Antinatalism is the view that the human race should let itself go extinct; more particularly, it should do so because that outcome is “better”; and therefore having children is immoral (there is a decent entry on this in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; it even has a Wikipedia page). I’ve been asked about it a lot and critiqued it in comments on various other articles. Here I’ll assemble and polish all those remarks into one reply, and address a defense of it sometimes overlooked, Christopher Belshaw’s “A New Argument for Anti-Natalism,” in the South African Journal of Philosophy 31.1 (2012): 117-27. I recently sat in on a Q&A in which Belshaw was tasked by several experts to defend his thesis, and he pretty much couldn’t. His view was based on hidden premises even he couldn’t articulate a defense of, and incoherencies even he couldn’t give a rational solution to. This is typical of the view.
Incoherence
Antinatalism holds that being alive causes suffering, such that not being alive is better. This entails killing everyone, and yourself. To try and avoid this consequence, as antinatalists do, with an equivocation fallacy, like “suicide and murdering billions causes suffering; therefore we ought not commit suicide or exterminate people,” only proves the point. They are contradicting themselves. If becoming dead is suffering, then how can being dead be better than being alive? The only reason one can ever coherently be against mass suicide is to admit that staying alive is better than being dead. But that renounces the entire premise that antinatalism is built on. What we are left with is incoherent nonsense.
If being dead actually was better than being alive, we should all seek death, and indeed give everyone death. It’s the only humane thing to do. Right? Antinatalism is really just a whitewashed Cthulhu cult. And there is no way to get around this consequence. Because it absolutely requires defending the premise “being alive causes enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Yet this cannot be defended if you then import a new premise with a conflicting utility function, that “being alive does not cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Hence saying “making people dead causes more suffering than letting them live” simply is a refutation of the antinatalist’s own premise. Because “being alive does not cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better” is literally the denial of “being alive causes enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Death is the absence of all pain. So the only reason death can ever be bad is that it ends something good. Which requires admitting life is not only good, but so good as to warrant outlawing death. So the antinatalist has set themselves a doomed project. They want a certain outcome (to have their cake and eat it too: being against all having of kids and being against genocide and suicide), but there is simply no logically coherent way to get that outcome. Yes, they will haul out much hand waving and harrumphing in attempts to deny this and stick to their self-contradiction. But what we never get in those desperate flailings is facts or logic.
Of course, one could bite the bullet, hail Cthulhu, and admit antinatalism does entail killing everyone and yourself, and start giving marching orders. That it has that outcome does not make it false. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we should hail Cthulhu and destroy the world. But that antinatalists recoil in horror at that conclusion calls into question the truth of their entire premise. In their very revulsion to this they reveal that even they don’t really believe that being dead is better than being alive. So you have to question what they are really on about. Their motives are clearly not rational. Which leaves something else.
Factually False Premises
It’s not just that all antinatalists are contradicting themselves. The truth of antinatalism not only requires that it be internally coherent (and indeed, so far, its proponents can never give us a coherent version of it); it is also contingent on the facts. We could contrive a dystopian fiction in which antinatalism would be a correct stance (some already have; it’s been explored in fiction more than once). But fiction is by definition false. And false is false. And a false premise gets you a false conclusion, when the conclusion can only be true when that premise is true, as is the case here. The antinatalist needs it to be true that being dead is better than being alive. But it factually isn’t.
You and I can directly observe that’s false for us and nearly everyone we know. But we don’t need anecdotes. We know this for a scientific fact. Just read the latest World Happiness Report. Mapped results show that life only becomes inadequately happy because of poor social conditions that have been (and therefore, can always be) solved with moral human action. There is no sense in which “all humans always everywhere” are more miserable alive than dead. To the contrary, progress on this metric in the last several centuries proves we have an arc already well beyond that, and getting further every decade (Pinker; Shermer; Zuckerman), and with endless potential (see How Not to Live in Zardoz; where I even describe a condition—in no way obtaining now—in which having children would be immoral, but only because we could then create new people without making them children, which illustrates that as human civilization increases the available options, antinatalism looks even more ridiculous). The argument that “all these people” are mistaken about their own subjective feelings and are therefore “wrong” to say they like being alive is pseudoscientific bullshit. There only is how they feel. To say someone is biased toward liking their life is nonsensical. Liking a thing and being biased toward it are the same thing. So you can’t spin them as opposites. That someone can be subjectively wrong in their feelings due to false beliefs or bad reasoning is true, but not equivalent to having no access to satisfaction-states; once you find that satisfaction states are objectively accessible, well, you have satisfaction-states. And that’s all we need. (For a more thorough destruction of this attempt to gaslight the entire planet, see the second half of the Artir critique.)
We could cherry-pick past historical points, and present sub-groups, where we can find the exceptional block to accessible satisfaction states that antinatalism requires be the case for everyone. But those exceptions prove the rule: they are conditional. And when something is conditional, it goes away when you remove the condition. Sure, you can remove it with death. But you can usually remove it without death. And between those two options, any objective intelligence will get you to the result that doing it without death is always better (see The Objective Value Cascade). Quite simply, you have two options: one with zero net utility (zero consciousness, zero pleasure, zero choice, zero degrees of freedom), and one with considerable net utility (consciousness, pleasure, choice, degrees of freedom). Imagine yourself in either state. Which, once in that state, would you prefer? The answer is obvious to all but the irrational.
So the exceptional states don’t make the case for antinatalism. They make the case, rather, for ending the conditions creating those exceptional states. For example, American Antebellum slaves could have opted to merely stop eating and died (for a zero probability of a nonzero outcome), or even took the more logical gamble (a nonzero probability of a nonzero outcome) and risk dying taking up arms to effect their escape—and some did. There were escaped slaves, and there were slave rebellions. And there were many who died trying. The main reason so many slaves opted out of those solutions was their failure to realize that “death or freedom” was actually a better optimization of their satisfaction-state potential than what they incorrectly reckoned that to be instead, which was continued compliance.
