upon, you will be
forced to admit that it would have been better if the surface of the earth were still as crystalline as that of the moon....For the world is Hell, and men are on the one had the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it." That was Schopenhauer, telling the Germans in their bristly abstract

way what Darwin told the English in their fussier, more detailed language: there is no point but suffering. There is no hidden redemptive
meaning in any of this. It's just an unfortunate industrial accident, organic life . Both Schopenhauer and Darwin resorted to animal

examples to convey the horror which summed up the world. They were trying to overcome the popular heresy that somehow, it all must "balance out" somehow. It doesn't, because it was never designed to do so: "compare the pleasure of an animal engaged in eating another animal with the
pain of the animal being eaten." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Schopenhauer and Darwin were in play in the higher European circles, mixing and strengthening each other. It was the bravest moment in the history of our species; something truly dangerous, a final anti-life
epiphany, seemed ready to happen. This is what poor sweet Nietzsche meant with his heartbreaking faith in "the men who are coming." Nihilism's one great weakness was that it had always been an elite cult, not considered transmissible to the masses. This was in fact why Buddhism was
replaced by a mindless demotic cult like Hinduism in India: Nirvana was too cold a doctrine for peasants who equated fecundity with happiness. But in the early twentieth century, a demographic anomaly appeared: the elite was big, and getting bigger. They brought their cult with them; art
began serving as the propaganda wing of Nihilism. What we call "Modernism" was actually a multimedia offensive which was beginning to make Nihilism palatable to the masses. The fuzzy "Modern/Postmodern" distinction is best seen as a change in popular religion: from 1910-1945, art
did an honorable job of preparing the masses to abandon their attachment to the biosphere; from 1945 to the present, art borrows Nihilist images, diction and narrative without the least intention of employing them to free us from attachment to organic life. The echoes of that dangerous early

twentieth-century art are still audible: "I've always been surprised by everyone's going on living." Birth, and copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks: Birth,

and copulation, and death. I've been born, and once is enough. You don't remember, but I remember, Once is enough. It's sad for the dog. He lives only because he was born, just like me.... So they sang. And many believed them. Maybe a few of them really meant it -- Schopenhauer

especially. What would Schopenhauer have said about nuclear weapons? My guess is he'd be all for them ; he was a serious

man, an honorable man. But the rest -- they never meant it, and only talked so grandly against Life because they knew there was no alternative, no way to end the world. When the cat's away, the mice will ham it up. But since 1945, they self-censored themselves, to the effect that no matter
how many Nihilist images you may borrow, you will do nothing truly dangerous -- nothing that could make anyone press that nuclear trigger. You can wear all the black you want; you can worship suicide -- individual suicide, that is -- ; you can write songs about how life sucks; but you can't
mean it. Of course, not everybody's in on the double-talk scam. Those dangerous anti-lifers are still floating around, infecting those naive enough to listen to them. Cobain and Courtney are the classic example: both wore the rags, the scowls, the sulk; both screamed and ranted against life; but
only one of them ever believed it. He, poor bastard, took it all seriously; she, a much more typical representative of the treacherous 20th-century avant garde, knew better. When you think of poor Cobain now, it all seems inevitable, from the moment he chose that fatal name for his band.
"Nirvana": a quaint Buddhist term, taken by most American bohemians to mean something like "nice peaceful feeling." But that's not what it means at all: "nirvana" means, literally, "the blowing out of a candle." Extinction, a return to stillness. Poor Cobain! He took it seriously, and made
Nirvana for himself...and Courtney inherited, pouting all the way to the bank. They're all Courtneys, the ones who still live. Lou Reed, who invented black, wrote hymns to heroin as the best available anti-life, and provided the soundtrack for God knows how many thousands of adolescent
suicides, showed up recently at a memorial service for John "All You Need Is Love" Lennon. There he was, up on the stage with a dozen other rich old popstar vampires, singing treacly Beatles songs. They were praying, really -- praying to be granted another few years of life. "Choose life!"
That's a vulture's favorite proverb, and these wrinkled undead were singin' it with feeling. The ones who meant it, even a little -- they die. Sid died because he believed it; John Lydon said so, giggling at his dead comrade's stupidity in a recent interview. Sid, he explained, took all the punk
stuff seriously, and died of it. Lydon knew better, he explained from poolside. He looked over at his pool frequently during the interview -- scanning his LA mansion, just overjoyed with his good sense and deriving an especially piquant satisfaction from the thought of poor old Sid. Johnny

A vampire universe feels great -- to a vampire. But what

chose life. It's not hard to see why a popstar chooses life; his life comes at the expense of everyone else's.

about the rest of us, the nobodies? The feeding cows? What do we have to lose? There's always
been a lot of preaching against suicide. to choose non-life frightens the ruling vampires In some way, any choice .

Their favorite argument is, of course, guilt: "Think of the pain you leave behind you!" I remember a scraggly hippie mystic on Sproul denouncing suicide as "a slap in the face to everybody who loves you," and adding, "Even the worst bum on Skid Row has somebody who loves him." It
impressed me at the time; I thought he must have had some special knowledge of the affectional backgrounds of bums which I didn't possess. It was several years before I knew for certain that he was simply preaching, another damn Christian-without-Christ babbling the ruling vampires'

cliches. Suicide is unpatriotic; that's why it offends them. It deprives the vampires of a jugular to sip.
How can you not like this boneyard? This is the finest torture-chamber in the universe! How
dare you opt out of it! But since 1945, the vampire lords have had another, much stronger reason to fear the idea of suicide: individual suicide is only Nuclear
Winter writ small. Nuclear Winter is universal Nirvana. And that makes it utterly different
from individual suicide -- because there will be no survivors to mourn and grieve. There will be
no mourning and grief at all, ever again. Thus nuclear winter offers a true cure for suffering --

You're gonnna go anyway

which the sermons against suicide do not. OK; you decide not to kill yourself because it will hurt your parents, friends, pit bull, roommates, chess club pals, whatever. So what? , and in some way much more

And when you do, that suffering of the survivors will begin
agonizing than a bullet to the head: cancer, car wreck, genetic glitch, rafting accident, heart valve pop. , the ten

It's not just horrible -- it's silly. Just plain dumb

billionth wail of grief heard on Earth. And the grieving die in their turn, and when they go another wail sets up.... . Squint at it -- draw your head

back just a little and squint at it -- and it's truly "laughable, man": these creatures whose life consists of a ride down a conveyor belt towards
 a meat grinder, making a continual wail of surprise as another one goes over the edge. Every one a surprise. "Oh! He

went in! How could this happen?" "Ah, she fell! My God!" Well Duh. What'd you expect? That's what suffering is: going over the edge one at a time. The experience of individual death while the world grinds on. What would happen in the Nuclear
Winter scenario is utterly different: all jump into the meatgrinder at once. No one is left to suffer or
mourn. when all die, blown out like a candle, there is no suffering.
When some die and some live, there is suffering; There is something else, something for

which we have no name. But one thing is clear: it is not suffering. "We shall not suffer, for we shall not be." It has been done on a small scale -- communal suicide, oblivion. The Old Believers; Jonestown; and
some of the tribes hunted for sport by the Europeans. The Carib -- the last Carib jumped off a cliff rather than be taken. As did the last few bands of Tasmanians. They saw the suffering of their children ahead, and took the kids with them over the cliff. Are they were right. Imagine the
prospects of a Tasmanian child in the hands of the British colonists who had killed its parents for sport. Life as a souvenir, mascot, bum-boy or -girl, stuffed exhibit in a museum… for what? So that in ten generations, one of its partial descendants might live to collect a guilt-dole from the
Australian government? So that in another two generations, an even more attenuated descendant could pen a jargon-stuffed "indictment" of the crime, hoping for publication and a tenure-track affirmative-action job at a new regional polytech? The cliff-edge has more dignity and sense.

We have given other species the gift of oblivion, sent them over the cliff : the Mammoth, the Moa Eagle, the Tasmanian Wolf...all the finest
species, really, are going or gone. A hundred years from now, when all the big cats are gone, no one will understand how we thought the life of a hundred million Tamils worth that of even one Bengal Tiger. Life on earth hit its peak during the Ice Ages, and we are now killing off the few
species from that period who survived our first coup, ten thousand years ago. We have very little to lose, destroying the remaining fauna, now that the best is gone. The lives of all the horrible humans in Houston are not worth even one Columbia Mammoth. So we have guides sent ahead of

us into oblivion. When we pull the plug, press the button, drop the nuclear dime on ourselves, we will
suffer no more than the Mammoth suffers. We owe them; let's join them. We can make our first
act in the afterlife a formal apology to the Tasmanian Wolf, the Cave Bear, the Mammoth. But at least their suffering is over now. The Mammoths' suffering ended when the last calf, watching its mother being hacked

the suffering of all Mammoths

to death by ugly apes wearing caribou skins, trumpeted in shock and pain and tried to run -- and was hacked to death, screaming, then silent. And when its life went out -- the blowing out of a candle --

ceased, gave way to Nirvana where they wait for us now

something entirely different: . The Nirvana of the Mammoths, . But we have to be sure of one thing: that it will be

. The thought of a post-nuke world of wretched survivors is the

oblivion, death for all, rather than another partial slaughter. That would be worse even than the present

only real argument against detonation now. That's why the notion of Nuclear Winter is crucial.
If, say, a nuclear war killed even five billion of us, it would leave a billion sobbing, burned
survivors; and their offspring, mutant children limping across a boneyard ; and hundreds of billions of mammals, birds, and reptiles mourning

This is not Nirvana. Agreed. But that argument has been specious since the early 1980s
their kin. , when a team of

a major nuclear war would create a cloud of ash which would blot
physicists including that annoying geek Carl Sagan suggested that

out the sun for decades, blocking 99% of solar energy for a period of three to 12 months,
and thus extinguishing the photosynthetic engine which runs this big green torture
chamber called Earth . Here's their scenario: "Nuclear explosions will set off firestorms in the cities and surrounding forest areas. The small particles of soot are carried high into the atmosphere. The smoke will block the sun's light for weeks

or months. The land temperatures would fall below freezing. This combination of reduced temperatures and reduced light levels would have catastrophic ecological consequences. Average light levels would be below the minimum required for photosynthesis during the first 30-40 days after
the explosion and most fresh water would be frozen. '...the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded.' This effect is similar to what may have killed the dinosaurs." You know you feel the pull of it already. How much of our alleged "fear" of nuclear war is longing --
lust for Nirvana, disguising itself as pious horror? In Berkeley, avid hobbyists went around spraypainting the sidewalks in a circle a half-mile around the Campanile, showing the range of "total destruction" from a nuclear blast over the campus. I remember seeing one of them at work -- a
skinny hippie who would've looked good in a pilgrim hat and black coat -- laboring over his stencil, biting his lip in what I then took for concentration but now seems more like...pleasure. He was having The Dream: that bomb-bay camera shot of a dull static city suddenly jolted by the first
blast, a hemisphere of fire, a half-sun umbrella over downtown...then the upwash, the stalk which will flatten out in the upper air to form the toadstool cap...now cut to houses sucked inward to fuel the blast, no sooner vacuumed toward the epicenter than the full blast whipsaws them
outwards, roofs and cars and windows blown out by the great breath...and then, the post-coital smoke: pillars of it, from the few ruins which have enough energy left to burn. A city of chimneys and rubble. The Japanese, the only ones to have felt the breath of oblivion, are more honest than
we in acknowledging its beauty. No Anime is complete without at least one annihilation of a city by atomic weapons. In Akira you get a bonus: you get to see Neo-Tokyo destroyed not once but twice by mushroom cloud. There is no pretense, in Akira, that this is a bad thing; it is
magnificent, a consummation devoutly to be wished. If any of what I am saying has truth, then one would expect the ruling committees to work for the destruction of all nuclear weapons, so that they can rule with the same security as the thousands of other cruel tribal elites, pre-1945. And in
fact, that's what's happening now, focused on the neutralization of the nukes in the former USSR. Nuclear Winter will occur only if there is a major detonation -- a real, Cold-War style genocidal war. It cannot be accomplished by small-scale nuclear war: the erasure of a city here or there, a
few missile bases melted, the boiling of a sea or two in order to cook a few enemy subs. It must be the US-USSR scenario. Now you see why so many artists who were in love with little wars feared that one so much. A small war is material for a million artists and writers and songsters. Take
Vietnam: they can't shut up about it. It was the classic evil little war: a lot of killing in a fecund jungle, with no chance at all of ending the world. But none of the artists who loved little wars wanted to endorse The Big One; that was bad for business. That meant canceling the whole season.
They sang, painted, wrote, and tap-danced down the streets against it. Or thought they were doing so; because their depictions of that sacred mushroom cloud were often beautiful in spite of the artist's conscious intention. The lust for Nirvana shone from them, unnoticed as the porn aspect of
a nineteenth-century nude statue. Now there's a push, a big one, encompassing all the bought artists, the spooks, the rich, the governments, to buy up and destroy the Russian nukes. It's not like they're against nukes; the West has no intention of giving them up. They like to play with them,
like suburban dads who clean their guns on the weekend. But they don't want the world to end. So they will do anything to buy up the Russian nukes. All those movies in the past ten years about Russian nukes "falling into the wrong hands" were cover for the real process, which involved

For the first time in the

those nukes falling into the wrongest hands of all: the people who plan to DESTROY those nukes, people who like this world and want it to continue. For the first time in history, we can vote against the incumbent.

history of organic life -- the first time in over three billion years of "birth and copulation and
death" -- the pitiful animals crawling over the surface of the planet have the power to choose to
exist or to cease to exist. Imagine a prisoner condemned to be tortured to death, huddling in a cell
waiting for the next call to the bloody floor where his teeth are extracted, one by one. One day
someone slips a knife under the door of his cell. For the first time, he has the option of ending a
life of pain. And, like a true slave, he throws the knife away in horror, hands it over to the guards
so that he may continue to be dragged out and tortured at their pleasure. We are not the only
lives at stake. We have a duty to the dead-and to the unborn . Life reached its peak at the edge of the glaciers; when they receded, we, ugly tropical scavengers,

They are waiting for us: the mammoths

killed all the great mammals who had walked the colder and grander world. and , the last Siberian Tiger and the Tasmanian Wolf -- and the Tasmanians, the Caribs,

the other billions of lives we can erase and avenge and join, with a single step, over the cliff, a
few seconds of rushing air, and then Nirvana.
Human life is not worth living; it’s an endless process of unfulfilled wants

Troxell 11 explains Schopenhauer

(Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). 2011. The Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy. Mary Troxell, Professor of Philosophy At Boston College.
Note: Troxell is explaining Schopenhauer’s position on existence.)

Because the
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the most well known feature of his philosophy, and he is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism. Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision follows from his account of the inner nature of the world as aimless blind striving.

will has no goal or purpose, the will’s satisfaction is impossible. The will objectifies itself in a
hierarchy of gradations from inorganic to organic life, and every grade of objectification of the
will, is marked by insatiable striving
from gravity to animal motion, . In addition, every force of nature and every organic form of nature participates in a struggle to seize matter from other forces or organisms.

Thus existence is marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction. The attainment of a goal or
desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment
results in suffering. Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of
this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering. This conclusion holds for all of nature, including inanimate natures, insofar as they are at

suffering is more conspicuous in the life of human beings because of their intellectual
essence will. However,

capacities. Rather than serving as a relief from suffering, the intellect of human beings brings
home their suffering with greater clarity and consciousness. Even with the use of reason, human
beings can in no way alter the degree of misery we experience; indeed, reason only magnifies the
degree to which we suffer. Thus all the ordinary pursuits of mankind are not only fruitless but
also illusory insofar as they are oriented toward satisfying an insatiable, blind will.

The Universe Sucks; expert consensus

Adams, 1995:
Douglas Adams (writer, once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.” Hitchhiker's Trilogy
(Book 2). Del Rey publishing (September 27, 1995).

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and
been widely regarded as a bad move.

Nonexistence Is Always Better Than Existence; lexical asymmetry

Benatar, 1997:
<Benatar, David (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa). “Why It is Better Never to Come Into
Existence.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 3, July 1997. >

There is a common assumption in the literature about future possible people that, all things being equal, one does no wrong by
bringing into existence people whose lives will be good on balance. This assumption rests on another, namely that being brought
into existence (with decent life prospects) is a benefit (even though not being born is not a harm). All this is assumed without
argument. I wish to argue that the underlying assumption is erroneous. Being brought into existence is not a
benefit but always a harm. Many people will find this deeply unsettling claim to be counter-intuitive and will wish to
dismiss it. For this reason, I propose not only to defend the claim, but also to suggest why people might be resistant to it. As a matter
of empirical fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to think of the millions who live a life of
poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most
of us who do nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often
the suffering is excruciating, even
if it is only in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of frailty. We all face
death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child: pain,
disappointment, anxiety, grief and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take
or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. (Only the prematurely deceased are spared some
but not the last.) None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm. Of course I have not told the whole
story. Not only bad things but also good things happen only to those who exist. Pleasures, joys, and satisfaction can be had only by
existers. Thus, the cheerful will say, we must weigh up the pleasures of life against the evils. As long as the former outweigh the
latter, the life is worth living. Coming into being with such a life is, on this view, a benefit. However, this conclusion does not follow.
This is because there is a crucial difference between harms and benefits which makes the advantages of existence over non-existence
hollow but the disadvantages real. Consider pains and pleasures as exemplars of harms and benefits. It is uncontroversial to say
that: 1) the presence of pain is bad and that 2) the presence of pleasure is good. However, such a symmetrical evaluation does not
apply to the absence of pain and pleasure, for: 3) the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not
enjoyed by anyone, whereas 4) the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody
for whom this absence is a deprivation. My view about the asymmetry between 3) and 4) is widely shared. A
number of reasons can be advanced to support this. First, this view is the best explanation for the commonly
held view that while there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, there
is no duty to bring happy people into being. In other words, the reason why we think that there is a duty not to
bring suffering people into existence is that the presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and
the absence of the suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). In contrast to
this, we think that there is no duty to bring happy people into existence because, while their pleasure would be good,
its absence would not be bad (given that there would be nobody who would be deprived of it).

We have a status quo bias that causes us to preserve our current conditions

Pearce, 2009:
David Pearce (Transhumanist vegan British philosopher; Pearce has spoken at Oxford and Harvard and been published in The Economist and
BBC Radio. In 1998, Pearce cofounded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom.) “Reprogramming Predators.” (2009). JDN.
http://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

The cruelties of the living world are "natural", therefore worth conserving: a price worth paying for the
glories of Nature. This is the way things ought to be, because this is the way things have always been. Status quo b ias
is endemic. Thus it simply doesn't seem to have occurred to some otherwise smart thinkers
in slave-owning societies that slavery could be morally wrong. Had the case for universal human freedom
been put to them, the idea might well have seemed as silly as does questioning the inviolability of the food-chain at present. Potentially, status
quo bias can take benign guises too. If
we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing
suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable - no more seriously
conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today. Of course the extent of our status quo bias shouldn't be exaggerated. There is
something self-intimatingly wrong with one's own intense pain while it lasts; and to a greater or lesser degree, we can generalize this urgent sense
of wrongness to other suffering beings with whom we identify. But
since most humans aren't in agony most of the
time, any generalizations we make tend to be weak; and restricted in scope on account of our evolutionary descent.
 I/T (Omega Point)
Extinction is good; all life on earth will be resurrected in a simulation of total
perfection at the Omega Point

Tipler, 1989:
(The Omega Point As Eschaton: Answers To Pannenberg’s Questions For Scientists. Zygon: Journal Of Religion & Science. Vol. 24, Issue 2
(June 1989), pp. 217-253. Frank J. Tipler, Professor Of Physics/ Mathematics At The University Of Tulane)

Of course, it is a consequence of physics that although our civilization may continue forever, our
species Homo sapiens must inevitably
become extinct, just as every individual human being must inevitably also die. For as the Omega Point is approached, the
temperature will approach infinity everywhere in the universe, and it is impossible for our type of life to survive in
that environment.9 But the death of Homo sapiens is an evil (beyond the death of the human
individuals) only for a racist value system. What is humanly important is the fact we think and feel, not the
particular bodily form which clothes the human personality. Just as within Homo sapiens a person is a person independent of sex or race, so
also an intelligent being is a person regardless of whether that individual is a member of the species Homo sapiens. Currently people of non-
European descent have a higher birthrate than people of European descent, and so the percentage of Homo sapiens which is of European descent
is decreasing. The human race is now changing color. In my own value system, this color change is morally neutral; what is important is the
overall condition of our civilization: are we advancing in knowledge and wisdom? Certainly our scientific knowledge is greater than it was a
century ago, and although there have been a great many steps backward during this century, I nevertheless think we are wiser than our great
grandparents. If the Omega Point exists, this advance will continue without limit into the Omega Point. Our species is
an intermediate step in the infinitely long temporal Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1936) that comprises the whole of life in
spacetime. An essential step, but still only a step. In fact, it is a logically necessary consequence of eternal progress that our
species become extinct! For we are finite beings; we have definite limits. Our brains can code only so much information, and
we can understand only rather simple arguments. If the ascent of Life into the Omega Point is to occur, one day the
most advanced minds must be non-Homo sapiens. The heirs of our civilization must be another species, and their
heirs yet another, ad infinitum into the Omega Point. We must die—as individuals, as a species—in order that our
civilization might live. But the contributions to civilization which we make as individuals will survive our individual deaths. Judging from
the rapid advance of computers at present, I would guess that the
next stage of intelligent life would be quite literally
information-processing machines. At the present rate, computers will reach the human level in information-processing and integration
ability probably within a century, certainly within a thousand years. Many find the assurance of the immortality of life as a whole cold comfort
for their death as individuals. They feel that a truly good God would make some provision for individual life after death also. What the Christian
hopes for in eternal life has been ably expressed by Pannenberg: the life that awakens in the resurrection of the dead is the same as the life we
now lead on earth. However, it is our present life as God sees it from his eternal present. Therefore, it will be completely different from the way
we now experience it. Yet, nothing happens in the resurrection of the dead except that which already constitutes the eternal depth of time now and
which is already present for God's eyes—for his creative view! (Pannenberg 1970,80) We shall, so to speak, live again in the mind of
God. But recall my discussion of Thomist aeternitas. There I pointed out that all the information contained in the whole of human
history, including every detail of every human life, will be available for analysis by the collectivity of life in the far
future. In principle at least (again ignoring the difficulty of extracting the relevant information from the overall background noise), it is
possible for life in the far future to construct, using this information, an exceedingly accurate simulation of these
past lives: in fact, this simulation is just what a sufficiently close scrutiny of our present lives by the Omega Point would amount to. And I
have also pointed out that a sufficiently perfect simulation of a living being would be alive! Whether the Omega Point would
choose to use His/Her power to do this simulation, I cannot say. But it seems the physical capability to carry out the scrutiny would be there.10
Furthermore, the drive for total knowledge—which life in the future must seek if it is to survive at all, and which will be achieved only at
the Omega Point—would seem to require that such an analysis of the past, and hence such a simulation, would be
carried out. If so, then the resurrection of the dead in Pannenberg's sense would seem inevitable in the eschaton (last
times). I should emphasize that this simulation of people that have lived in the past need not be limited to just repeating the past. Once a
simulation of a person and his or her world has been formed in a computer of sufficient capacity, the simulated
person can be allowed to develop further—to think and feel things that the long-dead original person being
simulated never felt and thought. It is not even necessary for any of the past to be repeated. The Omega Point11 could simply
begin the simulation with the brain memory of the dead person as it was at the instant of death (or, say, ten years before or
twenty minutes before) implanted in the simulated body of the dead person, the body being as it was at age twenty (or any
other age). This body and memory collection could be set in any simulated background environment the Omega Point
wished: a simulated world indistinguishable from the long-extinct society and physical universe of the revived dead person; or even a world
that never existed, but one as close as logically possible to the ideal fantasy world of the resurrected dead person. Fur-
thermore, all possible combinations of resurrected dead can be placed in the same simulation and allowed to interact.
For example, the reader could be placed in a simulation with all of his or her ancestors and descendents, each at whatever age (physical and
mental, separately) the Omega Point pleases. The Omega Point itself could interact— speak, for instance—with His/Her simulated creatures, who
could learn about Him/Her, about the world outside the simulation, and about other simulations, from Him/Her. The simulated body
could be one that has been vastly improved over the one we currently have; the laws of the simulated world could be modified to prevent a
second physical death. Borrowing the terminology of Paul, we can call the simulated, improved, and undying body a 'spiritual body', for it will be
of the same 'stuff' as the human mind now is: a 'thought inside a mind' (in Aristotelian language, 'a form inside a form'; in computer language, a
'virtual machine inside a machine'). The spiritual body is thus just the present body (with improvements!) at a higher level of implementation.12
With this phrasing, Paul's description is completely accurate: "So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in
incorruption: It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15:42-44). Only as a spiritual body, only as a computer simulation, is resurrection possible without a
second death: our current bodies, implemented in matter, could not possibly survive the extreme heat near the final
singularity. Again, Paul's words are descriptive: "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50). Nevertheless, it is
appropriate to regard computer simulation resurrection as being a "resurrection of the flesh" (in the words of the Apostles' Creed). For a
simulated person would observe herself to be as real, and as having a body as solid as the body we currently observe
ourselves to have. There would be nothing 'ghostly' about the simulated body, and nothing insubstantial about the simulated world in which
the simulated body found itself. In the words of Tertullian, the simulated body would be "this flesh, suffused with blood, built up with bones,
interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins, [a flesh] which .. . [is] ... undoubtedly human" (De Came Christi, 5; trans. by Pagels 1979,4).
Although computer simulation resurrection overcomes the physical barriers to eternal life of individual human beings, there remains a logical
problem, namely, the finiteness of the human memory. The human brain can store only about 10,F bits (this corresponds to roughly a thousand
subjective years of life), and once this memory space is exhausted we can grow no more (Barrow and Tipler 1986,136). Thus it is not clear that
the undying resurrected life is appropriately regarded as 'eternal'. There are several options: the Omega Point could permit us to merge our
individual personalities—upload our personalities out of the simulation into a higher level of implementation—into the universal mind 13 which is
His/Hers (increasing our memory storage capacity indefinitely beyond 1015 bits would amount to the same thing). Alternatively, the Omega
Point could guide us to a 'perfection' of our finite natures, whatever 'perfection' means! Depending on the definition, there could be
many perfections. With sufficient computer power, it should be possible to calculate what a human action would result in without the simulation
actually experiencing the action, so the Omega Point would be able to advise us on possible perfections without our having
to go through the trial-and-error procedure characteristic of this life. If more than one simulation of the same individual is made,
then all of these options could be realized simultaneously. Once an individual is 'perfected', the memory of this perfect individual could be
recorded permanently—preserved all the way into the Omega Point in its transcendence. The errors and evil committed by the imperfect
individual could be erased from the universal mind (or also permanently recorded). The perfected individual personality would be truly eternal;
she would exist for all future time. Furthermore, when the perfected personality reached the Omega Point in its transcendence,
it would become eternal in the sense of being beyond time, being truly one with God. The natural term to describe this per-
fected immortality is 'beatific vision'. If the resurrected life is going to be so wonderful,14 one might ask why we must go
through our current life, this 'vale of tears', at all. Why not start life at the resurrection? The answer was given in the third
and fourth sections: our current life is logically necessary; simulations indistinguishable from ourselves have to go through it. It is logically
impossible for the Omega Point to rescue us. Even omnipotence is limited by logic. This is the natural resolution to the Problem of Evil. In his
On the Immortality of the Soul, David Hume raised the following objection to the idea of a general resurrection of the dead: "How to dispose of
the infinite number of posthumous existences ought also to embarrass the religious theory" (Hume [1755] in Flew 1964, 187). Hume summarized
the argument in a later interview with the famous biographer James Boswell: [Hume] added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that he should
exist forever. That immortality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities;
that a great proportion dies in infancy before being possessed of reason; yet all these must be immortal; that a Porter who gets drunk by ten
o'clock with gin must be immortal; that the trash of every age must be preserved, and that new Universes must be created to contain such infinite
numbers. (Hume [1776] 1977, 77) The ever-growing numbers of people whom Hume regarded as trash nevertheless could be preserved forever in
our single finite (classical) universe if computer capacity is created fast enough. By looking more carefully at the calculations summarized in the
second section of this paper, one sees that they also show it is physically possible to save forever a certain constant percentage of the information
processed at a given universal time. Thus, the computer capacity will be there to preserve even drunken porters (and perfected drunken porters),
provided only that the Omega Point waits long enough before resurrecting them. Even though the computer capacity required to simulate
perfectly is exponentially related to the complexity of entity simulated, it is physically possible to resurrect an actual infinity of
individuals between now and the Omega Point—even assuming the complexity of the average individual diverges as the Omega Point
is approached—and guide then all into perfection. Total perfection of all would be achieved at the instant of the Omega
Point.15
 Schopenhauer
Life is net suffering—the badness of pain outweighs the goodness of pleasure
Schopenhauer 8
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher. Studies In Pessimism. Ebooks@Adelaide, 1908.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/index.html

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its
aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the
world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of
mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something
exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.
I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just
what is positive; it makes its own existence felt. Leibnitz is particularly concerned to defend this absurdity; and he seeks to strengthen his position
by using a palpable and paltry sophism.1 It is the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire
fulfilled, some state of pain brought to an end.

1 Translator’s Note , cf. Thèod , §153.— Leibnitz argued that evil is a negative quality —i.e ., the absence of good; and that its active and
seemingly positive character is an incidental and not an essential part of its nature. Cold, he said, is only the absence of the power of heat, and the
active power of expansion in freezing water is an incidental and not an essential part of the nature of cold. The fact is, that the power of expansion
in freezing water is really an increase of repulsion amongst its molecules; and Schopenhauer is quite right in calling the whole argument a
sophism.]

This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we
expected, and pain very much more painful.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even
balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let
him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people
who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one.
But what an awful fate this means for [hu]mankind as a whole!
 Nuclear War
Suffering is inevitable; nuclear war means fast timeframe extinction which solves
Dolan 02
(John Dolan, PhD in the writing of the Marquis de Sade from UC Berkeley, professor and essayist, “The Case for Nuclear Winter,” April 21,
2002, http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6495&IBLOCK_ID=35)

There are no nihilists any more. That fact is the most damning evidence of a great betrayal which has happened in the last half century. In 1945 the Bomb gave us the option of quitting
, when

this dirty, rigged game of Darwinian strip poker , we learned that not one of the anti-life artists meant what they said. In a few years, all the anti-life art of the early twentieth century vanished.

They saw that

The artists who had made their careers documenting the horrors of life on earth and denouncing the cycle of animal existence yelped away like scared puppies the moment a real chance to end the suffering appeared.

magnificent mushroom cloud and instead of falling down to worship it, they ran to the nearest church or Christian Science Reading Room

ran to hug the knees of GAIA, the bloody mother.

or Socialist meeting hall. After convincing thousands of adolescents to kill themselves in the name of holy despair, these sleazy careerists

They Chose Life -- the swine! Go ahead, pick a culture, any culture! Any culture you can name, during any historical period you choose, will furnish hundreds of examples of anti-life rhetoric which was taken very, very seriously

-- up until the moment when it actually meant something. Take, say, Europe in the nineteenth century, that cheery and bustling period. OK; here's its greatest philosopher on the subject: "If you imagine...the sum total of distress, pain and suffering which the sun shines upon, you will be
forced to admit that it would have been better if the surface of the earth were still as crystalline as that of the moon....For the world is Hell, and men are on the one had the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it." That was Schopenhauer, telling the Germans in their bristly abstract

way what Darwin told the English in their fussier, more detailed language: there is no point but suffering. There is no hidden redemptive
meaning in any of this. It's just an unfortunate industrial accident, organic life . Both Schopenhauer and Darwin resorted to animal

examples to convey the horror which summed up the world. They were trying to overcome the popular heresy that somehow, it all must "balance out" somehow. It doesn't, because it was never designed to do so: "compare the pleasure of an animal engaged in eating another animal with the
pain of the animal being eaten." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Schopenhauer and Darwin were in play in the higher European circles, mixing and strengthening each other. It was the bravest moment in the history of our species; something truly dangerous, a final anti-life
epiphany, seemed ready to happen. This is what poor sweet Nietzsche meant with his heartbreaking faith in "the men who are coming." Nihilism's one great weakness was that it had always been an elite cult, not considered transmissible to the masses. This was in fact why Buddhism was
replaced by a mindless demotic cult like Hinduism in India: Nirvana was too cold a doctrine for peasants who equated fecundity with happiness. But in the early twentieth century, a demographic anomaly appeared: the elite was big, and getting bigger. They brought their cult with them; art
began serving as the propaganda wing of Nihilism. What we call "Modernism" was actually a multimedia offensive which was beginning to make Nihilism palatable to the masses. The fuzzy "Modern/Postmodern" distinction is best seen as a change in popular religion: from 1910-1945, art
did an honorable job of preparing the masses to abandon their attachment to the biosphere; from 1945 to the present, art borrows Nihilist images, diction and narrative without the least intention of employing them to free us from attachment to organic life. The echoes of that dangerous early

twentieth-century art are still audible: "I've always been surprised by everyone's going on living." Birth, and copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks: Birth,

and copulation, and death. I've been born, and once is enough. You don't remember, but I remember, Once is enough. It's sad for the dog. He lives only because he was born, just like me.... So they sang. And many believed them. Maybe a few of them really meant it -- Schopenhauer

especially. What would Schopenhauer have said about nuclear weapons? My guess is he'd be all for them ; he was a serious

man, an honorable man. But the rest -- they never meant it, and only talked so grandly against Life because they knew there was no alternative, no way to end the world. When the cat's away, the mice will ham it up. But since 1945, they self-censored themselves, to the effect that no matter
how many Nihilist images you may borrow, you will do nothing truly dangerous -- nothing that could make anyone press that nuclear trigger. You can wear all the black you want; you can worship suicide -- individual suicide, that is -- ; you can write songs about how life sucks; but you can't
mean it. Of course, not everybody's in on the double-talk scam. Those dangerous anti-lifers are still floating around, infecting those naive enough to listen to them. Cobain and Courtney are the classic example: both wore the rags, the scowls, the sulk; both screamed and ranted against life; but
only one of them ever believed it. He, poor bastard, took it all seriously; she, a much more typical representative of the treacherous 20th-century avant garde, knew better. When you think of poor Cobain now, it all seems inevitable, from the moment he chose that fatal name for his band.
"Nirvana": a quaint Buddhist term, taken by most American bohemians to mean something like "nice peaceful feeling." But that's not what it means at all: "nirvana" means, literally, "the blowing out of a candle." Extinction, a return to stillness. Poor Cobain! He took it seriously, and made
Nirvana for himself...and Courtney inherited, pouting all the way to the bank. They're all Courtneys, the ones who still live. Lou Reed, who invented black, wrote hymns to heroin as the best available anti-life, and provided the soundtrack for God knows how many thousands of adolescent
suicides, showed up recently at a memorial service for John "All You Need Is Love" Lennon. There he was, up on the stage with a dozen other rich old popstar vampires, singing treacly Beatles songs. They were praying, really -- praying to be granted another few years of life. "Choose life!"
That's a vulture's favorite proverb, and these wrinkled undead were singin' it with feeling. The ones who meant it, even a little -- they die. Sid died because he believed it; John Lydon said so, giggling at his dead comrade's stupidity in a recent interview. Sid, he explained, took all the punk
stuff seriously, and died of it. Lydon knew better, he explained from poolside. He looked over at his pool frequently during the interview -- scanning his LA mansion, just overjoyed with his good sense and deriving an especially piquant satisfaction from the thought of poor old Sid. Johnny

A vampire universe feels great -- to a vampire. But what

chose life. It's not hard to see why a popstar chooses life; his life comes at the expense of everyone else's.

about the rest of us, the nobodies? The feeding cows? What do we have to lose? There's always
been a lot of preaching against suicide. to choose non-life frightens the ruling vampires In some way, any choice .

