Yes Rope, I have even quoted to you sections of it that I found particularly problematical.
Yes “purely intellectual” would probably have been a more accurate description than “purely rational” for the bizarre thoughts and decision-making that Nagasawa is attributing to atheists. Rather than hyper-rationalism, this would seem more a form of hyper-existentialism – a taking of the maxim of “Think Global – Act Local” to such an extreme that the “global” issues become so overpowering that local action seems fruitless – an existential ‘Total Perspective Vortex’.
No Rope. People do not need “to stop themselves from thinking about many sorts of problems”, particularly those of the existential kind Nagasawa imagines. They simply rarely think about them in the first place. As I said with my own personal example, I would not typically contemplate such issues in my ‘admiration’ for nature on my daily walks – and do not think that I had ever done so until you raised the topic. I know that these issues exist, if I choose to think about them – but very rarely have occasion to do so. This is normal human psychology.
When I do think about such things, I come to the conclusion that my appreciation of the beauty in no way worsens or cheapens the suffering. I view the universe as frequently beautiful, but generally pitiless, and not-infrequently cruel.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci”, in the words of Keats – to be admired, but not entirely to be trusted.
It is neither a “response” or a “solution” to those problems – it is a statement that those problems simply don’t exist in reality. That they are imagined problems.
What Nagasawa terms “systemic evil” is too remote and disconnected from the everyday lives of most people for them to give it much thought, let alone allow it to affect how they live their lives. Yes, if contemplated, it might lead somebody to question the existence of an omnibenebolvent God, but that is the likely extent of it.
Nagasawa asks:
Why should we think that the world is overall good and that we should be happy and grateful to be alive in it if our existence depends fundamentally on a violent, cruel, and unfair biological system which guarantees pain and suffering for uncountably many sentient animals?
I would ask in return:
Why would we need to “think that the world is overall good” in order to be “happy and grateful to be alive in it”, when neither our existence, happiness nor our gratitude would make the system any more "fundamentally … violent, cruel, and unfair "? Would our ceasing to exist or being unhappy or ungrateful make anything any better?
I simply think that Nagasawa has failed to demonstrate that a problem even exists.
The expectation that atheists (or anybody else, other than perhaps philosophers) would spend a sufficient amount of time contemplating such remote existential issues, such as the suffering of all animals over the last hundreds of millions of years, that they need “to stop themselves from thinking about” them is an unwarranted assumption. Let alone that these imagined contemplations will have a significant impact on their life choices.
Addendum:
Taking the likely contributions of the influences on such life-choices, such as having a child, from least rarefied and most impactful, to most rarefied and least impactful:
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spur-of-the-moment choices (e.g. unprotected sex leading to an unplanned pregnancy), emotion, instinct, and cultural pressures
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rational constraints, and questions like ‘can we afford to have a child?’
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in a tiny minority of cases, questions like ‘is it ethical to bring another child into an already-overpopulated world?’
(Caveat: the exact emphasis on each of the above would depend on the exact type of life-choices being made. Marriage, children and the like would put heavier emphasis on (1), career choices on (2).)
But I would be surprised if even one person in a thousand (and possibly not even one in a million) would base their decisions on the balance of wild animal suffering in the world. That issue is just too far away, too tenuously related to the decision at hand, and too much part of the existing accepted-without-really-thinking-about-it fabric of life, to enter into the equation.
[End of addendum]
It leads me to wonder if Nagasawa knows any non-philosopher atheists, let alone has spent sufficient time with them to actually understand their thought-processes. (Philosopher atheists would form an unrepresentative sample.)
This Rope is why I am wholly unwilling to accept philosophers’ assessments on “the proportion of suffering”, and would demand substantiation that has some factual basis. If Nagasawa is able to come up with this completely unrealistic model of atheist cognition, why should their other assessments be assumed to be any more reliable?
The rational position would seem to be to only trust philosophers’ assessments where they have a discernible basis in objective reality.