In other words, far more slaves than realized it would have been better off dying in a rebellion, as such would have ensured a higher percentage of net positive outcomes for the survivors freed (who at nonzero odds might even be themselves), while continued compliance did not out-compete death in utility of outcome, given the horrific brutality and inhumanity of America’s slave system. So there really was no good reason to remain compliant; but not everyone is rational, particularly when they are deprived of education, time, and even nutrition, and under continual debilitating duress. Of course when compliance really was the optimal choice (a slave had it good enough to stick around, however put upon), then my point is moot. But we are asking about the condition where it would not be the optimal choice, which is the only condition that approaches what antinatalists need to be true of all human beings whatever, and not just exceptionally situated humans (like 19th century American slaves). And in that condition, there are options with far more net utility than death—even if risking death is needed to have any probability of obtaining them.
Honestly, this is basic Game Theory: simply dying has a zero probability of gains; whereas even a 1% chance of surviving and escaping one’s life-devaluing conditions by rebellion is literally an infinite increase in utility (as any nonzero number is infinitely larger than zero). And that’s even accounting for diminishing returns and relative utilities (see Pascal’s Wager and the Ad Baculum Fallacy). And this is for 19th century American slaves, arguably the worst situated people in human history. So if this follows even for them, it darned well follows for all other human beings, past been or ever to be. If you asked Frederick Douglass if he was better off freed than slave, he would say yes, by loads; and objectively observing the differences in conditions, both of which he experienced, you would agree. But it cannot be that Douglass moved from a worse to a better state, and the complete absence of any positive states would be a yet further improvement. To the contrary, it would be a reversal. If Douglass was better off freed than slave, he logically necessarily must have been better off alive than dead. There is no logically coherent way to frame it otherwise. You can never get “nothing” to be more than “something.”
Incoherence Plus Absence of Facts Equals Bullshit
You cannot simultaneously will to be a universal rule “life is better than death” (so stop creating lives) and “death is better than life” (so preserve all existing lives), so you can’t get antinatalism on a deontological approach; and you can’t get “nothing is more than something,” so you can’t get antinatalism on a teleological approach; and there is no “virtue” or “hypothetical imperative” that can get there either, because both require backwards appeal to either deontology or teleology, or both (see Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same). So antinatalism is simply done for. It has no factual or logical basis.
As Kenton Engel put it, as a philosophy, antinatalism is “sociologically ignorant and vapid.” Good critiques of it with which I concur are by Bryan Caplan and Artir. The latter tackles more directly the illogical and convoluted argument of David Benatar, the poster child of antinatalist thought. What one notices rather quickly is that Benatar sucks at fourth-grade arithmetic. His arguments depend on ignoring the existence of “zero” and thus assuming anything that is not a positive is a negative, and vice versa. Thus he illogically twists himself into concluding that there is no mathematical difference between zero and “two minus one.” For example, he concludes that being dead (zero consciousness, hence zero goods) is no different (indeed even “better” somehow) than being alive and mildly put upon (actual consciousness with a net but not absolute good). But this makes no mathematical sense. There is very definitely a difference between being conscious and not in pain and not being in pain because you are not conscious. And that difference is both enormous and possessed of an enormous measurable positive utility. So clearly something has gone horribly wrong in Benatar’s train of thought.
Artir gets at the error. Benatar constructs a naive (and thus factually false) account of why we have certain differential intuitions about potential persons. For example, we do not feel sad for “potential happy people never realized” because unrealized people don’t exist and thus don’t have things to lose, and we also know there is a limited resource capacity, so the slots occupied by realized happy people have to be interchangeable (not every logically possible person can exist). Conversely, we do think “potential miserable people” should never be realized because, unlike “unrealized happy people,” “realized miserable people” would exist and would have things to lose. Benatar never comes to either realization, and thus he operates from premises that exclude these, the actual reasons, we have different intuitions about potential people. And as one can expect, he then gets an illogical, contrafactual result. Bad premises get you bad conclusions. We aren’t obligated to bring every happy person into existence because we physically can’t (resource limits contradict the objective) and because no loss is suffered by persons who never exist; whereas we are obligated to not bring miserable persons into existence because that would mean they would actually exist and thus can suffer the predicted losses. Actual people have notably different properties than potential people; and all our asymmetrical decisions regarding those two groups follow from this very fact.
I could add another fatal error in Benatar’s logic, which is his failure to appreciate that civilization operates fundamentally by division of labor. He often seems to confuse obligations on a society with obligations on an individual. But that’s nonsense. “We ought to have police officers” is morally true. “Every single human being ought to be a police officer” is not. Analogously, “We ought to produce a reasonable and sustainable supply of new people every decade” is morally true. “Every single human being ought to have kids” is not. We as a society are morally obligated to support parents in various ways; because we need them and their labor, not only because we need kids economically, but more so because human happiness can only continue, and continue to improve, in such fashion. But it does not follow that every member of society should be a parent, any more than every member of society should be a police officer, or a fire fighter, or a city council member, or a grocer, or a historian. The simple reason all human beings are not obligated to have children is that civilization only produces net goods for us all when we exercise its basic principle of division of labor—not everyone can be expected to do everything; ergo not everyone should be expected to do everything. Likewise, there are good arguments for pursuing ZPG, or even a managed reduction of population to a level that would optimize net goods, precisely because doing that will optimize the net good for all actual people; but these goals are rejected by antinatalists, and they follow from exactly the opposite premises to antinatalism’s anyway.
Of course, as I also noted, Benatar’s conclusion when taken to its actual logical outcome would demand that we not only extinguish ourselves, but first build a self-replicating fleet of space robots programmed to extinguish all life and every civilization in the universe—in other words, we should become the soullessly murderous alien monsters of virtually every sci-fi film made. It’s obvious something has gone wrong in your thinking if that’s where you’re landing. Benatar struggles to argue against this being the implication of his premises, but (as I already illustrated) such efforts are never logically valid or sound. The whole cockup bears an analogy to the equally foolish argument “our government’s policies are bad, therefore we should eliminate government,” rather than what is actually the rational response, that “our government’s policies are bad, therefore we need better government.” One can say exactly the same of the entirety of human society. We already have working examples of good lives and good communities on good trajectories. So we know the failure to extend that globally is an ethical failure of action on our part and not some existentially unavoidable fate we should run away from like cowards.
