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Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence

New York ;: Oxford University Press (2006)

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  1. Why Not Effective Altruism?Richard Yetter Chappell - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1):3-21.
    Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.
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  • Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining.Patrick Kaczmarek, Harry R. Lloyd & Michael Plant - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...)
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  • The scope of longtermism.David Thorstad - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Longtermism is the thesis that in a large class of decision situations, the best thing we can do is what is best for the long-term future. The scope question for longtermism asks: how large is the class of decision situations for which this is true? In this paper, I suggest that the scope of longtermism may be narrower than many longtermists suppose. I identify a restricted version of longtermism: swamping axiological strong longtermism (swamping ASL). I identify three scope-limiting factors - (...)
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  • Defending the de dicto approach to the non-identity problem.Joona Räsänen - 2023 - Monash Bioethics Review 41 (2):124-135.
    Is it wrong to create a blind child, for example by in vitro fertilization, if you could create a sighted child instead? Intuitively many people believe it is wrong, but this belief is difficult to justify. When there is a possibility to create and select either ‘blind’ or ‘sighted’ embryos choosing a set of ‘blind’ embryos seems to harm no-one since choosing ‘sighted’ embryos would create a different child altogether. So when the parents choose ‘blind’ embryos, they give some specific (...)
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  • A Kantian critique of Benatar's argument from the cosmic perspective.Byeong D. Lee - 2023 - Philosophical Forum 54 (3):185-198.
    Benatar argues that the absence of cosmic meaning is part of the reason why our lives are so bad that we had better not procreate. The goal of this paper is to argue against this claim from a Kantian point of view. For this goal, I argue first that the fact that human life is a product of blind evolution is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, mainly on the grounds that the concepts of good (...)
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  • Animal-Rights Primitivism: A Vital Needs Argument Against Modern Technology.James Schultz - 2023 - Between the Species 26 (1):65-92.
    In this essay, I argue that those who embrace animal rights should also embrace primitivism—the view that humans should abandon modern technology and take up something like hunter-gatherer technology instead. I call my view “animal-rights primitivism” to distinguish it from human-centered arguments for primitivism. In particular, I employ a vital-needs framework to make my argument. I argue that hunter-gatherer technology is the least harmful kind of technology, it is sufficient to meet human vital needs, and it is possible for humans (...)
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  • Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research.Andreas T. Schmidt & Jacob Barrett - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field by exploring the case for, and the implications of, ‘institutional longtermism’: the view that, when evaluating institutions, we should give significant weight to their very long-term effects. We begin by arguing that the standard case for longtermism may be more robust when applied to institutions than to individual actions or policies, both because institutions have large, broad, and long-term effects, and because institutional longtermism can plausibly sidestep various objections to individual (...)
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  • Is It a Wonderful Life? Frank Capra and Objective List Theories of Worth.Joshua Shaw - 2023 - Film-Philosophy 27 (2):240-261.
    Aaron Smuts argues that the holiday film It's a Wonderful Life should be understood as both an illustration and a cinematic vindication of objective list theories of worth. This article argues that he is right about the first point but wrong about the second. It's a Wonderful Life is an excellent illustration of objective list theories. However, it also exposes a problem for them – their susceptibility to sceptical anxieties about whether we can know if our lives are worth living. (...)
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  • Papers in Population Ethics.Elliott Thornley - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    This thesis consists of a series of papers in population ethics: a subfield of normative ethics concerned with the distinctive issues that arise in cases where our actions can affect the identities or number of people of who ever exist. Each paper can be read independently of the others. In Chapter 1, I present a dilemma for Archimedean views in population axiology: roughly, those views on which adding enough good lives to a population can make that population better than any (...)
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  • Sims and Vulnerability: On the Ethics of Creating Emulated Minds.Bartek Chomanski - forthcoming - Science and Engineering Ethics.
    It might become possible to build artificial minds with the capacity for experience. This raises a plethora of ethical issues, explored, among others, in the context of whole brain emulations (WBE). In this paper, I will take up the problem of vulnerability – given, for various reasons, less attention in the literature – that the conscious emulations will likely exhibit. Specifically, I will examine the role that vulnerability plays in generating ethical issues that may arise when dealing with WBEs. I (...)
