The peace ignorance offers is temporary and collapses on contact

The argument

This argument concedes that ignorance can feel like peace and denies that the feeling lasts. Proponents point out that the comfort of not knowing depends entirely on the ignorance holding, and ignorance about one's own life is unstable: symptoms worsen, accounts come due, secrets surface, and the undiscussed problem eventually declares itself. What looked like serenity turns out to have been a loan, and the repayment is often made all at once and at the worst possible moment. Proponents argue that the arrival is also harder than it needed to be. A person who learns of something early can absorb it gradually, plan, seek help and prepare those around them. A person who learns of it late receives the whole shock together, frequently alongside the additional grief of realising that it had been avoidable or manageable had they known sooner. The distress ignorance was meant to prevent is thus not avoided but concentrated, and compounded by regret. There is a further cost while the ignorance lasts, on this view: the uneasy sense that something is wrong. Proponents observe that people who avoid finding out rarely feel genuinely untroubled; they feel vigilant, and vigilance without information is its own form of suffering, with no possibility of resolution. Suspecting and refusing to check is a worse state than knowing, not a better one. Because the comfort of ignorance is provisional, is paid for with concentrated distress when it breaks, and is accompanied by unresolvable unease while it holds, this argument concludes, ignorance does not deliver the bliss attributed to it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents of ignorance reply that much of what is feared never arrives, so the dread spent in anticipation is simply unhappiness paid for nothing. Where the bad news does come, they argue, the person who learned it early suffered it twice, once in prospect and once in fact, while the person who did not suffered it once. They add that for outcomes that cannot be altered by foreknowledge, the interval of unworried life is a real good rather than a borrowed one.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the concealed fact typically surfaces eventually is the load-bearing claim and is stated without support. A great many facts about a person's circumstances never surface at all, and the premise would have to show that the ones in dispute do. [Rejecting P2] This describes facts that admit of absorbing, planning and preparing, which is the class where the opposing case concedes most. It does not reach what cannot be prepared for, and there learning early extends the distress rather than concentrating it. [Rejecting P3] Unresolvable unease is attributed to ignorance as such, when the premise's own description of it - something sensed but not known, suspicion, concealment - belongs to partial knowledge rather than to ignorance.