The following text is sort of an appendix for the claim that pleasure is not a symmetrical opposite to pain, a claim that is made in the text regarding David Benatar’s Asymmetry argument, but is highly crucial in ethics in general. Notwithstanding, this text does not aim at proving that it is more important to avoid causing pain than to cause pleasure. Assuming that anyone reading this text, not only already shares this intuition but is absolutely sure of its ethical verity, I’ll focus here on to what extent and why pain, or more accurately, negative experiences, are more important than positive ones for the experiencing individual.
In a sense, despite that it is not its aim, this text can anyway be seen as an answer to why the intuition that it is more important to avoid causing pain than to bestow pleasure is so common and viewed as obvious by many.
Most of this text is based on an article called Bad Is Stronger Than Good which basically gathers and sums many findings from a broad range of psychological phenomena, and concludes that bad is stronger than good, on principle. A suggested explanatory theory is also provided at the end of the article, and respectively at the end of this text. Despite the abundant quotes from the original article, it is highly recommended to read the full version itself. The reason I yet made this one is mainly since some of the claims made in the post regarding David Benatar’s Asymmetry argument, are not complete without some sound foundation. Since I didn’t want to overburden that already laden text, I’ve decided to make this appendix. Which by the way, can be read as an independent text just as much, since the extensive examples and evidences of how bad experiences are more important than good ones, serve as a proof that good experiences are at least not as good as bad experiences are bad, if not that bad experiences almost always outweigh the good ones, which is of course in itself a very good argument against procreation.
Bad Experiences are Stronger Than Good Ones
One very convincing way to base the claim that pain is more important than pleasure on the ethical level, is to prove that pain is more important than pleasure on the experience level.
If, generally speaking, positive experiences have weaker impact on someone’s wellbeing and behavior than negative experiences of the same intensity have, then positive and negative experiences are not equal. In the asymmetry argument context it means that pleasure is not as good as pain is bad, and so the two shouldn’t be valued in the column of existence as if they have an equal but opposite impact on an organism’s behavior.
The question now is how much stronger and how frequent bad experiences are compared with good ones. According to the article’s authors, it is not that positive experiences have a weaker impact on someone’s wellbeing and behavior compared with negative ones, but that they have a much weaker impact, and it is the case not only generally speaking, but regarding every aspect with sufficient, available and relevant data.
“The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”
“bad is stronger than good (see also Rozin & Royzman, in press). That is, events that are negatively valenced (e.g., losing money, being abandoned by friends, and receiving criticism) will have a greater impact on the individual than positively valenced events of the same type (e.g., winning money, gaining friends, and receiving praise).”
“Bad events produce more emotion, have bigger effects on adjustment measures, and have longer lasting effects.”
“it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. As an example, consider the implications of foregoing options or ignoring certain possible outcomes. A person who ignores the possibility of a positive outcome may later experience significant regret at having missed an opportunity for pleasure or advancement, but nothing directly terrible is likely to result. In contrast, a person who ignores danger (the possibility of a bad outcome) even once may end up maimed or dead. Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard to good ones. Hence, it would be adaptive to be psychologically designed to respond to bad more strongly than good.”
“Adaptation-level effects tend to prevent any lasting changes in overall happiness and instead return people to their baseline. After a short peak in happiness, people become accustomed to the new situation and are no more happy than they were before the improvement. After a serious misfortune, however, people adjust less quickly, even though many victims ultimately do recover.” (P. 325)
Trauma
“Perhaps the broadest manifestation of the greater power of bad events than good to elicit lasting reactions is contained in the psychology of trauma. The very concept of trauma has proven broadly useful, and psychologists have found it helpful in many different domains. Many kinds of traumas produce severe and lasting effects on behavior, but there is no corresponding concept of a positive event that can have similarly strong and lasting effects. In a sense, trauma has no true opposite concept. A single traumatic experience can have long-term effects on the person’s health, well-being, attitudes, self-esteem, anxiety, and behavior; many such effects have been documented. In contrast, there is little evidence that single positive experiences can have equally influential consequences.” (P. 325)
Everyday
“A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods.”