Their favorite argument is, of course, guilt: "Think of the pain you leave behind you!" I remember a scraggly hippie mystic on Sproul denouncing suicide as "a slap in the face to everybody who loves you," and adding, "Even the worst bum on Skid Row has somebody who loves him." It
impressed me at the time; I thought he must have had some special knowledge of the affectional backgrounds of bums which I didn't possess. It was several years before I knew for certain that he was simply preaching, another damn Christian-without-Christ babbling the ruling vampires'

cliches. Suicide is unpatriotic; that's why it offends them. It deprives the vampires of a jugular to sip.
How can you not like this boneyard? This is the finest torture-chamber in the universe! How
dare you opt out of it! But since 1945, the vampire lords have had another, much stronger reason to fear the idea of suicide: individual suicide is only Nuclear
Winter writ small. Nuclear Winter is universal Nirvana. And that makes it utterly different
from individual suicide -- because there will be no survivors to mourn and grieve. There will be
no mourning and grief at all, ever again. Thus nuclear winter offers a true cure for suffering --

You're gonnna go anyway

which the sermons against suicide do not. OK; you decide not to kill yourself because it will hurt your parents, friends, pit bull, roommates, chess club pals, whatever. So what? , and in some way much more

And when you do, that suffering of the survivors will begin
agonizing than a bullet to the head: cancer, car wreck, genetic glitch, rafting accident, heart valve pop. , the ten

It's not just horrible -- it's silly. Just plain dumb

billionth wail of grief heard on Earth. And the grieving die in their turn, and when they go another wail sets up.... . Squint at it -- draw your head

back just a little and squint at it -- and it's truly "laughable, man": these creatures whose life consists of a ride down a conveyor belt towards
a meat grinder, making a continual wail of surprise as another one goes over the edge. Every one a surprise. "Oh! He

went in! How could this happen?" "Ah, she fell! My God!" Well Duh. What'd you expect? That's what suffering is: going over the edge one at a time. The experience of individual death while the world grinds on. What would happen in the Nuclear
 Winter scenario is utterly different: all jump into the meatgrinder at once. No one is left to suffer or
mourn. when all die, blown out like a candle, there is no suffering.
When some die and some live, there is suffering; There is something else, something for

which we have no name. But one thing is clear: it is not suffering. "We shall not suffer, for we shall not be." It has been done on a small scale -- communal suicide, oblivion. The Old Believers; Jonestown; and
some of the tribes hunted for sport by the Europeans. The Carib -- the last Carib jumped off a cliff rather than be taken. As did the last few bands of Tasmanians. They saw the suffering of their children ahead, and took the kids with them over the cliff. Are they were right. Imagine the
prospects of a Tasmanian child in the hands of the British colonists who had killed its parents for sport. Life as a souvenir, mascot, bum-boy or -girl, stuffed exhibit in a museum… for what? So that in ten generations, one of its partial descendants might live to collect a guilt-dole from the
Australian government? So that in another two generations, an even more attenuated descendant could pen a jargon-stuffed "indictment" of the crime, hoping for publication and a tenure-track affirmative-action job at a new regional polytech? The cliff-edge has more dignity and sense.

We have given other species the gift of oblivion, sent them over the cliff : the Mammoth, the Moa Eagle, the Tasmanian Wolf...all the finest
species, really, are going or gone. A hundred years from now, when all the big cats are gone, no one will understand how we thought the life of a hundred million Tamils worth that of even one Bengal Tiger. Life on earth hit its peak during the Ice Ages, and we are now killing off the few
species from that period who survived our first coup, ten thousand years ago. We have very little to lose, destroying the remaining fauna, now that the best is gone. The lives of all the horrible humans in Houston are not worth even one Columbia Mammoth. So we have guides sent ahead of

us into oblivion. When we pull the plug, press the button, drop the nuclear dime on ourselves, we will
suffer no more than the Mammoth suffers. We owe them; let's join them. We can make our first
act in the afterlife a formal apology to the Tasmanian Wolf, the Cave Bear, the Mammoth. But at least their suffering is over now. The Mammoths' suffering ended when the last calf, watching its mother being hacked

the suffering of all Mammoths

to death by ugly apes wearing caribou skins, trumpeted in shock and pain and tried to run -- and was hacked to death, screaming, then silent. And when its life went out -- the blowing out of a candle --

ceased, gave way to Nirvana where they wait for us now

something entirely different: . The Nirvana of the Mammoths, . But we have to be sure of one thing: that it will be

. The thought of a post-nuke world of wretched survivors is the

oblivion, death for all, rather than another partial slaughter. That would be worse even than the present

only real argument against detonation now. That's why the notion of Nuclear Winter is crucial.
If, say, a nuclear war killed even five billion of us, it would leave a billion sobbing, burned
survivors; and their offspring, mutant children limping across a boneyard ; and hundreds of billions of mammals, birds, and reptiles mourning

This is not Nirvana. Agreed. But that argument has been specious since the early 1980s
their kin. , when a team of

a major nuclear war would create a cloud of ash which would blot
physicists including that annoying geek Carl Sagan suggested that

out the sun for decades, blocking 99% of solar energy for a period of three to 12 months,
and thus extinguishing the photosynthetic engine which runs this big green torture
chamber called Earth . Here's their scenario: "Nuclear explosions will set off firestorms in the cities and surrounding forest areas. The small particles of soot are carried high into the atmosphere. The smoke will block the sun's light for weeks

or months. The land temperatures would fall below freezing. This combination of reduced temperatures and reduced light levels would have catastrophic ecological consequences. Average light levels would be below the minimum required for photosynthesis during the first 30-40 days after
the explosion and most fresh water would be frozen. '...the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded.' This effect is similar to what may have killed the dinosaurs." You know you feel the pull of it already. How much of our alleged "fear" of nuclear war is longing --
lust for Nirvana, disguising itself as pious horror? In Berkeley, avid hobbyists went around spraypainting the sidewalks in a circle a half-mile around the Campanile, showing the range of "total destruction" from a nuclear blast over the campus. I remember seeing one of them at work -- a
skinny hippie who would've looked good in a pilgrim hat and black coat -- laboring over his stencil, biting his lip in what I then took for concentration but now seems more like...pleasure. He was having The Dream: that bomb-bay camera shot of a dull static city suddenly jolted by the first
blast, a hemisphere of fire, a half-sun umbrella over downtown...then the upwash, the stalk which will flatten out in the upper air to form the toadstool cap...now cut to houses sucked inward to fuel the blast, no sooner vacuumed toward the epicenter than the full blast whipsaws them
outwards, roofs and cars and windows blown out by the great breath...and then, the post-coital smoke: pillars of it, from the few ruins which have enough energy left to burn. A city of chimneys and rubble. The Japanese, the only ones to have felt the breath of oblivion, are more honest than
we in acknowledging its beauty. No Anime is complete without at least one annihilation of a city by atomic weapons. In Akira you get a bonus: you get to see Neo-Tokyo destroyed not once but twice by mushroom cloud. There is no pretense, in Akira, that this is a bad thing; it is
magnificent, a consummation devoutly to be wished. If any of what I am saying has truth, then one would expect the ruling committees to work for the destruction of all nuclear weapons, so that they can rule with the same security as the thousands of other cruel tribal elites, pre-1945. And in
fact, that's what's happening now, focused on the neutralization of the nukes in the former USSR. Nuclear Winter will occur only if there is a major detonation -- a real, Cold-War style genocidal war. It cannot be accomplished by small-scale nuclear war: the erasure of a city here or there, a
few missile bases melted, the boiling of a sea or two in order to cook a few enemy subs. It must be the US-USSR scenario. Now you see why so many artists who were in love with little wars feared that one so much. A small war is material for a million artists and writers and songsters. Take
Vietnam: they can't shut up about it. It was the classic evil little war: a lot of killing in a fecund jungle, with no chance at all of ending the world. But none of the artists who loved little wars wanted to endorse The Big One; that was bad for business. That meant canceling the whole season.
They sang, painted, wrote, and tap-danced down the streets against it. Or thought they were doing so; because their depictions of that sacred mushroom cloud were often beautiful in spite of the artist's conscious intention. The lust for Nirvana shone from them, unnoticed as the porn aspect of
a nineteenth-century nude statue. Now there's a push, a big one, encompassing all the bought artists, the spooks, the rich, the governments, to buy up and destroy the Russian nukes. It's not like they're against nukes; the West has no intention of giving them up. They like to play with them,
like suburban dads who clean their guns on the weekend. But they don't want the world to end. So they will do anything to buy up the Russian nukes. All those movies in the past ten years about Russian nukes "falling into the wrong hands" were cover for the real process, which involved

For the first time in the

those nukes falling into the wrongest hands of all: the people who plan to DESTROY those nukes, people who like this world and want it to continue. For the first time in history, we can vote against the incumbent.

history of organic life -- the first time in over three billion years of "birth and copulation and
death" -- the pitiful animals crawling over the surface of the planet have the power to choose to
exist or to cease to exist. Imagine a prisoner condemned to be tortured to death, huddling in a cell
waiting for the next call to the bloody floor where his teeth are extracted, one by one. One day
someone slips a knife under the door of his cell. For the first time, he has the option of ending a
life of pain. And, like a true slave, he throws the knife away in horror, hands it over to the guards
so that he may continue to be dragged out and tortured at their pleasure. We are not the only
lives at stake. We have a duty to the dead-and to the unborn . Life reached its peak at the edge of the glaciers; when they receded, we, ugly tropical scavengers,

They are waiting for us: the mammoths

killed all the great mammals who had walked the colder and grander world. and , the last Siberian Tiger and the Tasmanian Wolf -- and the Tasmanians, the Caribs,

the other billions of lives we can erase and avenge and join, with a single step, over the cliff, a
few seconds of rushing air, and then Nirvana.
 True Detective
Every generation brought into existence increases suffering; the only ethical act is
ending the cycle
Benatar 15
David Benatar (Professor, University of Cape Town). “We Are Creatures That Should Not Exist.” The Critique. 15 July 2015. JDN.
http://www.thecritique.com/articles/we-are-creatures-that-should-not-exist-the-theory-of-anti-natalism/

Anti-natalism is the view that we ought to desist from procreating – that it is wrong to have children. There are
various routes to this conclusion. Some of these are what we might call “philanthropic” routes.
They emanate from concern for the humans who will be brought into existence if we do
procreate. According to these arguments life is filled with suffering and we ought not to create more of it.
Many pro-natalists balk at this suggestion and claim, at the very least, that the good in life outweighs the bad. They should pause to remember the

following. First, there is ample evidence from psychological research that (most) people are prone
to an optimism bias and are subject to other psychological traits that lead them to
underestimate the amount of bad in life [4]. We thus have excellent reason for distrusting most
people’s cheery assessments of how well their lives are going. Second, when we look closely
we notice just how much suffering there is. Consider, for example, the millions living in
poverty or subjected to violence or the threat thereof. Psychological distress and disturbance is widespread. Rates of
depression are high. Everybody suffers frustrations and bereavements. Life is often punctuated by
periods of ill-health. Some of these pass without enduring effects but others have long-term
sequelae. In poorer parts of the world, infectious diseases account for most of the burden of
disease. However, those in the developed world are not exempt from appalling diseases. They
suffer from strokes, from various degenerative diseases and from cancer. Third, even if one
thought that the best of human lives were good (enough), to procreate is to inflict, on the being you create,
unacceptable risks of grotesque suffering, even if that occurs at the end of life. For example, 40%
of men and 37% of women in Britain develop cancer at some point. Those are just terrible odds. To inflict
them on another person by bringing him into existence is reckless. Rust Cohle expresses this idea when he says
that he thinks “about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this … Force a life into this thresher …” [5] (His talk of souls
should obviously be taken metaphorically.) Another route to anti-natalism is via what I call a “misanthropic” argument. According to this
argument humans are a deeply flawed and a destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and
non-human animals. [6] If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that
species not be brought into existence. Although Rustin Cohle does not explicitly employ misanthropy in support of his anti-natalism, he is
certainly misanthropic. For example, he observes astutely that “people incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.” [7] His inferences from
misanthropy are not ones that an anti-natalist would necessarily endorse. For instance, in justifying his own (“righteous”) violence, he says that
the “world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” [8] Anti-natalists are not committed to any
particular views about when violence is and is not justified. Anti-natalism is not a complete
moral theory, but only a view about the morality of procreation. However, it is unlikely that vigilante violence, in
which Rustin Cohle and his partner Martin Hart engage, would pass muster if relevant moral considerations were applied. Nor does anti-
natalism imply that we should resort to alcoholism. Consumed to excess, alcohol tends to make life not better but rather
worse – both for those who imbibe it and for those who come in contact with the alcohol abusers. There is a common tendency to
regard anti-natalists as nihilists. Rust Cohle claims to be a nihilist. However, despite that claim, as Nic
Pizzolatto himself has noted, Rust is no nihilist [9]. Nihilists (about value) think that nothing
matters, but Rust and anti-natalists in general, think that that there is much that matters. It
matters , for example, whether people suffer. Anti-natalism is grounded in deep concern about value rather than in the
absence of any value. It is not only humans but also animals, or at least sentient animals that are harmed
by being brought into existence. The basic curse of consciousness applies to all sentient beings.
However, many anti-natalists focus on humans. The reasons vary. Among them is that (normal, healthy, adult) humans face an additional curse of
self-consciousness. For related reasons, most humans are also able, at least in principle, to reflect on whether they should create offspring.
However, it should also be said that many humans give shockingly little if any thought to their procreative actions. This may be because humans
are not as different from non-human animals as they would like to think. Like other animals, we are the products of evolution, with all the
biological drives that such products can be expected to have. Rust recognizes this obstacle when he says: “I
think the honorable
thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand
into extinction one last midnight. Brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” [10]
 Asymmetry
Non-existence is categorically better than existence; there is a moral asymmetry
regardless of balance of impacts
Benatar 97
<Benatar, David (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa). “Why It is Better Never to Come Into
Existence.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 3, July 1997. >

There is a common assumption in the literature about future possible people that, all things being equal, one does no wrong by bringing into
existence people whose lives will be good on balance. This assumption rests on another, namely that being brought into existence (with decent
life prospects) is a benefit (even though not being born is not a harm). All this is assumed without argument. I wish to argue that the underlying

assumption is erroneous. Being brought into existence is not a benefit but always a harm. Many people will find this
deeply unsettling claim to be counter-intuitive and will wish to dismiss it. For this reason, I propose not only to defend the claim, but also to
suggest why people might be resistant to it. As a matter of empirical fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to
think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be
spared these fates, but most of us who do nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often
the suffering is
excruciating, even if it is only in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of
frailty. We all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child:
pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or
how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. (Only the prematurely deceased are spared some but not the
last.) None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm. Of course I have not told the whole story. Not only bad
things but also good things happen only to those who exist. Pleasures, joys, and satisfaction can be had only by existers. Thus, the cheerful will
say, we must weigh up the pleasures of life against the evils. As long as the former outweigh the latter, the life is worth living. Coming into
being with such a life is, on this view, a benefit. However, this conclusion does not follow. This is because there is a crucial difference between
harms and benefits which makes the advantages of existence over non-existence hollow but the disadvantages real. Consider pains and pleasures
as exemplars of harms and benefits. It is uncontroversial to say that: 1) the presence of pain is bad and that 2) the presence of pleasure is good.
However, such a symmetrical evaluation does not apply to the absence of pain and pleasure, for: 3) the
absence of pain is good,
even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas 4) the absence of pleasure is not bad
unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation. My view about the asymmetry between
3) and 4) is widely shared. A number of reasons can be advanced to support this. First, this view is the best explanation for
the commonly held view that while there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into
existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being. In other words, the reason why we think that there is a
duty not to bring suffering people into existence is that the presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and
the absence of the suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). In contrast to this, we
think that there is no duty to bring happy people into existence because, while their pleasure would be good, its absence
would not be bad (given that there would be nobody who would be deprived of it).
 General—Tomasik

Humans will vastly increase galactic suffering through terraforming, simulations,

and suffering subroutines. The risk is high, and the impact is orders of magnitude
larger than human extinction.
Tomasik 16
Brian Tomasik (Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000 Hours charity of
Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics at
Swarthmore College). “Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering.” Foundational Research Institute. First written: Dec. 2011; Major updates: Dec.
2012, Mar. 2013, Oct. 2013; Last update: 5 Jul. 2016. JDN. https://foundational-research.org/risks-of-astronomical-future-suffering/

Some scenarios for future suffering

Even if humans do preserve control over the future of Earth-based life, there are still many ways
in which space colonization would multiply suffering. Following are some of them.

Spread of wild animals

Humans may colonize other planets, spreading suffering-filled animal life via
terraforming. Some humans may use their resources to seed life throughout the galaxy, which
some sadly consider a moral imperative.

Sentient simulations
Given astronomical computing power, post-humans may run various kinds of simulations. These
sims may include many copies of wild-animal life, most of which dies painfully shortly after
being born. For example, a superintelligence aiming to explore the distribution of
extraterrestrials of different sorts might run vast numbers of simulations of evolution on
various kinds of planets. Moreover, scientists might run even larger numbers of simulations of
organisms-that-might-have-been, exploring the space of minds. They may simulate decillions of
reinforcement learners that are sufficiently self-aware as to feel what we consider conscious pain.

Suffering subroutines

It could be that certain algorithms (say, reinforcement agents) are very useful in performing
complex machine-learning computations that need to be run at massive scale by advanced AI.
These subroutines might be sufficiently similar to the pain programs in our own brains that we
consider them to
actually suffer . But profit and power may take precedence over pity, so these
subroutines may be used widely throughout the AI's Matrioshka brains.
Black swans
The range of scenarios that we can imagine is limited, and many more possibilities may emerge
that we haven't thought of or maybe can't even comprehend.

Even a human-controlled future is likely to increase suffering

would give ~70% probability that if humans choose to colonize

If I had to make an estimate now, I

space, this will cause more suffering than it reduces on intrinsic grounds (ignoring compromise
considerations discussed later). Think about how space colonization could plausibly reduce suffering. For most of those mechanisms, there seem
to be counter-mechanisms that will increase suffering at least as much. The following sections parallel those above.

Spread of wild animals

David Pearce coined the phrase "cosmic rescue missions" in referring to the possibility of sending probes to other planets to alleviate the wild
extraterrestrial (ET) suffering they contain. This is a nice idea, but there are a few problems.

We haven't found any ETs yet, so it's not obvious there are vast numbers of them waiting to be saved from Darwinian misery. The specific kind
of conscious suffering known to Earth-bound animal life would not necessarily be found among the ETs. Most likely ETs would be bacteria,
plants, etc., and even if they're intelligent, they might be intelligent in the way robots are without having emotions of the sort that we care very
much about. (However, if they were very sophisticated, it would be relatively unlikely that we would not consider them conscious.) It's unclear
whether humanity would support such missions. Environmentalists would ask us to leave ET habitats alone. Others wouldn't want to spend the
energy on rescue missions unless they planned to mine resources from those planets. Contrast this with the possibilities for spreading wild-animal
suffering:

Humans may spread life to many planets (e.g., Mars via terraforming, other Earth-like planets
via directed panspermia). The number of planets that can support life may be appreciably bigger than the number that already have it.
(See the discussion of fl in the Drake equation.) Moreover, the percentage of planets that can be converted into

computers that could simulate wild-animal suffering might be close to 100%.

We already know that Earth-based life is sentient, unlike for ETs. Spreading biological life is slow and difficult, but disbursing small life-
producing capsules is easier than dispatching Hedonistic Imperative probes or berserker probes. Fortunately, humans might not support spread of
life that much, though some do. For terraforming, there are survival pressures to do it in the near term, but probably directed panspermia is a
bigger problem in the long term. Also, given that terraforming is estimated to require at least thousands of years, while human-level digital
intelligence should take at most a few hundred years to develop, terraforming may be a moot point from the perspective of catastrophic risks,
since digital intelligence doesn't need terraformed planets. While I noted that ETs are not guaranteed to be sentient, I do think it's moderately
likely that consciousness is fairly convergent among intelligent civilizations. This is based on (a) suggestions of convergent consciousness among
animals on Earth and (b) the general principle that consciousness seems to be useful for planning, manipulating images, self-modeling, etc. On
the other hand, maybe this reflects the paucity of my human imagination in conceiving of ways to be intelligent without consciousness.

Sentient simulations

It may be that biological suffering is a drop in the bucket compared with digital suffering.
The biosphere of a planet is less than Type I on the Kardashev scale; it uses a tiny sliver of all
the energy of its star. Intelligent computations by a Type II civilization can be many orders of
magnitude higher. So humans' sims could be even more troubling than their spreading of wild
animals.
 Enviro—Sittler
Environmental destruction is a decision rule—it solves nonhuman suffering
Sittler-Adamczewski 16
Thomas M. Sittler-Adamczewski (University of Oxford). “Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals.” Journal of Practical
Ethics. OXFORD UEHIRO PRIZE IN PRACTICAL ETHICS 2015-16. December 2016. JDN. http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-
vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/

Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an
argument that wild
animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians
should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority. I consider objections to the argument, and
discuss which courses of action are open to those who accept the argument.

Many consequentialists are vegetarian because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. Some consequentialists may be vegetarian
because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. More precisely then,
ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not
worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so
that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical consequentialist vegetarians1 believed that
animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing
their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.

I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, the suffering of wild
animals would dominate their concerns , and would plausibly lead them to support reducing
the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation.
SUFFERING IN NATURE, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could
plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often
romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of
suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common
in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing
them (Tomasik 2009). In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in
the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death,
blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions (Michigan Department of Natural Resources).
While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature
and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable
experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally
undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering (Tomasik 2013). Wild animals do experience significant
pleasure, for instance when they eat, play, have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity. One reason to suspect that on
average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive
strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve
or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For
instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will
die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range
cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.

A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the
global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken) (Tomasik 2014). I
restrict my count of wild animals to
those at least as complex as chicken or small fish, which vegetarians clearly believe do have
moral weight. Using studies of animal density in different biomes, Tomasik estimates
conservatively that there are at least [60 Billion] 6*10^10 land birds, [600 Billion] 10^11 land
mammals, and [60 trillion] 10^13 fish. Animals in each of these categories alone are several times more numerous than
livestock.

If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living, and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild
animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being
eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands
of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’ (Dawkins 1996) If they accept the premises so far, consistent
vegetarians
should focus on preventing the existence of as many wild animals as possible, since even a
small reduction in the global number of wild animals would outweigh the impact of ending all
livestock production. For example, they could reduce animal populations by sterilising them, or
by destroying highly dense animal habitats such as rainforests. It may even be the case that vegetarians
should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer
wild animals per square kilometre than other biomes such as forests (Matheny and Chan 2005, 585). Of course, to the extent that it is more
difficult to reduce wild animal populations than farm animal populations, vegetarians should focus more resources on the latter. But it seems
implausible that it would be over a hundred times more difficult to achieve the same proportional reduction, which is what would be needed to
reverse my conclusion that wild animal suffering dominates. There
could be some simple ways, for instance, for
vegetarians to reduce habitat sizes: supporting the construction of large parking lots, or donating
to a pro-deforestation lobby. In the final paragraph, I touch upon the issue of how most effectively to reduce wild animal suffering.
 Impact—Moen
Nonhuman suffering is the largest impact—in quantity and severity
Moen 16
Ole Martin Moen (University of Oslo, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature). “The ethics of wild animal suffering.” Etikk i praksis. Nord J
Appl Ethics (2016), 91–104. JDN. http://www.olemartinmoen.com/wp-content/uploads/TheEthicsofWildAnimalSuffering.pdf

If you have an open wound, a fractured bone, or terminal cancer, you suffer. But how do wounds, bone fractures, and cancers feel for animals
such as sparrows, rabbits, and bears? Theoretically, it is possible that it does not feel like anything at all, because animals might not be conscious.
Perhaps animals are just complicated machines, more like clocks and cars than like humans. Though it is difficult to establish conclusively that
animals really are conscious, however, it is also increasingly difficult to see why rejecting consciousness in animals is any more reasonable than
rejecting consciousness in other human beings. Although solipsism at the species level might make sense within religious contexts where humans
Comparing
are taken to have originated separately from all other animals, it coheres well with neither neuroscience nor evolution.
ourselves to sparrows, rabbits, and bears, we may observe that we have the same kind of
neurons, the same main brain parts, and the same pain pathways (C and A delta fibers) that they
have. Sparrows, rabbits, and bears, moreover, react to noxious stimuli the same way we do, and
they stop doing so when anesthetized (see Griffin & Speck 2004; Dawkins 2015). Since we and other animals
are genetically, neurologically, and functionally very close, we would need weighty evidence to
conclude that, despite these similarities, humans work in fundamentally different ways from
other animals: humans consciously, animals non-consciously.1 Increased understanding of animal consciousness
helped spur the animal ethics movement. Keeping animals in small cages, castrating them without anesthetics, and branding them with glowing
irons—practices that, if performed on humans, would land the perpetrator in prison for decades—are common farming practices around the
world. Millions of farm animals live and die under such conditions. Opposing human disregard for animal welfare, Peter Singer (1990) famously
argues that just as we have gradually expanded our circle of moral concern to encompass ethnic groups other than our own, and finally humanity
as a whole, we should further expand it to include other sentient species. According to Singer, it is suffering as such that is bad, and it is bad
whoever experiences it. Though the animal ethics movement is commendable, its circle of moral concern has hitherto expanded almost
exclusively to captive animals. With very few exceptions—most notably, David Pearce and Jeff McMahan, whom I shall discuss in detail below
—animal ethicists have failed to adequately take into account the suffering of animals living in the wild. Wild animals, however, vastly
outnumber captive animals, and arguably, billions of wild animals live lives that are even more painful and distressing than those of their captive
counterparts. Though it might well be difficult to alleviate suffering in the wild, and comparatively easier to alleviate suffering caused by humans,
disregarding wild animal suffering from the outset involves a form of anthropocentrism that, sadly, enjoys wide acceptance even among those
who purport to oppose the doctrine. We might dub this the second anthropocentrism. While traditional anthropocentrics are concerned only with
human suffering, anthropocentrics of the second kind are concerned only with human-caused suffering. I will suggest, however, that if we take
suffering as such to be bad (roughly along the lines that Singer does), it is unclear why the species membership of those who cause the suffering
is morally relevant while the species membership of those who suffer is not. My aim in this paper is not to sway those who are indifferent to
animal welfare. Rather, my aim is to make those who are concerned with animal welfare more concerned with the welfare of wild animals.
Moreover, I shall exclusively discuss welfarist concerns, so if there are other grounds to care for animals, they lie beyond the scope of this paper.
My discussion is limited to mammals and birds, the reason for which is that these are the animals whose ability to suffer is least disputed. If fish,
amphibians, reptiles, and/or invertebrates can also suffer, my conclusion is amplified. The empirical side Let
me start by defending
three empirical claims: (1) that there are vastly more wild than captive animals; (2) that wild
animals have the same capacity to suffer as captive animals; and (3) that many, perhaps most,
wild animals suffer at least as much as their captive counterparts. These are all empirical claims that say nothing
about the value significance of wild animal suffering. As such, we should accept or reject these claims irrespective of our ethical views. How
many captive animals are there? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2014), the total number of
livestock in the world is—at any given time—roughly 25 billion, the majority of which are chicken, followed by
ducks, cattle, and sheep. Although this figure leaves out pets and laboratory animals, let us take for granted, for the sake of convenience, that the
number of livestock is roughly representative of the number of captive animals. How many wild animals are there? According to Brian Tomasik’s
(2014a) estimations, which are generated from research data on the typical prevalence of various animals in various environments coupled with
data on the global prevalence of these environments, there
are—at any given time—between 60 and 200 billion
birds and between 100 and 1,000 billion mammals. If we assume the middle estimate for both
birds and mammals, there are, at any given time, 700 billion wild birds and wild mammals
combined. This is roughly 25 times the number of birds and mammals in captivity. (If we were
to include in our estimates fish, amphibians, reptiles, and invertebrates, which are rare in human
captivity but very prevalent in the wild, we would end up with thousands of times more wild than
captive animals.) A further empirical premise is that wild animals have the same ability to suffer as captive animals. By this I simply
mean that if you tear the skin of both a wild and a captive animal, there is no compelling reason to believe that this would hurt more for the
captive animal than for the wild animal. In fact, if we were to conclude that there is a difference between the two, we should probably conclude
that while captive animals are more docile (due to drugs and lack of stimulation), wild animals remain sharp and focused. Let us assume,
however, that the ability to suffer is the same, or roughly the same, in captive and wild animals. How much do wild animals actually suffer? Very
likely, some wild animals suffer very little. Some live long and peaceful lives, have few natural enemies, and have ample supplies of food. When
they die, moreover, many animals die quick and painless deaths. The fact that some lives in the wild are pleasant, however, does not contradict

the fact for billions of wild animals, life is filled with suffering. One prominent source of suffering is predation.
Every day, millions of animals are eaten alive, and though some of them are killed quickly, larger animals will often stay alive for minutes or
hours before they die of blood loss, suffocation, drowning, or internal bleeding from poisoning (Tomasik 2014b). While some become paralyzed,
and are likely to feel nothing, others feel excruciating pain. Predation is a very visible cause of suffering. In response to this, Tyler Cowen (2003)
and Jeff McMahan (2010) have argued that if we can easily prevent a predator attack, we have at least a pro tanto moral reason to do so. In their
view, the way predators kill their prey is often so gruesome that if a human were to treat animals similarly, we would have strong reasons to
intervene – and for the animal that is eaten alive, the species membership of the attacking predator is likely to matter very little. Though this is an
important observation, I think Cowen and McMahan fail to appreciate that suffering caused by predation is likely to
account for only a small fraction of the total suffering in nature. Though death from predation might be the most
violent and visible cause of suffering, deaths from disease and parasites tend to be more drawn out in time.
The same is true of deaths from droughts, floods, and freezing. Life in the wild is also a constant
quest for nutrition; at any given time, thousands of animals are in the process of starving to
death. Though there is no agent responsible for this suffering, and though it might be hard for us to detect it, the suffering is nonetheless real
and prevalent. When a parent animal starves or freezes to death, gets eaten, or dies from disease, its young offspring will often face an equally
painful death. This borders on an important point, namely that most suffering in nature is likely to be endured by very young individuals. The
reason is not primarily that many parent animals die (although that is also the case), but that most
wild animals give birth to
many more offspring than are likely to reach adulthood. While humans normally give birth to just one child per year,
and provide extensive care to each child (this is called the Kselection strategy), many animals follow a different reproductive strategy: they
give birth to dozens or hundreds of offspring every year, and care very little for each individual
(the r-selection strategy). These strategies both work to spread the parents’ genes in the population, but the r-selection
strategy—which is most common in smaller animals—leads to enormous amounts of suffering because of the
very large number of young individuals that are left to starve to death or get eaten, either by their
stronger siblings or by other predators (for an elaboration, see Horta 2010). If the average female in a given animal population
gives birth to 50 offspring every year—and the population size remains stable year after year—then the majority of individuals in that population
will be individuals dying before reaching adulthood. If we grant that animals become conscious shortly after birth, as we assume to be the case
with humans, their deaths will often involve pain, and since their lives are very short, they will have very few good things in life to weigh up for
all that is bad. For
these reasons, Richard Dawkins is almost certainly correct when he writes: The
total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation . During
the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering
with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease
(Dawkins 1995: 131-32). Wild
animal suffering is mostly invisible to us. Humans never see the vast
majority of wild animals, and those that are seen by us are predominantly healthy and moving.
We do not see the young individuals starving to death or the adult individuals being devoured by
parasites, and we must keep in mind that even if we saw them, their suffering would often not be
apparent to us. While we have evolved to pick up pain cues from other human beings, we are
much worse at picking up pain cues from non-human animals, especially those that are genetically remote from us.
Moreover, many animals hide signs of weakness and disease to avoid attracting predators
(including humans) looking for easy prey. When Thomas Hobbes wrote that life, in the state of nature, is “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short,” he meant human life (Hobbes 1651/1996: XIII.9). It seems, however, that the description is also fitting for the lives of
many non-human animals. Because of the brutality of wildlife, one could even make the provocative case
that a typical life in the wild is even more painful and distressing than a typical life in human
captivity. Although factory farming is often grotesque, animals in captivity are seldom killed in ways that draw out their deaths over several
minutes or hours; they are not exposed to predators until they are slaughtered; they typically have access to sufficient amounts of food and water;
and the temperature tends to be comfortable. Concerning larger animals, such as cattle, individuals with serious Moen, O.M. Etikk i praksis. Nord
J Appl Ethics (2016), 91–104 95 diseases will often be euthanized. For this reason, it is not clear that the average life in the wild is filled with any
less suffering than the average life in captivity. However, even if wild animals do, on average, suffer less than
captive animals, the sheer number of wild animals is still so overwhelming that the
majority of suffering on Earth almost certainly takes place among animals living in
wild nature.
 Yes AI Pain
Future computations will have the capacity for vast amounts of conscious pain—
they structurally mirror animal brains
Tomasik 17
Brian Tomasik (Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000 Hours charity of
Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics at
Swarthmore College). “Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning.” Initial draft: 16 June 2012; last update: 7 Feb. 2017. JDN.
http://reducing-suffering.org/ethical-issues-artificial-reinforcement-learning/

There is a remarkable connection between artificial reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms and

the process of reward learning in animal brains. Do RL algorithms on computers pose moral problems? I think
current RL computations do matter, though they're probably less morally significant than animals, including insects, because the
degree of consciousness and emotional experience seems limited in present-day RL agents. As
RL becomes more sophisticated and is hooked up to other more "conscious" brain-like
operations, this topic will become increasingly urgent . Given the vast numbers of RL
computations that will be run in the future in industry, video games, robotics, and research, the
moral stakes are high. I encourage scientists and altruists to work toward more humane approaches to reinforcement learning.
 O/V—Animal Schopenhauer

Animal suffering outweighs every impact.

A. It impact turns every one of their choice and reversibility claims. If we win that
humanity will collectively choose to preserve the torture chamber that is Earth, then
those choices are unethical and should not be valued.
B. The conceded R-Selection framing means none of their turns apply. The vast
majority of all conscious creatures that will ever come into existence are excess
small animal young which will experience painful death shortly after birth, so they
never experience the possibility for any of their nebulous VTL impacts.
C. Quantitatively—we have the largest impact by orders of magnitude. There are
millions of animals for every human, and billions once invertebrates are accounted
for. They account for the majority of all suffering on the planet—that’s Moen.
Finishing the card because the last line is just that good.
Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen (University of Oslo, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature). “The ethics of wild animal suffering.” Etikk i
praksis. Nord J Appl Ethics (2016), 91–104. JDN. http://www.olemartinmoen.com/wp-content/uploads/TheEthicsofWildAnimalSuffering.pdf

the sheer number of wild animals is still so overwhelming that the majority of
suffering on Earth almost certainly takes place among animals living in wild nature.
 Sentience

Studies prove sentence even of simple organisms—the threshold is low

Ng 16
Ng, Yew-Kwang (Winsemius professor in economics at Nanyang Technological University; fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in
Australia and Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia) How welfare biology and commonsense may help to reduce animal
suffering. Animal Sentience. 7(1) Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling. 2016. JDN.
http://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss7/1/

Although it is difficult to establish with certainty that any individual animal or species is capable
of feeling and hence that their welfare is a matter of concern, this difficulty must not be over-emphasized.
Strictly, this lack of 100% certainty applies also to members of our own species; the only
exception is oneself, the subject of the only feelings anyone can ever feel: One may have 100% certainty that one feels what one feels
while one is feeling it. This we already know from the outcome of Descartes’s meditations on doubt and certainty: the Cogito. But in this
philosophical sense of 100% certainty, one is not even sure of the existence of the subjective feelings of one’s spouse! Hence surely
99.99999999% is close enough to be taken as if 100% at the practical level. None
of us worries about the 0.00…1%
possibility that our spouses or close friends do not really feel either. Practically the same goes for
the feelings, and hence the welfare needs, of all mammals, if not all vertebrates , as established
in the recent field of affective neuroscience (e.g., Mashour & Alkire, 2013). If we go beyond virtual
certainty (99.9% +) to the level of almost certainty (95% +), the range of animal species capable
of feeling must be greatly widened , as even crayfish appear to be capable of anxiety (Fossat,
2014). (For informative and interesting accounts of the many impressive capabilities for feelings, including even moral feelings, of many animal
species far beyond what we would have imagined, see e.g., Balcombe, 2010, and Bekoff, 2013.)

Neuroscience shows insects are sentient

Klein and Barron 16
Klein, Colin (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He works on philosophy of neuroscience with a side
interest in the perception of pain and other homeostatically relevant states. In 2014 he received an ARC Future Fellowship to look at
interventionist approaches to cognitive neuroscience) and Barron, Andrew B. (Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at
Macquarie University. With his team at Macquarie, he is exploring the neurobiology of major behavioural systems such as memory, goal-directed
behaviour and stress from a comparative and evolutionary perspective. In 2015 he was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship to develop a
computational model of the honey bee brain) Insects have the capacity for subjective experience. Animal Sentience. Animal Sentience: An
Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling. 9(1). 2016. JDN. http://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss9/1/

To what degree are non-human animals conscious? We propose that the most meaningful way to approach this question
is from the perspective of functional neurobiology. Here we focus on subjective experience, which is a basic
awareness of the world without further reflection on that awareness. This is considered the most
basic form of consciousness. Tellingly, this capacity is supported by the integrated midbrain and
basal ganglia structures, which are among the oldest and most highly conserved brain
systems in vertebrates. A reasonable inference is that the capacity for subjective experience is
both widespread and evolutionarily old within the vertebrate lineage. We argue that the insect
brain supports functions analogous to those of the vertebrate midbrain and hence that insects
may also have a capacity for subjective experience . We discuss the features of neural systems which can and cannot be
expected to support this capacity as well as the relationship between our arguments based on neurobiological mechanism and our approach to the
“hard problem” of conscious experience.