But Benatar’s entire argument is ridiculous even apart from that. As Atir succinctly puts it, even a “world of perfect bliss and happiness and meaningfulness, that contains the mere possibility of someone somewhere experiencing a minor itch is not worth bringing into existence” on Benatar’s view. There is no factual or logical basis for such a view. It is total 100% bullshit. Really, it’s on a par with “human souls live in beans, therefore the legume market is a genocidal horror.” Even Benatar’s attempt to escape this fact by appealing to disanalogous concepts exposes him as even more illogical than we’ve already seen; like, for example, arguing that we “don’t know” whether a person we create “might” end up miserable and would have been better off dead, and the teeniest tiniest possibility of that should warrant our refraining.
This is the most hare brained argument ever conceived in the history of philosophy. It reminds me of a scene in a Chevy Chase movie where someone tries defending the purchase of fighter planes that malfunction when wet, and the only sane general in the room shouts, incredulously, “Have none of you ever heard of rain!?” The argument of “possible outcomes opposite intention” applies to literally every act and choice every human will ever make (up to and including literally just breathing); consequently, it refutes itself. Game Theory, again. If you have two options, one leads to no positive sum outcomes, and the other leads very probably to positive sum outcomes and only improbably to negative sum outcomes, the only rational move is the second. All life consists of risk. If you are scared of all risk no matter how small or mitigable, then yeah, maybe you’d be better off dead. But the rest of us aren’t that stupid. The correct solution (as in the rational solution) to risk is not “the avoidance of all conceivable risk”; it’s taking steps to reduce or mitigate that risk. “I might die if I go outside, therefore I should never go outside” is the voice of an idiot (or literally the insane); “I might die if I go outside, therefore I should cooperate with society in making that as safe as we can” is the voice of the rational and sane.
And this does not change when it’s “other people affected.” Because you might accidentally cause some unsuspecting bystander’s death if you go outside, too. The response to that possibility is to take all morally available action to reduce its probability. And that’s it. All rational actors accept this is the case. I know I could be the victim of someone else’s unintentional accident. That’s part of the risk of “going outside” (or even staying in). The correct course of action is to keep that probability low. It is not to kill myself, lest I otherwise might be crushed by a building whose maker, unbeknownst to me, just happened to have bribed a building inspector. One has zero probability of gain. The other has a nonzero probability of gain. Only one of those two options actually produces a net expected utility. Even if I get crushed one twentieth of a second after making this decision, so that in both outcomes there will be no net gain, such that killing myself only avoids a net loss, it still produces zero gain. By waiting to see what happens, I get a nonzero probability of a positive gain. Death cannot do that for you—not even for a merely potential person. You can never win a lottery you never play; and when the odds of winning are near 100%, you have to be a stone cold idiot to try and argue against buying a ticket. Hence the problem with, for example, kids who end up with bad parents or bad luck, is not that they were born. The problem is their parents or their luck. And solutions should attack the problem. Only a fool thinks otherwise. And yes, that makes Benatar a fool. All antinatalists are.
Indeed, a lot of Benatar-style argumentation hinges on their wingeing about some person brought into the world “who regrets” that they were (this seems to be their actual emotional motivation for their stupid arguments; and for this they really need a therapist, not a philosophy journal). And in their stupidity, they fault this “hypothetical” person’s having been born for that outcome. But that’s false. There is no actual case, and never has been any actual case, wherein merely being born caused any negative outcome whatever. They are wingeing about the wrong thing. And this is proved by all the people who turned out well. If they could, so could anyone. The problem therefore is not being born (which all people share in common, so it cannot be the cause of any such difference—honestly, this is Causal Logic 101). The problem is whatever else has happened to produce a different outcome. Maybe it’s a genetic defect. Well, then that can be solved with genetic engineering or other treatments, or by rationally selective abortion rather than indiscriminate mass abortion. Or maybe it’s a circumstance (bad parents, a brain parasite from swimming, an accidental fall, a drunk driver, redlining, a hurricane, an ugly mug, systemic racism, unregulated capitalism, Vladimir Putin). Well, then that’s the problem then, isn’t it? We should get on that. Either fix it, or work around it. And the rest of us ought to do what we reasonably can to create a society that will help you with that.
No matter how depressed you are because of some thing you can’t have or do for whatever reason, there are a thousand other ways to enjoy life, and ten thousand other dice to roll for a shot thereat; so even when a direct solution to the problem isn’t available, an indirect one usually is, and so you should simply reinvest in some of those alternatives rather than obsessing over whatever few things you don’t have access to (and science has already established what the best alternatives are, e.g. a life of the mind, more presentism, cultivation of friendships and passions: see Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life and Your Own Moral Reasoning). And if after accounting for all that you really do end up in a condition where you really can’t acquire any net gain no matter what you do (like, a case that would actually pass muster in any legal assisted suicide regime), then you can easily mitigate that problem yourself with a conscientious and informed suicide. You really aren’t out anything here; you had a shot, and you got to exit when all options failed. So even then, you had a solve—and it got to be your choice, not someone else’s. But really, I must remind you, this is an extremely rare outcome; most suicides are neither conscientious nor informed, and are based on false beliefs and a failure of reason. If you’re in the United States, you can check which by dialing 988.
There is no argument here for never giving anyone a shot. Hence the argument of Häyry & Sukenick, in “Imposing a Lifestyle: A New Argument for Antinatalism,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2023), doesn’t carry any weight here, because it hinges on the notion that rationalists are against all “opt-out” protocols, like judicious suicide; but we aren’t, so there is no pertinent violation of consent. Indeed, we assume the same responsibility for children (morally and governmentally) as we do for the treatment of anyone else who deserves goods but can’t consent to them until after the fact—like the drowning, the comatose, and the insane. We don’t ask consent before installing safety features in anyone’s cars or roads, for example. They will eventually be able to vote for or against those things somewhere in the chain of authority (from propositions to legislatures), but we don’t wait for it, and no one of sense would want us to have.
Most goods are given to people without asking (civil and human rights; infrastructure; clean air and water; sustainably managed fisheries and forests; in most sensible countries, even access to quality health care), because we can’t wait to ask first, and the cost to them of that delay is net-positive and thus entirely warranted by the processes we’ve built. Because opting out is always possible. Euthanasia and sailboats are available to all (whether religious fanatics try to stop you or not). Which is not to say having children in the way we do will always be ethical—it simply is, at present, the only way to give the gift of life to new people, and to keep the economy running for everyone else. In future, ethics will curtail our options (see my proposed “Law of Generation” in How Not to Live in Zardoz), but it will not end them. In mere decades, new lives in the form of manufactured AI’s, born without the disabilities of ever being mentally and physically “a child,” will be inevitable; and as long as we pursue that ethically, it will not in and of itself be unethical.
Hence trying to argue for never having children is here like arguing for eradicating Earth’s atmosphere to prevent hurricanes, on the logic that, “Well, if it wasn’t for an atmosphere, there would be no hurricanes.” You may as well try to sell us fighter planes that don’t work when wet. We’re not buying what you’re selling. If you don’t like your life, you are obligated to get help with that, or find whichever gamble of escape has the best odds of a positive outcome and roll the dice (and keep doing that until you score). Because you never win if you never roll. And you never get to roll if you don’t exist. Suicide is almost always a fool’s move because it consists of preferring a zero probability of a cash prize to a decent nonzero probability of it. Only when that probability is legit too small and the costs legit too high to warrant a likely outcome before you die anyway does euthanasia make rational sense—and you can never know when that will be until you get there, which requires you to actually exist first. So the mere possibility of this cannot affect anyone’s decision to have kids.
The only thing actually keeping us from realizing every possible person’s existence is that there isn’t room for you all. Maximizing everyone’s utility requires optimizing population size. And in that and every other respect we are obligated to care about the odds of outcome we are leaving for anyone we create. We ought not create them if we can’t give them respectably good odds. But we are not obligated in any way to people who don’t exist; we only have such obligations towards those who will exist. That is what governs all natal decisions. Not Benatar’s illogical contradictory nonsense.
The Belshaw Argument
Okay. So David Benatar is a fact-challenged fool who can’t logic his way out of a paper bag and probably needs professional therapy. Can his case be salvaged? Christopher Belshaw gave it a try. He opens with several paragraphs trashing Benetar’s shit logic, which is encouraging. But when Belshaw gets to his own arguments, he is barely any more rational.
First, he tries to argue that “If we are looking just to the well-being of such animals” as, say, giraffes or sheep, “and not to their instrumental value then, I claim, we should think it better if these animals didn’t exist. And so we have reason to end their lives.” I do not think animals have the same ontological or moral status as people (see my debate In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals). But I do not concur with Belshaw’s reasoning here. It is possible for a sheep to have a net good life. It’s possible even for an industrial chicken or a pig to. This is what justifies our pursuit of enforcing moral and humane husbandry, without entailing the conclusion that killing them is bad (it’s not, if we do it humanely). There is such a thing as a better and a worse life for animals, which mathematically entails that a zero life cannot out-sum the better life. Zero does not equal two minus one. Belshaw seems to stumble from the conclusion that most animal lives do not rise to the experiential value of human lives to his assertion that we should just eradicate all animals—that this is better (so, not even neutral!).
Animals have no conscious existence that gains value by extension—in other words, there is little actual difference between a pig living one year or ten, it will itself never appreciate anything about this—but there is a substantive and measurable difference between an animal experiencing life at all (particularly to adulthood) and not at all. I do think ultimately there will be no animals in this sense (when we all live in virtual realities, we might have things like happy animal servants and trees that grow steak, but we’ll have no morally legitimate reason to replicate animals exactly as exist now). But as long as there are animals, there is no justification for eradicating them. True, in part this is due to the fact that we cannot simply, like Belshaw, dismiss their instrumental value (we quite need animals for a functioning global ecosystem, as well as all the industrial and commercial and social uses we find for them). One might agree with Belshaw that animals going extinct that won’t have a place in the future ecosystem should be left to their fate and not artificially “rescued,” but this conclusion would not extend to all animals whatever. Even apart from their instrumental value, their experiential life is still more meaningful than no life at all.
So I would call this a bad example. The value of animal life is much lower than human life. But less is not the same thing as zero—and zero is not the same thing as a negative. This is a the same arithmetic fail as Benatar’s. So all Belshaw’s wingeing about Daphne’s parrot gains him no purchase here. People aren’t parrots. And that’s just that. And the occasional parrot approaching a fate we’d rather kill them before than let them endure does not translate to “we ought to make a virus that sterilizes the entire genus of parrots so that parrots exist no more upon this Earth.” That’s just stupid. There is simply no logical connection between these two decisions. Parrots have few values as we conceive them, but still the world would be better with parrots than without, even if people didn’t exist to appreciate this, and far more so because people do exist to appreciate this. Like Daphne. Mars would certainly be a more valuable place, by every metric, if it thrived with animal life than if it were (as it is) a bare rock. To argue there’d be no meaningful difference, even in the absence (much less in the presence) of space-faring Earthlings, between those two versions of Mars is just dumb and has no place in serious philosophy.
In any case, as even Belshaw admits, we can’t connect this illogical conclusion to human antinatalism anyway, because by changing just one thing in his thought experiment (and philosophers too often suck at thought experiments) we would collapse the whole endeavor: give Daphne’s parrot human-level intelligence, such that you can have a conversation with it about the upcoming painful surgeries and its prognosis after them. Would Belshaw really then say, “Kill the fucker! Act of mercy!” Or would he change his tune entirely, when now he could be that parrot, able to rationally contemplate the options and their outcomes and make his own decision whether to be gassed or endure the treatment to enjoy more good years after. Dollars to doughnuts, he’d nix the gas option—and he as much says so. As Belshaw admits, the reason we are readier to euthanize a bird in such conditions is precisely that it can’t engage in this rational evaluation, it doesn’t value the extension of its life in any substantively analogous sense, and the loss endured by killing it isn’t remotely comparable to doing that if it were an intelligent person we could have a conversation with, and consequently the costs of such interventions aren’t merited as they are with people. Humans aren’t parrots.