“having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person’s well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day.”
“the bad has stronger power than good because only the bad reliably produced consecutive bad days.” (P. 327)
Sexuality
“Developmental and clinical observations likewise suggest that single bad events are far stronger than even the strongest good ones. Various studies reveal long-term harmful consequences of child abuse or sexual abuse, including depression, relationship problems, revictimization, and sexual dysfunction, even if the abuse occurred only once or twice (Cahill, Llewelyn, & Pearson, 1991; Fleming, Mullen, Sibthorpe, & Bammer, 1999; Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1983; Styron & Janoff-Bulman, 1997; Weiss, Longhurst, & Mazure, 1999). These effects seem more durable than any comparable positive aspect of childhood, and it also seems doubtful (although difficult to prove) that a single positive event could offset the harm caused by a single episode of violent or sexual abuse; whereas the single negative event can probably undo the benefits of many positive interactions.” (P. 325)
Close Relationships
“One of the central tasks and goals of human life is to sustain a network of close relationships characterized by mutual caring and pleasant, supportive interactions (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Unfortunately, many relationships fail to last, and others are sometimes less than satisfactory…relationships are most affected by patterns in which one person responds negatively to the other’s negative act or feeling. On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail.”
“The implication is that the long-term success of a relationship depends more on not doing bad things than on doing good things.”
“Even stronger results emerged from a 2-year longitudinal study by Huston and Vangelisti (1991). They measured three types of socioemotionally expressive behavior among newlywed couples: affectionate communication, sexual interest, and negativity. Sexual affection had no relation to marital satisfaction, and giving or receiving affection had only weak and inconsistent relationships to satisfaction. In contrast, negativity had strong and consistent links to global marital satisfaction. Thus, people’s satisfaction with their marriage depended much more heavily on the bad parts (negativity) than on the good parts (affection and sex).” (P. 325)
Other Relationships and Interactions
Regarding other relationships (non-intimate ones) it was found that “The effects of positive, good interactions were not consistently different from the effects of neutral interactions, whereas bad ones were clearly different from the neutral.” (P. 331)
Emotion
“There are many more techniques people use for escaping bad moods than for inducing good ones. Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice (1994) noted that there are six possible categories of affect regulation, consisting of efforts to induce, prolong, or terminate either a pleasant or an unpleasant state. Of these, however, efforts to terminate the unpleasant states are by far the most frequently reported. The fact that people exert disproportionate amounts of energy trying to escape from bad moods (and in particular more than they exert to induce good moods) is consistent with the hypothesis of greater power of negative emotions.” (P. 3321)
“there is an assortment of evidence that negative affect is stronger and more important than positive affect. People have more words for bad emotions than good ones and use them more frequently. Bad emotions generally produce more cognitive processing and have other effects on behavior that are stronger than positive emotions. People try harder to avoid and escape bad moods than to induce or prolong good moods, and they remember bad moods and emotions better.” (P. 331)
Learning
“The punishment of incorrect responses (by the presentation of an aversive stimulus on mistakes) was consistently found to be more effective than the reward of correct responses: Punishment led to faster learning than reward, across a variety of punishments and rewards.”
“Textbooks in learning and education sometimes assert that reward is better than punishment for learning, but they do not provide a clear basis for this assertion. The assertion itself would provide an important contradiction to the general pattern of bad being stronger than good. Yet they may assert the superiority of reward over punishment because of various side effects of punishment, such as aggravation, anger, and even disorientation, any of which could interfere with optimal learning. Such interference could even occur because bad events are stronger than good ones and because bad events produce side effects, whereas good ones do not.