Studies Confirm Lifelong Sentient Trauma In Animals

Tomasik 17
Brian Tomasik (consultant for the Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000
Hours charity of Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and
economics at Swarthmore College). “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering.” First written: July 2009; Last edited: 13 Feb. 2017. JDN.
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

Fear of predators produces not only immediate distress, but it may also cause long-term
psychological trauma. In one study of anxiolytics, researchers exposed mice to a cat for five minutes and observed
subsequent reactions. They found that this animal model of exposure of mice to unavoidable predatory stimuli
produces early cognitive changes analogous to those seen in patients with acute stress disorder (ASD).
[ElHagePeronnyGriebelBelzung] A follow-up study found long-term impacts on the mice's brains:
predatory exposure induced significant learning disabilities in the radial maze (16 to 22 days poststressor) and in the spatial configuration of
objects recognition test (26 to 28 days poststressor). These findings indicate that memory impairments may persist for extended periods beyond a
predatory stress.[ElHageGriebelBelzung] Similarly, Phillip R. Zoladz
exposed rats to unavoidable predators and
other anxiety-causing conditions to
produce changes in rat physiology and behavior that are
comparable to the symptoms observed in PTSD patients.[Zoladz] And in a review article, Rianne Stam explained:
Animal models that are characterised by long-lasting conditioned fear responses as well as generalised behavioural sensitisation to novel stimuli
following short-lasting but intense stress have a phenomenology that resembles that of PTSD in humans. [...] Weeks to months after
the trauma, treated animals on average also show a sensitisation to novel stressful stimuli
of neuroendocrine, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal motility responses as well as altered
pain sensitivity and immune function.[Stam] Even for those prey that haven't had a traumatic run-in with a predator, the
ecology of fear that predators create can be very distressing: In studies with elk, scientists have found that the presence of
wolves alters their behavior almost constantly, as they try to avoid encounters, leave room for escape and are constantly
vigilant.

Yes animals matter; they’re sentient before birth which means mass infant animal
death outweighs every other impact. Far more beings die within hours of birth than
ever live to fulfillment
Tomasik 17
Brian Tomasik (consultant for the Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000
Hours charity of Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and
economics at Swarthmore College). “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering.” First written: July 2009; Last edited: 13 Feb. 2017. JDN.
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

5.6. When Do Babies Become Sentient? The previous section explained that in r-selected species, parents may have hundreds or even tens of
thousands of offspring, and almost all of these die shortly after birth. This applies worldwide. But some questions remain. What fraction of these
offspring were sentient at the time of death, and what fraction merely died as unconscious eggs or larvae?
EFSA's Aspects of the biology and welfare of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes (pp. 37-42) explores when
fetuses of various species begin to feel conscious pain.[EFSA] The paper notes that the age of onset of
consciousness varies based on whether a species is precocial (well developed at birth, such as horses) or altricial (still developing at birth, such as
marsupials). Precocial animals are more likely to feel pain at earlier ages. Also relevant is whether the species is viviparous (having live birth) or
oviparous (giving birth through eggs). Viviparous
animals have greater need to inhibit fetal consciousness
during development in order to prevent injury to the mother and siblings. Oviparous fetuses that are
constrained by shells have less need for inhibition of awareness before birth. (p. 38) For this reason,
the report suggests: If awareness is the criterion for protection, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and
cephalopods may, therefore, be more obviously in need of protection pre-hatching than
mammals are in need of protection pre-partum. (p. 38) For example: Sensory and neural
development in a precocial bird such as the domestic chick is very well advanced several days before
hatching. Controlled movements and coordinated behavioural and electrophysiological
evoked responses to tactile, auditory and visual stimuli appear three or four days before
hatching occurs after 21 days of incubation (Broom, 1981). (p. 39) In contrast: Even though the mammalian fetus can
show physical responses to external stimuli, the weight of present evidence suggests that consciousness does not occur in the fetus until it is
delivered and starts to breathe air. (p. 42) Thus, it seems clear that many animals are able to suffer by the
time of birth if not before. The stage of development at which this risk [of suffering] is sufficient for protection to be necessary is
that at which the normal locomotion and sensory functioning of an individual independent of the egg or mother can occur. For air-breathing
animals this time will not generally be later than that at which the fetus could survive unassisted outside the uterus or egg. For most vertebrate
animals, the stage of development at which there is a risk of poor welfare when a procedure is carried out on them is the beginning of the last
third of development within the egg or mother. For a fish, amphibian, cephalopod, or decapod it is when it is capable of feeding independently
rather than being dependent on the food supply from the egg. [...] (p. 3) Most amphibians and fish have larval forms which are not well developed
at hatching but develop rapidly with experience of independent life[.] Those fish and amphibians that are well developed at hatching or
viviparous birth and all cephalopods, since these are small but well developed at hatching, will have had a functioning nervous system and the
potential for awareness for some time before hatching. (p. 38) Another consideration suggestive of pain before
birth is the fact that many oviparous vertebrates can hatch early in response to
environmental stimuli, including vibrations that feel like a predator. For example, for
skink eggs: Simulated predation experiments in the field induced hatching in both nest sites
(horizontal rock crevices) and in eggs displaced from nest sites. The hatching process was explosive: early hatching
embryos hatched in seconds and sprinted from the egg an average of 40 cm as they
hatched.[DoodyPaull] Early hatching has also been documented for amphibians, fish, and
invertebrates.[DoodyPaull] These points suggest that a significant fraction of the large numbers
of offspring born to r-selected species may very well be conscious during the pain of their
deaths after a few short days, or even hours, of life.

Err Negative On Sentience

Tomasik 17
Brian Tomasik (consultant for the Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000
Hours charity of Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and
economics at Swarthmore College). “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering.” First written: July 2009; Last edited: 13 Feb. 2017. JDN.
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

It's true that scientists

remain uncertain whether insects experience pain in a form that we would consider
conscious suffering.[insect-pain] However, the fact that there remains serious debate on the issue
suggests that we should not rule out the possibility. And seeing as arthropods number 10 18,
[Williams] with the number of copepods in the ocean of a similar magnitude,[SchubelButman] the
mathematical expected value (probability times amount) of their suffering is vast. I should note that the force of
this point would be lessened if, as may be the case, an animal's intensity or degree of emotional experience depends to some rough extent on the
amount of neural tissue it has devoted to pain signals.[Bostrom-qualia]

Animals Matter; Argument From Marginal Cases

Tanner 07
Julia K. H. Tanner (PhD, Durham University). “Animals, moral risk and moral considerability.” Durham theses, Durham University. 2007. JDN.
http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2477/

1) If a capacity/capacities such as rationality et al. is necessary for moral considerability animals

are not morally considerable, but nor are marginal humans who lack that capacity. 2) Many think
marginal humans are morally considerable despite lacking the necessary capacity/capacities. 3) If
marginal humans are morally considerable no capacity they lack can be necessary (though it may be
sufficient) for moral considerability. There must be another sufficient capacity. 4) Any capacity marginal humans
have some animals will also have. 5) Therefore: if marginal humans are morally considerable so
are animals that possess the relevant capacity/capacities. If animals are not morally considerable neither are marginal
humans.
 Hedonic Treadmill
The plan can’t possibly overcome the hedonic treadmill; status quo levels of
suffering are locked in by genetics
Pearce 07
David Pearce (Transhumanist vegan British philosopher; Pearce has spoken at Oxford and Harvard and been published in The Economist and
BBC Radio. In 1998, Pearce cofounded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom.) “THE ABOLITIONIST PROJECT.” 2007. JDN.
http://www.abolitionist.com/index.html

Sadly, what won't abolish suffering, or at least not on its own, is socio-economic reform, or exponential
economic growth, or technological progress in the usual sense, or any of the traditional panaceas
for solving the world's ills. Improving the external environment is admirable and important; but such improvement can't
recalibrate our hedonic treadmill above a genetically constrained ceiling . Twin studies
confirm there is a [partially] heritable set-point of well-being - or ill-being - around which we all tend
to fluctuate over the course of a lifetime. This set-point varies between individuals. [It's possible to lower our
hedonic set-point by inflicting prolonged uncontrolled stress; but even this re-set is not as easy as
it sounds: suicide-rates typically go down in wartime; and six months after a quadriplegia-
inducing accident, studies1 suggest that we are typically neither more nor less unhappy than we
were before the catastrophic event.] Unfortunately, attempts to build an ideal society can't overcome
this biological ceiling , whether utopias of the left or right, free-market or socialist, religious or
secular, futuristic high-tech or simply cultivating one's garden. Even if everything that traditional
futurists have asked for is delivered - eternal youth, unlimited material wealth, morphological
freedom, superintelligence, immersive VR, molecular nanotechnology, etc - there is no evidence
that our subjective quality of life would on average significantly surpass the quality of life of
our hunter-gatherer ancestors - or a New Guinea tribesman today - in the absence of reward pathway enrichment. This claim is difficult to

objective indices of psychological distress e.g. suicide rates,

prove in the absence of sophisticated neuroscanning; but

bear it out. Unenhanced humans will still be prey to the spectrum of Darwinian emotions,
ranging from terrible suffering to petty disappointments and frustrations - sadness, anxiety,
jealousy, existential angst. Their biology is part of "what it means to be human". Subjectively unpleasant states of
consciousness exist because they were genetically adaptive. Each of our core emotions had a
distinct signalling role in our evolutionary past: they tended to promote behaviours which
enhanced the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment.
 AT: Choose to Live (Hedonic Util)
This is answered by 1NC Benatar—humans’ preferences do not track their
objective wellbeing. Psychological studies verify an optimistic bias. People can
believe they would prefer to live and be wrong.
It also doesn’t respond to the bulk of our impact which is about future generations
who don’t currently have a desire to live which could be frustrated by non-existence.
Reject preference util. Desire-satisfaction is an inaccurate and internally
contradictory basis for value
Singer and Lazari-Radek 14
Peter Singer (The util guy from Princeton) and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of History and Philosophy,
University of Lodz). “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.” Oxford University Press. 2014. JDN. Print.

There are many varieties of desire theory, so supporters of such theories need to decide which version they wish to defend.
The most basic form holds that my good consists in the fulfilment of whatever desire I have right
now. The strength of this theory is that it wholeheartedly embraces the resonance constraint. Whatever the theory holds to be
good for me will necessarily resonate with me, because what is good for me now is what I now
want. The most obvious problem with this basic version, as Sidgwick observed, is that I may now have a
desire that I will later regret satisfying. I may, for example, now have an intense desire for
revenge on someone I believe to have wronged me, although if I do take revenge, it will lead to a spiral of violence that
will rebound on me and lead me to wish I had never done it. Sidgwick therefore considered also an ‘informed desire’
theory in which we suppose that the desirer has a ‘perfect forecast’ of all the consequences of satisfying her present desire. But even
this is not enough , since there may have been alternatives open to the desirer that would have led her to form different desires from
which she would have attained greater satisfaction. If we accept that this would have been a better outcome, we must switch to a theory that says
that my good consists in the fulfilment of the desires I would have under conditions of full information about all the different lines of conduct
open to me and the impact that these would have on the fulfilment of the desires I would then come to have, over my lifetime, or perhaps it would

be better to say, over all the different lifetimes that I could live. Even under such fantastically complicated ideal
conditions of full information, however, someone might choose against what would satisfy her
desires on the whole—she might, for example, give little weight to the future, or she might, like Parfit’s
man with Future Tuesday Indifference, have no desire for what happens to her on a particular day of the week. So even this fully informed desire
theory of the good is inadequate, since—as we saw in Chapter 5—there are grounds for holding that it is a requirement of reason that I have equal
concern for all the moments of my conscious experience. If, however, desire theory must give consideration to whether a person’s desires are
rational, in a sense that goes beyond whether they are fully informed, then a new and independent standard has been brought into the decision,
and the resonance constraint has been abandoned, or at least severely weakened. Desire theorists could try to find a more minimalist way of
dealing with the problem of the person who fails to give full weight to the satisfaction of her future desires. They might say that what is
ultimately good for me is not the satisfaction of my present desires but the greatest possible satisfaction of desires over my whole life. This is still
a form of desire theory, for it denies the existence of any goods (p.219) apart from the satisfaction of desires. It suggests that we should take into
account all of someone’s desires, actual and hypothetical, over the different alternatives open to her. We could then assign a positive number to a
fulfilled desire and a negative number to an unfulfilled one, with the numbers reflecting the intensity or importance of the desire. A simple sum

would then tell us which alternative yields the ‘greatest total net sum of desire-fulfilment’.12 There is, however, another,
more general problem about desire theories that sum up desire satisfaction over one’s entire
life. Richard Brandt has pointed out that desires may change over time, and vary in intensity: ‘Some occurrence I now want to
have happen may be something I did not want to have happen in the past, and will wish had not
happened, if it does happen, in the future.’13 Suppose, for example, that your friend has been, for
most of his life, an atheist who would have been appalled at the thought of a priest being present at his death bed. When he is
dying, however, he becomes afraid of hellfire and asks for a priest. The question is: should we
ignore the desire that he had most of his life, and call for the priest, or should we ignore the
desire he has right now? It would seem that a summative theory would require us to give greater weight
to desires held for many years than to a desire held for only a few hours. But it seems odd to bind the present
self by the desires of the past self. Ulysses’ sailors were right to reject his calls to be untied ,
when he heard the song of the sirens, but that was because they knew—as he knew when he ordered them to bind him to the mast and
block their own ears—that the sirens lead you to act on irrational desires, and sail onto the rocks. In deciding whether to

call the priest, do we need to form a view as to whether your dying friend’s fear of hellfire is irrational?14 Desires might be not

only unstable, but intransitive or cyclical. In some studies, people have been shown to prefer
A to B, B to C, and C to A. It is hard to know what a desire theorist could make of that. Since there is
then no fact of the matter about which of A, B, or C a person desires, one response would be to ignore all such desires. But (p.220) if all of a
person’s desires were cyclical, that would provide a strong reason for abandoning desire theory and moving to a different theory about what is
good for that person.15 Parfit
has another objection to ‘summative’ desire theories. Suppose I offer to make you
addicted to a drug. Taking the drug itself is neither pleasant nor painful, but when you wake up
each morning you have a strong desire for the drug. Fortunately, you will always be able to satisfy this desire because
supplies of the drug are readily available at no cost. Becoming addicted to this drug will therefore increase your desire satisfaction throughout
your life—but note, this is not because you get any pleasure from satisfying your desire for the drug. On
a summative desire
theory, becoming addicted to the drug increases your well-being. This, Parfit suggests, is not
plausible.

Prefer hedonistic util. Conscious pleasure and pain are the ultimate ends—all other
values reduce to them.
Singer and Lazari-Radek 14
Peter Singer (The util guy from Princeton) and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of History and Philosophy,
University of Lodz). “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.” Oxford University Press. 2014. JDN. Print.

We could, Sidgwick allows, ‘take “conscious life” in a wider sense, so as to include the objective relations of the conscious being implied in our
notions of Virtue, Truth, Beauty, Freedom’ (ME 400). Should we take this view, and therefore pursue, as the ultimately desirable ends for
everyone, not just pleasure or happiness, but also these ‘ideal goods’ as Sidgwick calls them, of living virtuously, knowing the truth,
contemplating beauty, and living in freedom? To that possibility Sidgwick responds in a manner typical of his approach to bedrock
questions. He appeals to ‘the sober judgment of reflective persons’. As he did when arguing that the common moral
rules should not be thought to be independently valid, irrespective of their consequences, (p.210) he begins by asking the reader to reflect upon
his ‘intuitive judgment after due consideration of the question when fairly placed before it’. Although
he admits that we do
experience preferences for states of affairs that are not merely conscious experiences, when we
reflect on this, he claims, we can only justify to ourselves the importance we give to any of these
objects ‘by considering its conduciveness, in one way or another, to the happiness of sentient
beings’ (ME 401). The second appeal Sidgwick makes is to the ‘ordinary judgments of mankind’. This argument is, he acknowledges, more
difficult to make completely cogent, as even some ‘cultivated persons’ are in the habit of judging knowledge, art, and virtue as ends to be sought
independently of the pleasure we may get from them. But Sidgwick believes that common
sense shows that such things as
beauty, knowledge, and freedom do make us happier, and moreover that they gain our approval
roughly in proportion to the extent to which they do so. Would common sense support
freedom if it had no tendency to promote the general happiness? The pursuit of knowledge, too, receives the
greatest support from common sense when the knowledge we gain brings benefits; although we often accept the value of scientific inquiry that
brings no immediate benefits, because we know from past experience that knowledge that appears useless may become unexpectedly useful.
Moreover, when
the legitimacy of a branch of science is contested—Sidgwick gives the example of
experiments on animals— the debate is always conducted on a utilitarian basis; that is, the proponents of the
form of inquiry under attack always appeal to the benefits of the knowledge they are seeking, rather than to the value of gaining knowledge for its
own sake. Finally, the example of virtue is especially interesting. Normally, encouraging people to have virtuous impulses and dispositions is so
obviously desirable that it is odd to even raise the question whether encouragement to virtue can go too far. But there are rare examples when
concentrating on the cultivation of virtue leads to moral fanaticism, which tends to reduce the general happiness. If we admit this possibility, then
we should also agree that the criterion for deciding how far the cultivation of the virtues should go must be, not the (p.211) intrinsic value of
virtue, but whether in the particular circumstances the further cultivation of virtue is likely to increase or decrease the general happiness.
Sidgwick has to concede that common sense shows some aversion to the idea that the sole
ultimate end of our actions, and the standard of right and wrong, is happiness, in the sense of
maximizing pleasures; but he thinks this aversion is due to some misunderstandings. He
mentions four of them. First of all, in ordinary usage the word pleasure is often used narrowly, to
suggest ‘the coarser and commoner’ feelings that we desire to have, rather than the more
elevated desirable states of consciousness, which would be less likely to produce aversion.
Moreover, we know that some pleasures will lead to great pain or the loss of more important pleasures. Since in many cases we have moral or
aesthetic instincts warning us against such ‘impure’ pleasures, we do not want to even think that they could be part of ultimate goodness. Second,
we should remember that we will be able to achieve many important pleasures only if we desire something other than pleasure, and do not
directly aim at pleasure. This means that ‘the very acceptance of Pleasure as the ultimate end of conduct involves the practical rule that it is not
always to be made the conscious end’ (ME 403). Hence the reluctance of common sense to take pleasure as the only thing desirable can be
justified on the grounds that people are less likely to be happy if they concentrate only on their own happiness. The pleasures of being benevolent,
for example, presuppose that we have genuine impulses to bring about the happiness of others. Third,
the aversion of common
sense to the idea that pleasure is the ultimate good may result from the assumption that this
means that each individual should pursue his or her own pleasure. The truth is that it is to egoism that common
sense is really averse, not to ‘Universal Happiness, desirable consciousness or feeling for the innumerable multitude of sentient beings, present
and to come’, which, Sidgwick says, ‘seems an End that satisfies our imagination by its vastness, and sustains our resolution by its comparative
security’ (ME 404). Finally, the point made about finding our own pleasure (p.212) only if we have other direct goals also applies, Sidgwick tells
us, from the universal point of view. The general happiness is more likely to be achieved if in many circumstances we do not consciously aim at
it. So to aim at such ideal objects as ‘Virtue, Truth, Freedom, Beauty, etc., for their own sakes, is indirectly and secondarily, though not primarily
and absolutely, rational’ (ME 405–6). Thus Sidgwick takes himself to have shown that common sense is not
really opposed to the idea that the ultimate good is pleasure . But before concluding his argument, he offers one
more consideration for accepting this view. If we reject it, he says, can we frame any coherent account of
ultimate good? If we do not take universal happiness as the proper common goal of human
activities, on what other basis can we systematize our ends? How, for example, can we compare
the values of the different ends, other than hedonism, with each other and with the value of
happiness? For in practice, we need to decide not only whether we should pursue truth rather than beauty or freedom, but how far we should
seek any of these if we foresee that doing so will lead to more pain, or less pleasure, for humans or other sentient beings. Sidgwick tells us that he
has failed to find ‘any systematic answer to this question that appears to me deserving of serious consideration’. As a result, he concludes that
rigorously applying the method of intuitionism leads us to universalistic hedonism, or in a word, utilitarianism.

Phenomenal introspection is a uniquely reliable process for forming beliefs and

entails that happiness is objectively good
Sinhababu 14
Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore). “The epistemic argument for hedonism.” 2014. JDN. https://philpapers.org/archive/SINTEA-
3.pdf
Phenomenal introspection, a reliable way of forming true beliefs about our experiences, tells us that pleasure is good and displeasure is bad. Even
as our other processes of moral belief formation prove unreliable, it provides reliable access to pleasure's goodness, justifying the positive claims
of hedonism. This section clarifies what phenomenal introspection and pleasure are, and explains how phenomenal introspection provides reliable
To use
access to pleasure's value. Section 2.2 argues that pleasure's goodness is genuine moral value, rather than value of some other kind.
phenomenal introspection is to look inward at one's subjective experience, or phenomenology, and
determine what it is like. One can use phenomenal introspection reliably while dreaming or hallucinating, as long as one can
determine what the dream or hallucination is like. By itself, phenomenal introspection produces no beliefs about things outside experience, or
about relations between our experiences and non-experiential things. It cannot by itself produce judgments about the rightness of actions or the
goodness of non-experiential things, as these are located outside of experience. Phenomenal introspection can be wrong, but is generally reliable.
As experience is rich in detail, one could get some of the details wrong in one's belief. Under adverse conditions when one has false expectations
about what one's experiences will be, or when one is in an extreme emotional state, one might make larger errors. Paradigmatically reliable
processes like vision share these failings. Vision sometimes produces false beliefs under adverse conditions, or when we are looking at complex
things. It is, nevertheless, fairly reliable. The
view that phenomenal introspection is unreliable about our
phenomenal states is about as radical as skepticism about the reliability of vision. While contemporary
psychologists reject introspection into one's motivations and other causal processes as unreliable, phenomenal introspection fares better. Daniel
Kahneman, for example, writes that “experienced utility is best measured by moment-based methods that assess the experience of the present.”20

Even those most skeptical about the reliability of phenomenal introspection, like Eric Schwitzgebel, concede that we can reliably
introspect whether we are in serious pain.21 Then we should be able to introspectively
determine what pain is like . I assume the reliability of phenomenal introspection in what follows. One can form a variety of
beliefs using phenomenal introspection. For example, one can believe that one is having sound experiences of particular noises and visual
experiences of different shades of color. When looking at a lemon and considering the phenomenal states that are yellow experiences, one can
form some beliefs about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are bright experiences. And when considering experiences of pleasure,
one can make some judgments about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are good experiences. Just
as one can look
inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and appreciate its brightness, one can look inward
at one's experience of pleasure and appreciate its goodness.22 When I consider a situation of increasing
pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, in the same way I form the belief that there is more brightness in my
visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form the belief that things are worse in my experience
than they were before. "Pleasure" here refers to the hedonic tone of experience. Having pleasure consists in one's experience having this hedonic
tone. Without descending into metaphor, it is hard to give a further account of what pleasure is like than to say that when one has it, one feels
good. AsAaron Smuts writes in defending the view of pleasure as hedonic tone, “to 'feel good' is
about as close to an experiential primitive as we get.”23 Some philosophers, like Fred Feldman,
see pleasure as fundamentally an attitude rather than a hedonic tone.24 But as long as hedonic
tones – good and bad feelings – are real components of experience, phenomenal introspection
will reveal pleasure's goodness. Opponents of the hedonic tone account of pleasure usually concede that hedonic tones exist, as
Feldman seems to in discussing “sensory pleasures,” which he thinks his view helps us understand. Even on his view of pleasure, phenomenal
introspection can produce the belief that some hedonic tones are good while others are bad. There are many different kinds of pleasant
experiences. There are sensory pleasures, like the pleasure of tasting delicious food, receiving a massage, or resting your tired limbs in a soft bed
after a hard day. There are the pleasures of seeing that our desires are satisfied, like the pleasure of winning a game, getting a promotion, or
seeing a friend succeed. These experiences differ in many ways, just as the experiences we have when looking at lemons and the sky on a sunny
day differ. It is easy to see the appeal of Feldman's view that pleasures “have just about nothing in common phenomenologically” (79). But just
as our experiences in looking at lemons and the sky on a sunny day have brightness in common, pleasant experiences all have “a certain common
quality – feeling good,” as Roger Crisp argues (109).25 As the analogy with brightness suggests, hedonic tone is phenomenologically very thin,
and usually mixed with a variety of other experiences.26 Pleasure of any kind feels good, and displeasure of any kind feels bad. These feelings
may or may not have bodily location or be combined with other sensory states like warmth or pressure. “Pleasure”
and
“displeasure” mean these thin phenomenal states of feeling good and feeling bad. As Joseph Mendola
writes, “the pleasantness of physical pleasure is a kind of hedonic value, a single homogenous sensory property, differing merely in intensity as
well as in extent and duration, which is yet a kind of goodness” (442). 27 What if Feldman is right and hedonic states feel good in fundamentally
different kinds of ways? Then phenomenal introspection will suggest a pluralist variety of hedonism. Each fundamental flavor of pleasure will
have a fundamentally different kind of goodness, as phenomenal introspection that is more accurate than mine will reveal. This is not my view,
but I suggest it to those convinced that hedonic tones are fundamentally heterogenous. If phenomenal introspection reliably informs us that
pleasure is good, how can anyone believe that their pleasures are bad? Hedonists can blame other processes of moral belief formation for these
beliefs. For example, someone who feels disgust or guilt about sex may not only regard sex as immoral, but the pleasure it produces as bad. Even
if phenomenal introspection on pleasure disposes one to believe that it is good, stronger negative emotional responses to it may more strongly
dispose one to believe that it is bad. This explanation of disagreement about pleasure's value lets hedonists deny that people believe that pleasure
As long as negative judgments of pleasure come from
is bad on the basis of phenomenal introspection alone.
unreliable processes instead of phenomenal introspection, the argument from disagreement will eliminate
them, while the reliable process of phenomenal introspection will univocally support pleasure's
goodness. The parallel between yellow’s brightness and pleasure’s goodness demonstrates the objectivity of the value detected in
phenomenal introspection. Just as anyone's yellow experiences objectively are bright experiences, anyone's
pleasure objectively is a good experience.28 While one's phenomenology is often called one's “subjective experience”, this does
facts about it are still objective. “Subjective” in “subjective experience” means “internal to the mind”, not “ ontologically dependent on attitudes
towards it.” My yellow-experiences are objectively bright, so that anyone who thought my yellow-experiences were not bright would be
mistaken. Pleasure similarly is objectively good – it is true that anyone's pleasure is good, and anyone who denies this is mistaken. As

Mendola writes, “ In the phenomenal value of phenomenal experience, we have a plausible

candidate for objective value ” (712).
 I/F (Bias)
Psychology Shows An Optimistic Bias; Even When Life Sucks, We Incorrectly
Assume It Will Improve

Tomasik 17
Brian Tomasik (consultant for the Foundational Research Institute; former tech developer and programmer at Microsoft; member of 80,000
Hours charity of Oxford University; Board member @ Animal Charity Evaluators; studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and
economics at Swarthmore College). “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering.” First written: July 2009; Last edited: 13 Feb. 2017. JDN.
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

People may not accurately assess at a single instant how they'll feel overall over a longer
period of time.[KahnemanSugden] They often exhibit rosy prospection toward future events and rosy
retrospection about the past, in which they assume that their future and previous levels of
wellbeing will be and were better than what they reported at the time of the experiences.
[MitchellThompson] Moreover, even when organisms do correctly judge their hedonic levels, they
often show a will to live quite apart from their level of pleasure or pain. Animals that, in
the face of lives genuinely not worth living, decide to end their existence tend not to
reproduce very successfully.

Independently, we Have A Status Quo Bias That Causes Us To Preserve Our

Current Conditions

Pearce 09
David Pearce (Transhumanist vegan British philosopher; Pearce has spoken at Oxford and Harvard and been published in The Economist and
BBC Radio. In 1998, Pearce cofounded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom.) “Reprogramming Predators.” (2009).
http://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

The cruelties of the living world are "natural", therefore worth conserving: a price worth paying for the
glories of Nature. This is the way things ought to be, because this is the way things have always been.
Status quo bias is endemic. Thus it simply doesn't seem to have occurred to some otherwise
smart thinkers in slave-owning societies that slavery could be morally wrong. Had the case for
universal human freedom been put to them, the idea might well have seemed as silly as does questioning the inviolability of the food-chain at
present. Potentially, status quo bias can take benign guises too. If
we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion
of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as
unimaginable - no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today. Of course the extent of our status quo
bias shouldn't be exaggerated. There is something self-intimatingly wrong with one's own intense pain while it lasts; and to a greater or lesser
degree, we can generalize this urgent sense of wrongness to other suffering beings with whom we identify. But
since most humans
aren't in agony most of the time, any generalizations we make tend to be weak; and restricted in
scope on account of our evolutionary descent.
 Pain O/W
Negative util is best—pain ethically outweighs pleasure
Contestabile 16
Bruno Contestabile (Engineer, information scientist and philosopher). “Negative Utilitarianism and Justice.” First version 2005. Last version
2016. JDN. http://www.socrethics.com/Folder2/Justice.htm#C3

3. Negative Utilitarianism (NU)

3.1 Historical Background

Ancient world

1.The idea to formulate an ethical goal negatively originates in Buddhism and is more than 2000
years old.
2. Greek philosopher Epicurus has sometimes been caricatured as crude hedonist. But Epicurus also maintained the puzzling doctrine
that the complete absence of pain constituted "the limit and highest point of pleasure" (Epicurus, David
Pearce)

3.While Epicurus has been commonly misunderstood to advocate the rampant pursuit of
pleasure, what he was really after was the absence of pain (both physical and mental, i.e., suffering) - a state of
satiation and tranquility that was free of the fear of death and the retribution of the gods. When we do not suffer pain, we are no longer in need of
pleasure, and we enter a state of 'perfect mental peace' (ataraxia). (Epicurus, Wikipedia)

Early utilitarianism

Historically utilitarianism was inspired by Stoicism and Epicureanism and therefore closer to
negative utilitarianism than the contemporary interpretation:
Although the favored means of the term negative welfarism – a stoician-like control of the birth of one’s desires which it also calls “liberation”
(moksa) – is in a sense opposed to economists’ conception, scholarly welfarism is in fact historically the direct descent of this Indian philosophy.
Indeed, the 18th century founders of utilitarianism were thoroughly inspired by Stoicism and Epicureanism, whereas the influence of Buddhist
and Jain thoughts on Stoician and other Hellenistic philosophies is explained in the previous reference. The oblivion of self-formation occurred
with that of the Rousseau-Kant “autonomy” by some narrowminded post-Mill 19th century scholars (even Mill’s “choice of lifestyle” is a
downgrading of full eudemonistic self-formation). Note that the view that utilitarianism is the necessary all-encompassing criterion was, in the
West, restricted to English-language scholars influenced by Bentham who introduced this view for a political reason. This is why Rawls appeared
to be much less original in other circles who acknowledged constitutional basic rights and where egalitarianism was a familiar ideal.
(Macrojustice from Equal Liberty, Serge-Christoph Kolm)

Also the Stoic cosmopolitanism corresponds well to utilitarianism. Stoicism, in contrast to Buddhism, was characterized by an optimistic world
view.

In contemporary negative utilitarianism we find both, optimistic and pessimistic visions of the future; see Hostility and the Minimization of
Suffering.

In the 20th century, the idea to formulate an ethical goal negatively is attributed to Karl Popper:

…there are no institutional means of making a man happy, but a claim not to be made unhappy,
where it can be avoided. The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of
searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than
searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good [Popper, 158]
At this point of chapter 9, Popper added his controversial note 2:
I believe that there
is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness,
or between pain and pleasure. Both the greatest happiness principle of the Utilitarians and Kant’s principle “Promote other
people’s happiness…” seem to me (at least in their formulations) wrong on this point which, however, is not completely decidable by rational
argument (…). In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase
the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.

A further criticism of the Utilitarian formula “Maximize pleasure” is that it assumes, in principle,
a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of
pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure and especially not
one man’s pain by another man’s pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least
amount of avoidable suffering for all; and further, that unavoidable suffering – such as hunger in times of unavoidable shortage of food – should
be distributed as equally as possible.

There is some analogy between this view of ethics and the view of scientific methodology which I
have advocated in my The Logic of Scientific Discovery. It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our
demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of
happiness. Similarly, it is helpful to formulate the task of scientific method as the elimination of false theories (from the various theories
tentatively preferred) rather than the attainment of established truths [Popper, 284].