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  • Pessimism, Political Critique, and the Contingently Bad Life.Patrick O'Donnell - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 12 (1):77-100.
    It is widely believed that philosophical pessimism is committed to fatalism about the sufferings that characterize the human condition, and that it encourages resignation and withdrawal from the political realm in response. This paper offers an explanation for and argument against this perception by distinguishing two functions that pessimism can serve. Pessimism’s skeptical mode suggests that fundamental cross-cultural constraints on the human condition bar us from the good life (however defined). These constraints are often represented as immune to political amelioration, (...)
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  • Benatar’s Anti-Natalism: Philosophically Flawed, Morally Dubious.Christian Piller - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):897-917.
    In the first part of the paper, I discuss Benatar’s asymmetry argument for the claim that it would have been better for each of us to have never lived at all. In contrast to other commentators, I will argue that there is a way of interpreting the premises of his argument which makes all of them come out true. (This will require one departure from Benatar’s own presentation.) Once we see why the premises are true, we will, however, also realise (...)
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  • An exploration of the evil-god challenge.Asha Lancaster-Thomas - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    The Evil-god challenge attempts to undermine classical monotheism by contending that because belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-malevolent God (the Evil-god hypothesis) is similarly reasonable to belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God (the Good-god hypothesis), the onus is on the classical monotheist to justify their belief in the latter hypothesis over the former hypothesis. This thesis explores the Evil-god challenge by detailing the history and recent developments of the challenge; distinguishing between different types of Evil-god challenge; responding to several (...)
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  • What Is Antinatalism? And Other Essays: Philosophy of Life in Contemporary Society.Masahiro Morioka - 2021 - Tokyo Philosophy Project.
    This book is a collection of essays on the philosophy of life’s meaning in contemporary society. Topics range from antinatalism, meaning of life, the trolley problem, to painless civilization. I am now writing a comprehensive philosophy book on those topics, but it will take several years to complete; hence, I decided to make a handy book to provide readers with an outline of the philosophical approaches to the meaning of life that I have in mind. -/- Chapter One discusses the (...)
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  • Una tipología de las éticas asimétricas.Mat Rozas - 2022 - Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 27 (1):29-40.
    En teoría del valor y en teoría normativa, es común considerar que lo positivo y lo negativo tienen la misma importancia. Algunas rechazan esta idea y consideran que lo negativo tiene mayor importancia. Aquí se presentarán algunos de los argumentos en favor de la asimetría. Tras esto, daré cuenta de los diferentes tipos de posiciones asimétricas defendibles. Explicaré cuáles son las características de cada teoría y qué puntos a favor y en contra de estas posiciones se pueden postular. Por último, (...)
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  • Gene editing, identity and benefit.Thomas Douglas & Katrien Devolder - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):305-325.
    Some suggest that gene editing human embryos to prevent genetic disorders will be in one respect morally preferable to using genetic selection for the same purpose: gene editing will benefit particular future persons, while genetic selection would merely replace them. We first construct the most plausible defence of this suggestion—the benefit argument—and defend it against a possible objection. We then advance another objection: the benefit argument succeeds only when restricted to cases in which the gene-edited child would have been brought (...)
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  • A Sonogram of the Dark Side of the Dao: The Possibility of Antinatalism in Daoism.Robbert Zandbergen - 2021 - Comparative Philosophy 13 (1).
    In the present work I study Daoist philosophy in conjunction with the radical new philosophy of antinatalism, spearheaded by South African philosopher David Benatar. Although I am not claiming equivalence between the two, a meaningful communication emerges between the classical Chinese sources used here and the modern doctrine of antinatalism. I argue that both visions partake in a radical critique of consciousness according to which this faculty of the human mind is far from what it is often held to be. (...)
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  • Annihilation Isn't Bad For You.Travis Timmerman - manuscript
    In The Human Predicament, David Benatar develops and defends the annihilation view, according to which “death is bad in large part because it annihilates the being who dies.” In this paper, I make both a positive and negative argument against the annihilation view. My positive argument consists in showing that the annihilation view generates implausible consequences in cases where one can incur some other (intrinsic) bad to avoid the supposed (intrinsic) bad of annihilation. More precisely, Benatar’s view entails that would (...)
