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Intruder,

Interesting point, but here are a few counters to your argument.

I think this binary nature of emotions, the ying and yang, is not a real need. Defining happiness is not a problem to me.

I don't think emotions have been described in binary terms here, rather they've been described as existing on a continuum, with positive emotions at one end and negative at the other. There are obviously all kinds and degrees of emotions in between. Rusty mentioned a state of apathy, a feeling of very little or nothing with regard to happiness or sadness.

Say you grow up in a place where nobody ever hurt you. You never had physical or emotional pain. Would you still be able to laugh without ever having had to cry? Of course you would.

Your conclusion: "Of course you would," is an assumption without any evidence. Who has ever grown up to experience no physical or emotional pain? This claim is untested, and probably untestable. How do you know that a human would be able to experience positive emotions without ever experiencing negative emotion when both are so centrally connected with human behavior?

Like good tasty food that you can't have enough of. The kids are the best evidence of this. Do they need to experience sadness to know joy? Not really. They could go on forever playing eating ice cream.

How do you know that children do not need to experience sadness to know joy? Most babies come out of the womb crying. Presumably (because none of us really know what a newborn experiences) it's very uncomfortable to suddenly be thrust from the warm, dark, quiet aquatic environment of the uterus into a cold, bright, noisy room full of people, trying to take a breath for the first time with gunk the lungs. Presumably, babies experience hunger (a type of physical pain) and cry. When fed, they're happy. If they never experienced the discomfort of hunger, would they learn to eat? Would they cry? Would their mothers feed them? Babies cry before they laugh.

Utilitarian ethics is a system of "right" and "wrong" based on the pleasure/pain, happiness/sadness principle. There are two basic levels to the system. On the first level, an individual has a desire. The person acts on the desire. The person then experiences a consequence for his action. On the second level, if the consequence was positive, the next time the desire presents itself, the person will probably act in the same manner to acheive the same consequence. If the consequence was negative, the person will be more likely to avoid it. Example:

Level 1
Desire: Child wants a cookie.
Action: Child reaches into the cookie jar and pulls out a cookie.
Consequence: Mother takes the cookie away and scolds the child.

Level 2
Desire: Child wants a cookie.
Reason: Child remembers consequence.
Action: Child averts attention and runs after the cat instead.

Based on utilitarian ethics (which is one of the most influential ethical systems in western culture), the child's response will be determined by the pleasure/pain principle. If the child takes the cookie and there is no negative consequence, the child will likely continue to take cookies when the desire to eat a cookie presents. However, if negative consequences result from that action, and the negative is stronger than the positive, the child will likely avoid that action next time.

To state that a child would experience happiness without sadness is an untested assumption about human behavior. At the earliest stages of development, infants presumably (although we truly don't know) don't eat based on the pleasurable taste of food. It's hard to imagine an infant with three different bottles of breastmilk in front of her trying to decide which "brand" tastes the best. LOL. Babies eat because they experience hunger, and by filling their bellies with milk they experience a positive consequence. The same is true with the mother. She hears her infant cry and recognizes its discomfort. The cry of the infant is uncomfortable to her. Therefore, she desires to relieve the infant's discomfort. She feeds the infant, and consequently both the mother and the infant experience comfort/happiness/contentment... however you want to phrase it. Without some type of negative experience, such as the pain/discomfort of hunger, I question how humans would ever survive to become happy little children eating their ice cream cones and laughing all day.

To become an adult in this world, however, the kid has to learn to expect pain from everywhere and at any moment. Thus, it's no wonder this resignation to the forces of 'good and bad' prevails.

I don't think anyone here is talking about "forces" of good an bad, at least not in any sort of metaphysical sense. It just seems to me that both positive and negative emotions are both entertwined so deeply within the human experience, that it's impossible to separate them. It also seems to me that the negative precedes the positive, as I mentioned above, and that it's necessary to experience the negative to value the positive. This doesn't mean that people have to experience all kinds of pain and sadness to know happiness. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I was pretty happy throughout my life as a JW. However, I do think that the extreme sadness and despair that I experienced when leaving the JW's heightened my appreciation for the positive aspects of life. The JW mindset is one in which everything is ideally happy and perfect, but to me that seems to be a denial of human nature. Life is full of a wide range of emotions, and I'd rather experience them all than limit myself to a simple state of emotional neutrality.

I'd have turned out just as nice as I am today.

I doubt that.

Nad

Good post, Intruder. I'm off to bed now, but I'll reply tomorrow if I have time.

Nad