Popper’s notes on ethics were not only influenced by his epistemological work, but also by
personal and historical experience:
1)      The failure of happiness-promoting philosophies like classical utilitarianism and Marxism
2)      Sixteen of Popper’s closest relatives became victims of Nazi Germany, partially in Auschwitz, some
committed suicide (from Die Erkenntnistheorie und das Problem des Friedens)
 More cards
Consciousness is the root cause of all suffering. The knowledge of our own
inevitable, painful demise causes limitless agony that we attempt to repress, but can
never displace. Suffering and terror are the inevitable counterparts of existence.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 24-26, Evan]
Undoing I For the rest of the earth’sorganisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about
three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content
ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know
we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly —
as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the
womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive,
reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the
tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-
conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. Nonhuman
occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful
thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a
confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that
would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To
end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be
conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing.
Nothing less will do, per Zapffe, although in “The Last Messiah” the character after whom the essay is named does all
the talking about human extinction. Elsewhere Zapffe speaks for himself on the subject. The sooner humanity
dares to harmonize itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly
withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct when temperatures
dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our
discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in
our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarization is the doctrine that
the individual “has a duty” to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits
the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of revulsion
being directed at the world-order engendering of the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is
to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful
blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the
survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths. (“Fragments of an Interview,”
Aftenposten, 1959) More provocative than it is astonishing, Zapffe’s thought is perhaps the most elementary in the history of
philosophical pessimism. As penetrable as it is cheerless, it rests on taboo commonplaces and outlawed truisms
while eschewing the recondite brain-twisters of his forerunners, all of whom engaged in the kind of
convoluted cerebration that for thousands of years has been philosophy’s stock in trade. For example,
The World as Will and Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lays out one
of the most absorbingly intricate metaphysical systems ever contrived—a quasi-mystical
elaboration of a “Will-to-live” as the hypostasis of reality, a mindless and untiring master of all being, a
directionless force that makes everything do what it does, an imbecilic puppeteer that sustains the ruckus of our world. But
Schopenhauer’s Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to
be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe’s principles are
non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors or practitioners of philosophy, who typically circle around the minutiae of theories
and not the gross facts of our lives. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable. Evidence: While
commentators on Schopenhauer’s thought have seized upon it as a philosophical system ripe for academic analysis, they do
not emphasize that its ideal endpoint—the denial of the Will-to-live—is a construct for the end
of human existence. But even Schopenhauer himself did not push this as aspect of his philosophy
to its ideal endpoint, which has kept him in fair repute as a philosopher.
Extinction is inevitable. Humanity is a cosmic accident that will inevitably
disappear, and any offense the aff has is terminally non-unique. If any value exists
in the universe, it comes from seizing the reins and ending the cruel experiment in
consciousness early by embracing extinction.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 42-, Evan]
Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees—a blunder of blind nature, according to
Zapffe, that has taken humankind down a black hole of logic. To make it through this life, we must make believe that
we are not what we are—contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as
mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. To correct this blunder, we should desist from procreating.
What could be more judicious or more urgent, existentially speaking, than our self-
administered oblivion? At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory of the
blunder as a “thought-experiment.” All civilizations become defunct. All species die out. There
is even an expiration date on the universe itself. Human beings would certainly not be the first
phenomenon to go belly up. But we could be the first to precipitate our own passing,
abbreviating it before the bodies really started to stack up. Could we know to their most fine-
grained details the lives of all who came before us, would we bless them for the care they took to
keep the race blundering along? Could we exhume them alive, would we shake their bony, undead hands and promise to pass on
the favor of living to future generations? Surely that is what they would want to hear, or at least that is what we want to think they would want to
hear. And just as surely that is what we would want to hear from our descendents living in far posterity, strangers though they would be as they
shook our bony, undead hands. Nature
proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have
blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal
from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun.
What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many
evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most
laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one? Of course, phenomena other than consciousness
have been thought to be blunders, beginning with life itself. For example, in a novel titled At the Mountains of
Madness (1936), the American writer H. P. Lovecraft has one of his characters mention a “primal myth” about “Great Old Ones who filtered
down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake.” Schopenhauer, once he had drafted his own mythology that everything
in the universe is energized by a Will-to-live, shifted
to a commonsense pessimism to represent life as a
congeries of excruciations. [L]ife presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a
task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares,
constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body
and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as
a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat
and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace
industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf
thousands. All push and drive, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the
ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To
sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate
case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui;
then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us
from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything
living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for some thing that is of no value. But when we
consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or
motive. (The World as Will and Representation, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp) Schopenhauer is here straightforward in limning his
awareness that, for human beings, existence is a state of demonic mania, with the Will-to-live as the
possessing spirit of “ephemeral and tormented individuals.” Elsewhere in his works, he denominates
consciousness as “an accident of life.” A blunder. A mistake. Is there really anything behind our
smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?
Our fear of death is a foundational and inevitable aspect of existence --- a vast body
of psychology proves --- struggling to stay alive just guarantees lashout to preserve
our fragile fantasies in the form of genocide, xenophobia, and racism
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 126-128, Evan] ***gender modified: note
that I modified a modification to a quote … originally was [Man] literally drives himself into; we
also don’t defend ableist language in this text
Be that as it may, there
is a school of psychology that has us all figured as morbid citizens. Known as
Terror Management Theory (TMT), its principles were inspired by the writings of the Canadian cultural
anthropologist Ernest Becker, who was one with Zapffe in wondering why a “damning surplus of
consciousness” had not caused humanity to go “extinct during great epidemics of madness.” In
his best-known work, The Denial of Death (1973), Becker wrote: “I believe that those who
speculate that a full apprehension of [hu]man[ity]’s condition would drive him insane are right,
quite literally right.” Zapffe concluded that we kept our heads by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” Becker
stated his identical conclusion as follows: “[[hu]Man[ity]] literally drives himself [itself] into a blind
obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the
reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.” Outlawed truisms. Taboo commonplaces. Synthesizing and
expanding Becker’s core ideas, three psychology professors —Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom
Pyszczynski—presented the concepts of TMT to the psychological community in the mid-1980s. In its clinical
studies and research, TMT indicates that the mainspring of human behavior is thanatophobia, and that
this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To subdue our death anxiety, we have
trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persist—if only symbolically—
beyond the breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day,
and to perpetuate our sanity we apotheosize it as the best world in the world. Housing the most cyclopean fabrications are
houses of worship where some people go to get a whiff of meaning, which to such people means only one thing—immortality. In heaven or
hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on and on—us without end. Travesties of
immortalism are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers’
image, a miracle granted by entering into a devil’s bargain with God, who is glorified with all the credit for giving us a
chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.4 However, as
TMT analyzes this scheme, getting the better of our death anxiety is not as simple as it might
appear. If we are to be at peace with our mortality, we need to know that what we leave behind us
when we die will survive just as we left it. Those churches cannot be just any churches—they must be our churches,
whoever we may be. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of personal immortality, we are willing to
accept the survival of persons and institutions that we regard as extensions of us—our families, our
heroes, our religions, our countries.5 And anyone who presents a threat to our continuance as a branded society
of selves, anyone who does not look and live as we do, should think twice before treading on our
turf, because from here to eternity it is every self for itself and all its facsimiles. In such a world,
one might extrapolate that the only honest persons—from the angle of self-delusion, naturally—are those who
brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge upon them and their world. With
that riff-raff out of the way, there will be more room on earth and in eternity for the right sort of people and their fabrications. That said,
promulgators of TMT believe that a universal dispersion of their ideas will make people more
tolerant of the alien worldviews of others and not kill them because those worldviews remind
them of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be. The paradox of this belief is that it requires everyone
to abandon the very techniques of terror management by which TMT claims we so far have
managed our terror, or some of it. As usual, though, there is an upbeat way out for terror management theorists in that they argue “that
the best worldviews are ones that value tolerance of different others, that are flexible and open to modifications, and that offer paths to self-
esteem minimally likely to encourage hurting others” (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg et al.). Of course,
this is just another worldview that brandishes itself as the best worldview in the world, meaning
that it would agitate others with a sense of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be and cause
them to retaliate. But terror management theorists also have a back-up plan, which is that in the
future we will not need terror management and instead will discover that “serious confrontations
with mortality can have positive, liberating effects, facilitating real growth and life satisfaction.” There is no
arguing that humanity may someday reap the benefits of a serious confrontation with mortality.
While waiting for that day, we still have genocide as the ultimate insurance of our worldviews. In
categorical opposition to genocide on an as-needed basis are such individuals as Gloria Beatty. Without making too much of a mess, they
quietly shut the door on a single life, caring not that they leave behind people who are not like
them. Most of these antisocial types are only following the logic of pain to its conclusion. Some plan
their last bow to serve the double duty of both delivering them from life and avenging themselves for some wrong,
real or imagined, against them. Also worthy of mention is a clique among the suicidal for whom the meaning of their act is a darker thing.
Frustrated as perpetrators of an all-inclusive extermination, they would kill themselves only
because killing it all is closed off to them. They hate having been delivered into a world only to be told, by and by, “This
way to the abattoir, Ladies and Gentlemen.” They despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life almost as much as
they despise themselves for being a party to it. If they could unmake the world by pushing a
button, they would do so without a second thought. There is no satisfaction in a lonesome
suicide. The phenomenon of “suicide euphoria” aside, there is only fear, bitterness, or depression beforehand,
then the troublesomeness of the method, and nothingness afterward. But to push that button, to
depopulate this earth and arrest its rotation as well—what satisfaction, as of a job prettily done. This
would be for the good of all, for even those who know nothing about the conspiracy against the
human race are among its injured parties.6
Their failure to grasp enjoyment is not only a political failure but also an existential
one. Only the death drive makes life worth living, and anything else is a politics of
life affirmation that deprives death of value while causing shocking outbursts of
death. 
McGowan ‘13 (Todd, Assoc. Prof. of Film and Television Studies @ U. of Vermont, Enjoying
What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, pp. 223-227)
On the level of common sense, this opposition is not symmetrical. What thinking person would
not want to side with those who love life rather than death.3 Everyone can readily understand
how one might love life, but the love of death is a counterintuitive phenomenon. It seems as if it
must be code language for some other desire, which is how Western leftists often view it.
Interpreting terrorist attacks as an ultimately life-affirming response to imperialism and
impoverishment, they implicitly reject the possibility of being in love with death. But this type of
interpretation can't explain why so many suicide bombers are middle-class, educated subjects
and not the most downtrodden victims of imperialist power.4 We must imagine that for subjects
such as these there is an appeal in death itself. Those who emphasize the importance of death at
the expense of life do so because death is the source of value.5 The fact that life has an end, that
we do not have an infinite amount of time to experience every possibility, means that we must
value some things above others. Death creates hierarchies of value, and these hierarchies are not
only vehicles for oppression but the pathways through which what we do matters at all. Without
the value that death provides, neither love nor ice cream nor friendship nor anything that we
enjoy would have any special worth whatsoever. Having an infinite amount of time, we would
have no incentive to opt for these experiences rather than other ones. We would be left unable to
enjoy what seems to make life most worth living. Even though enjoyment itself is an experience
of the infinite, an experience of transcending the limits that regulate everyday activity, it
nonetheless depends on the limits of finitude. When one enjoys, one accesses the infinite as a
finite subject, and it is this contrast that renders enjoyment enjoyable. Without the limits of
finitude, our experience of the infinite would become as tedious as our everyday lives (and in
fact would become our everyday experience). Finitude provides the punctuation through which
the infinite emerges as such. The struggle to assert the importance of death – the act of being in
love with death, as bin Laden claims that the Muslim youths are – is a mode of avowing one’s
allegiance to the infinite enjoyment that death doesn't extinguish but instead spawns.6 This is
exactly why Martin Heidegger attacks what he sees as our modern inauthentic relationship to
death. In Being and Time Heidegger sees our individual death as an absolute limit that has the
effect of creating value for us. As he puts it, "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its
ownmost potentiality-for-being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than
Dasein's Being-in-the-world.”7 Without the anticipation of our own death, we flit through the
world and fail to take up fully an attitude of care, the attitude most appropriate for our mode of
being, according to Heidegger. Nothing really matters to those who have not recognized the
approach of their own death. By depriving us of an authentic relationship to death, an ideology
that proclaims life as the only value creates a valueless world where nothing matters to us. But of
course the partisans of life are not actually eliminating death itself. They simply privilege life
over death and see the world in terms of life rather than death, which would seem to leave the
value-creating power of death intact. But this is not what happens. By privileging life and seeing
death only in terms of life, we change the way we experience the world. Without the mediation
that death provides, the system of pure life becomes a system utterly bereft of value.8 We can
see this in the two great systems of modernity – science and capitalism. Both modern science and
capitalism are systems structured around pure life.9 Neither recognizes any ontological limit but
instead continually embarks on a project of constant change and expansion. The scientific quest
for knowledge about the world moves forward without regard for humanitarian or ethical
concerns, which is why ethicists incessantly try to reconcile scientific discoveries with morality
after the fact. After scientists develop the ability to clone, for instance, we realize what cloning
portends for our sense of identity and attempt to police the practice. After Oppenheimer helps to
develop the atomic bomb, he addresses the world with pronouncements of its evil. But this
rearguard action has nothing to do with science as such. Oppenheimer the humanist is not
Oppenheimer the scientist.10 The same dynamic is visible with capitalism. As an economic
system, it promotes constant evolution and change just as life itself does. Nothing can remain the
same within the capitalist world because the production of value depends on the creation of the
new commodity, and even the old commodities must be constantly given new forms or renewed
in some way.11 Capitalism produces crises not because it can't produce enough – crises of
scarcity dominate the history of the noncapitalist world, not the capitalist one – but because it
produces too much. The crisis of capitalism is always a crisis of overproduction. The capitalist
economy suffocates from too much life, from excess, not from scarcity or death. Both science
and capitalism move forward without any acknowledged limit, which is why they are
synonymous with modernity.12 Modernity emerges with the bracketing of death's finitude and
the belief that there is no barrier to human possibility. The problem with the exclusive focus on
life at the expense of death is that it never finds enough life and thus remains perpetually
dissatisfied. The limit of this project is, paradoxically, its own infinitude. It evokes what 
Hegel calls the bad infinite – an infinite that is wrongly conceived as having no relation at all to
the finite. We succumb to the bad infinite when we pursue an unattainable object and fail to see
that the only possible satisfaction rests in the pursuit itself. The bad infinite -the infinite of
modernity- depends on a fundamental misrecognition. We continue on this path only as long as
we believe that we might attain the final piece of the puzzle, and yet this piece is constitutively
denied us by the structure of the system itself. We seek the commodity that would finally bring
us complete satisfaction, but dissatisfaction is built into the commodity structure, just as
obsolescence is built into the very fabric of our cars and computers. Like capitalism, scientific
inquiry cannot find a final answer: beneath atomic theory we find string theory, and beneath
string theory we find something else. In both cases, the system prevents us from recognizing
where our satisfaction lies; it diverts our focus away from our activity and onto the goal that we
pursue. In this way, modernity produces the dissatisfaction that keeps it going. But it also
produces another form of dissatisfaction that wants to arrest its forward movement. The further
the project of modernity moves in the direction of life, the more forcefully the specter of
fundamentalism will make its presence felt. The exclusive focus on life has the effect of
producing eruptions of death. As the life-affirming logic of science and capitalism structures all
societies to an increasing extent, the space for the creation of value disappears. Modernity
attempts to construct a symbolic space where there is no place for death and the limit that death
represents. As opposed to the closed world of traditional society, modernity opens up an infinite
universe.14 But this infinite universe is established through the repression of finitude. Explosions
of fundamentalist violence represent the return of what modernity's symbolic structure cannot
accommodate. As Lacan puts it in his seminar on psychosis, "Whatever is refused in the
symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real.”15 Fundamentalist violence is
blowback not simply in response to imperialist aggression, as the leftist common sense would
have it. This violence marks the return of what modernity necessarily forecloses.
Their relationship to those they describe as suffering is the primal scene of charity
cannibalism whereby the suffering of others becomes the adventure playground of
Western academics. Absent this aphrodisiac, the system would collapse. LT
roleplaying
Baudrillard 94. Jean Baudrillard, dead French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the University de Paris
X, The Illusion of The End, pg. 66-70
 We must
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde].
today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being
worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which
has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty
and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine
sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing
enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle
them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is
now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the
Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery
of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily
lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a
catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste
and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own
history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The
North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the
reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international
solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order . Other
people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of
repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the
war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful
our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact,
spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of
merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in
the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme
poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental
equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is
therefore normal that we should profit by it.  There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of
Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense,
with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should
Just as
we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne?
the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the
rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the
other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh,
etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor
countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our
media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to
exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic
cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by
our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as
economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice
has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself
reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns
on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like
coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet
its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious
appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to
invent one for ourselves. The
Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners,
but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from
the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East,
Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe
stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be
overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and
finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any
let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is
something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the
roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our
kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable
epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of
the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day
everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international
congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic  privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course
normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon.
But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely.  In any case,
the under-developed are only so by
comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure,
they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which
has always  been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and
everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that
evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any
idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples .
Thus, to encourage hope
of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective
illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity . In actual fact, it is their good fortune to
be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples,
including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no
small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of
violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance
that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the
sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for
them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they
could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy –
by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up
their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the
Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five
Adopt a framework of negative
hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.
utilitarianism—vote for whichever team best eliminates suffering. This is the only
ethical option.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 59-60, Evan]
One who did not balk entirely was the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) did have
a thing or two to say about human suffering. Briefly, he revamped the Utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century British philosopher John
Stuart Mill, who wrote: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong
as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness.” Popper remolded this summation of a positive
utilitarianism into a negative utilitarianism whose position he handily stated as follows: “It adds to clarity in
the fields of ethics, if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of
suffering rather than the promotion of happiness.” Taken to its logical and most humanitarian
conclusion, Popper’s demand can have as its only end the elimination of those who now suffer as
well as “counterfactual” beings who will suffer if they are born. What else could the “elimination
of suffering” mean if not its total abolition, and ours? Naturally, Popper held his horses well before suggesting that to
eliminate suffering would demand that we as a species be eliminated. But as R. N. Smart famously argued
(Mind, 1958), this is the only conclusion to be drawn from Negative Utilitarianism .
 1nc—Schopenhauer
The culmination of the will is the genocidal striving 
Troxell, philosophy professor at Boston College, no date 
[Mary, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860)”, https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/, 6/24 dwrs]

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the most well known feature of his philosophy, and he is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism.
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision follows from his account of the inner nature of the world as aimless blind striving.

Because the will has no goal or purpose, the will’s satisfaction is impossible . The will objectifies itself in a hierarchy of gradations from
inorganic to organic life, and every grade of objectification of the will, from gravity to animal motion, is marked by insatiable striving. In
addition, every force of nature and every organic form of nature participates in a struggle to seize matter from other forces or organisms. Thus
existence is marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction.

The attainment of a goal or desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment results in suffering.
Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by
suffering. This conclusion holds for all of nature, including inanimate natures, insofar as they are at essence will. However, suffering is more
conspicuous in the life of human beings because of their intellectual capacities. Rather than serving as a relief from suffering, the intellect of
human beings brings home their suffering with greater clarity and consciousness. Even with the use of reason, human beings can in no way
alter the degree of misery we experience; indeed, reason only magnifies the degree to which we suffer. Thus all the ordinary pursuits of mankind
are not only fruitless but also illusory insofar as they are oriented toward satisfying an insatiable, blind will.

Since the essence of existence is insatiable striving, and insatiable striving is suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that nonexistence is
preferable to existence. However, suicide is not the answer. One cannot resolve the problem of existence through suicide, for since all
existence is suffering, death does not end one’s suffering but only terminates the form that one’s suffering takes. The proper response to
recognizing that all existence is suffering is to turn away from or renounce one’s own desiring. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s thought
finds confirmation in the Eastern texts he read and admired: the goal of human life is to turn away from desire. Salvation can only be
found in resignation.
 1nc—fear of death
Debating is a technology of the constant striving to become un-self-conscious, an
anxious compulsion generated by the parental act of horror: psychogenesis.
Ligotti 12 [Thomas Ligotti, author, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, Hippocampus Press, available online:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1590452/29b1e623953914bf0b0ae8b363b4b746.pdf?1515783635 dwrs 8-1]

Zombification

As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done, Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by
relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny
in a conspiracy of silence.

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and
institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and
safe in our beds.

(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous
trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes

on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign

policy , their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing [petrifying] stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and
minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the rarest technique utilized
for conspiring against the human race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a
stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide
an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance. Zapffe uses
“The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity
of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear’s weep-ing for his dead daughter
Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing.

By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps
that may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town . Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.”

Trying to shift the conversation away from death is a rehearsal of the fantasy of
inevitability – instead, we should engage in corpse mediation 
Brooks 19 [Arthur C. Brooks, Atlantic contributor and president of the American Enterprise Institute. JULY ISSUE 2019, Atlantic, "Your
Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-
professional-decline/590650/ accessed 8-19-2019, dwrs]

--trying to shift conversations away from conversations of death is a doomed fantasy of invicibility, in which we deny that we will ever get old,
decline, suffer – that is destructive because it means that we never actualize our values, as they’re always deferred in favor of the mindless
striving toward success (skills) – this impact turns framework – the old Nietzsche argument: extinction comes sooner than we can do anything
about it anyway, or it’s just about skills in the first place – instead, we should just engage in corpse mediation 

I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death—a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if
death will never come by denying any degradation in my résumé virtues. This denial is destructive, because it leads me to ignore the eulogy
virtues that bring me the greatest joy.
How can I overcome this tendency? The Buddha recommends, of all things, corpse meditation: Many Theravada Buddhist monasteries in
Thailand and Sri Lanka display photos of corpses in various states of decomposition for the monks to contemplate. “This body, too,” students are
taught to say about their own body, “such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.” At first this seems morbid. But its logic
is grounded in psychological principles—and it’s not an exclusively Eastern idea. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,”
Michel de Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, “let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have
nothing more often in mind than death.”

Psychologists call this desensitization, in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seem ordinary, prosaic, not
scary. And for death, it works. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were
terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers
then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results,
published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as
those of the people actually facing death—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a
concrete reality closing in.

For most people, actively contemplating our demise so that it is present and real (rather than avoiding the thought of it via the mindless
pursuit of worldly success) can make death less frightening; embracing death reminds us that everything is temporary, and can make each day of
life more meaningful. “Death destroys a man,” E. M. Forster wrote, but “the idea of Death saves him.”

Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. Accepting the natural
cadence of our abilities sets up the possibility of transcendence, because it allows the shifting of attention to higher spiritual and life priorities.

But such a shift demands more than mere platitudes. I embarked on my research with the goal of producing a tangible road map to guide me
during the remaining years of my life. This has yielded four specific commitments.

Debating is a technology of the constant striving to become un-self-conscious, an

anxious compulsion generated by the parental act of horror: psychogenesis.
Ligotti 12 [Thomas Ligotti, author, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, Hippocampus Press, available online:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1590452/29b1e623953914bf0b0ae8b363b4b746.pdf?1515783635 dwrs 8-1]

Zombification

As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that
consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our
consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done, Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by
relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny
in a conspiracy of silence.

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and
institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and
safe in our beds.

(3) DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous
trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes

on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign

policy , their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing [petrifying] stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and
minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the rarest technique utilized
for conspiring against the human race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when
they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a
stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide
an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance. Zapffe uses
“The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity
of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear’s weep-ing for his dead daughter
Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing.

By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps
that may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy
theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your
consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical
beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of
us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and
nightmares around town . Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.”

Trying to shift the conversation away from death is a rehearsal of the fantasy of
inevitability – instead, we should engage in corpse mediation 
Brooks 19 [Arthur C. Brooks, Atlantic contributor and president of the American Enterprise Institute. JULY ISSUE 2019, Atlantic, "Your
Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-
professional-decline/590650/ accessed 8-19-2019, dwrs]

--trying to shift conversations away from conversations of death is a doomed fantasy of invicibility, in which we deny that we will ever get old,
decline, suffer – that is destructive because it means that we never actualize our values, as they’re always deferred in favor of the mindless
striving toward success (skills) – this impact turns framework – the old Nietzsche argument: extinction comes sooner than we can do anything
about it anyway, or it’s just about skills in the first place – instead, we should just engage in corpse mediation 

I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death—a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if
death will never come by denying any degradation in my résumé virtues. This denial is destructive, because it leads me to ignore the eulogy
virtues that bring me the greatest joy.

How can I overcome this tendency? The Buddha recommends, of all things, corpse meditation: Many Theravada Buddhist monasteries in
Thailand and Sri Lanka display photos of corpses in various states of decomposition for the monks to contemplate. “This body, too,” students are
taught to say about their own body, “such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.” At first this seems morbid. But its logic
is grounded in psychological principles—and it’s not an exclusively Eastern idea. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,”
Michel de Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, “let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have
nothing more often in mind than death.”

Psychologists call this desensitization, in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seem ordinary, prosaic, not
scary. And for death, it works. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were
terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers
then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results,
published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as
those of the people actually facing death—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a
concrete reality closing in.

For most people, actively contemplating our demise so that it is present and real (rather than avoiding the thought of it via the mindless
pursuit of worldly success) can make death less frightening; embracing death reminds us that everything is temporary, and can make each day of
life more meaningful. “Death destroys a man,” E. M. Forster wrote, but “the idea of Death saves him.”

Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. Accepting the natural
cadence of our abilities sets up the possibility of transcendence, because it allows the shifting of attention to higher spiritual and life priorities.

But such a shift demands more than mere platitudes. I embarked on my research with the goal of producing a tangible road map to guide me
during the remaining years of my life. This has yielded four specific commitments.

Our thesis is that capitalism relies on the suppression of symbolic exchange – the
mediation of value through capital makes death metaphysically incoherent which
necessitates a constant and violent striving for its abolition; life, information,
‘reasons to prefer’ – all operate under the logic of social exchange: accumulation.
Instead, we counterpose death. 
Robinson 2012. [Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the
Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by
Routledge. An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death. Ceasefire.
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/ 4/28 dwrs]

--the arguments about equivalence are the monism of capital: everything is always already just its exchange value in capitalism; nothing can
authentically have value because we’re trapped imagining everything in its ability to get us ballots—themselves merely capital—this is what our
later evidence will describe in the way that the only thing which disrupts the code, according to Baudrillard, is death – it is the only thing which is
not ‘liberated’, the thing with symbolic power – (Bataille)
--this is also where the thesis level arguments about difference/Otherness come from (alternatively articulated by Fisher and Lindsey, but
nevertheless of the same hypostasis) – capitalism hollows out the ability of difference by turning everything into itself, an incomplete process
(which is where Baudrillard’s arguments about ‘the Remainder’ come about) that is the basis for the security arguments, i.e. Evil, Otherness can’t
be eliminated, only papered over, which causes their return in the form of violence

--this is the basic stuff of the critiques of productivity—capitalism needs things to be valuable, and that is the basis for violence, both neoliberal
in the obvious way but also social 

--but, capitalism relies on the abolition of death – that is why an exchange with death is radical, why unproductivity is crucial, why death is the
one thing that breaks the code 

**(purple) the more the capitalistic reality principle attempts to flee death which means that when it does come, we’re panic-stricken, alone, and
unprepared – people say they’re not ‘prepared to die’ – which causes suffering

--desire is rooted in transgression – that’s a point of clash with a lot of affs (let women choose!!! let people choose if their life is worth living)
because it means that everyone mistheorizes desire – pleasure isn’t obtained by merely reforming the symbolic order (consciousness raising, all k
affs), but rather by transgression of that order, loosing the libidinal energy intrinsic to repression – liberation is an unsustainable sort of
tantalizing force where the imagination is that if only we were free enough but the processes which supposedly liberate us only make pleasure
harder to obtain 

---seriously – the sexual revolution made everything sexual except sex – it turned it into a literal industry, a way to sell products, a
fashion statement, a way of attaining clout  -- yet that literally makes everything sexual except sex: robbed of its Symbolic power., sex is reduced
to mere biophysical mechanics  

--the necessarily ambivalent nature of the world means that attempting to make the world productive, the attempt to abolish death through
transparency – this impact to the ‘will to transparency’ stuff

~recut this card as at: psychoanalysis

--that is, capitalist exchange can’t conceptualize non-value (death), it can only conceptualize a comparative absence of value – the difference
between 0, a known value, and non-value, the absence as such (again, death) 

-- we dissimulate difference 

-- the remainder haunts, i.e. it causes violence 

-- the exclusion of the dead is the fundamental basis on which all other splits occur – (and of course it is, it is intrinsic to being alive, something
that is impossible to avoid, in the way a Jungian archetype is: i.e. the only things that can be truly universal are those which are universal to the
human experience: death)

--the conception of life as merely whether or not people are functioning or not misunderstands death

-- (not currently highlighted) – the rise of death as the ‘end’ of the subject creates individualism that makes it impossible to empathetically
connect with other people 

-- (not currently highlighted) transparent veil stuff is like the ultimate VTL impact – everything is commodified—not necessarily to serve
capitalism, but at the very least by capitalism: everything is work, everything fun should be productive because being productive is fun, -- this is
the last paragraph of the card too where we’re afraid of being marionettes 

--the unintelligibility of death means that it takes over – there’s a biopolitics impact – without the symbolic force of death it becomes an
instrument of productivity, a ‘regressive redistribution’, that is, those in power can use wield death as another instrument of power – the ultimate
symbol is the concentration camp of course because it was the bureaucratic, judicial regime of death – that turns case because it means that even
if their example is an instance in which the tide has turned on arms, the very same incentives to mercilessly kill civillians via the production of
military technologies, military advancement/brinkspersonship 

The passage to capitalism

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism.  Baudrillard sees a change happening over
time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything
is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence.

Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general
equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-
time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared.

Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It
is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the
Other to an eternal return of the Same.

Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must
contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic
exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not
collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.

According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It
tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the
basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing
their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly.

Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the
past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According
to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now
have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or
remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the
remainder would be to destroy value.

Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential
exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating
or killing) cannot be returned by the other.

It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”,
which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the
separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore
only occurs under the regime of the code.

Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence
based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis
of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply

claim to live in societies . This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that
human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of
desire active.

Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies.
This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes
conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and
intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect
to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is
fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.

Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder
continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It
becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as
uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined.

This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the
force of symbolic exchange.

Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of
production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact
with monstrosity, with radical difference.

The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own
indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have
been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability.

Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious . Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or
exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the
mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the
symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate
retaliation.

The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to
be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic
exchange.

Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially
repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common
good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly,
but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its
intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power.
It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is
bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to
be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He
is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups.

Death

Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above
all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death.

Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a
form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly
discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations,
the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is
related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one
generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to
metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.

According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which
they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify.
Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological,
material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death.

Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the
division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of
others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular
segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another
marked or deviant category.

The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms
the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on.

This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not
exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function.
A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard,
this misunderstands the nature of life and death.

The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the
story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions . In relation to individuals, ideas
of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern
systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves.

The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say,
between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their
actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off
the danger of irruptions of the symbolic.

The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the
categories. In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living,
mortal relationships with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us.

Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place. It is the
process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people
turn the other into their ‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the
“Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the
resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. “We all” become
dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion.

The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered,
and the dead become prohibited. The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so
as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and
its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation.

In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People
no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’. It
can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’.

This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol. The system now commands that
we must not die – at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety
regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees
this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrestled from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies.
For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them
as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety
about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains within
the master’s dialectic for as long as ‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination.
 1nc—skepticism

Causes can’t be identified – vote neg on presumption. 

Sextus Empiricus, pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, 2nd Century BCE*
[Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism,** Translated, with Introduction and Commentary, by Benson Mates Oxford University Press***,
New York Oxford 1996. Book 3, Chapters 5. http://www.sciacchitano.it/pensatori%20epistemici/scettici/outlines%20of%20pyrronism.pdf dwrs
6/20. *S.E. is thought to live between the second and third century BCE; this book was likely written in this time. **Sometimes translated
‘Outlines of Skepticism. It is published as all three volumes. ***There are other editions; this is to which the link corresponds.]

For these reasons it is plausible that there are causes. But that it is also plausible, on the other hand, to say that nothing is the cause of anything
will be plain when we have set forth a few of the many arguments to show this. Thus, for instance, it is impossible to conceive of a cause before
apprehending its effect as its effect. For only then do we recognize that it is a cause of the effect, when we apprehend the latter as an effect. But
we are not able to apprehend the effect of the cause as its effect if we do not apprehend the cause of the effect as its cause. For only then do we
suppose ourselves to recognize that the effect is an effect of it, when we apprehend the cause as the cause of that effect . If, then, in order to
conceive the cause it is necessary to have prior recognition of the effect, and in order to recognize the effect, as I said, it is necessary to have prior
acquaintance with the cause, the circularity type of aporia shows that both are inconceivable, it being impossible to conceive the cause as a
cause or the effect as an effect; for, since each of them needs credibility from the other, we do not know with which of them to begin the
conceiving. Hence we shall not be able to assert that anything is the cause of anything.  
 1nc
debating only enflames cruel optimism – Brandolini’s Law states that it takes an
order of magnitude more effort to refute bullshit than to spew it, which means that
interventions on the level of information are a doomed political strategy because
they will always get out-resourced, out-maneuvered, and exhausted which trades off
with effective political orientation – vote neg on presumption
Roberts 18
Roberts, energy and climate reporter for Vox, 18 [David, 10/31/18, Vox, “Why conservatives keep gaslighting the nation about climate change”,
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/10/22/18007922/climate-change-republicans-denial-marco-rubio-trump dwrs]

None of it is in good faith 

Having just made that basic argument for the 12 billionth time in my career, let me follow up by pointing out that making that argument
is almost certainly futile. There is no interlocutor on the other side interested in arguments of facts. There’s no one to talk to. 

To see the true nature of right-wing climate denialism, it’s better to look past people like Rubio, who have trained their whole lives to pass as
moderate on Sunday talk shows. Instead, the real truth of right-wing tribalism works on climate change is embodied by none other than President
Donald Trump. 

Consider Trump’s responses to the questioning of Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes on the subject of climate change. Historians will marvel over this
document:

 There’s no argument here. Trump does not make arguments. There are just ... phrases, unconnected to the phrases that precede and follow them.
It’s just bits of rhetoric Trump has heard — his impression of what his people say about these things — jumbled up in his brain.  Note that
someone clearly told him before the interview that the “hoax” thing is a trap and he should not outright deny climate change. You can tell,
because he just blurts it out: “I don’t think it’s a hoax.” And then, “I’m not denying climate change.”  But if you rewind or fast forward through
the phrases, you can find plenty that do exactly those things. He says “something’s changing and it’ll change back again.” That’s denying climate
change. He says “I don’t know that it’s manmade.” That’s denying climate change (see above). He says there’s no way to know if Greenland
glaciers would be melting without human activity. That’s denying climate change.  She protests: “But that’s denying it.” She asks, “What about
all the scientists?” “Scientists also have a political agenda,” he says. That sounds like he’s calling it a hoax!   The point here is not to catch
Trump in a contradiction. Trump contradicts himself every time he opens his mouth. He does not have beliefs as such, not like we ordinarily
understand them, and so he can’t really contradict himself. Nothing divided by nothing is nothing.   Rather, the point is that Trump, in this
as in so many other areas, is a rawer, truer reflection of right-wing thinking on this subject.  Listening to him talk, it’s clear that everything is
geared around defending the right’s tribal position. He just says whatever comes to mind in that pursuit, grabs whatever talking point bubbles
up from his Fox-informed subconscious. It doesn’t matter — I’m sure it never occurs to him — that half the things he says don’t fit with the other
half. He’s not offering good-faith arguments, statements of fact or reasoning meant to be subject to critical scrutiny.  Persuasion is not any part
of this, in either direction. The goal is only to deflect, confuse, and mislead, in defense of the status quo .  Conservatives have been
gaslighting the nation about climate change for years  That is obviously true when it comes to Trump, because he scarcely tries, indeed doesn’t
know how, to pretend otherwise. But it’s just as true of the entire conservative movement, for decades now. All the denialist talking points —
nefarious scientists, sunspots, natural cycles — have their true believers in the base, among the chumps who drink the Kool-Aid and fill up the
comment sections.  But the motive force is not any assessment of science. It’s the tight alliance between the cultural politics of white resentment
and the power of fossil fuel and related industries. To acknowledge anthropogenic climate change is to empower liberals, open the door to
additional taxes and regulations, and threaten the power of the fossil fuel industry.  The Republican Party as currently constituted will simply
never do those things. Ever. The arguments are secondary.  It’s difficult for people who care about climate change to accept this. It implies
that all those hours spent earnestly arguing about climate science have been, to a first approximation, wasted. And it’s been a lot of hours
— thousands and thousands of hours, spent by people of good faith in hopes that evidence and reason can change minds .  But it always
should have been obvious that those with power connected to fossil fuels will not give up that power without a fight. They certainly will not
give it up based on scientific or humanistic considerations. They will defend their prerogatives and privileges, as those with power always
have, throughout history.  And they will always find people who will defend their interests, using whatever language serves the purpose.
The arguments offered to the public may be scientific, political, or economic, or some jumble thereof, as with Trump. They may make
occasional rhetorical concessions, if the tide of public opinion threatens them. They will perform substantive engagement, to the extent
circumstances demand it.  But defense of the status quo is the point, not the arguments. And the only way it can be overcome is through
power and money, i.e., organized political opposition. Focusing on the words — scrutinizing the exact mathematical degree of denial
displayed in a particular Republican’s comments, as though it reflects anything deeper — is just getting played.

theirs is an unsustainable, utilian politics of desire which culminate in warfare and

suffering -- vote neg to refuse desire
Troxell, philosophy professor at Boston College, no date 
[Mary, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860)”, https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/, 6/24 dwrs]

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the most well known feature of his philosophy, and he is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism.
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision follows from his account of the inner nature of the world as aimless blind striving.

Because the will has no goal or purpose, the will’s satisfaction is impossible . The will objectifies itself in a hierarchy of gradations from
inorganic to organic life, and every grade of objectification of the will, from gravity to animal motion, is marked by insatiable striving. In
addition, every force of nature and every organic form of nature participates in a struggle to seize matter from other forces or organisms. Thus
existence is marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction.

The attainment of a goal or desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment results in suffering.
Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by
suffering. This conclusion holds for all of nature, including inanimate natures, insofar as they are at essence will. However, suffering is more
conspicuous in the life of human beings because of their intellectual capacities. Rather than serving as a relief from suffering, the intellect of
human beings brings home their suffering with greater clarity and consciousness. Even with the use of reason, human beings can in no way
alter the degree of misery we experience; indeed, reason only magnifies the degree to which we suffer. Thus all the ordinary pursuits of mankind
are not only fruitless but also illusory insofar as they are oriented toward satisfying an insatiable, blind will.

Since the essence of existence is insatiable striving, and insatiable striving is suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that nonexistence is
preferable to existence. However, suicide is not the answer. One cannot resolve the problem of existence through suicide, for since all
existence is suffering, death does not end one’s suffering but only terminates the form that one’s suffering takes. The proper response to
recognizing that all existence is suffering is to turn away from or renounce one’s own desiring. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s thought
finds confirmation in the Eastern texts he read and admired: the goal of human life is to turn away from desire. Salvation can only be
found in resignation.
 1NC
One needs to have a plan, someone said who was
turned away into the shadows 

and who I had believed was sleeping or dead

Imagine, he said, all the flesh that is eaten 

the teeth tearing into it 

the tongue tasting its savor and the hunger for that taste 

Now take away that flesh, he said

 take away the teeth and the tongue 

the taste and the hunger 

Take away everything as it is-

That was my plan, my own special plan for this world

I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder

 If this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead 

Would ever approach his vision 

even in his deepest dreams 

or his most lasting death 

Because I had heard of such plans, such visions 

And I knew they did not see far enough-

That what was demanded—in the way of a plan-

Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth 

and hunger and flesh

 Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones 

and the wind that would come 

to blow the dust away 

And so I began to envision a darkness 

That was long before the dark of night 

And a strangely shining light 

That owed nothing to the light of day.