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  • What Is Antinatalism?: Definition, History, and Categories.Masahiro Morioka - 2021 - The Review of Life Studies 12:1-39.
    The concept of antinatalism is now becoming popular on the Internet. Many online newspaper articles deal with this topic, and numerous academic papers on antinatalism have been published over the past ten years in the fields of philosophy and ethics. The word “antinatalism” was first used in the current meaning in 2006, when the two books that justify the universal negation of procreation were published: one by David Benatar and the other by Théophile de Giraud. However, we can find various (...)
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  • What Is Birth Affirmation?: The Meaning of Saying “Yes” to Having Been Born.Masahiro Morioka - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 11 (1):43-59.
    In this paper, the concept of birth affirmation is clarified in both the psychological dimension and the philosophical dimension. In the psychological dimension, we propose two interpretations: 1) Possible world interpretation: Even if I could imagine a possible world in which my ideal was realized or my grave sufferings were resolved, I would never think, at the bottom of my heart, that it would have been better to have been born to that possible world. 2) Anti-antinatalistic interpretation: I would never (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Benatar’s Asymmetry Argument.Fumitake Yoshizawa - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):529-544.
    In this paper, I show that David Benatar’s asymmetry argument for anti-natalism leads to a dilemma. In Chapter 2 of his book Better Never to Have Been, Benatar claims that there is an axiological asymmetry between harms and benefits that explains four prevalent asymmetries. Based on the axiological asymmetry, he defends the anti-natalist conclusion that we should not have children. The four prevalent asymmetries to be explained are moral duties, reasons, attitudes, or feelings concerning life as a whole. However, Benatar (...)
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  • Kantian Approaches to Human Reproduction: Both Favorable and Unfavorable.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2021 - Kantian Journal 40 (1):51-96.
    Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the question of whether humans should reproduce. Some say human life is too punishing and cruel to impose upon an innocent. Others hold that such harms do not undermine the great and possibly unique value of human life. Tracing these outlooks historically in the debate has barely begun. What might philosophers have said, or what did they say, about human life itself and its value to merit reproduction? This article looks to (...)
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  • Applying Moral Caution in the Face of Disagreement.Jonathan D. Matheson - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-18.
    In this paper I explore an epistemic asymmetry that sometimes occurs regarding the moral status of alternative actions. I argue that this asymmetry is significant and has ramifications for what it is morally permissible to do. I then show how this asymmetry often obtains regarding three moral issues: vegetarianism, abortion, and charitable giving. In doing so, I rely on the epistemic significance of disagreement and the existence of moral controversy about these issues.
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  • Aristotle and Eudoxus on the Argument from Contraries.Wei Cheng - 2020 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 102 (4):588-618.
    The debate over the value of pleasure among Eudoxus, Speusippus, and Aristotle is dramatically documented by the Nicomachean Ethics, particularly in the dialectical pros-and-cons concerning the so-called argument from contraries. Two similar versions of this argument are preserved at EN VII. 13, 1153b1–4, and X. 2, 1172b18–20. Many scholars believe that the argument at EN VII is either a report or an appropriation of the Eudoxean argument in EN X. This essay aims to revise this received view. It will explain (...)
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  • If robots are people, can they be made for profit? Commercial implications of robot personhood.Bartek Chomanski - forthcoming - AI and Ethics.
    It could become technologically possible to build artificial agents instantiating whatever properties are sufficient for personhood. It is also possible, if not likely, that such beings could be built for commercial purposes. This paper asks whether such commercialization can be handled in a way that is not morally reprehensible, and answers in the affirmative. There exists a morally acceptable institutional framework that could allow for building artificial persons for commercial gain. The paper first considers the minimal ethical requirements that any (...)
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  • Antitheodicy and the Grading of Theodicies by Moral Offensiveness.James Franklin - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):563-576.
    Antitheodicy objects to all attempts to solve the problem of evil. Its objections are almost all on moral grounds—it argues that the whole project of theodicy is morally offensive. Trying to excuse God’s permission of evil is said to deny the reality of evil, to exhibit gross insensitivity to suffering, and to insult the victims of grave evils. Since antitheodicists urge the avoidance of theodicies for moral reasons, it is desirable to evaluate the moral reasons against theodicies in abstraction from (...)