So why does Belshaw bring it up? I don’t know. It gets nowhere toward a defense of antinatalism. He doesn’t even produce a logical case for exterminating animals (despite insisting he has). So this was all wasted ink. Why did he bother? In his penultimate section he winds around in his illogical, convoluted essay to arguing that babies have no appreciable net utility so that if they won’t survive a year, we should smother them outright and be done with it—for their own good. Like Benatar, nothing Belshaw says leading to this conclusion is scientifically or factually true. Babies barely recall pains they suffer, so that “colic and teething” won’t even really bear much negative utility for them across their entire year of wonderment, giggling, and joy. So his premise that babies are miserable is bullshit. Antinatalists are fond of bullshit. It’s their favorite meal. They serve it whenever they can. And that’s even apart from the fact that we never even know this anyway (there is no such thing as a condition that “guarantees” a baby will die in a year; prognosis is never that reliable, which is the point of not acting so rashly as to just smother babies everywhere willy nilly).
Eventually Belshaw throws out a random assertion that he thinks everyone should stop having children because we only have them to exploit them (as labor when they become adults). This is also bullshit and suggests he also needs therapy. Hardly anyone in modern society has kids for this reason, and in fact we have laws against it. It is true we do have kids for the return on investment (in fact, we need them for that reason; Belshaw would be well and truly fucked if we stopped having them), but per Kant, moral people don’t treat kids merely as a means to an end but as an end in themselves. Remember what I said before about antinatalists wiping out atmospheres to stop hurricanes? They are always shooting the wrong target. If you are concerned that people aren’t treating children as people unto themselves who stand a good chance of enjoying life as much or more as their parents, and deserve to in exchange for the help we need from them in return, then the problem isn’t the children. It’s how we are treating them. Solutions must target the problem. So if the problem is how adults treat children, the solution is changing the adults, not getting rid of the kids. The antinatalist argument is simply a non sequitur, void of logic.
So when Belshaw ever gets around to even explicitly making an argument, we get this hot garbage:
Imagine we look at creatures on a distant planet. They live for ten years in agony, and thereafter sixty years in bliss. And there are no important psychological connections over this period. We probably think it better if these creatures never come to be, though of course after ten years there’s no reason at all to kill them, or wish them dead. This is, I’ve argued, more or less the picture with human lives.
Dude. No moral human being would think this way. What the fuck is wrong with Belshaw? Is he a sociopath? If we found a society of Martians who lived ten years in agony and sixty years in bliss, our thought would not be, “Get rid of them! Forced sterilizations!” We’d be moral monsters—and idiots. We’re neither. So that is not at all how 98% of human beings would react to this discovery, or how 100% of sane and rational human beings would. Not a single one would say “it would be better they never existed.” We’d say, “that’s a rough start they have to put up with, but it’s clearly worth it in the end.” And we’d say that because those Martians who actually live through it would say that. And that’s how empathy works.
Of course, in reality, we’d say, “Wow, what can we do to fix that?” And they’d say, “Hey, yeah, let’s share knowledge and resources and put our brains together and see if we can reduce those ten years, maybe even to zero in time!” And we’d say, “Yeah! That might take a while but it’s a worthy project. Good thing we didn’t stop having kids so we could extend that effort over generations for the good of your future kin!” And they’d say, “Yeah, because we believe compassion is a virtue, and therefore we want our future generations to have it better than we did.” And we’d bump fist to tentacle and get to work. Meanwhile the antinatalist would be wearing a dunce hat in the corner during all this, deprived of a pension because they’d renounced all dependency on the labor of new adults, and made fun of by passing school children for being callous asshats.
More to the point, Belshaw thinks he has given some sort of rational excuse for threading the needle between the contradictions of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism here. He thinks his completely sociopathic reaction to those hypothetical aliens produces some rational navigation between that Scylla and Charybdis. It doesn’t. It produces no rational basis for wanting those aliens extinct. So it simply fails to reconcile that conclusion with the more sane result of not wanting to kill them. The antinatalist philosophy remains as self-contradictory as ever. If those sixty closing years are worth having, so is their being born. The ten early years have absolutely zero effect on that calculus. It’s a net gain. And a net positive is always more than zero. The only proper response to that tragedy is not forced sterilizations to effect the extermination of a sentient species. It’s to try and make the miserable bits better. Which is the entire history of civilization in a nutshell. Solutions must target the problem. And birth isn’t these alien’s problem. Nor is existing.
Really, Belshaw has simply lost the plot. Without Benatar’s premise that any misery whatever negates the entire value of any life (even the sixty years after the ten for these Martians), such that (by some magic math) zero utility is larger than any other value in net utility, you simply don’t get antinatalism at all. Belshaw just did what all antinatalists do: flatly contradict themselves by admitting life, even with a 1:6 ratio of misery to joy, has above-zero utility (“there’s no reason at all to kill them, or wish them dead”); and in the very next sentence insisting death has a higher utility because it consists of zero utility. Bonkers. If they are better off alive than dead, then they are quite simply better off alive than dead. You can’t have it both ways. Pick a lane. Neither gets Belshaw to where he wants to go.