The trap of consciousness is one that dooms us to pitiful, pointless lives

of pain and apathy. Information is contrary to its own intent as it only
manages to reveal to us how shitty and pointless and repulsive this all is
rather than reveal any positive reason to act. This is a matrix of
infinite suffering which births postmodern modes of capitalist
accumulation and should independently frame your decision calculus.
Ligotti 07 [Thomas Ligotti, Nick Land without the amphetamines, The Conspiracy
Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, 2007, *brackets for gendered
language*, //Stefan]

human suffering. This is the

Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is

last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that
matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparkling Clean Toilet Bowl.
For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any

cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of
human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical
action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by “human
Remedies
suffering,” the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself.

may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be

amended. But these are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long
as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s “Last Messiah.”
It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do
so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.
Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is
nonetheless real. As a survival-happy species, our successes are calculated in the
number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of suffering being
only incidental to this aim. To stay alive under almost any circumstances is a
sickness with us. Nothing could be more unhealthy than to “watch one’s health” as a
means of stalling death. The lengths we will go as procrastinators of that last gasp
only demonstrate a morbid dread of that event . By contrast, our fear of suffering is deficient. So
Shakespeare’s Edgar when he passes on the wisdom that “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”
Officially, there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of
such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate
worse than death itself. Longevity is without question of paramount value in our
lives, and finding a corrective for mortality is our compulsive project . Anything
goes insofar as lengthening our earthly tenure. And how we have cashed in on our
efforts. No need to cram our lives into two or three decades now that we can cram them into seven, eight, nine, or more.
The lifespan of non-domesticated mammals has never changed, while ours has grown by leaps and bounds. What a coup for
the human race. Unaware how long they will live, other warm-blooded life forms are sluggards by comparison. Time will run
out for us as it does for all creatures, true, but at least we can dream of a day when we might elect our own deadline. Then
perhaps we can all die of the same thing: a killing satiation with our durability in a world that is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
“Worthless” rather than “useless” is the more familiar epithet in this context. The rationale for using “useless” in place of
“worthless” in this histrionically capitalized phrase is that “worthless” is tied to the concepts of desirability and value, and
by their depreciation introduces them into the existential mix. “Useless,” on the other hand, is not so inviting of these
concepts. Elsewhere in this work, “worthless” is connected to the language of pessimism and does what damage it can. But
the devil of it is that “worthless” really does not go far enough when speaking pessimistically about the character of
existence.Too many times the question “Is life worth living?” has been asked. This
usage of “worth” excites impressions of a fair lot of experiences that are arguably
desirable and valuable within limits and that may follow upon one another in such a
way as to suggest that life is not totally worthless. With “useless,” the wispy
spirits of desirability and value do not as readily rear their heads. Naturally, the
uselessness of all that is or could ever be is subject to the same repudiations as
the worthlessness of all that is or could ever be. For this reason, the adverb “malignantly” has been
annexed to “useless” to give it a little more semantic stretch and a dose of toxicity. But to express with any

adequacy a sense of the uselessness of everything, a nonlinguistic modality would

be needed, some effusion out of a dream that amalgamated every gradation of the
useless and wordlessly transmitted to us the inanity of existence under any
possible conditions. Indigent of such means of communication, the uselessness of all that exists or could possibly
exist must be spoken with a poor potency. Not unexpectedly, no one believes that everything is useless, and with good
reason. We all live within relative frameworks, and within those frameworks uselessness is far wide of the norm. A potato
masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes. For some people, a system of being that includes an afterlife of eternal
bliss may not seem useless. They might say that such a system is absolutely useful because it gives them the hope they need
to make it through this life. But an afterlife of eternal bliss is not and cannot be absolutely useful simply because you need it
to be. It is part of a relative framework and nothing beyond that, just as a potato masher is only part of a relative
framework and is useful only if you need to mash potatoes. Once you had made it through this life to an afterlife of eternal
bliss, you would have no use for that afterlife. Its job would be done, and all you would have is an afterlife of eternal bliss—a
You might as well not exist at
paradise for reverent hedonists and pious libertines. What is the use in that?

all, either in this life or in an afterlife of eternal bliss. Any kind of existence is
useless. Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense. There
are some people who do not get up in arms about potato-masher relativism, while other people do. The latter want to think in
terms of absolutes that are really absolute and not just absolute potato mashers. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a real
problem with a potato-masher system of being. Buddhists have no problem with a potato-masher system because for them
there are no absolutes. What they need to realize is the truth of “dependent origination,” which means that everything is
related to everything else in a great network of potato mashers that are always interacting with one another. So the only
problem Buddhists have is not being able to realize that the only absolutely useful thing is the realization that everything is
a great network of potato mashers. They think that if they can get over this hump, they will be eternally liberated from
suffering. At least they hope they will, which is all they really need to make it through this life. In the Buddhist faith,
everyone suffers who cannot see that the world is a MALIGNANTLY USELESS potato-mashing network. However, that does
not make Buddhists superior to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It only means they have a different system for making it
through a life where all we can do is wait for musty shadows to call our names when they are ready for us. After that
happens, there will be nobody who will need anything that is not absolutely useless. Ask any atheist. Ecocide Despite Zapffe’s
work as a philosopher, although not in an occupational role (he earned his living by writing poems, plays, stories, and humorous
pieces), he is better known as an early ecologist who popularized the term “biosophy” to name a discipline that would broaden
the compass of philosophy to include the interests of other living things besides human beings. In this capacity, he serves as
an inspiration to environmentalists who worry about the well-being of the earth and its organisms. Here, too, we catch
the act of conspiring to build barricades against
ourselves—and Zapffe himself, as he affirmed—in

the repugnant facts of life by signing on to a cause (in this case that of environmentalism) that
snubs the real issue. Vandalism of the environment is but a sidebar to humanity’s refusal

to look into the jaws of existence. In truth, we have only one foot in the natural
environment of this world. Other worlds are always calling us away from nature. We
live in a habitat of unrealities—not of earth, air, water, and wildlife—and cradling
illusion trounces grim logic every time. Some of the more combative environmentalists, however, have
concurred with Zapffe that we should retire from existence. But their advocacy of worldwide suicide as a strategy for
saving the earth from being pillaged by human beings receives no mention in “The Last Messiah” and was probably not on
Zapffe’s mind when he wrote this essay. As appealing as a universal suicide pact may be, why take part in it just to conserve
this planet, this dim bulb in the blackness of space?Nature produced us, or at least subsidized our
evolution. It intruded on an inorganic wasteland and set up shop. What evolved was
a global workhouse where nothing is ever at rest, where the generation and
discarding of life incessantly goes on. By what virtue, then, is it entitled to receive
a pardon for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse, just as reproduction
makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual’s death? In its course,
nature has made blunders in plenty. These are left to die out, as is nature’s wont .
Perhaps this will be how we will go—a natural death. It might be idly theorized, though, that nature has

a special plan for human beings and devised us to serve as a way revoking itself , much
like Mainländer’s self-expunging God. An offbeat idea, no protest, but not the strangest we have ever heard or lived by. We
could at least take up the hypothesis and see where it leads. If it is proved unviable, then where is the harm? But until then,
might we not let ourselves be drawn along by nature’s plan, which includes our sacking the earth as a paradoxical means of
living better in it, or at least living as our nature bids us to live. We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that
could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along— a
world where
all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which
will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves. Left
unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell remains palpitating in this
cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature’s suicide?
For want of a deity that could be held to account for a world in which there is terrible pain, let nature take the blame for
our troubles. We did not create an environment uncongenial to our species, nature did. One would think that nature was
trying to kill us off, or get us to suicide ourselves once the blunder of consciousness came upon us. What was nature
thinking? We tried to anthropomorphize it, to romanticize it, to let it into our hearts. But nature kept its distance, leaving us
to our own devices. So be it. Survival is a two-way street. Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet
from outer space. It’s the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us. Let it save itself if it can—the condemned are
known for the acrobatics they will execute to wriggle out of their sentences. But if it cannot destroy what it has made, and
what could possibly unmake it, then may it perish along with every other living thing it has introduced to pain. While no
species has given in to pain to the point of giving up its existence, so far as we know, it is not a phenomenon whose praises
are often sung. Hopelessness In Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” the titular figure appears at the end and makes the mock-
Socratic, biblically parodic pronouncement, “Know yourselves—be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye” (Zapffe’s
emphasis). As Zapffe pictures the scene, the Last Messiah’s words will not be well received: “And when he has spoken, they
will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.” Semantically
speaking, the Last Messiah is not a messiah, since he saves no living soul and will be erased from human memory by a vigilante
group whose kingpins are “the pacifier makers and the midwives.” Moreover, a resurrection seems to be the last thing in the
Last Messiah’s future. To exposit why humanity should not further tarry on earth is one thing; to believe that this
proposition will be agreeable to others is quite another. Due to the note of hopelessness in the coda to Zapffe’s essay, we
are discouraged from imagining a world in which the self-liquidation of humanity could ever be put into effect. The
Norwegian himself did not take the trouble to do so in “The Last Messiah.” No reason he should, since he would first have to
imagine a new humanity, which is not as a practice done outside of fiction, a medium of realism but not of reality. Yet these
new humans would not have to be super-evolved or otherwise freakish organisms living far in the future. They would only
a retreat from the worldly scene would be a benevolent
have to be like Zapffe in recognizing that

proceeding for the good of the unborn. Becoming extinct would seem to be a tall order, but not one that
would be insurmountably time-consuming. Zapffe optimistically projected that those of the new humanity could be evacuated
from existence over the course of a few generations. And indeed they could. As their numbers tapered off, these dead-
the most privileged individuals in history and share with one
enders of our species could be

another material comforts once held in trust only for the well-born or money-
getting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passé as a motive for the new humanity,
there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep
everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged
among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist. And how many would speed up the process of
extinction once euthanasia was decriminalized and offered in humane and even enjoyable ways? What a relief, what an
unburdening to have closed the book on humankind. Yet it would not need to be slammed shut. As long as we progressed
toward a thinning of the herd, couples could still introduce new faces into the human fold as billions became millions and then
thousands. New generations would learn about the past, and, like those before them, feel lucky not to have been born in
times of fewer conveniences and cures, although they might still play at cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, management
the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great
and labor. The last of us could be

exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the

reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits. Quite naturally, this
depiction of an end times by an extinctionist covenant will seem abhorrent to those now living in hope of a better future (not
necessarily one in which glorious progress has been made toward the alleviation of human misery, but at least one that will
partially exculpate them from a depraved indifference to the harm predestined for their young). It may also seem a
romanticized utopia, since those who predict major readjustments in humanity’s self-conception (Karl Marx, et al.) often
believe that a revolution in ethics will blossom when their “truths” are instituted. Worse, or perhaps better if the solution to
the idea of a new humanity may be a smokescreen for a
human suffering is to be final,

tyrannical oligarchy run by militants of extinction rather than a social and

psychological sanctuary for a species harboring the universal goal of delimiting its
stay on earth. If Zapffe uselessly exercised himself by formulating the thesis of “The Last Messiah,” he was sharp
enough to give it a hopeless finale. Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of
The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and
its own deliverance.

denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one
that will be passed on to countless generations. The reception of the research of a Canadian scientist
named Michael Persinger may be seen as an indication of humanity’s genius for keeping itself locked into its old ways. In the
1980s, Persinger modified a motorcycle helmet to affect the magnetic fields of the brain of its wearer, inducing a variety of
strange sensations. These included experiences in which subjects felt themselves proximate to supernatural phenomena that
included ghosts and gods. Atheists used Persinger’s studies to nail closed their argument for the subjectivity of anyone’s
sense of the supernatural. Not to be left behind, believers wrote their own books in which they contended that the
magnetic-field-emitting motorcycle helmet proved the existence of a god that “hard-wired” itself into our brains. A field of
Even if you can prop up a
study called neurotheology grew up around this and other laboratory experiments.

scientific theory with a cudgel of data that should render the holy opposition
unconscious, they will be standing ready to discredit you —imprisonment, torture,
and public execution having gone the way of chastity belts . For writers of supernatural horror
the perquisite of this deadlock is that it ensures the larger part of humanity will remain in a state

of fear, because no one can ever be certain of either [their] own ontological status
or that of gods, demons, alien invaders , and sundry other bugbears. A Buddhist would advise
that we forget about whether or not the bogeymen we have invented or divined are real. The big question is this:
Are we real?
 2NC

Tag- people choose wrong 

Ligotti 07 [Thomas Ligotti, Nick Land without the amphetamines, The Conspiracy
Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, 2007, *brackets for gendered
language*, //Stefan]
When people are asked to respond to the statement “I am happy—true or false,” the word “true” is spoken more often than
“false,” overwhelmingly so. If there is some loss of face in confessing that one is not happy, this does not mean that those
who profess happiness as their dominant humor are lying through their teeth. People want to be happy. They believe they
should be happy. And if some philosopher says they can never be happy because their consciousness has ensured their
discontinuing our
unhappiness, that philosopher will not be part of the dialogue, especially if he blathers about

species by ceasing to bear children who can also never be happy even though, to extend
the point, they can also never be unhappy given their inexperience of existi ng. Ask Zapffe.

So you ask whether I would choose to be unborn? One must be born in order to choose, and the

choice involves destruction. But ask my brother in that chair over there. Indeed, it is an empty one; my brother
did not get so far. Yet ask him, as he is traveling like the wind below the sky, crashing against the beach, scenting in the
grass, reveling in his strength as he pursues his living food. Do you think he is bereaved by his incapacity to fulfill his fate on
the waiting list of the Oslo Housing and Savings Society? And have you ever missed him? Look around in a crowded afternoon
tram and reflect whether you would allow a lottery to select one of the exhausted toilers as the one whom you put into this
world. They pay no attention as one person gets off and two get on. The tram keeps rolling along. (“Fragments of an
in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be
Interview,” Aftenposten, 1959) The point that

deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this fact plays no part
in their existential computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic. Whether a
pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a knife in our gut or denounces life as notworth living is immaterial. What matters
is that he makes no bones about hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy to observe. But this problem can
be solved only by establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that would enable us in principle to say which is more
desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of human life,
pessimists still run themselves ragged trying to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When they do argue for
the desirability of human life it is only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even though no airtight case has ever
been made regarding that desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out
of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of
our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any
given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists. For optimists, human life never needs justification, no
there
matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists,

is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human

beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt. As a worst-
case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or human-made cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic
counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree of ingenuity from an optimist, but it could
be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no
possible formula can be established to measure proportions and types of hurt and happiness in the world. If such a formula
could be established, then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in to their adversaries. One formula to establish
the imbalance at issue has been tendered by the South African philosopher of ethics David Benatar. In his Better Never to
Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006), Benatar cogently propounds that, because some amount of suffering
is inevitable for all who are born, while the absence of happiness does not deprive those who would have been born but were
not, the scales are tipped in favor of not bearing children. Therefore, propagators violate any conceivable system of morality
and ethics because they are guilty of doing harm. To Benatar, the extent of the harm that always occurs matters not.
Once harm has been ensured by the begetting of a bundle of joy, a line has been
crossed from moral-ethical behavior to immoral-unethical behavior . This violation
of morality and ethics holds for Benatar in all instances of childbirth. People like Benatar who
argue that the world’s “ideal population size is zero ” are written off as being unhealthy of mind. Further
accentuating this presumed unhealthiness is Benatar’s argument that giving birth is not only harmful but should be seen as so
egregiously harmful that there is no happiness that can counterbalance it. As harms go in this world, there are none worse
than the harm that entails all others. Ask William James for a perspective on one of those great harms—to which he gives
The method of averting
the name “melancholy”—and how it is generally passed over in the lives of healthy adults.

one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as
it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and
within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down
impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that
healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to
account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and
possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. The normal process of life contains

moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with , moments in
which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of
horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on
the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless
agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) James
himself suffered a brush with melancholy, but he made a full recovery and began to think positively, or at least equivocally,
about being alive, answering yes to the question “Is life worth living?” However, by force of his honesty of intellect he knew
this opinion needed to be defended as much as any other opinion. No logic can support it. Indeed, logic defeats all
feeling that life is worth living, which, James says, only a self-willed belief in a higher order of existence can
instill. Then every suffering will seem worthwhile in the way that the vivisection of a living dog, to use James’s example,
would seem worthwhile to the animal if only it could comprehend the goodly ends its pain serves for the higher order of
human existence. In his lecture “Is Life worth Living,” James opined that human beings, unlike dogs, can in fact imagine a
higher order of existence than theirs, one that may legitimate the worst adversities of mortal life. James was a rare
philosopher in that he put no faith in logic. And he was doubtless wise to adopt that stance, since the fortunes of those who
attempt to defend their opinions with logic are not enviable. Naturally, for those whose opinion is that it is “better to be”
than “better never to have been,” Benatar’s logic for the latter proposition is rejected as faulty, the more so in that its
conclusions are not supported by a consensus of ordinary folk. Logic notwithstanding, Benatar’s moral-ethical censure of
reproduction does prove that humanity’s continuance is not universally accepted as a good in itself, even in a super-modern
world. It also reminds us that no one can make a case that every individual’s birth, or any individual’s birth, is a good in itself.
And that is the case that needs to be made, at least morally and ethically speaking as well as logically speaking. (For more on
If most people believe that
this, see the section Pressurized in the chapter “The Cult of Grinning Martyrs.”)

being alive is all right—the alternative to this belief having no appeal for them—
the rectitude of causing new people to become alive is just a matter of opinion.
 1nc
Modern Medicine has increased end of life pain - that means a drawn out painful
death awaits for all of us at the end of our natural lives - instant extinction now is
preferable. 
Gold 15 Jenny Gold (covers the health care industry, overhaul and disparities for radio and print).
“Pain And Suffering At Life's End Are Getting Worse, Not Better.” NRP. 3 February 2015. HW.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/02/03/383522954/pain-and-suffering-at-lifes-end-are-
getting-worse-not-better
It's been more than 15 years since the Institute of Medicine released its seminal 1997 report detailing the suffering that many Americans experience at the end of life and offering sweeping recommendations on how to improve care. But the
number of people experiencing pain in the last year of life actually

increased by nearly 12 percent between 1998 and 2010 And , according to a study published Monday.

the number of people with depression in the last year of life increased
by more than 26 percent. All that happened as guidelines and quality measures for end-of-life care were developed, the number of palliative care programs rose and hospice use doubled between
2000 and 2009. "We've put a lot of work into this and it's not yielding what we thought it should be yielding. So what do we do now?" asked Dr. Joanne Lynn, a study author who directs the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at the Altarum Institute. Robert
Schwimmer, 66, and his son Scott Schwimmer, 21, spoke with NPR about Robert's wish to hasten his death under certain circumstances. Here — as in the family photo above — they're in Kauai, Hawaii, on the family's "last big trip" after Robert received a 6-month
prognosis in October. SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS Family Struggles With Father's Wish To Die The study looked at 7,204 patients who died while enrolled in the national Health and Retirement study, a survey of Americans over age 50. After each participant's death,
a family member was asked questions about the person's end-of-life experience, including whether the person suffered pain, depression or periodic confusion. Those three symptoms were all found to have become more prevalent over the 10-year analysis. One
reason, Lynn said, is that doctors are using a greater range of high-tech treatments, which can lengthen the process of dying without curing the patient. "We throw more medical treatment at patients who are on their way to dying, which keeps them in a difficult
situation for much, much longer," she said. "We've increased the number of people put on ventilators and kept in hospitals, and we simply have more treatments that are possible to offer." Medical research focuses on wiping out diseases, Lynn says, rather than on
long-term support or symptom management for people with chronic conditions or disabilities associated with aging: "Think about how much we invest in curing Alzheimer's disease, and how little we put into making the course of Alzheimer's better."

we have a duty to the future generations of people we will save from ever suffering -
that outweighs current suffering we may experience from going extinct 
Matheny 7 (Jason, Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public
Health, Johns Hopkins University, “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” Risk Analysis, Vol. 27,
No. 5, 2007)
Discussing the risks of “nuclear winter,” Carl Sagan (1983) wrote: Some have argued that the difference between the deaths of several hundred million people in a nuclear war (as has been thought until recently to be a rea- sonable upper limit) and the death of
every person on Earth (as now seems possible) is only a matter of one order of magnitude. For me, the difference is considerably greater. Restricting our attention only to those who die as a consequence of the war conceals its full impact. If we are required to
calibrate extinction in nu- merical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born. A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an

over a typical time period for the biological evolution of a

average lifetime of the order of 100 years,

successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about

some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only”
hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their
descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise. In a similar vein, the philosopher Derek Parfit (1984) wrote: I believe that 

Nuclear extinction is key to solve nonhuman suffering; biodiverse ecosystems are

torture chambers for trillions of conscious creatures
Sittler 16
Thomas M. Sittler-Adamczewski (University of Oxford). “Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals.” Journal of
Practical Ethics. OXFORD UEHIRO PRIZE IN PRACTICAL ETHICS 2015-16. December 2016. JDN.
http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/

Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority. I consider objections to the argument, and discuss which courses of action are open to those who accept the
argument.

Many consequentialists are vegetarian because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. More precisely then, ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to
come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical consequentialist vegetarians1 believed that animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat
from free-range cows.

almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to

If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living,

also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often
romanticised But extreme forms of suffering like as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive.

starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are

much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before

killing them (Tomasik 2009). In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions (Michigan Department of Natural Resources). While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful
death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering (Tomasik 2013). Wild animals do experience significant pleasure, for instance when they eat, play, have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity. One reason to suspect that on average this pleasure is
outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproduc tive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could
have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.

Using
A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken) (Tomasik 2014). I restrict my count of wild animals to those at least as complex as chicken or small fish, which vegetarians clearly believe do have moral weight.

studies of animal density there are at least [60 Billion] in different biomes, Tomasik estimates conservatively that

birds, [600 Billion] land mammals, and [60 trillion] fish.

6*10^10 land

categories alone are several times more numerous than livestock.

10^11 10^13 Animals in each of these

If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living, and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites;

[we should] focus on preventing the

thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’ (Dawkins 1996) If they accept the premises so far, consistent vegetarians should

existence of as many wild animals as possible, since even a small

reduction in the global number of wild animals would outweigh
the impact of ending all livestock production. [we] could For example, they

reduce animal populations by destroying highly dense animal by sterilising them, or

habitats such as rainforests.   It may even be the case that vegetarians should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer wild animals per square kilometre than other

biomes such as forests (Matheny and Chan 2005, 585). Of course, to the extent that it is more difficult to reduce wild animal populations than farm animal populations, vegetarians should focus more resources on the latter. But it seems implausible that it would be over a hundred times more difficult to achieve the same proportional reduction, which is what would be needed to reverse my conclusion that wild animal
suffering dominates. There could be some simple ways, for instance, for vegetarians to reduce habitat sizes: supporting the construction of large parking lots, or donating to a pro-deforestation lobby. In the final paragraph, I touch upon the issue of how most effectively to reduce wild animal suffering.

The question is why? Salvation is only valuable if existence is suffering. Death is the
freedom from the horrors of life.
Cioran 49 (Emil Cioran was Romanian philosopher and essayist, “Précti de decomposition,”
1949, translated by Richard Howard, Editions Gallimard ///ghs-sc)
A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation 'existence
equals suffering.' It is neither a sudden realization nor a series of reasonings which leads us
to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our
experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that
the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later;
the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of 'wisdom.' But, suppose we do
not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts - what if we
prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime
impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself
alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious
temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest
wallow - dead drunk - in imperfection ...

Asymmetry between pain and pleasure[edit]

Benatar argues there is crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure
and pain, which means it would be better for humans not to have been born:

1. the presence of pain is bad;

2. the presence of pleasure is good;
3. the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone;
4. the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence
is a deprivation.[6][7]

Scenario A (X exists) Scenario B (X never exists)

(1) Presence of pain (Bad) (3) Absence of pain (Good)

(2) Presence of pleasure (4) Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

(Good)

Implications for procreation[edit]

Benatar argues that bringing someone into existence generates both good and bad experiences,
pain and pleasure, whereas not doing so generates neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain
is good, the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-
procreation.
Benatar raises four other related asymmetries that he considers quite plausible:

1. We have a moral obligation not to create unhappy people and we have no moral
obligation to create happy people. The reason why we think there is a moral
obligation not to create unhappy people is that the presence of this suffering would
be bad (for the sufferers) and the absence of the suffering is good (even though there
is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). By contrast, the reason we think there is
no moral obligation to create happy people is that although their pleasure would be
good for them, the absence of pleasure when they do not come into existence will not
be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
2. It is strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide to
create them, and it is not strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a
reason why we decide not to create them. That the child may be happy is not a
morally important reason to create them. By contrast, that the child may be unhappy
is an important moral reason not to create them. If it were the case that the absence
of pleasure is bad even if someone does not exist to experience its absence, then we
would have a significant moral reason to create a child and to create as many
children as possible. And if it were not the case that the absence of pain is good even
if someone does not exist to experience this good, then we would not have a
significant moral reason not to create a child.
3. Someday we can regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on
our decision, that we created them – a person can be unhappy and the presence of
their pain would be a bad thing. But we will never feel regret for the sake of a person
whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we did not create them – a
person will not be deprived of happiness, because he or she will never exist, and the
absence of happiness will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be
deprived of this good.
4. We feel sadness by the fact that somewhere people come into existence and suffer,
and we feel no sadness by the fact that somewhere people did not come into
existence in a place where there are happy people. When we know that somewhere
people came into existence and suffer, we feel compassion. The fact that on some
deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and suffer is good. This
is because the absence of pain is good even when there is not someone who is
experiencing this good. On the other hand, we do not feel sadness by the fact that on
some deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and are not
happy. This is because the absence of pleasure is bad only when someone exists to
be deprived of this good.[8]
Humans' unreliable assessment of life's quality[edit]
Benatar raises the issue of whether humans inaccurately estimate the true quality of their lives, and
has cited three psychological phenomena which he believes are responsible for this:

1. Tendency towards optimism: we have a positively distorted perspective of our lives in

the past, present, and future.
2. Adaptation: we adapt to our circumstances, and if they worsen, our sense of well-
being is lowered in anticipation of those harmful circumstances, according to our
expectations, which are usually divorced from the reality of our circumstances.
3. Comparison: we judge our lives by comparing them to those of others, ignoring the
negatives which affect everyone to focus on specific differences. And due to our
optimism bias, we mostly compare ourselves to those worse off, to overestimate the
value of our own well-being.

He concludes;

The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They
militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still
suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they
might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives.
Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected.[9]

Suffering and pleasure gives Hedonic treadmill theory shows material changes to
our life do not effect our level of suffering - we always become adjusted to the status
quo and return to a baseline. 
Michaela Keilty 17 , Dynamic Marketings, "Why We're Never Satisfied | The Hedonic Treadmill —", 2017,
https://www.dynamicmarketingsd.com/blog/2017/3/15/why-were-never-satisfied-the-hedonic-treadmill
people who achieve success
There is a scientific reason for why fail to achieve happiness. , fame, and luxury long-term The term

hedonic adaptation.
psychologists use for this is called: The tendency of humans According to Psychology today, hedonic adaptation by definition is: “

to quickly return to a stable level of happiness despite major positive relatively or negative

life changes .” Let’s quickly note that hedonic adaptation can also occur with negative changes or experiences, which I happen to see as a good thing. However, for the sake of this post, I’m focusing on the hedonic adaptation that occurs
when we experience “positive” things. Like material luxuries, job promotions, marriage, etc. For instance, let’s say you buy your first new luxury car. You worked hard to reach this milestone in your life. As you’re handed over the keys, you can’t help but smile from

feelings of
ear to ear. You drive off, hands gripping the wheel, feeling like nothing in the universe can ever stop you. Perhaps for weeks you feel this way each time you get into your new car. But after about a month, those

satisfaction dwindle. your new car isn’t exciting anymore.

and happiness All of a sudden, as to you

Eventually, it won’t bring you any joy at all. You may even find yourself dreaming of what you’ll drive next instead of appreciating the luxury you have. They’ve

studies on lottery winners, conclude winners’ satisfaction

even done subsided which d that from their financial gains

completely after 1.5 years. an average of we all Hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill as it’s commonly referenced, can happen to anyone regardless of status or age. Celebrity or average joe,

experience this phenomenon some level of in our own unique ways. Thankfully, there are psychologists/happiness experts that have helped us identify the reasons for this ever pacing satisfaction treadmill.

We stop feeling the excitement

Kennon Sheldon & Sophia Lyubomirsky published a white paper to help us understand the reasons why our moments of pleasure seem to dwindle so quickly. Reason #1.

of our newfound pleasures. Let’s say you get married. All that time leading up to the event there’s excitement and anticipation. The grand event occurs and in the blink of an eye, it’s over. Normal life resumes
and reality sets in. Many newlyweds even report feeling depressed after the excitement of the wedding subsides and the satisfaction fades away. This happens in relationships as well - in fact, many relationships fail after approximately the 2 year point- when most of
the excitement has faded away. Maybe you move into a new house and it’s a grade above all the rest. At first, you marvel at your granite countertops and shiny hardwood floors. It doesn’t take long before all of the factors that used to excite you about this new home
just become the new “normal.” You might lose weight, causing others to notice you differently. Compliments may fly from every direction. You may experience more attention from the opposite sex. Soon enough, the 15lbs of weight you lost isn’t good enough
anymore. Instead of being a size 6, you’d “be happier if you were a 4.” You could receive a well-deserved promotion. One that you worked hard for. But after the champagne celebrations have ended and the congratulatory sentiments are over - the stress of your added

. We raise the bar on our desired pleasures as

responsibilities cloud the previous joy you worked so hard to feel. Does that make sense? Reason #2

soon as we receive them. when we achieve our desire s As a result of reason #1, d plea ures (material items, weight loss, a new job, a

we raise our mental bar regarding what we believe will make us

promotion, a fancier car, etc)

happy I don’t know what I’ll do

. I am guilty of this in practically every way that I mentioned above - Including the car scenario. I’ve heard myself say, as if from standing outside of my own body, “

when it comes time to sell the BMW- there’s no way I could go back to driving anything
else. ” All of a sudden “normal” cars weren’t good enough for me anymore. As embarrassed I am to admit that I've said such a nonsensical remark, the first part of solving a problem is recognizing you have one, right? ;) The good news is, you can short circuit
the satisfaction treadmill by making small changes in your life. It’s not easy, but if you’re honest with yourself and want to find longer sustaining satisfaction, escaping the hedonic treadmill is a good place to start. Let me preface by saying that I DO NOT believe you
should stop aiming for success. Go for that promotion, get in physical shape, buy that fancy purse, drive that Audi. Just don't confuse these things for long-term happiness. You will always be
searching for more.
Hedonic Treadmill theory is empirically proven
Pennock 20 Seph Fontane Pennock, Positive Psychology , "The Hedonic Treadmill - Are We Forever Chasing
Rainbows?", 29 05 2020, https://positivepsychology.com/hedonic-treadmill/
Brickman and Campbell’s research
Along with studied two sets of original (1971), a notable piece of research on the hedonic treadmill

people: a group who won lottery prizes, and One wasa group of accident of people large the other was

victims who were paralyzed in the long term, neither group now (including quadriplegic and paraplegic people). The research revealed that,

appeared to be happier than the other. The (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978). Of course, the lottery winners and paralysis victims experienced initial reactions of happiness and sadness, respectively.

effects didn’t turn out to be long-lasting both groups shortly reverted to , and people in

their previous levels of happiness . In the original theory of the hedonic treadmill, Brickman and Campbell proposed that people immediately react to good and bad events but in a short time return to neutrality (1971). However, if the theory put forth by Brickman and

any effort to increase happiness is pointless

Campbell is correct, if our happiness set — meaning that

point is on the low end we’re doomed to unhappiness. of the spectrum,

The treadmill’s set point will ALWAYS be negative because we are evolutionarily
coded to be discontent - if humans found lasting happiness they would not seek out
things like sex or food.
Euba 19 Rafael Euba, NeuroScienceNews.com , "Humans aren’t designed to be happy - Neuroscience News", July
19 2019, https://neurosciencenews.com/human-happiness-14525/
A huge happiness and positive thinking industry, estimated to be worth US$11 billion a year, has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular

even when our

culture. Indeed, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the US’s “unalienable rights”. Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real-life stubbornly refuses to deliver. Because all

material and biological needs are satisfied, a state of sustained happiness

will remain elusive
still Caliph of Córdoba in the tenth century,a theoretical and goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III,

discovered. He was one of the most powerful men of his time, who enjoyed
military and cultural achievements, as well as the earthly pleasures of his two harems.
Towards the end of his life, however, he decided to count the exact number of
days during which he had felt happy. They amounted to precisely 14 . Happiness, as the
Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.” Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the brain, but

sustained happiness has no biological basis. And – perhaps surprisingly – I reckon this is something to be happy about. Nature and evolution Humans are

we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce,

not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, like every other creature in

A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would

the natural world.

lower our guard against possible threats to our survival. The fact that evolution has prioritized the development of a big
frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy, tells us a lot about nature’s priorities. Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and

nature’s failure to weed out

intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue. In fact, experts in this field argue that

depression in the evolutionary process is due to the (despite the obvious disadvantages in terms of survival and reproduction) precisely

fact that Depressive

depression as an adaptation plays a useful role in times of adversity , by helping the depressed individual disengage from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win.

ruminations have a problem-solving function can also during difficult times.

meaning to moral actions making it the basis of all moral systems and the ultimate
good. 
Ariansen 98 [Per Ariansen (University of Oslo, Department of Philosophy). “Anthropocentrism with a human face.” Ecological
Economics 24 (1998) 153–162] AJ
Will ethics be meaningful
Suspending for a while the idea of morality as a game, one could approach the question of the nature of ethics from another angle. One could try to seek out a set of necessary and sufficient condi- tions for ethics to be operative. What traits of ethics cannot be lacking without ethics losing its meaning?

in a world where no suffering is known to anyone? Technically it (to focus on the duty to alleviate suffering rather that promote happiness)

would be possible to tell a lie in such a society, but the difference between or break a promis e

lying and telling the truth would have no moral significance, since any or breaking and keeping promises

outcome is just as good as any other . In such a world any

of any event (rather, as indifferent) outcome of the event mention of responsibilities and

duties would be meaningless. Ethics clearly needs to relate to joy and

suffering. This axiological orientation is necessary to give meaning to the
ethical project, to mark it out as an ethical project in contrast to other projects of rationalization.

Any amount of pain makes life not worth living because of the asymmetry between
pleasure and pain - graph in the doc 

(1) Presence of pain (Bad) (3) Absence of pain (Good)

(2) Presence of pleasure (4) Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

(Good)

Kolbert 12 Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, "The Case Against Kids | The New Yorker", April 2 2012,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/09/the-case-against-kids
Consider two couples, A and B A’s are healthy,
Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. the ’s the ’s. The young,

and rich. If they had children, they could give them the everything best of —schools, clothes,

Even so, we would not say the A’s have a moral obligation to
electronic gaming devices. that

reproduce. The B’s both have a genetic disease, were they to have are just as young and rich. But and,

a child that child would suffer terribly. We would say,

together, that the B’s using Benatar’s logic,

have an ethical obligation not to procreate. shows that we regard The case of the A’s and the B’s

pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed by the nonexistent doesn’t out on

count as harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the
a

recipient is nonexistent a one.And what holds for the A’s and the B’s is basically true for everyone. Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone

the implications is that

—that is, had the life never been created—no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it. “One of of my argument

a life filled with good containing only the most minute quantity of bad— and a life of

the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all

utter bliss adulterated only by ,” Benatar writes.

Nuclear war is key to resolve nonhuman suffering; biodiverse ecosystems are

torture chambers for trillions of conscious creatures
Sittler-Adamczewski 16
Thomas M. Sittler-Adamczewski (University of Oxford). “Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals.” Journal of
Practical Ethics. OXFORD UEHIRO PRIZE IN PRACTICAL ETHICS 2015-16. December 2016. JDN.
http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/

Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority. I consider objections to the argument, and discuss which courses of action are open to those who accept the

argument. Many consequentialists are vegetarian because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here. More precisely then, ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have
lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical consequentialist
vegetarians1 believed that animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.
I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, the suffering of wild animals would dominate their concerns , and would plausibly lead them to support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation. SUFFERING IN NATURE, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild

Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may

animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence.

seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation,

dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are common in wild much more animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and

diseases produce excruciating symptoms

hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them (Tomasik 2009). In birds, like avian salmonellosis in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death,
blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions (Michigan Department of Natural Resources). While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned

One reason to suspect that on average

extreme suffering (Tomasik 2013). Wild animals do experience significant pleasure, for instance when they eat, play, have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity. this

pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use reproductive the strategy of

r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring

starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die

before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.

Using
A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken) (Tomasik 2014). I restrict my count of wild animals to those at least as complex as chicken or small fish, which vegetarians clearly believe do have moral weight.

studies of animal density there are at least [60 Billion] 6*10^10 land in different biomes, Tomasik estimates conservatively that

birds, [600 Billion] 10^11 land mammals, and [60 trillion] 10^13 fish.
several times more numerous than livestock.
Animals in each of these categories alone are

If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living, and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites;

focus on preventing the existence of as many wild

thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’ (Dawkins 1996) If they accept the premises so far, consistent vegetarians should

animals as possible even a small reduction would outweigh . , since in the global number of wild animals the impact of ending all livestock production

For example, by destroying highly dense animal habitats such as they could reduce animal populations by sterilising them, or

rainforests.  It may even be the case that vegetarians should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer wild animals per square kilometre than other biomes such as forests (Matheny and Chan 2005, 585). Of course, to the extent that it is more difficult to reduce wild animal

populations than farm animal populations, vegetarians should focus more resources on the latter. But it seems implausible that it would be over a hundred times more difficult to achieve the same proportional reduction, which is what would be needed to reverse my conclusion that wild animal suffering dominates. There could be some simple ways, for instance, for vegetarians to reduce habitat sizes: supporting the
construction of large parking lots, or donating to a pro-deforestation lobby. In the final paragraph, I touch upon the issue of how most effectively to reduce wild animal suffering.

Even if they win that death is bad you should still vote aff for a process of negative
visualization whereby you affirm your own death - imagining bad outcomes might
be the only way to escape the hedonic treadmill.  The ROTB is to vote for the
advocacy that best methodologically escapes the hedonic treadmill - it is the only
way to achieve happiness and link turns all other frameworks. 
Dang 08 Jessica Dang, Minimal Students, "How imagining the worst can make you happier | Minimal Student",
2008, http://www.minimalstudent.com/how-imagining-the-worst-can-make-you-happier/
What phenomenon happens to every person on earth every day of their lives without anyone realising it or learning from? The answer is hedonic adaptation. It’s the tendency of humans to go back to a stable level of happiness, even after something good (or bad) has

I’ll be happy when I have that after

happened to them. If you’ve ever dreamed of doing or buying something that seemed unobtainable at the time, thinking, “ ”, then

getting it you find yourself getting used to having it you move onto so that eventually

wanting something new, running on the hedonic treadmill. you’ve experienced You keep chasing bigger and better

you’re not really going anywhere

things, but . That’s how people who win the lottery revert back to the same level of happiness after a few years, and even billionaires have their own

there is never enough money/stuff/fame/power/achievements/love that you

problems. In the end

can’t get used it’s a recipe for perpetual unhappiness. to eventually. It may be in our nature to always be seeking more, but What
can we do about it? It turns out, insatiable human appetite isn’t a new problem. In fact, it’s a conundrum at least 2,000 years old because even in ancient times the Stoics were thinking about it. They may not have been pining for the latest smartphone or sports cars

how do we balance unlimited wants with trying to live a

back then, but they had the same issues we do today— find a between our

virtuous life The solution was simple—imagine the worst that could
and happy ? ir

happen. negative visualisation. take the things you value

They called this Essentially it’s an exercise where you the most, it

and imagine
could be anything at all, not having it. You’ll realise just how much you take it for a minute

for granted. think of a beloved spouse but imagine they will

For example, , family member, or child. It sounds horrible,

die tomorrow. You would spend every moment What will you do on their last day? Would you waste time watching TV or staying late after work? No!

you could with that person Compare this with the , savouring every minute of it. someone who takes more common

approach of banishing all negative thoughts living in denial from their mind. They think they’re better off but they are

that their beloved could be gone. one day So they go about their daily lives as most people do, without realising that they’re taking the most precious things for granted. In the end, they
will probably have more regrets about how they spent their time. You might think this is all quite morbid, but who do you think is the person who is happier and more grateful for their loved one? Is it the person who periodically thinks about the fact that nothing
lasts forever so they better make the most of it, or the person who doesn’t think about it at all? Who do you think is more grateful? Who do you think will have the fewest regrets? The same could be applied to anything—you could imagine for a minute losing your
home, or your job, or your health, or specific things such as your eyesight, access to the internet, running water, or political stability in your country… there is an infinite number of things that would be terrible or uncomfortable to live without. There is so much to be

It’s a reminder
grateful for. The Stoics advised doing this kind of exercise every now and again, maybe a few times a week or daily at most. Imagining the worst isn’t supposed to make you worry or become a morbid pessimist.

to appreciate things while you have them, and mitigate utter

disappointment when not everything goes your way. Saying that, exercising negative visualisation doesn’t mean anyone wouldn’t be devastated to lose something that is important to them. It’s not intended to be a magical

learning to be grateful for what you have

solution to all problems. But will give you a already , even for a few moments,

break from running when I realise I still have whatever it is I on that treadmill. Indeed, often when I do this,

was thinking about losing, it feels like I’m waking up from a bad dream. I’m so relieved
that it even makes me smile. So I encourage you to ask yourself today—what do you value most that you take for granted?

There’s no way to overcome the endless circle of hedonic suffering. It

is in our genetics to suffer.
Pearce 7
David Pearce (Transhumanist vegan British philosopher; Pearce has spoken at Oxford and Harvard and been published in The
Economist and BBC Radio. In 1998, Pearce cofounded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom.) “THE ABOLITIONIST PROJECT.” 2007.
JDN. http://www.abolitionist.com/index.html
Sadly, what won't abolish suffering, or at least not on its own, is socio-economic reform, or
exponential economic growth, or technological progress in the usual sense, or any of the
traditional panaceas for solving the world's ills. Improving the external environment is admirable and important; but
such improvement can't recalibrate our hedonic treadmill above a
genetically constrained ceiling. Twin studies confirm there is a [partially] heritable
set-point of well-being - or ill-being - around which we all tend to fluctuate over the
course of a lifetime. This set-point varies between individuals. [It's possible to lower our hedonic set-point
by inflicting prolonged uncontrolled stress; but even this re-set is not as easy as it
sounds: suicide-rates typically go down in wartime; and six months after a quadriplegia-
inducing accident, studies1 suggest that we are typically neither more nor less unhappy
than we were before the catastrophic event.] Unfortunately, attempts to build an ideal
society can't overcome this biological ceiling , whether utopias of the left or right,
free-market or socialist, religious or secular, futuristic high-tech or simply cultivating
one's garden. Even if everything that traditional futurists have asked for is delivered -
eternal youth, unlimited material wealth, morphological freedom, superintelligence,
immersive VR, molecular nanotechnology, etc - there is no evidence that our subjective
quality of life would on average significantly surpass the quality of life of our
hunter-gatherer ancestors - or a New Guinea tribesman today - in the absence of reward pathway enrichment. This claim is
difficult to prove in the absence of sophisticated neuroscanning; but objective indices of psychological distress e.g.
suicide rates, bear it out. Unenhanced humans will still be prey to the spectrum of
Darwinian emotions, ranging from terrible suffering to petty disappointments and
frustrations - sadness, anxiety, jealousy, existential angst. Their biology is part of "what it means to be
human". Subjectively unpleasant states of consciousness exist because they were genetically
adaptive. Each of our core emotions had a distinct signalling role in our evolutionary
past: they tended to promote behaviours which enhanced the inclusive fitness of our
genes in the ancestral environment.
ADVANTAGE

Life is a sentence of never-ending suffering; every day will be worse than the next until
the worst of all. On the whole it would be better if the earth was like the moon,
devoid of life.
Schopenhauer in 1904 (Arthur [philosopher] THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENAUER;
STUDIES IN PESSIMISM, http://ww.gutenberg.org/files/10732/10732-8.txt) [Recut Lynbrook
AM]
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain
is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not
know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent
prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence
means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may
be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all. " If you try to
imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in
its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as xlittle as on the moon, the
sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in
a crystalline state. Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the
blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well,
the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat_.

We have trapped our existence of eternal suffering – we have no escape from the
dominant structure of power that keeps us slaves of our own ontology. We are
driven to the brink by the slave master – the will. Joy is impossible – the will dooms
us to a perpetual cycle of suffering that we can only escape through pure annihilation.
Becker 8 – philosopher and writer (David, “The Question of Coherence in Schopenhauer’s System: An Examination of the Will’s Self-
Overcoming”, 2008; pp. 19-21, print.)//Beddow [Recut Lynbrook AM]

Thus, for Schopenhauer, the Will is the driving force, the dynamic energy, that moves everything in the
universe. But it is also more than this. For the Will is not, according to Schopenhauer, merely a force within the world, ¡t is not simply an
energy that animates a created o pre-existing material cosmos. It is, in fact, the underlying essence of that cosmos
itself. It is not content to remain a formless, amorphous font of energy, but rather seeks and
achieves endlessly changing, yet constantly renewed “objectifications ,” — transformations into a multiplicity of
specific archetypes (Schopenhauer’s ‘Platonic Ideas”), which are then further instantiated in the individual objects of the phenomenal world.
The Will, itself a primordial unity, somehow undergoes an overflowing of its essence, becoming the world of plurality and change, within which
its own tendencies drive the interactions among the various differentiated objects. Thus, according to Schopenhauer: The merely empirical
consideration of nature already recognizes a constant transition from the simplest and most necessary manifestation of some universal force of
nature up to the life and consciousness of man... .in all these phenomena, the inner essence, that which manifests itself, that which appears is
one and the same thing standing out more and more distinctly. Accordingly, that which exhibits itself a million forms of endless variety and
diversity.., is this one essence.5 Yet at the same time, Schopenhauer never abandoned his fundamentally idealist perspective, at least with
respect to the world, as opposed to the Will, from which the world arises and which is truly the mind independent thing4n itself” For the
diverse objects of the phenomenal world only achieve reality through the activity of the perceiving subject. They are not real, material things in
the ordinary sense of the word, but rather are dependent upon an existent perceiving consciousness to make them manifest; they would vanish
as completely as a dream in the absence of such percipients. For Schopenhauer the
Will is noumenal, the thing-in-itself.” a
mind-independent reality, but the world which issues from that Will is purely phenomenal, and hence
ideal, dependent for its very existence upon a perceiving subject.” Yet, although Will, according to
Schopenhauer, is the true reality, the basis of the phenomenal world, it is. by its very nature,
unstable and in a state of perpetual strife with itself. For Will is fundamentally an expression
of the necessity and inevitability of change.” Thus there is a perpetual tension between the
present and the willed future state that is not yet achieved . Will is, in a most peculiar way, at
war with itself, a divided and conflicted entity whose fundamental state is that of pain,
alienation, and suffering. As Schopenhauer states “Thus everywhere in nature we see contest, struggle and the fluctuation of
victory, and later on we shall recognize in this more distinctly that variance with itself essential to the will. Every grade of the will’s
objectification fights for the matter, the space and the time of another. ...Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself
In fact, absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature
that is essential to the will.’” He later adds,
of the will in itself, which is an endless striving .. .Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and
so on ad infinitim. This conception of the universe led Schopenhauer to embrace a philosophy of man that was appropriate to such a
metaphysics. Schopenhauer propounded what one
could accurately be described as a philosophy of negative
salvation” (Erlossung),’° the idea that man, an instantiation of the universal Will, can and must
seek his blessedness in self- annihilation, that is, by annihilating the Will that is his own
essence. It is only by ceasing to will, that is, by ceasing, in some mysterious way, to participate in the
universal essence of the world, that man can achieve a release from suffering and genuine
deliverance. Schopenhauer writes that: “all willing springs from lack (Bedurfness, in the German text) from deficiency, and thus from
suffering... No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts.... Therefore, so long as our consciousness is tilled by
our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so
long as we are thy subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.’”

Our attempts to throw off a specific form of suffering merely changes the form of
suffering in a dance that will inevitably bring us back to the same place. Even lower
amounts of sadness occur solely due to random internal acts-only a nihilistic view
towards our well-being, like our embrace of extinction, can thwart our world of pain
and suffering.
Schopenhauer 1844, Late German philosopher, 1844 (Arthur, The World as Will and
Representation Fourth Book, Second Edition, Translated by Richard Burdon Haldane and J.
Kemp, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation/Fourth_Book)
JNF
whoever a man be and whatever he may possess, the pain
But whatever nature and fortune may have done,
which is essential to life cannot be thrown off : F[T]\I&TI<; & &)//,o>fey, i$wv ei? ovpavov evpvv (Pelidcs autcm cjulavit,
intuit us in cesium latum). And again : Zyvos /zez> Trat? 770, Kpoviovos, avrap oifyv ei^ov aTreipeairjv (Jovis quidem filius cram Saturnii ; vcrum
ccrumnam habebam inftnitam). The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering accomplish no more than to
make it change its form. It is essentially deficiency, want, care^jfor _ the mainte nance of life. If we succeed, which is very
difficult, in removing pain in this form, it immediately assumes a thousand others, varying
according to age and circum stances, such as lust, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred,
anxiety, ambition, covetousness, sickness, &a, &c. If at last it can find entrance in no other form, it comes in the sad, grey
garments of tediousness and ennui, against which we then strive in various ways. If finally we succeed in driving this away,
we shall hardly do so without letting pain enter in one of its earlier forms, and the dance
begin again from the beginning ; for all human Ijfojsjossed backwards and forwards between pain and ennui. Depressing as
this view of life is, I will draw attention, by the way, to an aspect of it from which con solation may be drawn, and perhaps even a stoical indif
ference to one s own present ills may be attained. For our impatience at these arises for the most part from the fact that we regard them as
brought about by a chain of causes which might easily be different. We do not gene rally grieve over ills which are directly necessary and quite
universal ; for example, the necessity of age and of THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 407 death, and many daily inconveniences. It is
rather the consideration of the accidental nature of the circum stances that brought some sorrow just to us, that gives it its sting. // But
if
we have recognised that pain, as such, is inevitable and essential to life, and that nothing de
pends upon chance but its mere fashion, the form under which it presents itself, that thus our
present sorrow fills a place that, without it, would at once be occupied by another which now
is excluded by it, and that therefore fate can affect us little in what is essential  ; such a
reflection, if it were to become a living conviction, might produce a considerable degree of
stoical equanimity, and very much lessen the anxious care for our own well-being. But, in fact, such
a powerful control of reason over directly felt suffering seldom or never occurs.// Besides, through this view of the inevitableness of pain, of the
supplanting of one pain by another, and the intro duction of a new pain through the passing away of that which preceded it, one might be led
to the paradoxical but not absurd hypothesis, that i measure nfjjiAjTg.jr pssp.nti a.1 fcLliJni Wf>fi HptArmJnftH once for__all Jby_his nature, a
measure which could neither remain empty, nor be more than filled, however ; muchjbhe form of the suffering mjght^change. Thus his
suffering and well-being would by no means be determined from without, but only through that measure, that natural_dis r Dosition, which
indeed might experience certain additions and diminutions from the physical condition at different times, but yet, on the whole, would remain
the same, and would just be what is called the temperament, or, more accurately, the degree in which he might be euKoXo? or SvovcoXo?, as
Plato expresses it in the First Book of the Republic, i.e., in an easy or difficult mood. This hypo thesis is supported not only by the well-known
experi ence that great suffering makes all lesser ills cease to be felt, and conversely that freedom from great suffering makes even the most
trifling inconveniences torment us. BK. iv. and put us out of humour ; but experience also teaches that it a great misfortune, at the mere
thought of which we shuddered, actually befalls us, as soon as we have overcome the first pain of it, our disposition remains for the most part
unchanged ; and, conversely, that after the attainment of some happiness we have long desired, we do not feel ourselves on the whole and
permanently very much better off and agreeably situated than before. Only the moment at which these changes occur affects us with unusual
strength, as deep sorrow or exulting joy, out both soon pass away, for they are based upon illu sion. For they do not spring from the exulting
joy, out both soon pass away, for they are based upon illu sion. For they do not spring from the immediately present pleasure or pain, but only
from the opening up of a new future which is anticipated in them. Only by borrowing from the future could pain or pleasure bo heightened so
abnormally, and of suffering and of welL- being would be subjective and determined a priori, fc as_is the case with knowing: consequently not
endur- ingly. It would follow, from the hypothesis advanced, that a lartre part of the feeling and we may add the following remarks as evidence
in favour of it. Human cheerful ness or dejection are manifestly not determined by external circumstances, such as wealth and position, for we
see at least as many glad faces among the poor as among the rich. Further, the motives which induce suicide are so very different, that we can
assign no motive that is so great as to bring it about, even with great probability, in every character, and few that would be so small that the
like of them had never caused it. Now although the degree of our serenity or sadness is not at all times the same,
yet, in consequence of this view, we shall not attribute it to the change of outward circumstances, but to
that of the inner condition, ^hejhysical state. For when an actual, though only temporary, increase
of our serenity, even to the extent of joyfulness, takes place, it usually appears without any
external occasion. It is true that THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 409 we often see our pain arise only
from some definite ex ternal relation, and are visibly oppressed and saddened by this only.
Then we believe that if only this were taken away, the greatest contentment would necessarily ensue. But this is illusion. The measure of our
pain and our happiness is on the whole, according to our hypothesis, subjectively determined for each point of time, and the motive for sadness
is related to that, just as a blister which draws to a head all the bad humours other wise distributed is related to the body. The pain which is at
that period of time essential to our nature, and therefore cannot be shaken off, would, without the definite external cause of our suffering, be
divided at a hundred points, and appear in the form of a hundred little annoy ances and cares about things which we now entirely over look,
because our capacity for pain is already filled by that chief evil which has concentrated in a point all the suffering otherwise dispersed. This
corresponds also to the observation that if a great and pressing care is lifted from our breast by its fortunate issue, another imme diately takes
its place, the whole material of which was already there before, yet could not come into conscious ness as care because there was no capacity
left for it, and therefore this material of care remained indistinct and unobserved in a cloudy form on the farthest horizon of consciousness. But
now that there is room, this prepared material at once comes forward and occupies the throne of the reigning care of the day (Trpv-ravevovaa).
And if it is very much lighter in its matter than the material of the care which has vanished, it knows how to blow itself out so as apparently to
equal it in size, and thus, as the chief care of the day, completely fills the throne

Our illusory forms of fulfillment only furthering the Will, perpetuating suffering.
Gallegos 11 – professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (Manolito, “The Negative Ontology of Happiness: A
Schopenhauerian Argument”, 2011; < http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/logoi/article/view/9118/2968>)//Beddow

Not all lack of suffering is necessarily preceded by suffering. For example, certain forms
of inner peace or lack of desire might
be invoked to take the place of happiness . This objection might be granted, but it is basically merely a
restatement of Schopenhauer’s argument himself — states of inner peace without desire are,
of course, states in which suffering has ceased. However, one might claim that these states of inner peace
are not, in fact, necessarily preceded by suffering, and thus are something that is not reliant on
suffering. But this is incorrect for a few reasons. For one, no organism is born in such a state —
some instinct, desire or drive will propel it onward, and it will feel the empirical correlates
thereof. These inner periods of peace only ever occur if there is no desire present, which
seems to be impossible for entities: at the very least they are either driven to somehow keep
themselves alive, or they are bored. Even if this were not the case, the very nature of thought and inner
phenomenological life is oriented around striving, pain and boredom. This is because thinking
is always about something, an active affair born from one desire or another : for a being that lacks
nothing, need not think about anything and has no intellectual problems to solve; neither does
he have the need to feel anything. It is hard to imagine that we can still call such a "perfect" entity an "entity" at all — it is
rather, nothing. And while this goes beyond the scope of Schopenhauer’s argument, it is a far cry from refuting it — the type of happiness that
Schopenhauer addresses is circumvented here in favour of a kind of happiness which equates to some form of "nothing" or "nothingness" —
which cannot be used to establish a positive ontology for happiness.

Existence is suffering that nonexistence negates – death is preferable.

Troxell 11 – Boston College, writing for peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Mary, “Schopenhauer, Arthur”, 5/11/11; <
http://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#H3>//Beddow

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the most well known feature of his philosophy, and he is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism.
inner nature of the world as aimless blind striving.
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision follows from his account of the
Because the will has no goal or purpose, the will’s satisfaction is impossible. The will objectifies
itself in a hierarchy of gradations from inorganic to organic life, and every grade of
objectification of the will, from gravity to animal motion, is marked by insatiable striving. In
addition, every force of nature and every organic form of nature participates in a struggle to seize matter from other forces or organisms.
Thus existence is marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction . The attainment of a goal or
desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such
attainment results in suffering. Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since
satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering. This conclusion
holds for all of nature, including inanimate natures, insofar as they are at essence will. However, suffering is more conspicuous in the life of
human beings because of their intellectual capacities. Rather than serving as a relief from suffering, the intellect of human beings brings home
their suffering with greater clarity and consciousness. Even with the use of reason, human beings can in no way alter the degree of misery we
experience; indeed, reason only magnifies the degree to which we suffer. Thus all the
ordinary pursuits of mankind are not
only fruitless but also illusory insofar as they are oriented toward satisfying an insatiable,
blind will. Since the essence of existence is insatiable striving, and insatiable striving is
suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that nonexistence is preferable to existence. However, suicide
is not the answer. One cannot resolve the problem of existence through suicide, for since all
existence is suffering, death does not end one’s suffering but only terminates the form that
one’s suffering takes. The proper response to recognizing that all existence is suffering is to turn
away from or renounce one’s own desiring. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s thought finds confirmation in the Eastern
texts he read and admired: the goal of human life is to turn away from desire. Salvation can only be found in resignation.

The impacts of nuclear extinction bring us to the nirvana of collective death. All forms
of existence are merely a suspension in eternal suffering. The only alternative to
collective extinction is gradual decay and worse forms of suffering.
Dolan, APRIL 13TH 2009, John, The Case For Nuclear Winter, The Exiled,
http://exiledonline.com/feature-story-the-case-for-nuclear-winter/ [Lynbrook AM]
There are no nihilists any more. That fact is the most damning evidence of a great betrayal which has happened in the last half century. In
1945, when the Bomb gave us the option of quitting this dirty, rigged game of Darwinian strip
poker, we learned that not one of the anti-life artists meant what they said . In a few years, all the anti-
life art of the early twentieth century vanished. The artists who had made their careers documenting the horrors of life on earth and
denouncing the cycle of animal existence yelped away like scared puppies the moment a real chance to end the suffering appeared. They
saw that magnificent mushroom cloud and instead of falling down to worship it , they ran to
the nearest church or Christian Science Reading Room or Socialist meeting hall. After convincing
thousands of adolescents to kill themselves in the name of holy despair, these sleazy careerists ran to hug the knees of GAIA, the bloody
mother. They Chose Life — the swine! Go ahead, pick a culture, any culture! Any culture you can name, during any historical
period you choose, will furnish hundreds of examples of anti-life rhetoric which was taken very, very seriously — up until the moment when it
actually meant something. Take, say, Europe in the nineteenth century, that cheery and bustling period. OK; here’s its greatest philosopher on
the subject: “If you imagine…the sum total of distress, pain and suffering which the sun shines upon, you will be forced to admit that it would
have been better if the surface of the earth were still as crystalline as that of the moon….For the world is Hell, and men are on the one had the
tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.” That was Schopenhauer, telling the Germans in their bristly abstract way what Darwin told
the English in their fussier, more detailed language: there
is no point but suffering. There is no hidden
redemptive meaning in any of this. It’s just an unfortunate industrial accident, organic life.
Both Schopenhauer and Darwin resorted to animal examples to convey the horror which summed up the world. They were trying to overcome
the popular heresy that somehow, it all must “balance out” somehow. It doesn’t, because it was never designed to do so: “ compare the
pleasure of an animal engaged in eating another animal with the pain of the animal being
eaten.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, Schopenhauer and Darwin were in play in the higher European circles, mixing and
strengthening each other. It was the bravest moment in the history of our species; something truly dangerous, a final anti-life epiphany,
seemed ready to happen. This is what poor sweet Nietzsche meant with his heartbreaking faith in “the men who are coming.” Nihilism’s
one great weakness was that it had always been an elite cult, not considered transmissible to
the masses. This was in fact why Buddhism was replaced by a mindless demotic cult like
Hinduism in India: Nirvana was too cold a doctrine for peasants who equated fecundity with
happiness. But in the early twentieth century, a demographic anomaly appeared: the elite was big, and getting bigger. They brought their
cult with them; art began serving as the propaganda wing of Nihilism. What we call “Modernism” was actually a multimedia offensive which
was beginning to make Nihilism palatable to the masses. The fuzzy “Modern/Postmodern” distinction is best seen as a change in popular
religion: from 1910-1945, art did an honorable job of preparing the masses to abandon their attachment to the biosphere; from 1945 to the
present, art borrows Nihilist images, diction and narrative without the least intention of employing them to free us from attachment to organic
life. The echoes of that dangerous early twentieth-century art are still audible: “I’ve
always been surprised by everyone’s
going on living.” Birth, and copulation and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass
tacks: Birth, and copulation, and death. I’ve been born, and once is enough. You don’t
remember, but I remember, Once is enough. It’s sad for the dog. He lives only because he was
born, just like me….So they sang. And many believed them. Maybe a few of them really meant it — Schopenhauer especially.
What would Schopenhauer have said about nuclear weapons? My guess is he’d be all for them; he
was a serious man, anhonorable man. But the rest — they never meant it, and only talked so grandly against Life because they knew there was
no alternative, no way to end the world. When the cat’s away, the mice will ham it up. But since 1945, they self-censored themselves, to the
effect that no
matter how many Nihilist images you may borrow, you will do nothing truly
dangerous — nothing that could make anyone press that nuclear trigger .

Our ticket to life is a bunch of pain. The pleasure we feel is an illusion, caused by the
cessation of that constant pain. In the end, it is all still pain.
Kerns 03 – professor of philosophy at North Seattle Community College (Tom, PhD, “Lecture:
Schopenhauer on Suffering”, 1/3/03; < http://members.pioneer.net/~tkerns/waol-phi-
website/lecsite/lec-schop-suff.html>)//Beddow [Recut Lynbrook AM]
When Schopenhauer says that all
life is suffering he means that all life, that is, everything that lives and
strives, is filled with suffering. Life wants, and because its wants are mostly unfulfilled, it exists
largely in a state of unfulfilled striving and deprivation . Schopenhauer says it thus: All willing springs from
lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish
that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time,
demands and requests go on to infinity, fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly. But even
the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one;
the former is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give
a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery
may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will [which is as
long as we are will-filled living beings], so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with
its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting
happiness or peace. Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the
constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is
absolutely impossible. (Die Welt, vol I, p 196) We have seen this theme in The Book of Ecclesiastes and we could have seen it as well in Leo
Tolstoy's A Confession, as well as in Blaise Pascal's Pensées, so it should not really be new to us. Pascal tells us in his Pensées, for example, that
we all do actually realize life to be so full of suffering, emptiness, and unsatisfaction that the only way
we can tolerate it is by filling our lives with a whole variety of diversions and entertainments . Misery.--
The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our
miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which
makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this [diversions] we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would
spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to
death. (Pensées # 171) Diversion.--As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they
have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all. (Pensées # 168) And
Pascal reminds us also about Ecclesiastes and Job. Misery.--Solomon and Job have best known and best spoken of the misery of man; the
former the most fortunate, and the latter most unfortunate of men; the former knowing the vanity of pleasures from experience, the latter the
reality of evils. (Pensées # 174) What Schopenhauer adds to this awareness of universal suffering is, as we saw above, that the root of all
life's suffering lies in wanting, desiring and fearing, i.e., in willing You will see much of Schopenhauer's thinking
on this theme in pp 311-26 of Die Welt, so you might want to pay particular attention to those pages. For example, on p 315 he tells us The
ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing more than a change in its form. This is essentially want, lack, care for the maintenance of
If, which is very difficult, we have succeeded in removing pain in this form, it at once appears
life.
on the scene in a thousand others, varying according to age and circumstances, such as sexual
impulse, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, ambition, avarice, sickness, and so on.
Finally, if it cannot find entry in any other shape, it comes in the sad, grey garment of
weariness, satiety, and boredom, against which many different attempts are made. Even if we
ultimately succeed in driving these away, it will hardly be done without letting pain in again in
one of the previous forms, and thus starting the dance once more at the beginning; for every
human life is tossed backwards and forwards between pain and boredom. And even what we
call "happiness," he says, is really only a temporary cessation of some particular suffering.
Schopenhauer tells us that All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and
essentially always negative only, and never positive. It is not a gratification which comes to us
originally and of itself, but it must always be the satisfaction of a wish. For desire, that is to
say, want [or will], is the precedent condition of every pleasure; but with the satisfaction, the
desire and therefore the pleasure cease; and so the satisfaction or gratification can never be
more than deliverance from a pain, from a want. (p 319) Furthermore, all this suffering is
without any purpose or meaning (pp 161-65). It is all pointless and in vain.
 Death Good
GENERIC
All organisms and system are left with a surplus of energy, which we should
squander endlessly. Death is the ultimate form of this unproductive expenditure –
an ecological gift to new life.
Rowe 17 (James Rowe is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of
Victoria. “Georges Bataille, Chögyam Trungpa, and Radical Transformation: Theorizing the
Political Value of Mindfulness”, The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics
///ghs-sc) 
The sun is a centr   al force in the philosophies of both Trungpa and Bataille. For Trungpa, the sun is a symbol of basic goodness, and the human capacity to awaken to it, to become enlightened.

“Solar energy,” writes Bataille, “is the source of

For Bataille, the sun is the material starting point for earthly life, and thus his phi- losophy.

life’s exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of
the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return.”65 The sun offers our planet
enough energy in one hour to meet contemporary civilizational needs for an entire year.66 Harnessing this
energy, to be sure, is a massive technological challenge. Moreover, biological life only has limited access to the superabundance of solar energy that hits the planet every day. But the amount of

Bataille’s materialist analysis of solar lavishness helpfully

energy we can access enables an energetically rich life.

concretizes Trungpa’s account of basic goodness, what he also referred to as “basic richness.”67
While Trungpa o ers practices for people to feel their inherent goodness and richness, actually experiencing this goodness takes time.68 Without spending hours meditating, and slowly

Bataille’s materialist account of solar

uncovering a tender and radiating heart, Trungpa’s teachings on basic goodness and richness can appear ideal- istic.

generosity further evidences Trungpa’s philosophy; it offers strong conceptual proof that can
heighten commitment to the experiential practice of meditation. “ The sun gives without ever
receiving,” argues Bataille. “[Humans] were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they
associated its splen- dor with the act of someone who gives without receiving.”69At a basic biological level, the sun’s exuberance means that “on the surface of the globe, for living matter in

We receive more energy than we can

general, energy is always in excess, the ques- tion is always posed in terms of extravagance.”70 Put more succinctly: “

use.”71 e basic planetary con- dition is wealth more than poverty. The essential meaning of Bataille’s claim that luxury—not
necessity—organizes life on earth is that all organisms have access to more energy than
required for subsistence, thanks to the sun’s exuberance, is excess is often invested in
biological growth (at the level of an organism, species, or ecosystem). But growth can never
fully exhaust the energy available to an individual organism or biological system. All organisms
and systems are left with a surplus to spend “willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”72
Evidence of earthly richness includes the ornate colors and plumage of the animal kingdom that seemingly exceed evolutionary use-value. Similarly, consider the capacity for pleasure su using
animal life, espe- cially all the sexualized pleasures apparently unrelated to procreation. Even when a sensory pleasure is associated with basic functioning like a good sneeze, excretion, or
stretch, there can still be sumptuousness to the sensation (need it feel so good?). A sneeze is arguably basic good- ness at work, a ash of solar exuberance amidst our everyday lives. Consider,
also, the ubiquity of queerness across the animal king- dom. According to Bruce Bagemihl, author of Biological Exuberance (a book that draws heavily from Bataille), “homosexuality is found in
virtually all animal groups, in virtually all geographic areas and time periods, and in a wide variety of forms.”73 But why, asks Bagemihl, “does same-sex activity persist—reappearing in species
after species, generation after generation, individual after individual—when it is not useful” from a strictly evolutionary perspective?74 Bagemihl’s answer is that use and necessity are not life’s
sole organizing principles: “Natural systems are driven as much by abundance and excess as they are by limitation and practicality. Seen in this light, homosexuality and non- reproductive

For Bataille, our

heterosexuality are ‘expected’ occurrences—they are one manifestation of an overall ‘extravagance’ of biological systems that has many expressions.”75

primordial condition is marked by richness thanks to the lavishness of the sun. And then, of
course, we die. Death can easily appear as proof of our ultimate poverty; it seemingly mocks
attempts to assert the basic richness or goodness of life. But Bataille reads mortality as another
marker of life’s luxuriousness. Large mam- mals like us are impressive condensations of energy (we are ourselves only possible given energetic wealth). is
energy is then extravagantly squandered upon our necessary deaths. “When we curse death,”
argues Bataille, “we only fear ourselves... We lie to ourselves when we dream of escaping the
movement of luxurious exuberance of which we are only the most intense form.”76 Death’s
energetic squandering is also an ecological gift for the new life arising from decay:
“[Humankind] conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things.”77 Bataille’s reading of death
 “make friends with our death,” and to not resentfully cast it as
as exemplary of basic goodness supports Trungpa’s encouragement to

“a defeat and as an insult.”78 Tibetan culture, according to Bataille, is more successful than
Euro-American ones at affirming the totality of life. For Bataille, cultur- al forms that communicate this a rmation are glorious expenditures of
basic energetic wealth. e resentment that animates so many Eu- ro-American cultural forms is itself enabled by energetic exuberance, a “catastrophic” use of our basic richness.79 And the Euro-
American desire to escape our corporeality only intensi es feelings of lack and malaise by disconnecting us from the earthly exuberance alive in our changeful bodies. For Bataille:

Anguish arises when the anxious individual is not himself stretched tight by the feeling of
superabundance. is is precisely what evinces the isolated, individual character of anguish. ere can be anguish only from a personal, par- ticular point of view that is radically
opposed to the general point of view based on the exuberance of living matter as a whole. Anguish is meaningless for someone who over ows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an over
owing by its very nature.80 Energetic poverty and lack are realities for life on earth. But they are always felt by particular beings at particular times; energetic lack is not our general or basic
condition. And yet the more we separate ourselves from exuberant life energies in attempts to gain dominion over them, the more liable we are to experience lack; we progressively remove our-
selves from nature’s over ow. Bataille was interested in nurturing a sovereign—rather than ser- vile—human encounter with existence: “ e sovereignty I speak of has little to do with the
sovereignty of states... I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate.”81 Viewing humans as agents of life’s exuberance, Bataille saw sovereignty as hu-

We are regal and rich from birth. But this sovereignty is tarnished when we
manity’s “primordial condition.”82

cower before ourselves and the teeming life energies we issue from, return to, and are animated
by.
DEATH MAKES NEW THINGS
They ignore that death is the youth of things – the impacts the aff has identified are
nothing but a balancing of the disequilibrium of life. Instead of guarding against
death, we should embrace it as the birth of new life.
Bataille 86 (Georges Bataille, crazy librarian, “Erotism: Death & Sensuality,” 1986 ///ghs-sc)
taboos appeared in response to the
AFFINITIES BETWEEN REPRODUCTION AND DEATH Death, Corruption and the Renewal of Life It is clear from the start that

necessity of banishing violence from the course of everyday life. I could not give a definition of violence straight away, nor do I think it
necessary to do so. The unity of pleaning of these taboos should finally be clear from studies of their various aspects. We come up against one difficulty at the start: the taboos I regard as fundamental affect two radically different
fields. Death and reproduction are as diametrically opposed as negation and affirmation. Death is really the opposite process to the process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled. The death of the one being is

Life is always a product of the decomposition of life. Life first

correlated with the birth of the other, heralding it and making it possible.