In any case, the studies we have reviewed show that punishment is stronger than reward. We were not able to find studies showing the opposite.” (P. 334)
“Even more dramatic evidence comes from studies linking brain responses to learning and extinction of fear responses. Apparently fear inducing events leave indelible memory traces in the brain (LeDoux, Romanski, & Xagoraris, 1989; Quirk, Repa, & LeDoux, 1995). Even after the behavioral response to a fear-inducing conditioned stimulus has been extinguished, the brain retains a changed pattern of neuronal firing in response to that stimulus and of neuronal connections between cells (Quirk et al., 1995; Sanghera, Rolls, & Roper-Hall, 1979).” (P. 336)
“The organism retains the readiness to respond with fear again, so subsequent relearning of the fear response would be facilitated. Clearly, this would be an adaptive pattern insofar as once a threat is recognized, the person or animal will remember the threat more or less forever.” (P. 337)
Child Development
“having exceptionally good parents or a positive environment would not produce any better development than having average parents and an average environment; whereas having bad parents or a bad environment can inflict lasting harm. Thus, only the bad, and not the good, can produce effects that go beyond the average or normal.” (P. 337)
In an article called Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development, the authors argue that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. They give plenty of examples of research findings to support their claim.
“An important way that infants learn about their environment is by using the emotional information that they receive from their caregivers. This is especially true toward the end of the first year, when infants begin independent locomotion and become relatively self-sufficient in exploring their surroundings…
In the second half of the first year, infants seem to visually attend more and allocate more attentional resources to fearful than positive expressions…
Ludemann and Nelson (1988) found that 7-month-olds looked longer at fearful than at happy faces, a finding that has since been replicated and extended.” (P. 391)
“In one classic study, Hornik et al. (1987) had mothers use facial, vocal, and gesture cues to display positive affect, disgust, or no affect about an ambiguous toy to their 12-month-old infants. In support of the social referencing hypothesis, Hornik et al. found that maternal displays of emotion appropriately influenced infants’ responses to the toy. Interestingly, however, infants in the disgust condition played less with the ambiguous toy than did infants in the positive or neutral conditions, whereas infant behavior did not differ across neutral and positive conditions.” (P. 385)
“In another social referencing study, Mumme and Fernald (2003) showed 12-month-old infants an experimenter on a television screen displaying happy, neutral, or fear facial and vocal cues toward one ambiguous toy (the target) while ignoring another ambiguous toy (the distracter). These same toys were then presented to infants, and infants’ interactions with the toys were assessed. Again, similar to Hornik et al. (1987) and Mumme et al. (1996), there was no significant difference in the amount that 12-month-olds touched the target in the positive compared with the neutral conditions, whereas infants in the fear condition touched the target less than in the neutral condition.” (P. 388)
“Research with older children has also revealed evidence for a negativity bias in a social referencing context. For instance, Walden (1993) conducted a study in which an experimenter told children what to expect when they opened a box. Children were either made to expect something positive, scary, or neutral, or were not given any information about the box (control). They were then taken to the room with the box and allowed to interact with it for a few minutes. Walden found that for children as young as 2 years, being told that the stimulus was frightening virtually eliminated all proximal behavior toward the stimulus, whereas the other three conditions (positive, neutral, and control) were equivalent in all aspects of these young children’s behavior.” (P. 389)
“the lack of difference in most studies between positive and neutral conditions is suggestive of a positivity offset (Cacioppo et al., 1997, 1999; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999) because it indicates that in the absence of any negative information about a novel stimulus (whether because the information is positive, neutral, or entirely absent), most infants initially display a tendency to explore the stimulus. Thus, positive information does not increase infants’ exploration of novel stimuli; negative information decreases it.” (P. 395)
“Some research on children’s memories of positive and negative events also indicates a negativity bias. In a longitudinal study, P. J. Miller and Sperry (1988) found that 1.5- to 2.5-year-old girls’ talk with their mothers about distant past events was primarily about negative events, especially those involving physical harm. A longitudinal case study that examined a child’s ability to talk with her mother about the past between 20 and 28 months (Hudson, 1991) revealed that both mother and daughter discussed past negative emotions far more than positive emotions: negative emotions comprised 68% of emotions mentioned by the mother and 76% of those mentioned by the daughter.” (P. 390)
“These results correspond with work on children’s understanding about the causal precursors of negative versus positive emotions. For example, Lagattuta and Wellman (2001) found that 3- to 7-year-old children consistently used a person’s past experiences to explain that person’s current negative emotions (sadness or anger) more than they did to explain the person’s current positive emotions. These children also made more frequent references to the person’s thinking about the past when the person was currently experiencing a negative versus a positive emotion.”
“One suggestion (Nelson, Morse, & Leavitt, 1979) is that certain negative expressions (such as anger or fear) may cause a defensive response in infants, resulting in greater arousal and therefore slower habituation. This response might be due to a species-specific predisposition to code negative expressions as signaling aversive situations. That is, it may be inherently more important for an infant to attend to fear or anger than to happy expressions, as fear and anger signal danger. Such an evolution-based theory seems to imply that the negativity bias is innate, i.e., built right into our neural circuitry and consequently into our psychology (e.g., Rozin & Royzman, 2001).” (P. 391)
Social Support
“Various findings have indicated that negative or upsetting social support weighs more heavily than positive or helpful social support… helpful aspects of one’s social network bear little or no relation to depression, well-being, and social support satisfaction, while upsetting or unhelpful aspects do.” (P. 340)
Stereotypes
“bad reputations are easy to acquire but difficult to lose, whereas good reputations are difficult to acquire but easy to lose. These findings suggest that unfavorable characteristics once acquired as part of a stereotype may be difficult to lose in part because a large number of observations are necessary for their disconfirmation. The findings certainly confirm that bad is stronger than good: It takes far more to overcome the bad than the good trait, and more to change the bad than the good reputation.” (P. 344)
Information Processing
“Participants spent longer viewing the photographs depicting negative than positive behaviors, suggesting that people paid more attention to bad than good acts when forming impressions.”
“Participants were twice as likely to remember the bad ones than the good ones. This suggests that the automatic shifting of attention to the bad traits stimulated some incidental learning, resulting in the superior recall.” (P. 341)
“To be categorized as good, one has to be good all of the time (consistently). To be categorized as bad, a few bad acts are sufficient, and presumably hardly anyone is consistently bad. Hence, negative behaviors carry more weight than positive behaviors for ruling out some categories. The diagnosticity view was tested in a later paper by Skowronski and Carlston (1992). They noted that to be morally good means to be always good, whereas immorality does not require consistent immorality, so single immoral behaviors are more diagnostic. For example, one may be regarded as a liar despite telling the truth on many occasions, but one will not be regarded as an honest man if he tells many lies.” (P. 346)
Memory
“Cognitive psychologists have examined whether bad items are processed and remembered better than positive ones. Robinson- Riegler and Winton (1996) confirmed that participants showed better recognition memory for negative than positive items. Furthermore, they were better able to recall the source of bad than good information, as shown by their ability to identify which stimuli had come to them in a second as opposed to a first phase; whereas the positive stimuli seemed simply to get all mixed together. These findings suggest that the bad material received more thorough processing when it was encoded and was, therefore, retained in a more complex, elaborate memory trace.” (P. 344)
Health
“Given that stressful events happen to everyone at some point, researchers have sought to assess whether relaxation techniques would yield benefits to physiology comparable to the harm caused by stress. Thus far, the answer appears to be no. There has only been one study to assess immune functioning after a stress reduction intervention in the presence of a stressful event (Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser, Strain, Stout, & Tarr, 1986). These researchers found that training medical students in relaxation techniques did not affect the immune changes that occurred as the result of stressful first-year exams. Cohen and Herbert (1996) concluded that there is little evidence for the benefits of stress reduction techniques on immunological health. In other words, bad events impair the body’s protective system, but good events do not boost it.”
“In summary, various studies and reviews of the immunology literature indicate that bad is stronger than good. In particular, researchers have found that stress and the absence of social support are reliably associated with immunosuppression, whereas their opposites—relaxation and increases in social support—do not seem to have beneficial effects.”