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  • Benatar on the Badness of All Human Lives.Iddo Landau - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (1):333-345.
    This paper presents a critique of David Benatar’s arguments on the badness of all human lives. I argue that even if Benatar is right that there is an asymmetry between the good and the bad in life so that each “unit” of bad is indeed more effective than each “unit” of good, lives in which there is a lot of good and only little bad are still overall good. Even if there are more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires in life, a (...)
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  • Asymmetries in the Value of Existence.Jacob M. Nebel - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):126-145.
    According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...)
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  • What Is the Question to which Anti-Natalism Is the Answer?Nicholas Smyth - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):1-17.
    The ethics of biological procreation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet, as I show in this paper, much of what has come to be called procreative ethics is conducted in a strangely abstract, impersonal mode, one which stands little chance of speaking to the practical perspectives of any prospective parent. In short, the field appears to be flirting with a strange sort of practical irrelevance, wherein its verdicts are answers to questions that no-one is asking. (...)
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  • Unconscious Rationalization, or: How (Not) to Think about Awfulness and Death.Jake Quilty-Dunn - manuscript
    Many contemporary epistemologists take rational inference to be a conscious action performed by the thinker (Boghossian 2014; 2018; Valaris 2014; Malmgren 2018). It is tempting to think that rational evaluability requires responsibility, which in turn requires conscious action. In that case, unconscious cognition involves merely associative or otherwise arational processing. This paper argues instead for deep rationalism: unconscious inference often exhibits the same rational status and richly structured logical character as conscious inference. The central case study is rationalization, in which (...)
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  • Non-Repeatable Hedonism Is False.Travis Timmerman & Felipe Pereira - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6:697-705.
    In a series of recent papers, Ben Bramble defends a version of hedonism which holds that purely repetitious pleasures add no value to one’s life (i.e. Non-Repeatable Hedonism). In this paper, we pose a dilemma for Non-Repeatable Hedonism. We argue that it is either committed both to a deeply implausible asymmetry between how pleasures and pains affect a person’s well-being and to deeply implausible claims about how to maximize well-being, or is committed to the claim that a life of eternal (...)
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  • Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to My Critics.David Benatar - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2):121-151.
    In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, I argued that coming into existence is always a harm and that procreation is wrong. In this paper, I respond to those of my critics to whom I have not previously responded. More specifically, I engage the objections of Tim Bayne, Ben Bradley, Campbell Brown, David DeGrazia, Elizabeth Harman, Chris Kaposy, Joseph Packer and Saul Smilansky.
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  • Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives.Jeff McMahan - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1):5-35.
    Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...)
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  • The Hypothetical Consent Objection to Anti-Natalism.Asheel Singh - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1135-1150.
    A very common but untested assumption is that potential children would consent to be exposed to the harms of existence in order to experience its benefits. And so, would-be parents might appeal to the following view: Procreation is all-things-considered permissible, as it is morally acceptable for one to knowingly harm an unconsenting patient if one has good reasons for assuming her hypothetical consent—and procreators can indeed reasonably rely on some notion of hypothetical consent. I argue that this view is in (...)
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  • Sex and Sexuality.Raja Halwani - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is a detailed encyclopedia entry on sex and sexuality, explaining the main issues and debates in philosophy about them.
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  • The Rights of Future Persons under Attack: Correlativity in the Non-Identity Problem.Andre Santos Campos - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):625-648.
    This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive (...)
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  • Is Death Bad for a Cow?Ben Bradley - 2015 - In Tatjana Višak & Robert Garner (eds.), The Ethics of Killing Animals. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 51-64.
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  • Not “Not ‘Better Never to Have Been’”: A Reply to Christine Overall.David Benatar - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (2):353-367.
    In her Why Have Children?, Christine Overall takes issue with my anti-natalist arguments that it is better never to come into existence. She provides three criticisms of my arguments and then, in a fourth criticism, suggests that my conclusions are bad for women. I respond to her criticisms, arguing that they fail.
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  • Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering.Kaj Sotala & Lukas Gloor - 2017 - Informatica: An International Journal of Computing and Informatics 41 (4):389-400.