pays its tribute to death which disappears, then to corruption following on death and
bringing back into the cycle of change the matter necessary for the ceaseless arrival of new
beings into the world. Yet life is none the less a negation of death. It condemns it and shuts it out.
This reaction is strongest in man, and horror at death is linked not only with the annihilation of the individual but also with the decay that

sends the dead flesh back into the general ferment of life. Indeed the deep respect for the solemn image of death found in idealistic civilisation alone
comes out in radical opposition. Spontaneous physical revulsion keeps alive in some indirect fashion at least the consciousness that the terrifying face of death, its stinking putrefaction, are to be identified with the sickening primary
condition of life. For primitive people the moment of greatest anguish is the phase of decomposition; when the bones are bare and white they are not intolerable as the putrefying flesh is, food for worms. In some obscure way the
survivors perceive in the horror aroused by corruption a rancour and a hatred projected towards them by the dead man which it is the function of the rites of mourning to appease. But afterwards they feel that the whitening bones bear
witness to that appeasement. The bones are objects of reverence to them and draw the first veil of decency and solemnity over death and make it bearable; it is painful still but free of the virulent activity of corruption. These white
bones do not leave the survivors a prey to the slimy menace of disgust. They put an end to the close connections between decomposition, the source of an abundant surge of life, and death. But in an age more in touch with the earliest

creatures, brought into being spontaneously, as he thought, in earth or

human reactions than ours, this connection appeared so necessary that even Aristotle said that certain

water, were born of corruption) The generative power of corruption is a naive belief responding to the mingled horror and fascination aroused in us by decay. This belief is behind a belief we once held
about nature as something wicked and shameful: decay summed up the world we spring from and return to , and horror and

shame were attached both to our birth and to our death. That nauseous, rank and heaving matter, frightful to look upon, a ferment of life, teeming with
worms, grubs and eggs, I That is how Aristotle thought of "spontaneous generation", which he believed to take place. is at the bottom of the decisive reactions we call nausea, disgust or repugnance. Beyond the

annihilation to come which will fall with all its weight on the being I now am, which still waits
to be called into existence, which can even be said to be about to exist rather than to exist (as if I
did not exist here and now but in the future in store for me, though that is not what I am now)
death will proclaim my return to seething life. Hence I can anticipate and live in expectation of
that multiple putrescence that anticipates its sickening triumph in my person. Nausea and its general field
When somebody dies we, the survivors, expecting the life of that man now motionless beside us
to go on, find that our expectation has suddenly come to nothing at all. A dead body cannot be called nothing at all, but that object,
that corpse, is stamped straight off with the sign "nothing at all". For us survivors, the corpse and its threat of imminent decay is

no answer to any expectation like the one we nourished while that now prostrate man was
still alive; it is the answer to a fear. This object, then, is less than nothing and worse than
nothing. It is entirely in keeping that fear, the basis of disgust, is not stimulated by a real danger.
The threat in question cannot be justified objectively. There is no reason to look at a man's corpse otherwise than at an animal's, at game that has been killed,
for instance. The terrified recoiling at the sight of advanced decay is not of itself inevitable. Along with this sort of reaction we have a whole range of artificial behaviour. The horror we feel at the thought of a corpse is akin to the
feeling we have at human excreta. What makes this association more compelling is our similar disgust at aspects of sensuality we call obscene. The sexual channels are also the bod y' s sewers; we think of them as shameful and
connect the anal orifice with them. St. Augustine was at pains to insist on the obscenity of the organs and function of reproduction. "Inter faeces et urinam nascimur", he said-"we are born between faeces and urine". Our faecal
products are not subject to a taboo formulated by meticulous social regulations like those relating to dead bodies or· to menstruation. But generally speaking, and though the relationship defies clear definition, there do exist
unmistakable links between excreta, decay and sexuality. It may look as though physical circumstances imposed from without are chiefly operative in marking out this area of sensibility. But it also has its subjective aspect. The
feeling of nausea varies with the individual and its material source is now one thing and now, another. After the living man the dead body is nothing at all; similarly nothing tangible or objective brings ·on our feeling of nausea; what
we experience is a kind of void, a sinking sensation. We cannot easily discuss these things which in themselves are nothing at all. Yet they do make their presence felt and often they force themselves on the senses in a way that inert
objects perceived objectively do not. How could' anyone assert that that stinking mass is nothing at all? But our protest, if we make one, implies our humiliation and our refusal to see. We imagine that it is the stink of excrement that
makes us feel sick. But would it stink if we had not thought it was disgusting in the first place ? We do not take long to forget what trouble we go to to pass on to our children the aversions that make us what we are, which make us
human beings to begin with. Our children do not spontaneously have our reactions. They may not like a certain food and they may refuse it. But we have to teach them by .pantomime or failing that, by violence, that curious aberration
called disgust, powerful enough to make us feel faint, a contagion passed down to us from the earliest men through countless generatipns of scolded children. Our mistake is to take these teachings lightly. For thousands of years we

we
have been h~ding them down to our children, but they used to have a different form. The realm of disgust and nausea is broadly the result of these teachings. The prodigality of life and our fear of it After reading this

may feel a void opening within us. What I have been saying refers to this void and nothing else. But the void opens at a specific
point. Death, for instance, may open it: the corpse into which death infuses absence, the
putrefaction associated with this absence. I can link my revulsion at the decay (my imagination suggests it, not my memory, so
profoundly is it a forbidden object for me) with the feelings that obscenity arouse in me. I can tell myself that repugnance

and horror are the mainsprings of my desire, that such desire is only aroused as long as its object
causes a chasm no less deep than death to yawn within me, and that this desire originates in its
opposite, horror. From the outset reflections like these go beyond all reasonableness. It takes an
iron nerve to perceive the connection between the promise of life implicit in eroticism and the
sensuous aspect of death. Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of
things. Blindfolded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without
which life would be blind. We refuse to see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life
is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge
of explosion. But since the incessant explosion constantly exhausts its resources, it can only
proceed under one condition: that beings given life whose explosive force is exhausted shall
make room for fresh beings coming into the cycle with renewed vigour.' I Although this truth is generally ignored, Bossuet
expounds it in his Sermon on Death (1662). "Nature" he says "as if jealous of her gifts to us, often declares and makes plain the

fact that she cannot leave: us for long in possession of the little substance she lends us, which
must not remain always in the same hands but must be kept eternally in circulation. She needs it
for other forms, she asks for it to be returned for other works. Those continual additions to
humankind, the children being born, seem to nudge us aside as they come forward, saying 'Back
now; it is our tum'. So as we see others pass ahead of us, others will see us pass, and themselves
present the same spectacle to their successors". A more extravagant procedure cannot be
imagined. In one way life is possible, it could easily be maintained, without this colossal waste, this squandering annihilation at which imagination boggles. Compared with that of the infusoria, the
mammalian organism is a gulf that swallows vast quantities of energy. This energy is not entirely wasted if it allows other
developments to take place. But we must consider the devilish cycle from start to finish . The growth of vegetable life implies the continuous piling

up of dissociated substances corrupted by death. Herbivorous creatures swallow vegetable matter

by the heap before they themselves are eaten, victims of the carnivore's urge to devour. Finally
nothing is left but this fierce beast of prey or his remains, in their tum the prey of hyenas and
worms. There is one way of considering this process in harmony with its nature: the more
extravagant are the means of engendering life, the more costly is the production of new
organisms, the more successful the operation is! The wish to produce at cut prices is niggardly and human. Humanity keeps to the
narrow capitalist principle, that of the company director, that of the private individual who sells
in order to rake in the accumulated credits in the long run (for raked in somehow they always are). On a comprehensive
view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point where the
anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. How can this escape us if
we look at it dispassionately? Everything proclaims it! A febrile unrest within us asks death
to wreak its havoc at our expense. We go half way to meet these manifold trials, these false starts, this squandering of living strength in the transition from ageing beings to other
younger ones. At bottom we actually want the impossible situation it all leads to: the isolation, the threat

of pain, the horror of annihilation; but for the sensation of nausea bound up with it, so horrible that often in silent panic we regard the whole thing as impossible, we should not be
satisfied. But our judgments are formed under the influence of recurring disappointments and the

obstinate expectation of a calm which goes hand in hand with that desire; our capacity to make
ourselves understood is in direct ratio with the blindness we cling to. For at the crest of the convulsion, which gives us shape the
naive stubbornness that hopes that it will cease can only increase the torment, and this
allows life, wholly committed to this gratuitous pattern, to add the luxury of a beloved
torment to fatality. For if man is condemned to be a luxury in himself, what is one to say of the
luxury that is anguish? Man's "no" to Nature When all is said and done human reactions are what speed up the process; anguish
speeds it up and makes it more keenly felt at the same time. In general man's attitude is one of refusal. Man has leant
over backwards in order not to be carried away by the process, but all he manages to do by
this is to hurry it along at an even dizzier speed. If we view the primary taboos as the refusal laid
down by the individual to co-operate with nature regarded as a squandering of living energy and
an orgy of annihilation we can no longer differentiate between death and sexuality. Sexuality and death are simply the
culminating points of the holiday, nature celebrates, with the inexhaustible multitude of
living beings, both of them signifying the boundless wastage of nature's resources as
opposed to the urge to live on characteristic of every living creature. In the long or short run, reproduction demands the death of
the parents who produced their young only to give fuller rein to the forces of annihilation (just as the death of a generation demands that 'a new

generation be born). In the parallels perceived by the human mind between putrefaction and the various aspects of sexual activity the feelings of revulsion which set us against both end by mingling. The
taboos embodying a single dual purpose reaction may have taken shape one at a time, and one can even imagine a long time elapsing between the taboo connected with death and the one connected with reproduction (often the most

man had once and for

perfect things take shape hesitatingly through successive modifications). But we perceive their unity none the less: we feel we are dealing with an indivisible complex, just as if

all realised how impossible it is for nature (as a given force) to exact from the beings that she
brings forth their participation in the destructive and implacable frenzy that animates her. Nature
demands their surrender; or rather she asks them to go crashing headlong to their own
ruin. Humanity became possible at the instant when, seized by an insurmountable
dizziness, man tried to answer "No". Man tried? In fact men have never definitively said no to violence
(to the excessive urges in question). In their weaker moments they have resisted nature's
current but this is a momentary suspension and not a final standstill. We must now examine the transgressions that lie
beyond the taboos.

Death resides at the center of the general economy – it functions as the ultimate
form of expidenture. The cold embrace of death is a pre-requisite for the brilliance
of life.
Hegarty 2000 (Paul Hegarty is an author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork,
“Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist” ///ghs-sc)
Death is at the centre of the general economy, as
a continual concern for Bataille, from the earliest writings, to the last fizzles in and around The Tears of Eros, and arguably sits

death can be seen as 'the ultimate term of possible expenditure ('Attraction and Repulsion IF, 123; OC II, 332 trans, mod.). Bataille's notion of

death is negativity, but one that cannot be recuperated

an empty version of Hegel's: it is Death is , even if all our actions can be seen as attempts at such a recuperation.

the loss that defines our existence as individuals, since sexual reproduction is absolutely caught
up with the death of the individual ; unlike amoebae, there is no continuity of Being from one organism to the next (The Accursed Share, 32; OC VII, 39. See also Eroticism, 12-15; OCX, 17-21). Death, then, is as much part

Death seems to us like the most wasteful form

of the inherent wastefulness in nature as life. , but for Bataille, such a conception is to be left behind (not ignored or overcome): 'the luxury of death
is regarded by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first as a negation of ourselves, then - in a sudden reversal - as the profound truth of that movement of which life is the manifestation (The Accursed Share, 34-5; OC VII, 41). Is death then in some way the truth of Bataille's system? At
points it recalls Heidegger's notion of 'Being toward death', but as with many of Bataille's notions, the whole issue of centrality is open to question even as it is posed. Bataille argues that it will always be possible to show that whichever primordial fact gets priority presuppose s the existence
of anothe r one (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 82; OC VIII, 71). 1 Death features in early writings - 'beings only die to be born', 'Solar Anus', 7; OC I, 84), and become s something that does not transcend the individual so much as lose the individual in a generalized excess. Instead of Hegel's

we see that in the fact that life and death are passionately devoted to the subsidence of the
mastery of death,

void, the relation of master/slave subordination is no longer revealed, but life and void are
confused and mingled like lovers, in the convulsive moments of the end. Instead of ('Sacrifices', 133; OC I, 93 trans, mod.)

giving in to death, accepting it at a distance, as the distancing that structure s Being (Heidegger),
death is to be embraced, as 'it appears that no less a loss than death is needed for the brilliance of
life to traverse and transfigure dull existence (Th e Practice of Joy Before Death', 239; OC I, 557). This is not because death is so marvellous, but because it is everywhere, linking the individual to
everything else (what Bataille will go on to call the general economy): I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendours whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my
own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be annihilated. (The Practice of Joy Before Death', 239; OCI, 557) Bataille is not arguing from the perspective whereby the universe only exists in one's own mind, but that even we, pathetic individuals that
we are, feature in the ceaseless process of death and destruction. This linkage of the individual, throug h death, to others, to the general economy, is what is pursued in Bataille's connecting of the erotic with death, which is a development of the linkage between sex and death. In Eroticism he
uses the term 'continuity to designate both the state of shared existence of asexual reproduction and what lies beyond individuality when individuals lose themselves in sacrifice, erotic activity, laughter, drunkenness and so on (Eroticism, 11-25; OCX, 17-30). These attempts interest him
because 'eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of our individual selves (24; 29). Death 57 The second volume of The Accursed Share, subtitled The History of Eroticism, is often seen as being little more than a draft version of Eroticism, but there are crucial
differences in emphasis. The History of Eroticism really is a genuine part of the work on 'the accursed share', whereas such an economy is only implicit in Eroticism. More importantly still, the former seeks to link sexuality to death, and the latter attempts the opposite movement (both
movements, for no clear theoretically necessary reason, lead Bataille to associate Woman with death). The second volume of The Accursed Share even starts by stating that it is not really about eroticism, but is instead 'a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror', emerging from 'a
system of thought exhausting the totality of the possible (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 14; OC VIII, 10). In writing about death as part of the general economy, it also emerges that death is not necessarily literal death. But we should on no account take it as simply a metaphor, as metaphors

imply a reality to be represented, and Bataille offers no such real world, existing to be represented in mimesis, metaphor or metonymy. Death and Fear Hegel sees death as the origin of
humanity's self-consciousness and the rest of time consists of the struggle to (this being, initially, consciousness of death),

master death. 'architecture is something appearing in

Communal existence is also centred around death, and the two combine in the form of architecture. According to Hollier, for Hegel,

the place of death, to point out its presence and to cover it up: the victory of death and the victory
over death' (Against Architecture, 6). For Bataille, however, this is precisely the problem: our society is this fearful covering up of death (whereas the Aztecs, for example, exposed death in the sacrifice - at the top of, rather than inside, the pyramid). 2 In The Accursed

all society, all individual existence

Share, vol. II, he argues that emerges from this fear of (as opposed to the restricted economy of modern individualism)

death - and this fear is at its most creative when it approaches death. humanity is 58 Georges Bataille At the same time as

drawn toward death, this repulsion is what defines humanity. death is not simply
it pushes it away - Repulsion is the key word, as

a negativity, something that happens to the subject, but something that, even when it happens to
someone else, provokes disgust. Humanity is defined by its 'repugnance for death / (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 61;

death is specifically part of what repels us because we repel it, and arguably
OC VIII, 51). This is hardly a novel or shocking statement, but

the (primordial) object of disgust (and only in becoming human does death constitute something
disgusting). Humans have a horror of all that threatens their unitary existence: excretions, filth, loss of control through drunkenness, eroticism (61-2; 51-2). More than this, we also have a horror of life, as at some level we are aware of life as a by-product of death, so
much so that 'we might think, if need be, that living matter on the very level we separate ourselves from it is the privileged object of our disgust (63; 52). All such disgusts are caught up within taboos, in a relation where it is impossible to ascertain whether the taboo created the disgust, or
responds to it. For Bataille, however, death really is at the heart of the existence of taboo, but is not the exclusive centre: since it goes without saying, I will not linger over the possible anteriority of the horror of death. This horror is perhaps at the root of our repugnance (the loathing of
nothingness would then be at the origin of the loathing of decay, which is not physical since it is not shared by animals) . It is clear, in any event, that the nature of excrement is analogous to that of corpses and that the places of its emission are close to the sexual parts; more often than not,
this complex of prohibitions appears inextricable. (79; 68) This complex marks the line of demarcation between human and other and proximity to these phenomena constitutes the crossing of this line. This crossing and the fear of crossing gives the 'universally human character of the

Death is also 'at the beginning insofar as its

problem of obscenity (54; 45), even if contra Freud and Levi-Strauss, for example, there is no particular taboo that is universal.3

appearance coincides with labour and utility - this is what makes death a problem for the
individual, as the individual conceives of his or her self as something to be maintained,
preserved and developed Death very rapidly becomes the site of prohibition, and takes (82; 70) .

two principal forms: both murder and 'contact with corpses are forbidden (79; 68). It is not the metaphysical difficulty of impending death that
creates this fear, since this arises from an awareness that life is an accident between waste and decay, with only waste and decay in between. As Bataille notes, life is a luxury of which death is the highest degree (85-6; 74) and 'moreover, life is a product of putrefaction (80; 69), so

death and decay are linked to conceptions of our birth and origin (for him, this accounts for 'our fear of menstrual blood, for example). Here, as elsewhere, it is
striking how far Bataille goes down a road attacking preconceptions only to launch into a restatement of tired cliches about 'woman as other, as death. He simply does not question the taboos around 'woman', and this is why Kristeva's gloss on Bataille (Powers of Horror) and Mary Douglas's
Purity and Danger is so successful - it completes the logic already under way. The all-pervasive absence, or denial, of death, through prohibition, is why death is to be approached, and also why we have an attraction to as well as repulsion from death and all that threatens our identity, so that
for example, 'eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death (Eroticism, 11; OCX, 17). Death and eroticism remain charged with danger, and create anguish in individuals as their individuality falls away (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 101; OC VIII, 88) . 5 But as with
Hegel's 'facing up to death', Bataille does not limit the notion of death to actual biological death - it comes to include all that undoes the individual, such that the introduction, or irruption, of death into life makes life become exuberant (99; 86). Erotic activity, for example, must be carried out

Bataille does not mean the kinds

intensely (otherwise it is just sex), for 'if the sensations do not have their greatest intensity, it is possible for us to isolate objects on the field of the totality (118-19; 102). By totality,

of ideology that account for everything, but the amorphous sphere beyond subjects, and
beyond a simple subject/object divide. Even if death is not real, there is no reduction of the
experience of approaching death we are instructed that to 'live life to the (we can never attain death - in this Bataille is with Heidegger). If

full we must 'embrace death' , what do we gain? Nothing much, except the awareness of an impossibility (we do not even gain nothing, as asceticism would aspire to), but what will have happened is the following: the embrace restores
us, not to nature (which is itself, if it is not reintegrated, only a detached part), but rather to the totality in which man has his share by losing himself. For an embrace is not just a fall into the animal muck, but the anticipation of death, and the putrefaction that follows it. (119; 103) There is no

there can be the project of approaching death

why, however, and there can only be Virtuar replies to 'why? - i.e. but this project is , as it enhances subjectivity,

lost at the moment it is attained, whether in actual death or in death-like experience

(nonexperience). Bataille also
Note also that the only 'return is to something that is necessarily lost, again and again. Eroticism, then, is one direction waste or excess can take that involves death (itself waste, excess), but

hints at another level at which death can be approached - a level that really is
metaphorical.
MORTALITY RC VIOLENCE
Their project of self-preservation is implicated in the exploitation of others. Our
fascination with mortality is the root cause of violence, as we subordinate others to
hide from the fungibility of our own existence.
Winters 17 (Joseph Winters is an assistant professor of Religious Studies with a secondary
position in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University,
“Baldwin, Bataille, and the Anguish of the (Racialized) Human,” Journal of Religious
Ethics, ///ghs-sc)
To some extent, death and its intimations—loss, suffering, shame, ecstasy, vulnerability—cannot have a
place in a world defined by duration and preservation. In other words, even though death is a permanent feature of human life,
the order of things must cultivate and imagine ways to diminish, mitigate, and deflect its effects
and implications. We feel this pressure in moments when instances of suffering and loss are expected to produce or express some reassuring meaning
(everything happens for a reason; that person got what he deserved). This mitigating process typically happens when
individuals and communities locate death, suffering, and excessive violence elsewhere, in
another place and community—a strategy that often justifies and makes acceptable violent
projects to fix or restore that other community. Therefore, when Bataille says that “death means everything” to
the world of accumulation and duration, he is thinking about how the anxiety and horror around death is
related to our commitment to qpreserving ourselves in the future, a commitment that involves
various forms of displacement and deferral. In other words, the will to futurity intensifies the anxiety
and anguish that accompany thoughts and images of death, mortality, and vulnerability. Of course,
humans are also fascinated with images, and practices, of violence and death, but only if they
can experience and view these images from a comfortable distance or participate in these
practices in a manner that reduces the risks to the self’s coherence and duration.9 On the duplicity of the self’s
relationship to violence, Bataille writes, “Violence, and death signifying violence, have a double meaning. On the
one hand the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life; on the other an element at once
solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly” (Bataille 1986, 45). What is crucial here is that the order
of things, the order of life preservation, is defined over and against death and loss—death means everything to this order. Yet I also take
Bataille to be suggesting that everyday projects and strategies of selfpreservation are implicated in the mundane,
often undetected, exploitation and suffering of others; again, death means everything to the real world. Therefore, the
human self is a site of a paradox: the world of projects, goals, and accumulation “imparts an
unreal character to death even though man’s membership in this world is tied to the positing of
the body as a thing insofar as it is mortal” (Bataille 2006, 46). According to Bataille, our general commitment to
duration, to reproducing life, will always mean that some being, force, or desire will be marked
as a threat or danger to that reproduction. And those threats will have to be managed,
assimilated, disciplined, or subordinated in some manner. One’s ability to endure in this
world, to accumulate recognition, prestige, and various kinds of capital means that one must
separate oneself, to some extent, from those qualities and characteristics that endanger self or
communal projects and aspirations. To put it differently, life needs to be cordoned off from death and
those beings associated with death (even as we know that life and death are always intertwined and that certain kinds of subjects and
communities are made more vulnerable to death and its intimations). Here Bataille’s line of thought converges with Baldwin’s point about social life providing a kind
of barrier to “menacing” forces, to beings and desires that signify chaos and disorder. If Baldwin and Bataille are right, then racism, which is always about marking,
disciplining, and managing “dangerous” bodies and communities, must be confronted alongside fundamental social and human limitations.

Recognizing the mortality inherent to human existence is essential to achieve

liberation. We can only attain truth through absolute dismemberment.
Bataille 97 (Georges Bataille, crazy libarian, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” in “The Bataille
Reader, trans. by Stuart and Michelle Kendall, 1997 ///ghs-sc)
It was precisely the univocal character of death for Hegel that inspired the following commentary from Kojeve, which applies, again, to the passage from the Preface:
(K, 549; TEL, 551). 'Certainly, the idea of death does not heighten the well-being of Man; it does not make
him happy nor does it give him any pleasure.' Kojeve wondered in what way satisfaction results from a familiarity with the negative,
from a tete-a-tete with death. He believed it his duty, out of decency, to reject vulgar satisfaction. The fact that Hegel himself said, in this respect, that Spirit
'only attains it truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment' goes together, in principle, with Kojeve's negation.
Consequently, it would even be superfluous to insist ... Kojeve simply states that the idea of death 'is alone capable if satisfying
man's pride' .... Indeed, the desire to be 'recognized', which Hegel places at the origin of historical struggles, could be
expressed in an intrepid attitude, of the sort that shows a character to its best advantage. 'It is
only', says Kojeve, 'in being or in becoming aware of one's mortality or finitude, in existing
and in feeling one's existence in a universe without a beyond or without a God, that Man can
affirm his liberty, his historicity and his individuality - "unique in all the world" - and have
them be recognized.' (Ibid.). But if Kojeve sets aside vulgar satisfaction - happiness - he now also sets aside Hegel's 'absolute dismemberment': indeed,
such dismemberment is not easily reconciled with the desire for recognition.
Their obsession with survival negates the possibility of life.
Vaneigem 94 (Raoul Vaneigem is the leader of the Situationist International, The Movement of
the Free Spirit, Trans. R. Cherry and I. Patterson, ///ghs-sc)
"surviving" has so far
Many observations that were considered ludicrous in 1967 have now become commonplace. For it is obvious today that
prevented us from "living"; that man's insistence on making himself useful in his work is actually
of little use to him in his own life, and even kills him. It is clear, too, that life usually ends precisely
because it has never begun (which most people realize only in their last moments); and that the price of representation is paid for in terms of
world-weariness and self-contempt. These ideas are already so deeply entrenched that, in the absence of any real lived experience to dispel them, they still nourish not
the need to work in order to
only nostalgic theorizing but  even the most fashionably glib talk. This vicious cycle continues out of an old inertia:
survive compensates for the life lost in wage labor (an even costlier form of survival). The effect
on consciousness is fatal, with two sets of prejudices contributing to the mortification: in the first, survival takes
precedence over living; and in the second, the exercise of the intellect – through critical analysis of
society, of political issues, of cultural decay, of the future of humanity – takes the place of
existence, while the body is left to express its discontent through sickness and malaise. And one need not
get very close to these ideas to detect a whiff of the cassock. 3 The economy is everywhere that life is not: but however intertwined the two may become, they simply
Most people do not really live: their overly precise
do not meld, and one can never be confused with the other.
calculations about money, work, exchange, guilt and power govern their lives so thoroughly and
irremediably that the only thing to escape this bloodlessly cold calculus is the warm pathos of
sweat and tears – which is all that is left to take on the aspects of human reality.
NUCLEAR WAR
The lines of hell never stop expanding – the nuclear bomb is indistinguishable from
humanity, existing at the sacred core of humanity’s origins. The death by fire they
articulate is necessarily unremarkable.
Sivak 15 (Andrew Mark Sivak, Ph.D., is a professor of History of Consciousness UC Santa
Cruz, “Destroyer of Worlds: War and Apocalypse in the Nuclear Epoch,” 2015 ///ghs-sc)
The philosophical counter-argument to the theory of Hiroshima as event articulated by Anders
was established years prior to this flare up with Jaspers by Georges Bataille, in his critical review of John Hersey's Hiroshima,
which opened with a 162 Anders, “Theses,” 494-5. 142 provocative formulation of infernal recurrence. “ Let's admit it,” he admonished, “the population of hell increases

annually by fifty millions souls . . . A world war may accelerate the rhythm slightly, but it cannot
significantly alter it. To the ten million killed in the war from 1914 to 1918 one must add the two
hundred million who, during the same period, were fated to die natural deaths.163 Hell did not
stop expanding after Hiroshima. Furthermore, there was for Bataille nothing particularly noteworthy about the ways in which the victims at Hiroshima suffered: If the misfortunes of
Hiroshima are faced up to freely from the perspective of a sensibility that is not faked, they cannot be isolated from other misfortunes. The tens of thousands of victims of the

atom bomb are on the same level as the tens of millions whom nature yearly hands over to death.
One cannot deny the differences in age and suffering, but origin and intensity change nothing:
horror is everywhere the same. The point that, in principle, the one horror is preventable while the other is not is, in the last analysis, a matter of indifference.164 163 Bataille,
“Concerning the Accounts,” 221. 164 Ibid, 228. Emphasis added. However, the human meaning of Hiroshima's burning , as distinct from the animality of bodily suffering

and death, was important to Bataille, who in this passage distances himself from the contextualizing

moves represented by Churchill and the dehumanizing descriptors used by Truman and Life:
“But the death of sixty thousand is charged with meaning, in that it depended on their fellow men
to kill them or let them live. The atom bomb draws its meaning from its human origin: it is the
possibility that the hands of man deliberately hang suspended over the future. And it is a means
of action: the fear produced by a tidal wave or a volcano has no meaning, whereas uranium fission a project whose goal is to
impose, by fear, the will of the one who provokes it. At the same time it puts an end to the projects of those whom it strikes. It is by representing possible projects, which in turn are intended to make other projects impossible, that an

atom bomb 143 The horrific carnage and mass death had precedent. Arguing for the exceptionality of Hiroshima was, according to Bataille, a cheap form of
sentimentality and in the end, dishonest. The cruelties of the Second World War did nothing to alter the underlying
situation of death: the lines at the gates of Hell are only getting longer. Death by fire, in whatever form,
was in Bataille’s eyes unremarkable, for “each fire is all fires.” What so moved Bataille about atomic bombs and
the idea of nuclear war, contra Anders, was not escalating thresholds of death (individual, collective, the end of a world shaped by humanity) and he
disdained moralistic critiques, especially those based on a concern for the suffering of others. For Bataille, what the nuclear bomb revealed was the dark truth

of human destiny—not what we have since become due to a twist of fate but what we were from
the very start, though we could not see it. Over a decade after his review of Hiroshima, revising his earlier interpretation of Hiroshima's bombing being more of the same, he
wrote in another article titled, “Unlivable Earth,” that We know that we cannot attain this world without denying, without suppressing what we are. But in catching sight of it, we are led to forget its real takes on a human meaning.
Otherwise, it would merely have the animal meaning of smoking out termites.” Ibid, 226-7. 144 spirit, its horrible tribal wars, its tortures, its massacres; or, in a less primitive civilization, the reduction of an unfortunate group of

There is something
conquered men to slavery, men transported by force, under the lash, toward unspeakable markets. Only by dint of grievous lies can we conceal the accursed truth of history.

frightful in human destiny, which undoubtedly was always at the limit of this unlimited
nightmare that the most modern weaponry, the nuclear bomb, finally announces.165 And later in the same piece: The
first men, as well as some very primitive savages today, think they are really animals: because animals are, in their mind, the most holy, having a sacred quality, which men have lost. Thus, according to the simplest among us,

we might have
animals, not men, are gods: animals alone have retained these supernatural qualities, which men have lost. Of course it is hard for us to think that we are becoming completely wretched! And yet . . .

a sublime idea of the animal now that we have ceased being certain that one day the nuclear
bomb will not make the planet an unlivable place for man.166 The deep truth of nuclear war is
that it announces the revelation of our lost animality. By contextualizing the atomic bomb in this way, Bataille was not (in the vein of someone like Churchill)
attempting to diminish the significance of atomic bombs. To the contrary, driven by “the will to create a force, starting from an awareness of the misery and the grandeur of this perishable existence that has befallen us,” Bataille once

STANDING AND FACING DESTINY remains in my eyes the

165 Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 176. 166 Ibid, 178. 145 proclaimed: “

essential aspect of knowledge.”167 For him, the nuclear bomb did not reveal a new situation, as Anders believed, so
much as it represented the real of an old situation that seemed preoccupied with continuity but
was suicidal from the start. According to Bataille, the nuclear epoch did not threaten humanity so much
as it was indistinguishable from humanity. Nuclear war would constitute an infernal return of
an animal indifference to death—the sacred core of humanity's origins.
FRAMING
The notion of debate as a tool to achieve their standards is emblematic of the will to
productivity and is exactly what we’re critiquing
Brewer 13 (Ben Brewer is a Graduate Student of Philosophy at Emory University, “Unsaying
Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing,” 2013 ///ghs-sc)
According to utility, an
Though the critiques of project and rationality follow similar structures and are equiprimordial, it is easiest to begin with the critique of utility.

object must have reference to some external end in order to be considered meaningful. In this mode of being-
in-the-world, the tool is the primary example of meaning. Importantly, the tool “has no value in itself” and is only meaningful “in

relation to an anticipated result” (Theory of Religion 28). While the truth of the tool lies in its usefulness towards a given end, the end is itself also grounded
in utility. The tools of agriculture, to use Bataille’s example from Theory of Religion, are defined in terms of their usefulness to the cultivation of crops: a plow is only a plow so long as it
accomplishes the goal of preparing soil for planting. The resulting food is, in turn, only valuable to the end of being eaten, which is only valuable in terms of its ability to sustain human life,
which is only valuable in its ability to do work, etc. The absurdity of this “endless deferral” is matched by the equal absurdity of “a true end, which would serve no purpose” (29). Either utility

A “true end,” must be

continues indefinitely such that no individual thing is valuable in itself, or the utility is grounded in something which is not itself useful.

something with no use-value at all. This is true for two reasons. The first is clearly explicit in my preceding explanation:
there must be something at the end of the line, so to speak, which grounds meaning. This is a purely logical objection.
Meaning based in utility makes impossible the very thing it purports to offer: grounded meaning.
The second necessity deals instead with Bataille’s ethical commitment to immanent subjectivity: “What a
‘true end’ reintroduces is the continuous being, lost in the world like water is lost in water” (29). The
structure of the tool introduces a break into the continuity of animal experiencing. In order for me to

use something as a tool, it must first be distinct from me. Once it is distinct from me, I am no
longer in an immanent state of continuity with my world. The introduction of discontinuity into
the indiscriminate immanence of existence is the condition of the possibility of a tool. To use a
tool, therefore, is already to be in the realm of project.3 Bataille then introduces the dimension
of temporality to the critique of utility in order to critique what he calls “project,” though it could easily be
referred to as desire.Project denotes a mode of being-in-the-world in which time itself is experienced as an
object to be enlisted in the favor of utility. The present becomes meaningful only insofar as its
occurrences are useful in relation to the accomplishment of a (future) goal. The critique of this mode of being-in-the-
world runs similarly to the critique of utility. First of all, I will never be fulfilled . This is the basic problem of desire or

projection: desire is constituted on a lack. I can only desire something I do not have. More importantly, it will
not actually fulfill my desire; my desire, instead, will simply reconstitute itself with a new object-cause, which will be equally unsatisfactory upon its acquisition. The infinite

regress of utility-based meaning manifests itself here as the impossibility of satisfying desire.
The ethical problem of discontinuity, however, also reappears with the introduction of temporality. Right after
the above-quoted passage about animality, Bataille also notes that the goshawk eating the hen exists in a way “in which nothing is given in time…in which nothing is given beyond the present”

(18). For Bataille, the very division of time into past, present, and future introduces discontinuity and
transcendence into the continuous oneness of immanence. This discontinuity is, for Bataille, the
underlying problem of utility as well. The idea of discontinuity, either between subject and object or
among past, present, and future, is the condition of the possibility of utility’s emergence. Nick
Land explains, “Bataille’s thought of discontinuity is more intricate than his fluent deployment
of the word might indicate. It is the condition for transcendent illusion” (Land 64). In this way the
same critique of deferral applies to discontinuity: “Discontinuity is not ontologically grounded
but positively fabricated” (64). The groundlessness of discontinuity is not, then, accidental to the
groundlessness of deferral, but rather constitutive of it. Finally, Bataille applies the critiques of utility
and project to the practice of discursive reason. Broadly speaking, discursive reason is the practice of
philosophy understood as explanation. Insofar as discursive reasoning always occurs within the
context of elucidating something for a higher end, usually “truth,” it is based in project and
utility. In contradistinction to this approach to philosophy, Bataille poses “sovereign nonknowledge”—a way of philosophizing that does not attempt to elucidate transcendent truths, but
rather forces the reader into an experience (“Nonknowledge” 196). Discursive reason also rests on the distinction between subject

and object. In order to define something for explication or exploration, one must first delimit it
from the manifold. I cannot give an account of what a chair is without first designating that a
chair is some object distinct from all other possible objects in the world. This ontological problem of discursive reason
points to the role that language plays in Bataille’s thought. Language rests on this same dividing up of the world. It rests on the

ability to define a subject as distinct from an object. Even if I proclaim that I am thinking about
myself, syntax necessitates that there is an “I” who is thinking (subject) and an “I” which is
being thought about (object). This structural necessity is, for Bataille, “one of the most fateful
aberrations of language” (Theory of Religion 28). Bataille’s non-knowledge, then, cannot simply be
expressed in discursive language. Instead Bataille engages what Michael Sells calls “unsaying,”
perverting and twisting language against itself in order to “engage the ineffable” (Sells 3). In these critiques
Bataille attempts to elucidate and undermine the very basis of transcendent subjectivity—
discontinuity. The calling into question of the structure of discontinuity, between subject and
world, between I and thou, undergirds all of Bataille’s thought.
AT LIFE GOOD
The question is why? Salvation is only valuable if existence is suffering. Death is the
freedom from the horrors of life.
Cioran 49 (Emil Cioran was Romanian philosopher and essayist, “Précti de decomposition,”
1949, translated by Richard Howard, Editions Gallimard ///ghs-sc)
A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation 'existence equals
suffering.' It is neither a sudden realization nor a series of reasonings which leads us to this
equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our
experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that
the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The
arguments come later;
the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of 'wisdom.' But, suppose we do
not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts - what if we
prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime
impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself
alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious
temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest
wallow - dead drunk - in imperfection ... 