Belshaw ends by falsely claiming his view is less extreme than the Epicureans who said death was nothing. He clearly does not know anything about Epicurean philosophy, which doesn’t derive illogical conclusions from this premise like Belshaw does. But since he just asserted this and gave no argument (he couldn’t have, because there is no argument here to be had), I’ll let it go as just another stupid ejaculation from an asshat antinatalist. More pertinent is his attempt to claim in the end that what he has argued is a defense of his “claim that a painless death is bad for adults, but not for babies.” But he never actually argued this. He argues that maybe it wouldn’t be bad for babies we are 100% certain will die before their first year of age. That was not a sound argument anyway—as I just noted it was bullshit on both facts and logic; but even had it been sound, he still never connected that hypothetical to just killing all babies—even the ones we are fairly certain will live forty to eighty years or so (the average world life expectancy). So he seems somehow to have tricked himself into thinking he made an argument he never made. In case he needs this explained to him: the reason we don’t just kill babies is, first, that they do have a prospect of a long net-positive life (destroying antinatalism at its very premise) and, second, no less than other higher animals, they actually have a net-positive life even in their first year (on average, in fact, even in their net first twenty-four hours). The idea that such a life is “no different” than complete non-existence is simply bullshit. It’s bullshit even just in the math. Something is always more than zero. If you don’t understand that, you need to go back to grade school.
Conclusion
Antinatalism fails both on its logic (it is full of non sequiturs, equivocations, and false lemmas) and on every pertinent fact (neither the world nor human psychology operates in any of the ways its proponents claim and its premises require). There is no basis for it. It’s stupid. There is a case to be made for approaching a smaller population and for managing child production (and every other aspect of society) to ensure better outcomes for every actual person produced by it, and for in various ways respecting individual choices whether to have any kids or not, or how many, or when, and moral considerations can weigh there (some people should not have kids, while other people would do well to). But none of that case involves any of the premises on which antinatalism is based.
Statistically almost no one regrets being alive, and of those few there are the vast majority are mentally ill and need treatment, not death (because their reasoning is provably delusional and irrational; and people ought only take a catastrophic action rationally and on well-founded beliefs), and of those very few left who actually have an objectively rational basis for not wanting to be alive anymore, they can exercise their own choice to. We have no business making that choice for them, much less on no certain knowledge of its even being warranted. Our decisions about child production must be based on the likely outcomes of those actually produced. We have absolutely no reason to consider or care about the feelings of people who don’t exist and never will. Only the living matter; whether alive now, or later. All our decisions must further their welfare. Because we are all obligated to leave the world better off than we found it. And we can’t do that if from our own stupid decisions there is no world left at all.
As a retired professional nurse, mother, and grandmother, I completely disagree. Forcing life into this world (especially now) is not only selfish, it’s barbaric. I have suffered (almost died from childbirth), and my great grandmother in fact, did. And if that wasn’t enough, my son is neuro-diverse from his dad, whom I had no idea what that was 43 years ago. If I could go back, I would never have a child; it was terribly unfair to him.
That doesn’t make any sense. You are referring to dying in childbirth, not the children regretting being born. So you are attacking the wrong problem. Solutions must address the problem. If the problem is maternal mortality, the solution is reducing maternal mortality (and at-risk potential mothers not being the ones to have children), not “not having children at all.” And I am skeptical that your “neuro-diverse” son regrets being born and having a shot at life. Neuroatypicality is not a life-negating misery.
Mr Richard, let alone arguments; I’m glad you have been exposed to antinatalism idea, whoever came across it realized the wrong side we as humans have been on, it’s like finding a true religion and hence I know if it’s not about creating a content, you are just shocked and you can’t believe how you’re finding out the truth this late.
Sorry, but that run-on sentence had no clear point. I have no idea what you are trying to say.
That’s not what this is about at all. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t get pregnant, or have an early abortion. Anti-natalism is the stance that it’s wrong to create life because you didn’t ask for consent (which is the most unintelligent thing I’ve ever heard from someone pretending to be philosophical), and thus want all creation of more life to stop.
To steelman the anti-natalists:
Your argument about the contradiction caused by them not wanting to murder I think falls short, at least for hypothetical variants (anti-natalists are often so misanthropic and yet trying to deny that misanthropy that this contradiction may very well be in their mind). Threatening to kill people directly is to act awfully. Deontologically, the anti-natalist can argue, the duty to not harm others in the present is not changed at all by how bad anyone’s life is. Just like everyone would agree that killing a person who had not consented to being killed would be evil on its no matter how miserable their life was except possibly in very narrowly defined cases (e.g. an imminently lethal, massively painful wound), the anti-natalist would argue that the fact that death is preferable to life in the abstract is moot here. Similarly, a utilitarian argument also falls afoul: there’s no practical way to kill people without causing grief, fear and pain, both to those about to die and their loved ones. And from a virtue ethics perspective, being the kind of person to do that to people makes us worse. If I were an anti-natalist, I’d argue that that trap is itself a sign of how perverse life can be.
What I think is interesting to ask all anti-natalists would be, “If you could Thanos snap all human life, would you?” In other words, if we could imagine an approach that would cause no fear or pain (maybe even everyone dying in ecstasy and peace), should we? Similarly, if the issue is consent, should anti-natalists be talking people into suicide, or is that immoral because of the utilitarian consequences of doing so to those who don’t?
Everything else I don’t really see much room for them to argue. The only thing I’d argue if I was forced to is that consciousness in and of itself is not inherently good. If you don’t have anything positive in your life and also have relatively mild problems, that still kind of sucks. I don’t know if the psych or sociological literature actually directly rebuts that on point, but there’s certainly no evidence for it either and I think it’s obviously false.
The response is of course that allowing deontological or utilitarian exceptions against causing harm entails admitting that life isn’t net negative. But they need it to be to get their “no kids” conclusion. So either they admit that killing is wrong because the result is worse, which ends their “no kids” conclusion, or they admit that life is bad enough that any brief misery in the process of wiping people out is worth imposing to get the infinite improved result.
Basically, if you can’t justify mercy killing, then you can’t justify the conclusion that life is so bad it’s better to be dead. So the problem lies in their metrics. “You just can’t get there from here” as they say. In utilitarian terms, not mercy killing multiplies misery billions of times, whereas causing relatively brief misery to end civilization obtains higher utility by their required metric (likewise less violent things like systematically poisoning the world food supply to painlessly cause universal infertility, and other James Bond Villain scale objectives). And deontologically, you certainly can will to be a universal rule that causing relatively less misery to prevent vastly greater misery ought always be done; it certainly treats people as an end in themselves and not a means to an end (giving them a better state to be in, and preventing billions more from suffering, selflessly).
