Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his earlier contribution to the philosophy of life, Better Never To Have Been (OUP, 2006) Benatar presented two core arguments. According to his ‘asymmetry’ argument, whereas to begin living (or ‘to come into existence’) is always partly harmful and partly beneficial, not to begin living is never even partly harmful; and if this is so, then it is always better not to begin living than to begin living. According to his quality of life argument, the quality of every (human) life is poor. Once we discount quality of life judgments that are unduly influenced by our distorting optimistic biases, the argument went, we can see clearly that the amount, distribution, and axiological weight of every life's positive qualities (e.g., pleasure, desire-satisfaction, the goods on which ‘objective list theories’ focus) are swamped by the amount, distribution, and weight of its negative qualities (e.g., pain, desire-frustration, and objective list bads). The asymmetry argument plays no important role in Benatar's latest contribution. But the quality of life argument does: with minor modifications, it serves as one main element of the overall case that Benatar makes in The Human Predicament for his broadest pessimistic contention yet. Simply put, this contention is that, judged by any relevant measure, all lives are bad in the sense that they are regrettable or unfortunate—instances of a ‘tragic predicament’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".