“Optimism and pessimism were examined by Schulz, Bookwala, Knapp, Scheier, and Williamson (1996) in an effort to predict the mortality of cancer patients. Across 8 months, 70 of the 238 patients in a radiation therapy sample died. Using Scheier and Carver’s (1985) Life Orientation Test, Schulz et al. assessed both optimism and pessimism traits. Optimism failed to predict survival, either alone or in interaction with age. Pessimism, however, did yield a significant prediction of mortality, although only for the youngest (30-59) age range. (Thus, the only significant predictor was pessimism interacting with age.) Although the results are correlational, the longitudinal prediction does enhance the plausibility that the trait caused the survival outcome rather than vice versa. The implication is that the negative thoughts and feelings associated with pessimism had a stronger effect on mortality outcomes than the positive thoughts and feelings that characterize optimism.” (P. 353)
Culture
“Love has likewise received idealization in cultural mythology that has made of it a more extreme good than is empirically justified. Songs, films, novels, and wedding vows continue to promise that love is forever, even though the statistics on divorce, marriage therapy, and infidelity indicate that it is not. In fact, Baumeister (1991) concluded that cultural ideals of fulfillment have a general pattern of promising more permanence than is typically found, whether these fulfillments involve love, happiness, spiritual enlightenment, fame and celebrity, wealth, creativity, or others. Thus, culture certainly presents individuals with mythical images of extreme possibilities in both directions. Probably the reason for this is that these cultural myths are important means by which a society can motivate its individuals to behave in socially desirable ways, and mitigating the extremity of the myth would simply weaken the motivations. In particular, culture may find it optimal to encourage people to delay gratification over periods that are far longer than what prevailed in our evolutionary history.”
In Conclusion
“The principle that bad is stronger than good appears to be consistently supported across a broad range of psychological phenomena. The quantity and strength of the evidence were not consistent and in fact varied widely from one topic to another. The breadth and convergence of evidence, however, across different areas were striking, which forms the most important evidence. In no area were we able to find a consistent reversal, such that one could draw a firm conclusion that good is stronger than bad.”
“In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony…
Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly, harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people’s desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. The preponderance of words for bad emotions, contrasted with the greater frequency of good emotions, suggests that bad emotions have more power. Some patterns of learning suggest that bad things are more quickly and effectively learned than corresponding good things. The lack of a positive counterpart to the concept of trauma is itself a sign that single bad events often have effects that are much more lasting and important than any results of single good events. Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one’s social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. The self appears to be more strongly motivated to avoid the bad than to embrace the good. Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook).” (P. 361)
Explanatory Theory – Why Bad Would be Stronger than Good across Such Diverse Areas and with Such Reliability
“We began this article by briefly suggesting that the relative strength of bad over good is an adaptive response of the human organism to its physical and social environment. In view of how pervasive the relative strength of bad is, it seems unlikely that this pattern is maladaptive. In particular, we found that bad was stronger than good with regard to health, social support, and learning—all of which are important spheres for adaptations. It seems especially unlikely that maladaptive patterns would have remained powerful there. We also noted that people for whom good is stronger than bad (e.g., people insensitive to pain or to guilt) seem prone to misfortunes and early deaths; this too is consistent with the view that it is adaptive for bad events to have greater power.”
In other words, considering how bad has much greater power than good, it is unlikely that this mechanism is an evolutionary anomaly that somehow was developed among each sentient species, and was naturally selected again and again and again, and every single time. It is much more likely that bad has much stronger effect on a being than good, since it strengthen the fitness of sentient creatures. (P. 358)
“We turn now to the question of why bad would be stronger than good across such diverse areas and with such reliability.”
“The broadest argument we can devise is based on a change in motivational states in the presence of negative events, stimuli, and information. When considering why bad outweighs good, an intriguing possibility is that bad things indicate a need for the self to change something about itself; that is, that bad things prompt self-regulation. Through self-regulation, an organism can adapt and change itself to fit its environment, a strategy that is adaptive, given that the organisms most likely to reproduce are those that can be flexible in the face of ever-changing circumstances.”