If life is always worse than death, then it is both consequentially and deontologically an act of charity to murder people. Any misery caused is brief and vanishes (no PTSD when you’re dead, right?), whereas you have created an infinite net gain in utility and welfare, which well outweighs any finite negatives that are also erased by the effort (this is the founding principle of all apocalyptic moralities).
The conclusion follows even more securely for one’s own suicide, and like you note, persuading people to painlessly kill themselves. The only argument to be had against that is that it is better to be alive than dead. So the contradiction is plain in that case. That this carries also for murder once you do any net ends-means calculation follows with just a few more steps. And in between you have all manner of nefarious evil missions entailed as moral goals (like the global sterilization project).
It also can’t work on a consent model, because admitting someone isn’t giving you consent entails admitting they prefer being alive to being dead, which entails a refutation of their own premise. Whereas arguing that people aren’t competent to have a correct assessment entails concluding they aren’t competent to make decisions for themselves, an exception to consent mores widely accepted (we compel the incompetent to treatments all the time, and even deem it morally necessary).
No matter which way you turn, they have to reject the premise that being alive is worse than being dead, in order to justify not taking steps to end all life, especially their own.
I really don’t think it does have to concede that in the narrow sense. To make an analogy: I can say that you’d have been better off not winning the lottery and then still say once you won it that it’d be wrong to steal it from you. The fact that doing X is wrong when Y state of affairs attains doesn’t mean that problem A that X could solve isn’t a problem. I think it gets even clearer with rule utilitarianism. I could argue that life on balance is shitty and still not be willing to risk the killing or exhorting to suicide of the few lucky people who happen to have good lives. There’s lots of reasons that one could think life has no net value and still think that it’d be wrong to do something to end it, not least because we have a gigantic prisoner’s dilemma problem where even a suicide of someone whose life really is totally not worth living (e.g. people in serious, unending physical pain with no hope of relief) still causes the worsening of everyone else’s life from despair and sadness.
Yes, that does mean that life has to not be so bad that the negative harm of mass murder would outweigh its negative utility, but that threshold could be quite broad if we take the total spectrum of harms from mass murder or mass exhortation to suicide as extreme. I can easily imagine a case being made that the average life has a hedonic value of -10 and then causes an overflow hedonic externality of -100, but to kill that life would be a hedonic value of -1000.
Merely exhorting people not to have kids, meanwhile, is going to do very little for harm. Indeed, even if we accept that most people will never be anti-natalists, just giving an additional cultural force behind people who may feel pressured to have children but don’t really want to and toward families to consider fewer children (and consider things like adoption instead) could be massively pro-positive.
It’s particularly clear when we think about the green side of the anti-natalist argument. In that perspective, if we value all life extremely highly and don’t value consciousness highly at all, then humans doing the ecological damage they’re doing means that we want to find a way of humans not existing that doesn’t involve the action of harming them. That would include an exhortation to not have kids. Indeed, humans are the only species that that could even hypothetically work with.
I personally wouldn’t reject any of this calculus per se so far. I really do see the distinction between “life is generally pretty shitty” and “life is so shitty for everyone all the time that mercy killing them even against their consent even before we have convinced them that life is so shitty and they are deluding themselves and before we have convinced them to say goodbye to their loved ones”. I really don’t think it’s a meaningful lower bar here.
An argument I used for a character in one of my campaigns who was indeed engaging in an anti-natalist omnicide was that all human beings are basically animals in a snare, and the only difference is how long it takes the snare to kill them and how much they notice. I can see an non-omnicidal anti-natalist still make the same argument: Even if people at the moment think life isn’t so bad, their opinion is going to change retroactively when they get sick enough and suffer enough. That wouldn’t justify killing them now because killing them against their consent before they realized that would still be wrong. Again, if you’ve adopted this deeply misanthropic lens and you’re not a sociopath so you still have compassion, this would only further your commitment to this belief: It would make you think the universe as it is is a sorrow trap made so elegantly for us to suffer that even our escapes are worse, or at least appear so much worse that they may as well be.
My problem with all of this is that life is objectively just not that shitty and that we are better off making meaningful investments into making it less so, having rational family planning not based on misanthropy and self-loathing, and engaging in radical technological and social change to fix our relationship with the natural world rather than exhorting people to not have kids. This is especially true because that exhortation isn’t going to work and has gross classist/racist/etc. implications because it ignores that not everyone is equally capable of actually implementing it.
I do agree firmly that the contradiction here does establish a lower bound on their position. They may be able to get away with the idea that life for humans is on average mildly shitty, but not so much so and not invariably so that all of the negative consequences of building up a killing infrastructure or even a hypothetical Thanos snap would be worth doing. And I personally do agree that that lower bound, once all the other arguments are taken into account, is fatal for the anti-natalists because that lower bound is pretty obviously within a range that the best utilitarian action isn’t murder or suicide or anti-natalist proposals but rather pretty much anything else. But I do think one can pretty easily attach infinite or near-infinite negative utility to any mercy killing or exhortation to suicide approach.
In particular, I rather quite like my life, challenges and all, and a lot of other people do too. So the goal should be to make sure psychological and material conditions emerge that let more people have high levels of life satisfaction, while also protecting non-human animals and the ecosystem, and investing in technological solutions that will make our lives much better.
I don’t know that you really can argue that. Saying it is wrong to steal from me entails assuming it would harm and not help me to take it, which entails conceding I’m better with it than without. There really isn’t any principled way to argue against theft without that presumption. This is the problem.
Underlying all moral assumptions is the principal of harm. Take that away, and there remains no basis to declare some action immoral. This is why it is a logical (not just, as you note, an evidential) problem that these alleged harms are really net goods. The antinatalist is trying to argue that even a net good is worth less than zero as long as the net involves any minus. They need two minus one to be less than zero. But that’s illogical.
Thus, even the “lottery will harm you” argument entails assuming there is still a net good (that I have benefits along with those harms), such that taking it from me would still take something of value away from me. Once you remove that assumption—and go all the way that antinatalists do—the intuition fails, because they need it to be the case that stealing would not take anything of value away from me (indeed, more than that, that they would be giving me back more than they took).
