Human Life: Both Good and Bad
Neither bumper sticker below is quite right. Let me explain.
Regarding optimism: no, the human experience is not all good. I understand the psychological inclination toward optimism; it’s something of a survival mechanism to help one overcome the miseries of life. But the maintenance of total optimism requires the pretense that these miseries don’t exist. The total optimist must hide them from his focus – which is a fancy of wishful thinking that the truth-seeker cannot indulge.
As Schopenhauer says somewhere near the end of The World as Will and Representation, if the optimist were to look clearly at the world’s prisons, hospitals, torture chambers, battlefields, and execution rooms, his optimism would die a quick death. Add to these the various institutions of slavery that humans have practiced throughout history and continue to practice in some respects (see here, for example), the Holocaust, the genocides of Rwanda and elsewhere, the Japanese rape of Nanking during the 1930s, and so on. If one were to study human history with a careful eye, one would see that it has been a bloodbath of moral evil and natural calamity. And I didn’t even mention the numerous instances of willful ignorance, folly, irrationality, lying, bullshit, cheating, gossip, slander, abuse, envy, schadenfreude, and general hatred that any of us can discover simply by paying attention to daily human life. Left unchecked, the human inclination toward selfishness threatens to produce a bellum omnium contra omnes. I repeat: human life is not all good. Although the logical version of the problem of evil fails, the probabilistic version of the problem is quite alive and, in my view, is sufficeint to support a reasonable atheism. (I say this as a theist who holds that theism is also rationally justifiable, though neither position has been proved with certainty.)
But the pessimist is also wrong: the human experience is not all bad. The problem of evil faces a serious problem of goodness. There is far too much good in the world for one to remain a thoroughgoing pessimist: love, kindness, wisdom, rationality, courage, freedom, beauty, aesthetic experience, moral rights, friendship, and so forth. The list of intrinsic values is quite long, as William Frankena has noted. Human life is not all bad.
Moreover, assuming that value is objectively real and that worlds as such are possessors of value, we are not able to determine with epistemic certainty whether the axiological balance of the world as a whole leans toward the good or toward the bad. Such matters are beyond our ken. We are not up to the task of world evaluation; the job is too complicated for our cognitive capacities. Or so I’m inclined to say.
From a reasonable human perspective that considers all the relevant and available evidence, the fact is that, concerning the realm of human experience, the world is partly good and partly bad. The bumper stickers should be combined.
Yet there is reason to hope and believe that the end of our story will be exceedingly better than its middle, as I note here and here and here and elsewhere.