“A related argument is that progress may be best facilitated by having bad events have a lasting impact while good events have a temporary one. This too is based on the idea that bad events signal a need for change, whereas good ones do not. If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances. The ephemeral nature of good feelings may therefore stimulate progress (which is adaptive).
If bad feelings wore off, however, people might repeat their mistakes, so genuine progress would best be served by having the effects of bad events linger for a relatively long time. Organisms require not only a system to signal the need for change, but also one that communicates quickly and intensely, with little energy or effort required and without awareness, because the necessary change may require swift responding. Empirical findings have demonstrated that bad things satisfy these criteria. Research confirms that negative stimuli have greater influence on neural responses than positive stimuli (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998); that negative traits, relative to positive traits, have greater influence on the overall impression of another person (Peeters & Czapinski, 1990); and that negative trait adjectives command more attention, at a nonconscious level, than positive trait adjectives (Pratto & John, 1991).
In summary, it may be that humans and animals show heightened awareness of and responded more quickly to negative information because it signals a need for change. Hence, the adaptiveness of self-regulation partly lies in the organism’s ability to detect when response modifications are necessary and when they are unnecessary. Moreover, the lessons learned from bad events should ideally be retained permanently so that the same dangers or costs are not encountered repeatedly. Meanwhile, good events (such as those that provide a feeling of satisfaction and contentment) should ideally wear off so that the organism is motivated to continue searching for more and better outcomes. As a result, organisms that possess mechanisms for adept perception and processing of negative cues will achieve greater fitness with the environment and, consequently, will have a greater chance of surviving threats and more successful reproductive attempts.” (P.357)
Even if you disagree that pleasure is a form of pain, in the sense that it opens the door for pain in the form of more wants for more pleasures which end up with more frustration when not all of them are satisfied, most people intuition is that not causing pain is more important ethically than causing pleasure. In other words, even if pleasure is not pain increaser in disguise, there is an asymmetry between pain and pleasure. As common as this ethical intuition is, in most cases, it doesn’t seem to lead people to wonder about the origin of this obvious perception, and more importantly to consider what should be the subsequent logical ethical implications.
The ample evidences that bad experiences are more important than good ones, not only serve as a proof that good experiences are at least not as good as bad experiences are bad (if not proving that bad experiences almost always outweigh the good ones), but how horrible life actually and inherently is. Basically, pain and other negative experiences, increase the fitness of individuals by enhancing their respondence ability to threats to their survival and reproduction. It has a crucial adaptive function. Existing sentient beings are tortured by evolutionary mechanisms which their only point is that additional sentient beings would exist, regardless of any of those beings’ personal wellbeing. It is a pointless, frustrating and painful trap.
Procreation is forcing someone into this mechanism of suffering, suffering which each newborn is being compelled to experience and to inflict on other experiencing creatures who are forced into this mechanism as well.
As convincing and unequivocal as these findings are regarding the primacy and dominancy of bad experiences over positive ones, people are very unlikely to prevent this fate from their descendants, let alone sentient creatures from other species, which they don’t even care enough about to stop supporting their torture by stopping to consume them. This misery cycle will not end voluntarily. We have to find ways to break it somehow.
References
Bain, D and Brady, M Pain, Pleasure, and Unpleasure (2014)
Baumeister, R and Bratslavsky, E and Finkenauer, C and Vohs, K Bad Is Stronger Than Good Review of General Psychology 2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370
Ingraham, P Pain is Weird (2018)
Ingraham, P Why Does Pain Hurt? (2015)
Shriver, A The Asymmetrical Contributions of Pleasure and Pain To Animal Welfare The Cambridge Journal of Healthcare Ethics (2014)
Socrethics The Biological Evolution of Pain (2018)
Vaish, A and Grossmann, T and Woodward, A Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development Psychological Bulletin 2008, Vol. 134, No. 3, 383–403
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