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    42
    There is more happiness than misery in the world — Carmelics
    Home/Problem of Evil
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    There is more happiness than misery in the world

    Problem of Evil
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • Denying that happiness exceeds misery would eliminate the basis for all religion
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Schopenhauer argues that unfulfilled desire constitutes the baseline of conscious existence, making suffering structurally prior to satisfaction.
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    • 2.Negative experiences (pain, grief, anxiety) are phenomenologically more intense and memorable than equivalent positive experiences, as Kahneman's loss aversion research confirms.
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    • 3.If suffering's subjective weight exceeds pleasure's even when frequencies are equal, aggregate misery can dominate even in a world with more happy moments than unhappy ones.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.The argument that denying happiness's dominance would undermine religion commits the genetic fallacy—a claim's theological utility is irrelevant to its empirical truth.
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    • 2.Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov establishes that even one innocent child's suffering is sufficient to indict cosmic moral optimism, regardless of aggregate hedonic calculations.
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    • 3.Moral arithmetic that averages suffering across persons violates the separateness of persons, making global happiness tallies ethically and metaphysically suspect as evidence.
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    Topics

    Problem of Evil

    Connections

    1 topic

    Natural Theology1 linked

    Related

    Denying that happiness exceeds misery would eliminate the basis for all religionDostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov establishes that even one innocent child's suffering...If suffering's subjective weight exceeds pleasure's even when frequencies are eq...Moral arithmetic that averages suffering across persons violates the separatenes...
    +3 moreShow less
    Negative experiences (pain, grief, anxiety) are phenomenologically more intense ...Schopenhauer argues that unfulfilled desire constitutes the baseline of consciou...The argument that denying happiness's dominance would undermine religion commits...

    Similar

    It will be difficult to prove that happiness exceeds misery in the wor...89%Proving happiness exceeds misery is insufficient to vindicate God's mo...81%Denying that happiness exceeds misery would eliminate the basis for al...77%Suffering generates wishes that a better world might exist75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: hume-religion
    View source passageHide passage
    Faced with this difficulty, Cleanthes insists that contrary to all that Philo and Demea have claimed, we must allow that there is more happiness than misery, more pleasure than pain, in this world. Failing this, “there is an end at once of all religion” (D, 10.28/199). Philo’s response is that this is a fatal concession. Not only will it be hard to prove that there is more happiness than misery in the world, much more than this is needed to vindicate God’s moral attributes. Unless all evil is es
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit