A Critique of Affirmative Morality: A Reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life

257 Pages·2014·3.351 MB·English

by  Julio Cabrera

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REFERÊNCIA
CABRERA, Julio. A critique of affirmative morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of
life. Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions, 2014. 255p.

A Critique of Affirmative Morality

(A reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life)

Julio Cabrera

(Translation from Spanish by Ygor Buslik)
3rd Edition, (First English Edition)
September, 2014, Brasília, Brazil

Rights on all editions in English:
Julio Cabrera Editions

Cover photograph and Layout by Léo Pimentel

ISBN: 978-85-916170-1-2
Contents

Foreword ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Addendum to the Foreword ...................................................................................................... 12

Part I ................................................................................................................................................. 13
On the route to a morality of non-being ...................................................................................... 13

1 ........................................................................................................................................................ 14
From the question on the sense of being to the question on its value. Value of being and
oblivion. Ethics and ontology ........................................................................................................ 14
Note 1: About the radical character of thinking .................................................................. 22
Note 2. Being and beings. .................................................................................................... 24

2 ........................................................................................................................................................ 27
Fragments of a map for the re-conduction of non-being to the very structure of the world 27

PART II ............................................................................................................................................. 34
Birth and Suicide: the arguments of a radical and anti-skeptic moralist ................................ 34

1 ........................................................................................................................................................ 35
The structural-worldly suffering and its connection with moral disqualification .................... 35
Note 3. Tribute to Schopenhauer. ........................................................................................ 50

2 .................................................................................................................................................... 52
Procreation .................................................................................................................................. 52
Note 4: About Children and works of art. ............................................................................ 62

3 .................................................................................................................................................... 65
Suicide.......................................................................................................................................... 65
Note 5. Esquisse for a theory of radical non-communication .......................................... 80
Note 6. Leibniz and the innocence of the Father .............................................................. 95
Note 7. Kant and the antinomy of suicide ........................................................................ 107

PART III .......................................................................................................................................... 127
Return to a morality of being (of how-to live) after the negative reflection .......................... 127

1 ...................................................................................................................................................... 128
The main points for a critique of affirmative morality .............................................................. 128

2 .................................................................................................................................................. 149
Is non-affirmative morality even possible? (A short Survival Handbook) ........................ 149

Note 8. On the impossible conciliation between ethics and politics, based on an
analysis of their relations with death.................................................................................. 163
Note 9. A logical-ethical paradox ....................................................................................... 172

PART IV ......................................................................................................................................... 175
Negative ethics and some contemporary ethical theories on the issue of moral
responsibility concerning possible children: discourse ethics (Habermas), moral of
seriousness (Tugendhat), critical utilitarianism (Hare), Empirical pessimism (Benatar) .. 175

1 .................................................................................................................................................. 176
Habermas and the irrecoverable asymmetry of birth .......................................................... 176
(a) On two types of Skepticism ..................................................................................... 176
(b) Habermas playing with children ............................................................................. 179

2 .................................................................................................................................................. 187
Tugendhat and the seriousness of negative ........................................................................ 187
(a) The importance of being “ernsthaftig” ................................................................... 187
(b) The negative character of the fundamental “empirical fact” ............................... 195

3 .................................................................................................................................................. 201
R. M. Hare and “possible people” .......................................................................................... 201
(a) On the fundamental ambiguity of the Utilitarian principle: the principle of
“gratification” and the “anesthetic” principle ..................................................................... 201
(b) Hare‟s lack of radicality on the consideration about the nature of a worth-living
life 205

4 .................................................................................................................................................. 216
David Benatar and the limits of empirical pessimism ......................................................... 216
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 216
(a) Two notions of “possible being”. ............................................................................ 216
(b) Weakness of the “support asymmetries” .............................................................. 220
(c) Crossing argumentation between absence/presence and existing/not-existing
dualisms. ................................................................................................................................ 224
(d) Benatar's material argumentation: limits of the empiricist approach ................ 228
(e) On the alleged independence between formal and material argumentation. .. 231

TWO EPILOGUES ....................................................................................................................... 235

EPILOGUE I ........................................................................................................................ 235

SUMMARY OF THE ETHICAL QUESTION IN THE NEGATIVE APPROACH .............. 235
Steps towards Negative Ethics ........................................................................................... 235
Recent ideas on suicide ...................................................................................................... 239

II .................................................................................................................................................. 243
ON THE UNLIMITED SAYING YES (FOR AND AGAINST NIETZSCHE) ...................... 243

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 254
Foreword

The issues concerning birth and death often occur in the available literature,
in books on “applied ethics" or in essays on "bioethics". This suggests ethics is
already constituted and that afterwards the question will be to see how ethics
“applies" to those matters. The present book aims to drastically break this usual
expositive mold: birth and death are part, as it will be seen, of the very theoretical
structure of ethics, of its constitution as such, not as “mere applications” that could
be made or not. This work argues ethics has been constituted on the basis of not
explicit answers, of fundamental character, given to these two issues: birth and
death.

