Fallible wrote:Given that I usually agree with you I am leaning towards to concluding that the fault here is mine, yet at the same time I cannot seem to see the sense in what you are saying. Firstly, what exactly are you referring to with your 'most relevant sense of the word suffer"'? Most relevant according to whom? Taking it as a given that the dead neither suffer nor thrive does not allow that the living suffer more? How do you reckon? If someone scratches their face a little harder than they intended and that manifests as a little pain, they have immediately suffered more than a dead person can. A dead person.
Let me try and put a bit of context back to the comments and see if that clears up our disagreement:-
In post #786 (which I found to be a good post, with much to agree with in it), you wrote in response to Sendraks' and TMB's discussion on the previous page:-
Fallible wrote:I think this is an instance of someone being so desperate to not admit they are wrong that they begin to make clearly counter-factual 'arguments'. 'If we assume that dead people do not suffer as do the living'? One thing which would appear to be rather beyond dispute unless you believe in life after death is that the dead experience nothing at all, be that pleasure or pain. Quite clearly then, the living experience more suffering by virtue of the fact that the dead do not experience at all, and it is therefore worse for the one left alive when a loved one dies, simply because the loved one no longer 'is', and the one left behind is suffering.
With TMB's last post, which I take as the context for this remark being:-
TMB wrote:This is not how life expectancy is measured. Men die more often than women at every age. In the womb, as babies and adults of every age. In addition to this, women are also likely to live longer than men.
You suggesting that life somehow allows advantage to be gained, but I se life as an end in itself as long as it has quality. If you are not alive you have no opportunity whatever unless you believe in life after death. I do not see that there is a difference in the latter years of either gender in terms of the degrading quality of life, illness as they approach the end. Since this is the case, we can assume that women will generally get more years where the quality is OK.
You are also arguing that when your loved ones die, it is worse for the one left alive. THis sounds a bit like Hillary Clinton's view that women are the real victims when men get killed in war because they are left alive to suffer. If we assume that dead people do not suffer as do the living, if life was so bad for these'victims ' of war they would end their lives.
He also quoted some of Sendraks text from further back, which included:-
Sendraks wrote:The end result is that women still live longer than men, but those additional years of life hardly confer any sort of significant advantage to women. It's not as if we're seeing the female octogenarian workforce as a powerhouse of industry in the absence of competition men of a similar age.
Instead what we see is old women. Growing sicker, weaker and poorer. Many of them alone because their loved one died years ago. A curious "advantage" this longer lifespan.
Now, aside from the last half sentence (marked in red) I do not see much wrong in TMB's view. It doesn't strike me as particularly unreasonable to say that most people (even those suffering) see their lives postively or to say that life is an end in itself as long as quality of life is good.
What you said, that I contest (marked in blue) is a corollary to the dead experiencing nothing - that the living who do experience therefore have it "worse". Now, answering one question above, I am saying that it is not reasonable (in light of TMB's and Sendrak's exchange) to assume that the only relevant factor here is how much the death itself hurts the parties, instead the debate (which I find to be slightly in poor taste in the first place) about "who has it worse that men die sooner" clearly involves some kind of appraisal of whether the extra life the women get is "worth living", I think this is apparent in (for example) the text marked green above.
Fallible wrote:Not a dying person. If you have nothing of a thing, anyone who has even the tiniest amount of said thing has more of it than you do. If you have nothing of a thing and never have, anyone who has ever had at any point the tiniest amount of said thing will have had more than you do. Someone may have suffered long and hard in life right up until the point of death. That is still the suffering of the living.
Absolutely, so
if there is no way to say that the living experience either no suffering or negative suffering then it follows that the living always suffer more than the dead. I think there
is a very contextually relevant sense in which this can be true - for example if a bereaved person sees their life as a net positive there is a clear sense in which they are "better" rather than "worse" off than the lost loved one.
Fallible wrote:Many living people, even the bereaved, view their ongoing life positively.
Did I say otherwise? Some people even view suffering as a positive experience. That people can see their ongoing, bereaved life positively does not suggest that they are not also suffering.
Sure, for a given meaning of "suffering". If, as I suggested is possible TMB has in mind some view of "net suffering", when he talks about life being a positive in and of itself as long as quality is present then there's no reason "suffering" cannot be nil or even negative (i.e. positive overall quality of life), in which sense it is not readily apparent that the dead have it "worse".
I think by assuming a particular view on suffering your rebuttal fails - because for TMB to be wrong (
"so desperate to not admit they are wrong") in accordance with the criticism of yours quoted above in this post, he must have taken that view and I think it is clear from the context of his comment that he does not do what you did and restrict the scope of suffering to strictly negative feelings regarding the death of the loved one, but instead was comparing whether "men" or "women" have it worse overall based on the shorter life expectancy. Which is where my comments about bereaved persons with positive life outlook fitted in.