    Discussions about the possible consequences of creating superintelligence have included the possibility of existential risk, often understood mainly as the risk of human extinction. We argue that suffering risks (s-risks) , where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on an astronomical scale, are risks of a comparable severity and probability as risks of extinction. Preventing them is the common interest of many different value systems. Furthermore, we argue that in the same way as superintelligent AI both contributes to (...)
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  • A Good Exit: What to Do about the End of Our Species?Toby Handfield - 2018 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (3):272-297.
    We know that Homo sapiens will not exist forever. Given this, how should our species end? What are the reasons, if any, to delay our extinction? In this paper, I show that the pre-eminent reasons which favour prolonging the existence of the species are partial: they will arise from the particular attachments and projects of the final few generations. While there may also be impartial reasons to prolong the species, these reasons are liable, with time, to reverse their valence: we (...)
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  • Social choice ethics in artificial intelligence.Seth D. Baum - 2020 - AI and Society 35 (1):165-176.
    A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three (...)
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  • Saving or Creating: Which Are We Doing When We Resuscitate Extremely Preterm Infants?Travis N. Rieder - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics 17 (8):4-12.
    Neonatal intensive care units represent simultaneously one of the great success stories of modern medicine, and one of its most controversial developments. One particularly controversial issue is the resuscitation of extremely preterm infants. Physicians in the United States generally accept that they are required to resuscitate infants born as early as 25 weeks and that it is permissible to resuscitate as early as 22 weeks. In this article, I question the moral pressure to resuscitate by criticizing the idea that resuscitation (...)
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  • The Saving/Creating Distinction and the Axiology of the Cost–Benefit Approach to Neonatal Medicine.Tomasz Żuradzki - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics 17 (8):29-31.
    The aim of this commentary is to discuss the axiology of the cost–benefit approach assumed by Travis Rieder (2017) to analyze medical decision making in the case of extremely preterm infants.
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  • Why We Should Create Artificial Offspring: Meaning and the Collective Afterlife.John Danaher - 2018 - Science and Engineering Ethics 24 (4):1097-1118.
    This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...)
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  • Procreative-parenting, love's reasons and the demands of morality.Luara Ferracioli - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (270):77-97.
    Many philosophers believe that the relationship between a parent and a child is objectively valuable, but few believe that there is any objective value in first creating a child in order to parent her. But if it is indeed true that all of the objective value of procreative-parenting comes from parenting, then it is hard to see how procreative-parenting can overcome two particularly pressing philosophical challenges. A first challenge is to show that it is morally permissible for prospective parents to (...)
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  • better no longer to be.R. Mcgregor & E. Sullivan-Bissett - 2012 - South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):55-68.
    David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm, and that – for all of us unfortunate enough to have come into existence – it would be better had we never come to be. We contend that if one accepts Benatar’s arguments for the asymmetry between the presence and absence of pleasure and pain, and the poor quality of life, one must also accept that suicide is preferable to continued existence, and that his view therefore implies both anti-natalism (...)
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  • In Defense of Artificial Replacement.Derek Shiller - 2017 - Bioethics 31 (5):393-399.
    If it is within our power to provide a significantly better world for future generations at a comparatively small cost to ourselves, we have a strong moral reason to do so. One way of providing a significantly better world may involve replacing our species with something better. It is plausible that in the not‐too‐distant future, we will be able to create artificially intelligent creatures with whatever physical and psychological traits we choose. Granted this assumption, it is argued that we should (...)
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  • What’s wrong with human extinction?Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):327-343.
    This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: it would prevent millions of people from being born; it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider (...)
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  • A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry.Jake Earl - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):178-199.
    The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not (...)
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  • Gifts without Givers: Secular Spirituality and Metaphorical Cognition.Drew Chastain - 2017 - Sophia 56 (4):631-647.
    The option of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ deserves much more philosophical attention. That is the aim here, taking the work of Robert Solomon as a starting point, with focus on the particular issues around viewing life as gift. This requires analysis of ‘existential gratitude’ to show that there can be gratitude for things without gratitude to someone for providing things, and also closer attention to the role that metaphor plays in cognition. I consider two main concerns with gift and (...)
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