Someone once considered the Introduction to formal logic of the Spanish
Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book will be
considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions - often exasperating –
this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn
and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why
do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our
parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc.,
and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of
children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to
surpass the stage of the children‟s questions and to analyze “the serious moral
crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These
"adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present
book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction
life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the
more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the
disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the
“naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely
because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues
of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack
of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times.

Nor do I mean to say something particularly "profound" or "interesting" about
my questions, but only to expose what appears as true to rational argument and
unquiet moral sensibility. The idea truth must be "profound" and "interesting" is
strangely uncritical. If truth is superficial, irritating and banal - as the relations
between truth and death suggest - this book will inevitably be superficial, irritating
and banal. As jugglers, writers and directors of horror films, philosophers have
always tried to “surprise” their readers, telling them something new and never
heard; and their best procedure has been questioning of the obvious: they have
tried to demonstrate the world we see does not exist, that the other humans may
be robots, that we have no images in our minds, that there are no intentions in our
actions, that we do not make representations of things, that our expressions have
no meaning, and that it is not true that if I push a billiard ball with my finger, my
action has been the cause of the movement of the ball.

Philosophies seem to assume the obligation of saying something different,
extraordinarily interesting and strongly counter-intuitive, and whoever fails falls
under the stigma of banality, and listeners move to another place where they could
be told "something they do not already know". As if philosophical astonishment
would be lost and replaced by mere surprise. Philosophers seem to have lost the
ability to hear "the same", the ability of re-position, and think that truth must
necessarily move, change its skin, shining in different stances. As if the dynamics
of truth would be confused with the dynamics of life. It is part of the vivacity of life
to keep incessantly feeding with "the new", but we do not need to think of truth as a
stimulus to life. Why would not truth have a much greater affinity with the monotony
of death than with the always renewed exuberance of life? This book has been
written for those who are able to bear the irritating sound of a hammer hitting
always on the same nail. All the "depth" of the book - whether it is even possible to
be "deep" in radical philosophy - will be achieved through its banality and
monotony, and the book does not aspire to any other deepness.

Nor have I intended the book is, in Fernando Savater‟s words, particularly
“innovative” or “revolutionary”, an impression which could be given by the
deliberately radical character of the reflection. On the contrary, the intention is to
show an uncommon way of visualizing morality that could be repetitive, insisting on
the monotonous trivialities of human condition; a procedure far from any
proclaimed “revolutionary” style of thinking.

Writers and filmmakers have indeed lingered more in the monotony of human
condition than philosophers. Artists seem more gifted for pointless repetitions than
philosophers, who frequently felt obliged to assume the clarity and precision of
science. But it is difficult for philosophers to make scientific philosophy and, at the
same time, to say something relevant about the monotonous human condition, of
which science knows little. The notion of "affirmative" criticized in this book shows,
however, that under the current philosophical practices following the model of
science, literary motivations are hidden in a sort of narrative impulse to tell moral
(or moralist) tales where the heroine is moral law and the villains, skepticism,
relativism and nihilism. Perhaps in the impossibility of philosophy to refrain from
telling an "edifying" story to their readers - despite its professed scientific objectivity
and universality – is concealed some kind of revenge of what is neither art, nor
science nor philosophy, but religion. The "metaphysics of life" presented here in
the form of a “natural ontology” aims to move away from scientific arbitrariness -
whereby nothing is essentially linked to anything – as from religious fatalism,
according to which, magically, everything is inextricably connected to everything.

This type of subject also facilitates the temptation for ad hominem arguments.
As it occurs with firearms, when someone handles ideas about life, death and
suicide, he or she should take extreme care in their manipulation. With "mortal
questions" happens the same thing as with "deadly weapons": when we have them