AT SUFFERING
Existence is horror. Suffering is inevitable – the only question is our orientation to
it.
Kain 07 (Phillip J Kain, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at
San Diego, “Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence,” 2007 ///ghs-sc)
Knowledge of the horror of existence kills action—which requires distance¶ and illusion. The
horror and meaninglessness of existence must be veiled if we¶ are to live and act. What we must
do, Nietzsche thinks, is construct a meaning¶ for suffering. Suffering we can handle. Meaningless suffering, suffering for no¶ reason at all,
we cannot handle. So we give suffering a meaning. We invent a¶ meaning. We create an illusion. The Greeks
constructed gods for whom wars¶ and other forms of suffering were festival plays and thus an occasion to be¶ celebrated by the poets. Christians imagine a God for
whom suffering is¶ punishment for sin (GM II:7; cf. D 78).¶ One might find all this unacceptable. After all, isn’t it just obvious that we¶ can change things, reduce
suffering, improve existence, and make progress?¶ Isn’t it just obvious that modern science and technology have done so? Isn’t it¶ just absurd for Nietzsche to reject
Hasn’t¶ such change already occurred?¶ Well, perhaps not. Even modern
the possibility of significant change?
environmentalists might resist all this¶ obviousness. They might respond in a rather Nietzschean vein that technology¶
may have caused as many problems as it has solved. The advocate of the¶ perfectible cosmos, on the
other hand, would no doubt counter such Nietzschean¶ pessimism by arguing that even if technology does cause
some problems, the¶ solution to those problems can only come from better technology. Honesty¶ requires
us to admit, however, that this is merely a hope, not something for which¶ we already have evidence, not something that it is absurd to doubt—not at all¶ something
obvious. Furthertechnology may or may not improve things. The¶ widespread use of antibiotics seems
to have done a miraculous job of improving¶ our health and reducing suffering, but we are also
discovering that such antibiotics¶ give rise to even more powerful bacteria that are immune to
those¶ antibiotics. We have largely eliminated diseases like cholera, smallpox, malaria,¶ and tuberculosis, but we have produced cancer and heart disease.
We can cure¶ syphilis and gonorrhea, but we now have AIDS.¶ Even if we could show that it will be possible to
continuously reduce suffering,¶ it is very unlikely that we will ever eliminate it. If that is so,
then it remains¶ a real question whether it is not better to face suffering, use it as a discipline,¶
perhaps even increase it, so as to toughen ourselves, rather than let it weaken¶ us, allow it to
dominate us, by continually hoping to overcome it.¶ But whatever we think about the possibility of reducing suffering, the
question¶ may well become moot. Nietzsche tells a story: “Once upon a time, in some out¶ of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless
twinkling¶ solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That¶ was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but
nevertheless,¶ it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled¶ and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die” (TL 1, 79).
Whatever progress¶ we might think we are making in reducing suffering, whatever change we
think¶ we are bringing about, it may all amount to nothing more than a brief and accidental¶
moment in biological time, whose imminent disappearance will finally¶ confirm the horror and
meaninglessness of existence.¶ The disagreement here is not so much about the quantity of suffering that¶ we can expect to find in the world
but, rather, its nature. 0 It is not a necessary part of the nature of things. It does not make¶ up the essence of existence. We must develop virtue, and then we can
basically¶ expect to fit and be at home in the cosmos. For the proponents of a¶ perfectible cosmos, suffering is neither essential nor unessential. The cosmos¶ is
even if we can change this or that, even
neutral. We must work on it to reduce suffering. We must bring about our¶ own fit. For Nietzsche,
if we can reduce¶ suffering here and there, what cannot be changed for human beings is that
suffering¶ is fundamental and central to life. The very nature of things, the very¶ essence of existence, means
suffering. Moreover, it means meaningless¶ suffering—suffering for no reason at all. That cannot be changed—it can only¶ be
 Nietzsche does not reject all forms of change. What he rejects is the sort of¶ change
concealed.¶
necessary for a perfectible cosmos. He rejects the notion that science¶ and technology can transform the essence of things—he rejects the
notion that¶ human effort can significantly reduce physical suffering. Instead, he only¶ thinks it possible to build up the power necessary to construct meaning in a¶
meaningless world and thus to conceal the horror of existence, which cannot¶ be eliminated.
 Schopenhauer
The plan inevitably brings suffering that will outweigh its benefits
Schopenhauer 1904 (Arthur, “THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENAUER; STUDIES IN
PESSIMISM”, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10732/10732-8.txt)[rkezios]

Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it _is_; for ever after, that it _was_. Every
evening we are poorer by a day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time
ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our being we are secretly conscious of our share in
the exhaustible spring of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again. Consideration of the
kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to embrace the belief that the greatest _wisdom_ is to
make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else
being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the
greatest _folly_: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can
never be worth a serious effort. The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present--the ever-fleeting present. It lies,
then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we
are always striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or,
again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry forward on its
way.Unrest is the mark of existence. In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept
onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must
always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope--in such a world, happiness in inconceivable.
How can it dwell where, as Plato says, _continual Becoming and never Being_ is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man
never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he
seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the
end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been
happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and
now it is over.
 Fear of Death

Our aversion to death is irrationally rooted in the ego – our bodies are perpetually
dying, and accepting that solves
Chopra 6 – Teaches at the medical schools of Tufts University, Boston University and Harvard
University, M.D. (Deepak, “The Absolute Break between Life and Death is an Illusion”
http://www.kavitachhibber.com/main/main.jsp?id=wisdom-May2006)[rkezios]

What bothers people about losing the body is that it seems like a terrible break or interruption. This
interruption is imagined as going into the void; it is total personal extinction. Yet that perspective, which arouses huge fears, is
limited to the ego. The ego craves continuity; it wants today to feel like an extension of yesterday. Without that
thread to cling to, the journey day to day would feel disconnected, or so the ego fears . But how traumatized are
you by having a new image come to mind, or a new desire? You dip into the field of infinite possibilities for any new thought, returning with a
specific image out of the trillions that could possibly exist. At
that moment, you aren’t the person you were a second ago.
So, you are clinging to an illusion of continuity. Give it up this moment and you will fulfill St. Paul’s
dictum to die unto death. You will realize that you have been discontinuous all along, constantly
changing, constantly dipping into the ocean of possibilities to bring forth anything new. Death can be
viewed as a total illusion because you are dead already. When you think of who you are in terms of I, me, and mine, you are
referring to your past, a time that is dead and gone. Its memories are relics of time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact
by repeating what it already knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to
conceive of new thoughts, desires, and experiences. By choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing itself.
Why wait? You can be as alive as you want to be through a process known as surrender. This is the next step in conquering death. So far the line
between life and death has become so blurry that it has almost disappeared. Surrender is the act of erasing the line entirely. When
you can
see yourself as the total cycle of death within life and the life within death, you have surrendered – the
mystic’s most powerful tool against materialism. At the threshold of the one reality, the mystic gives up
all need for boundaries and plunges directly into existence. The circle closes, and the mystic experiences
himself as the one reality.
 Baudrillard
Upholding life as inherently valuable forces us into ontological slavery – instead we
should embrace the liberation of sacrifice
Baudrillard 2 (Jean, “The Spirit of Terrorism: Hypotheses on Terrorism”, pg. 68-70)[rkezios]

All the same, we should try to get beyond the moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life, and
conceive that one might respect, both in the other and in oneself, something other than, and more than, life (existence isn’t
everything, it is even the least of things): a destiny, a cause, a form of pride or of sacrifice. There are symbolic stakes
which far exceed existence and freedom - which we find it unbearable to lose, because we have made
them the fetishistic values of a universal humanist order . So we cannot imagine a terrorist act committed with entire
autonomy and ‘freedom of conscience’. Now, choice in terms of symbolic obligations is sometimes profoundly mysterious - as in the case of
Romand, the man with the double life, who murdered his whole family, not for fear of being unmasked, but for fear of inflicting on them the
profound disappointment of discovering his deception. 3 Committing suicide would not have expunged the crime from the record; he would
merely have passed the shame off on to the others. Where is the courage, where the cowardice? The
question of freedom, one’s own or
that of others, no longer poses itself in terms of moral consciousness, and a higher freedom must allow us to
dispose of it to the point of abusing or sacrificing it. Omar Khayyam: ‘Rather one freeman bind with chains of love than set a
thousand prisoned captives free.’ Seen in that light, this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the
master-slave relationship. In the past, the
master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it.
The slave was the one deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labour . How do things
stand today? We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the
position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival
as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.

The idea that we must reject death at all costs is the root cause of all exclusionary
dichotomies
Baudrillard 76 (Jean, “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, pg. 125-126)[rkezios]

Racism is modern. Previous races or cultures were ignored or eliminated, but never under the sign of a universal Reason. There is no
criterion of man, no split from the Inhuman, there are only differences with which to oppose death. But it
is our undifferentiated concept of man that gives rise to discrimination . We must read the following narrative by Jean
deLéry, from the sixteenth century: Histoire d'un voyage en la terre de Brésil ('The History of a Journey to the Land of Brazil') to see that racism
did not exist in this period when the Idea of Man does not yet cast its shadow over all the metaphysical purity of Western culture. This
Reformation puritan from Geneva, landing amongst Brazilian cannibals, is not racist. It
is due to the extent of our progress that
we have since become racists, and not only towards Indians and cannibals: the increasing hold of rationality on our
culture has meant the successive extradition of inanimate nature, animals and inferior races 1 into the
Inhuman, while the cancer of the Human has invested the very society it claimed to contain within its
absolute superiority. Michel Foucault has analysed the extradition of madmen at the dawn of Western modernity, but we also know of the
extradition and progressive confinement of children, following the course of Reason itself, into the idealised state of infancy, the ghetto of the
infantile universe and the abjection of innocence. But the old have also become inhuman, pushed to the fringes of normality. Like so many others,
the mad, children and the old have only become 'categories' under the sign of the successive segregations that have marked the development of
culture. The
poor, the under-developed, those with subnormal IQs, perverts, transsexuals, intellectuals and
women form a folklore of terror, a folklore of excommunication on the basis of an increasingly racist
definition of the 'normal human'. Quintessence of normality: ultimately all these 'categories' will be
excluded, segregated, exiled in a finally universal society, where the normal and the universal will at last
fuse under the sign of the Human.2Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural history, takes the form of a
genealogy of discrimination in which, at the start of the nineteenth century, labour and production occupy a decisive place. At
the very core
of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the
exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their
model: the exclusion of the dead and of death.

Baudrillard 76 (Jean, “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, pg. 147-148)[rkezios]

Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death , to ward off the ambivalence of death in the
interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our phantasm, and ramifies in every
direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation.
No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the interests of life as positivity: life as
accumulation, death as due payment. No other culture had this impasse: as soon as the ambivalence of life and
death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter into a process of accumulation of
life as value; but by the same token, we also enter the field of the equivalent production of death. So life-
become value is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same instant, becomes the object of a perverse
desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death. This is the only way that we can speak of a
death-drive. This is the only way we can speak of the unconscious, for the unconscious is only the accumulation of equivalent
death, the death that is no longer exchanged and can only be cashed out in the phantasm. The symbolic is
the inverse dream of an end of accumulation and a possible reversibility of death in exchange. Symbolic
death, which has not undergone the imaginary disjunction of life and death which is at the origin of the
reality of death, is exchanged in a social ritual of feasting. Imaginary-real death (our own) can only be
redeemed through the individual work of mourning, which the subject carries out over the death of others
and over himself from the start of his own life. This work of mourning has fuelled Western metaphysics of death
since Christianity, even in the metaphysical concept of the death drive.

Confronting the inevitability of death solves

Baudrillard 76 (Jean, “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, pg. 158-160)[rkezios]

The irreversibility of biological death, its objective and punctual character, is a modern fact of science. It
is specific to our culture. Every other culture says that death begins before death, that life goes on after
life, and that it is impossible to distinguish life from death. Against the representation which sees in one
the term of the other, we must try to see the radical indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility
of their autonomy in the symbolic order Death is not a due payment [echeance], it is a nuance of life; or, life
is a nuance of death. But our modern idea of death is controlled by a very different system of
representations: that of the machine and the function. A machine either works or it does not. Thus the
biological machine is either dead or alive. The symbolic order is ignorant of this digital abstraction. And even biology
acknowledges that we start dying at birth, but this remains with the category of a functional definition.25 It is quite another thing to say
that death articulates life, is exchanged with life and is the apogee of life: for then it becomes absurd to
make life a process which expires with death, and more absurd still to make death equivalent to a deficit
and an accelerated repayment. Neither life nor death can any longer be assigned a given end: there is
therefore no punctuality nor any possible definition of death . We are living entirely within evolutionist thought, which
states that we go from Life to death: this is the illusion of the subject that sustains both biology and metaphysics
(biology wishes to reverse metaphysics, but merely prolongs it). But there is no longer even a subject who dies at a given moment. It is more real
to say that whole parts of 'ourselves' (of our bodies, our language) fall from life to death, while the living are subjected to the work of mourning.
In this way, a few of the living manage to forget them gradually, as God managed to forget the drowned girl who was carried away by the stream
of water in Brecht's song: Und es geschah, dass Gott sie allmiihlich vergass, zuerst das Gesicht, dann die Hiinde, und zuletzt das Haar [It
happened (very slowly) that it gently slid from God's thoughts: First her face, then her hands, and right at the end her hair.] ('The Drowned Girl'
in Bertolt Brecht: Poems and Songs, ed and tr John Willett, London: Methuen, 1990, p. 14] The subject's identity is continually falling apart,
falling into God's forgetting. But this death is not at all biological. At one pole, biochemistry, asexual protozoa are not affected by death, they
divide and branch out (nor is the genetic code, for its part, ever affected by death: it is transmitted unchanged beyond individual fates). At the
other, symbolic, pole, death and nothingness no longer exist, since in the symbolic, life and death are reversible. Only
in the
infinitesimal space of the individual conscious subject does death take on an irreversible meaning. Even
here, death is not an event, but a myth experienced as anticipation. The subject needs a myth of its end, as
of its origin, to form its identity In reality, the subject is never there: like the face, the hands and the hair,
and even before no doubt, it is always already somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution, an end
less cycle impelled by death. This death, everywhere in life, must be con jured up and localised in a precise point of time and a precise
place: the body In biological death, death and the body neutralise instead of stimulating each other The mind-body duality is
biology's fundamental presupposi tion. In a certain sense, this duality is death itself, since it objectifies the
body as residual, as a bad object which takes its revenge by dying. It is according to the mind that the
body becomes the brute, objective fact, fated for sex, anguish and death. It is according to the mind, this
imaginary schizz, that the body becomes the 'reality' that exists only in being condemned to death. Therefore
the mortal body is no more 'real' than the immortal soul: both result simultaneously from the same abstraction, and with them the two great
complementary metaphysics: the idealism of the soul (with all its moral metamorphoses) and the 'materialist' idealism of the body, pro longed in
biology Biology lives on as much by the separation of mind and body as from any other Christian or Cartesian metaphysics, but it no longer
declares this. The
mind or soul is not mentioned any more: as an ideal principle, it has entirely passed into the
moral discipline of science; into the legitimating principle of technical operations on the real and on the
world; into the principles of an 'objective' materialism. In the Middle Ages, those who practised the
discourse of the mind or soul were closer to the 'bodily signs ' (Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions [tr Helen Lane,
New York: Arcade, 1990] ) than biological science, which, techniques and axioms, has passed entirely over to
the side of the 'non-body'
 Bataille
Second, we’ll Impact turn your death bad arguments. Just like Perseus looking at
Medusa in the mirror, sacrificing the affirmative even in the face of extinction
causes an intimate encounter with death that is critical to affirming life.
Razinsky 9 (Liran, University of Wisconsin, “How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and
Bataille”)[rkezios]

Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in
totality. This attempt necessitates bringing death into the account, but death itself hampers this very
attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why does he believe sacrifice to be a
solution to Hegel’s fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man
meets death face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his
life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man destroys the animal within him and establishes his human truth as a
“being unto death” (he uses Heidegger’s term). Sacrifice provides a clear manifestation of man’s
fundamental negativity, in the form of death (Bataille, “Hegel” 335-36; 286). The sacrificer both destroys
and survives. Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached voluntarily by Man. In this way the paradox
is overcome, and yet remains open. We can approach death and yet remain alive, but, one might ask, is
it really death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a simulacrum? Bataille insists elsewhere,
however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real
impression of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading radiation our eyes
can hardly bear, and calls for the negation of individuals as such (“The Festival” 313; 215). We did not
fool death; we are burned in its fire. Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice also addresses Freud’s paradox. It
might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible to imagine it with the aid of
some mediator, to meet death through an other’s death. Yet on some level this other’s death must be
our own as well for it to be effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element
of identification: “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down
dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287). “There is no sacrifice,” writes Denis
Hollier, “unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with the victim” (166). Thus it is through
identification, through otherness that is partly sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we
would die in the act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy
is Bataille’s stress on the involvement of sight: “and so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287),
which brings him close to Freud’s view of the nature of the problem, for Freud insists on the visual,
recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining, perceiving. Bataille’s description recapitulates
that of Freud, but renders it positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so.
Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Significantly, meeting death is a need, not uncalled-
for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through identification and
through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved, accompanied by the critical
revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with death crucial for “humanness.” Note that both
possibilities of meeting death—in the sacrificial-ritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to
which we now turn—are social. In Hegel and in Freud the problem was stated as relevant to the
individual alone, whether facing reality or within the cosmos of his thought. Bataille’s solution is
achieved through an expansion of the horizons into social existence. The two modes through which the
contradiction can be avoided involve the presence of other people.8 A Visit to the Theater We have seen
that Freud argues that death is ungraspable, and that in his struggle with a related paradox, Bataille
offers a solution applicable to Freud’s argument. We shall now see ambiguous hints in Freud’s own text
toward a similar solution, and examine the issue of the possible encounter with death in a more modern
context than that of sacrifice, perhaps one that is closer to us. Let us first return to Freud’s argument of
the impossibility of the representation of death. The point in the argument is that we remain spectators.
Not specters, as one could imagine one should be, having survived one’s own death, but spectators.
Speculation or thought about death fails because of the position of the spectator. Having tried to mirror
ourselves in a specular way and failed, we note that we are still in there, watching. But more than the
visual, the use of the term of spectators (Zuschauer) carries us swiftly into the domain of the theater.
Less than two pages later, Freud stumbles on the idea of theater more directly. Having described our
tendency to push death away from life and thus to live an impoverished life, Freud continues: It is an
inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre
compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die— who,
indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it
possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely that behind all the vicissitudes of life we
should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be like it is in
chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start
no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need.
We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die
again just as safely with another hero. (“Thoughts” 291) Although the passage is compelling, one should
note that it is marginal in Freud’s text, with much poetic force yet of little relevance to the entire article.
Freud does not return to it, does not treat it in depth; neither do those who have studied the question
of death in Freud (Rank, Schur, Becker, Lifton, Hoffman, Yalom and Piven, among others). In any event, it
is not in relation to the problem of the representation of death that he pens this passage that looks, at
least at first, like a burst of literary imagination rather than a serious discussion. More important than
the question of its marginality, attention should be given to what Freud does in this passage. For Freud,
as can be seen from the context of this passage, what takes places in the theater belongs to the cultural-
conventional attitude to death, which tries hard to ignore it. In his description theater is a sort of
bourgeois solution, superficial and limited, that replaces meeting death in person. More lip-service to
death than a true encounter, it is, again as the context shows, the solution of the coward. He who is
unwilling to risk his life, being controlled by fear (Freud’s point in the passage that precedes the one on
the theater) finds some surrogate satisfaction, a mild compensation, by proxy, in seeing others pretend
to die. Freud’s description stresses another point: the survival of the spectator and the necessary
detachment implied by the possibility of replacing one hero for another. Theater does not reveal
anything to us about death, for “behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life
intact.” Thus not only do we survive the hero, we even benefit from his death: this is what we seek, our
own survival. In that description, we come to the theater in order to make sure that we keep death
away. We come to meet our “aliveness” again, once again to confirm ourselves in our complete
rejection of death. Night after night in the theater, we convince ourselves of our immunity and
invulnerability. The entire artistic setting helps us: we can always step out of the enchanted dream, out
of the willing suspension of disbelief, and tell ourselves: “After all, it is only a show, only a story.”9 Thus
there is no real danger, no real undermining of our security. Theater, Freud seems to suggest, is just a
play. But is theater really that meaningless? Is the encounter with death there really a missed
encounter? We shall now turn to Bataille, who offers an alternative view, where theater is regarded as
much more serious. Theatrical art, Bataille reminds, is the heir to religion. Theatrical representation
evolved from the sacrificial rite and still maintains its essence, which is, as we have seen, to enable us to
come close to death (La Littérature 214; 69). Theater, literature in general, and the sacrificial rituals are
essential to us: through them we become human, for we can familiarize ourselves with death and
distance ourselves from our animal nature. Theater, according to Bataille’s description, overcomes
Hegel’s paradox: “In tragedy, at least, it is a question of our identifying with some character who dies,
and of believing that we die, although we are alive (Bataille, “Hegel” 337; 287). Bataille’s phrasing is
almost identical to that of Freud. But the perspective differs. It is a delicate yet crucial nuance. Bataille,
in contrast with Freud (under the above reading), stresses that we really do get a glimpse of dying there,
that it is not merely a game. He also views the encounter with death as an existential necessity, crucial
for Man to be human, not as some entertainment. And third, there is a twist of value: for Bataille we
actively try to bring death closer, trying to force ourselves to represent it, in various cultural ways
(sacrifice, art). Theater, be it tragedy or comedy, is very serious for Bataille, and he attempts to explain
why: if, he says, the goal of all life is to push death aside, to head away from it, theater offers an element
in life that goes in the opposite direction. Instead of moving us away from death, it brings us nearer. It
serves a deep need in us. “…Just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light,”
Bataille writes, “so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of
human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funeral domain.” Yet it is
sometimes necessary for life not to “flee from the shades of death,” but to “allow…them to grow within
it” (La Littérature 212-13; 66-67). Moreover, this should not be done passively, in spite of ourselves: “we
must,” Bataille insists, “revive [the shades of death] voluntarily.” One of our ways to do so is art. “The
arts […] incessantly evoke these derangements, these lacerations, this decline which our entire activity
endeavors to avoid,” and it is done in order to arouse anxiety in us. Sacrifice is of the same nature (213-
14; 67-68). Not that we die in the theater. Bataille is aware, as is Freud, that by surviving the
protagonists we only affirm life once again. Our laughter or our tears signify that for a moment, “death
appears light to us” (La Littérature 214; 68). Yet if it appears light, it is because for a moment it is as
though we have risen beyond the horror, for a moment we are not busy fearing death: at that moment
we come to understand something about the presence of death. It teaches us that “when we flee wisely
from the elements of death, we merely want to preserve life,” whereas, by entering those “regions that
wisdom tells us to avoid, we really live it.” By coming close to death, to the symbols of its emptiness, we
get “a heightened consciousness of being.” When we laugh in the theater, such laughter “brings us out
[…] from the impasse in which life is enclosed by those whose only concern is to preserve life” (214; 68,
italics in original). Theater thus has a liberating power. It frees us from the concern of pushing death
aside, it brings us into contact with it and thus illuminates the rest of our life, constantly busy with
fleeing death, in a peculiar light. For a moment we are, as it were, free from that compulsive need, and
can have a different perspective on life. Returning to Freud, we can try to read his passage through
Bataille’s lens and ask whether the theatrical-artistic possibility is really so superficial. Reading against
the grain, we can see that Freud does actually offer something there. Even if what we wish in theater is
to “be able to preserve a life intact,” it is noteworthy that we seek it. Although the result is similar to
that described in the paradox of the impossibility of the representation of death, namely our survival
after the representation, there is a difference. There, it was a limitation we encountered, that we
remained alive (or was it? We shall see later), whereas here, concerning the theater, it is something we
seek: to meet death and yet “preserve a life intact.” Even if only to reaffirm our “aliveness,” we do
display a certain magnetic attraction towards death. We might have remained alive, but with some
integration of death into this “aliveness.” Theatrical representation, according to Freud’s text, also
provides us with a model for another approach to death, one that does not shun it. “There we still find
people who know how to die – who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else.” Those people do not
embrace our own cowardly evasive attitude to death, they are not obsessed with keeping themselves at
a distance from death. They approach it. Theater may not represent death, but it does manage to
present us with a model of how to approach it. The crucial element here is that death, in the theater, is
the death of an other. Blind as we are to our own death, and in other circumstances blind to the death
of the other, in theater we manage in some way, albeit limited, to experience death. For if we identify,
as Freud says, with the hero, it means that there is a certain link between him and us. It means that
although the overall outcome is that we are only reassured during the spectacle itself, we might still be
temporarily seized with apprehension of death. Although turning to the other looks protective at first, it
might still shake our affirmation of ourselves to a certain degree. In part this seems due to the hybrid
status—split between otherness and sameness—of the hero in the theatrical representation or the
literary work: on the one hand, different, estranged from ourselves; on the other hand, close to us
through our identification with him. In a sense, we are the same. This hybrid position seems to be the
opening through which recognition of death might enter our sheltered, protective person.10 Thus
Freud’s text, although it insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally
perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to the other. Death perhaps cannot be
looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways, indirectly, vicariously through a mirror, to use
Perseus’s ancient trick against Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from
oneself, into the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its incontestable
truth and its solipsism and affirmation of oneself. The safety that theater provides, of essentially
knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind of requirement for our ability to really identify with
the other. In that, it paradoxically enables us to really get a taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that
possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have
seen and shall see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much
more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate nuance, but a nuance that makes all the
difference. The idea common to both authors—that we can meet death through the other and yet
remain alive—is ambiguous. One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive.11
Freud tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting the first. The
benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter
with Death Death in Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are
often focused on the other as their object. But almost always it is as though through the discussion of
the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this other more
seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is
an other that dies. In one passage in his text, the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point
for Freud as well—one passage where death does not seem so distant. Freud comments on the attitude
of primeval Man to death, as described above—namely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in
himself. “But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided,”
he continues. It occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his
child, his friend […]. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his
whole being revolted against the admission. (“Thoughts” 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved
one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from this point,
Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion sprang.12 I have described elsewhere
(Razinsky, “A Struggle”) how Freud’s reluctance to admit the importance of death quickly undermines
this juncture of the existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of
primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description is there and is very telling. Primeval
man witnessed death, and “his whole being revolted against the admission.” ”Man could no longer keep
death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the dead” (Freud, “Thoughts” 294). Once again,
it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special
admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death.
Something of myself must be in the other in order for me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his
or her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not
present, there would be no acknowledgement of death, one’s own death always being, says Freud,
one’s blind spot.13 I mentioned before Heidegger’s grappling with a problem similar to Bataille’s
paradox. It is part of Heidegger’s claim, which he shares with Freud, that one’s death is unimaginable. In
a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the
other but dismisses it, essentially since the other in that case would retain its otherness: the other’s
death is necessarily the other’s and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem we started
with—that of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death.
Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical
difference of both from me as a subject will remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from
the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the person both close and distant,
both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification.14
As Bataille says, regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of
the deceased: “It is the death of an other, but in such instances, the death of the other is always the
image of one’s own death” (“Hegel” 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object
boundaries in sacrifice, of the “fusion of beings” in these moments of intensity (“The Festival” 307-11;
210-13; La Littérature 215; 70). Possibly, that is what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies
and why his “whole being” is affected. He himself is no longer sure of his identity. Before, it was clear—
there is the other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the
spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is also an
object, taking part in the world of objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to
me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never dies. Psychologically nothing limits
him,15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited in
space, limited in being the thought-content of someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that
he is the same for other subjects as other subjects are for him—that is, they can wish him dead or,
which is pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The encounter made primeval man step
out of the psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only a
spirit but also a thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him.16 The Highest Stake
in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our first two questions: the limitation in
imagining death and the possible solution through a form of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or a
spontaneous encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of
representation by involving oneself through deep identification. We shall now turn to our third question,
of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Bataille’s perspective
continuously brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can
grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The encounter with death, that
we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing a positive value, indeed as
fundamental. What we shall now examine is Freud’s attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an
attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence. As mentioned, Freud’s text is very confused, due to
true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, “A Struggle”). One manifestation of this confusion is
Freud’s position regarding this cultural-conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on
the other hand he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from death’s
exclusion from unconscious thought (“Thoughts” 289, 296-97). Death cannot be represented and is
therefore destined to remain foreign to our life.17 But then Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite
necessity: not to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize
ourselves with it: But this attitude [the cultural-conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful
effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living,
life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in
which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-
affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties,
the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those
who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact
indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with
explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son’s place with his mother,
the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency
to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.
Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’ (“It is necessary
to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”) (“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper
are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of
this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freud’s thought. One can hardly find
any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination with death, and
praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being
unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear.18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive
substances—seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the
problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that,
rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to
stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he
describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our
thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including death in life, but insists,
elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot
accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering
Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance,
concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the flight into
normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille
there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by
our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with
occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of
the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations
“necessary for his preservation,” that he “asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The
approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency
to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Man’s need to
approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only
fleeing death has less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the
paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the end of the article,
where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due”
(“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life “more tolerable for us once again” (299).
But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the
impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the content of our thought, his
sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for
the need to approach death. He says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of
abstaining from carrying out “experiments with explosive substances.” In addition, his ideas on the
shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the
lines offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to interpret them here. Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings
together life in its fullness and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual.
Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened
state of living. “The sacred horror,” he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most
agonizing experience.” It “opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every
limited meaning is transfigured in it (“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not
humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it an emotional
twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying,
intense. Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where individuality
melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest.
Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and
the world, between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity
are moments of excess and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself,
even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up for us
something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s text with
which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an
impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the repression of death is generalized and extended:
“the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations
and exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The
intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is
written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is
broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death. “Death could no longer be denied.
We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has
recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of
consequences, taking death into consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to
death, a sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths”
of others. Life can only become vivid, fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both
authors speak of a valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the
masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death, like the American couple or those who are
busy with the thought of “who is to take our place,” the individualists do not go with the herd, and by
allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty.19 Yet
again, Freud’s claims hover in the air, lacking any theoretical background. Bataille supplies us with such
background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival. Survival, he tells us, has a price. It
limits our life. As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses the
same tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life intact, and
therefore limit our existence to the bare minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in
order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual world, according to Bataille, is
characterized by the duration of things, by the “future” function, rather than by the present. Things are
constituted as separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for the threat of death: it ruins
value where value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is
continuously hidden from us in the order of things where life runs its normal course. Man “is afraid of
death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things” (“The Festival” 312; 214).
Sacrifice is the opposite of production and accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it is
an affirmation of the intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is
therefore rejected. “The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of
life […]. Death reveals life in its plenitude” (309; 212). Bataille’s “neutral image of life” is the equivalent
of Freud’s “shallow and empty” life. What Freud denounces is a life trapped within the cowardly
economical system of considerations. It is precisely the economy of value and future-oriented
calculations that stand in opposition to the insertion of death into life. “Who is to take the son’s place
with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children.” Of course there is an
emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on replacement that leaves us on the side of survival
and stops us sometimes from living the present. “The need for duration,” in the words of Bataille,
“conceals life from us” (“The Festival” 309; 212). For both authors, when death is left out, life “as it is” is
false and superficial. Another Look at Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements
associated with death invade our life anyway, we might as well succumb and give them an ordered place
in our thoughts. The necessity to meet death is not due to the fact that we do not have a choice. Rather,
familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full value, and is part of what makes us human.
But the tension between the tendencies—to flee death or to embrace it—is not easily resolved, and the
evasive tendency always tries to assert itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrifice, we are
exposed through death to other dimensions of life. But the exposure, he adds, is limited, for next comes
another phase, performed post-hoc, after the event: the ensuing horror and the intensity are too high to
maintain, and must be countered. Bataille speaks of the justifications of the sacrifice given by cultures,
which inscribe it in the general order of things. Thus, sacrifice is said to foster more rain, to appease the
gods, or to help in war. These explanations, he insists, are always secondary (“Hegel” 342-3; 291-2),
contrary to the very essence of sacrifice, which entails a glimpse into the intimate order of the world,
characterized by intensity, lack of distinctions and “immanence between man and the world, between
the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307; 210). And still, the explanations are essential and cannot
be eliminated.20
 Biocentrism

Death is just a anthropologic construct to interpret reality – science and biology

proves
Lanza 11 – American Doctor of Medicine, scientist, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell
Technology (ACT) and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake
Forest University School of Medicine, inventor of modern cell-replication and cloning processes,
(Robert, “What Is Death?”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/transcending-
death_b_865233.html)[rkezios]

We all know the biological reason we age and die. Our bodies break down and are discarded like an old car or a worn-out pair of jeans. No one escapes the ravages of
time. Or do they? The big question is why
is the universe this way to begin with? Of all of the possible ways the universe could be structured,
why are the laws of nature the way they are? Why do things become less ordered (second law of thermodynamics), rather than more ordered? Why
do
systems deteriorate -- and life die -- rather than stay the same? Equally relevant, is the question of why out of all of existence -- out
of everything possible in the universe -- all you get to be is, say, a plumber or a hairdresser. And that's it! -- followed by nothingness for the rest of eternity. You'll
never get to travel in a spaceship to distant stars, or to live in a world without cancer or war. Scientists say it's all an accident. If you're dealt
a bad hand, oh well, it's just tough luck. You'll die soon enough. Our inability to comprehend the true nature of life shouldn't come as a surprise,
considering our DNA differs from apes and monkeys by less than 2 percent. We primates -- whether scientist or macaque -- have significant cognitive
limitations. Like a mouse or a gerbil, we open our eyes and the world −- as if by magic -- is just there. We think it's a thing,
a hard object. But this is inconsistent with hundreds of experiments carried out in the last century. Reality is
observer-determined -- it's a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately, means that things must change. Could you imagine always and forever
being a toddler? Diapers and lollipops would grow tiresome. Or forever being a senior? The laws of nature are structured so that we grow
and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence . That part of the equation is easy to understand:
First we experience life as children, then as middle-aged adults, and finally, as senior citizens. But we can't connect the dots beyond that. You're a shoe-maker for a
few years and then it's into the void of nothingness forever. Stephen Hawking summed this viewpoint up quite accurately: "I regard the brain as a computer which will
stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers." This is the limit of our primate
comprehension. Still, at some point, virtually everyone has wondered: "Is this all we are, is there nothing more?" Fortunately, there is more. In Immanuel
Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," the great philosopher explained how space and time are forms of human intuition . Indeed, everything
you see and experience is information in your mind. If space and time are tools of the mind, then we shouldn't be surprised that at
death there's a break in the connection of time and place. Without consciousness, space and time are
meaningless; in reality we can take any time -- or any spatial plane -- and estimate everything against this
new frame of reference. Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness . Indeed, biocentrism suggests
it's a manifold to all dimensional potentialities (see "What Happens When You Die?). Time is the inner sense that animates existence,
not just our thoughts and feelings, but the spatial representations we experience from birth until death. It's just the way
we connect things, not an invisible, continuous matrix with people and particles bouncing around in it.
Consciousness isn't created or destroyed -- it only changes forms . It's like a bubble machine that creates spheres -- spheres of
space and time, which we carry around with us like turtles with shells. Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather,
there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability . According to one interpretation, each of these
possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the "multiverse"). There are an infinite number of universes (including our own) that comprise everything
that can possibly happen. Thus, death
doesn't exist in any real sense, since all possible universes exist simultaneously
regardless of what happens in any of them. True, you age and die, but there are always bubble s (universes)
spanning the breadth of eternity. Some may not travel very far, but others will float off into the horizon. Perhaps you'll get that space-trip to the stars
after all. "The first step to eternal life," said Chuck Palahniuk "is you have to die." ously intensively pursuing that

scholarship. In debate, the fruits of critical theory and persistent interrogation are not intellectual paralysis
or withdrawal from political advocacy, but more often than not a reciprocal engagement with
creative experimentation.
Their indicts are just pandering for funding, Lanza is just politically unpopular but not
incorrect
Henry 9 – Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University (Richard Conn,
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 23, Number 3, Fall, 2009, page 371,
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/biocentrism.pdf )[rkezios]

And what is their underlying thesis? They present it as a long list of Principles of Biocentrism that have
no individual value, in my opinion––but the heart of it, collectively, is correc t. On page 15 they say
“the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.” That is the essence of the entire
book, and that is factually correct. It is an elementary conclusion from quantum mechanics. So what
Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the
physicists, do NOT say it––or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private– –furiously blushing as
we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no! Bless Robert Lanza for creating this book, and
bless Bob Berman for not dissuading friend Robert from going ahead with it.