This is why their position is illogical. It is not that they are saying life has lots of goods, but any negative entails getting rid of it; they can’t get that conclusion by any logical means. So they have to declare all goods zeroed out by the negatives. It is this bizarre position that entails the contradictions, and explodes all moral intuitions like the one you just relied upon with the lottery.
They need to say none of the goods are valuable at all, as that is the only logical way to get to one minus two is less than zero, rather than two minus one is less than zero. Because the latter is false (it’s a logical non sequitur, indeed a flat contradiction), they have to lean on the former. But the former simply reproduces the contradiction, by eliminating moral exceptions like your lottery example: they need to argue that stealing the lottery would leave me with more than I started with, so it isn’t stealing, but giving. Otherwise they end up with no logical path to their conclusion.
I think the critical point is this: Stealing from you when you have a lottery win could be wrong only once you have it . There’s often points in life where something that would have been great to avoid if one could have done it is pointless to do now. One shouldn’t speed to try to gun it past a yellow light. But if you’re in the midst of doing it, slamming on the brakes is a bad idea: Just get through the intersection and behave better in the future. I think this would be the only valid anti-natalist argument. “We’re not saying that life is so bad that it is necessary to deprive others of it. We are saying that, at the decision point where one chooses life or non-life, life is bad enough as compared to non-life that it should never be chosen”. (Which entails that we have to imagine a hypothetical non-existent observer which can make a choice between the two which is a fundamental problem about the entire discussion, of course).
That position as stated does not necessarily entail that, once one has life, it is better to get rid of it, let alone to exhort others to get rid of it. Indeed, one could very easily argue that, once one has life, the moral thing to do is to promote anti-natalism because at that point one person’s life would pragmatically have potentially prevented hundreds of new painful and harmful lives.
And that’s when the moral externalities and ecological arguments and such come into play. Which is where a lot of the argument for the anti-natalist has to be fought. The only reason I am willing to even momentarily attend to the anti-natalist is because I can see a historically contingent argument based on having pessimistic prospects for the human race to be able to stop doing immense collateral damage.
As regards the two minus one line of reasoning: I am sure many anti-natalists fall into this trap, but I can imagine an argument that goes somewhat differently. I think one can argue, “Yes, life has positives, but it has negatives. The average person’s life will be negative, such that if they were properly informed about the prospects for their life improving they would be willing to die and certainly would not want to gamble that anyone else’s life might be worse than theirs rather than better. And human life has so many negative externalities for third parties, from other humans to sentient animals to the ecosystem in general, that human life should not exist. But because our very goal is to reduce suffering for all animals, we know that promoting an anti-life idea and anti-life policies will cause far more harm than we are willing to accept”.
Yes, I agree that this position still takes us to the fundamental point that it’s not really possible to compare non-existence with existence, that it’s a comparison not to a zero point but to an undefined point. However, putting aside that problem and allowing for the sake of argument that human life can be compared to non-existence which we count as a zero and then each human life can be given a hedonic score and a score for their negative impact, there could be a state of the evidence that would accrue where the average score is so negative as to make it a morally bad bet to risk any new life being born into it. And I do accept the anti-natalist reasoning (as would most responsible people doing family planning) that one should only take that bet at a sufficiently high payoff, because one is betting with someone else’s potential life.
In other words, I think you’re focusing on the value of life per se to the possessor whereas one could take the stance that a life is like an empty wallet: It’s not independently valuable, it only contains things that are. (That gets us into the weeds in terms of differentiating between very basic benefits of life, like being able to experience at all and discover at all let alone outright moments of joy, but again I can cede the distinction to the anti-natalist for the moment). So then we have to ask if the wallet has IOUs or money in it by the end of the lifetime. And the anti-natalist would argue that, while it is hypothetically possible for a life to accrue more positives than negatives, it is the state of the evidence that an intolerably high number don’t.
This means that an anti-natalist could be agnostic as to the value of life per se, or even grant that being a conscious and sapient animal per se has a slight positive benefit, and still all told in the calculus come out that the total is negative. Because the real living person does have to experience negative sensations, and we all agree that there are magnitudes of negative sensations that make people consider ending it. (Whether they are being rational doing so is another question entirely, of course).
Even with all that, there are immense problems both in the evidence and in the framing thereof, but I don’t see your current a priori arguments rebutting that stance, only the a posteriori ones. And I readily grant that I am almost certainly making an incredibly steelmanned case, and that in all likelihood many people won’t make the case as I have precisely because to make the case in the first place requires a certain kind of callousness or pessimism or anti-human sentiment that ends up blunting the ability to be rational about it in the first place, but I am operating from the best read I have of the Buddhist anti-natalist sentiment.
Having read the responses to Benatar, I am pretty amazed that someone did seriously try to argue this under peer review. I was pretty shocked: The only time I’ve ever seen any anti-natalist sentiment has been from people concerned about the present state of the planet, not some arbitrary philosophical evidence-free state. Philosophical anti-natalism seems to be the worst kind of navel-gazing. It’s pretty rare that I find a position that is expressed worse in the technical literature than elsewhere. About the only thing that Benatar has that anyone can even discuss about is the risk to the unborn of a miserable life, and Benatar seems so committed to the idea that any risk is intolerable that he can’t do what a reasonable person would do and try to find a risk threshold he can argue should be viewed as intolerable then argue that life as really lived is below it. But hey, why do that when reasoning from the armchair is so much easier?
A lot of the optimism in this post stems from the Star Trek value system that science, technology, and contemporary philosophy can solve every problem, and while I agree that all that is worth-a-shot I still recognize that human extinction is a possibility. Mr. Carrier mentions the culprit of this problem in his articles about cognitive bias. Antinatalism is incoherent but pessimism is still justified.
I’m not sure what you mean by “pessimism” in this context. “We might go extinct” doesn’t bear on the question of “we ought to drive ourselves extinct.”
Indeed, the fact that the discussion brings about this kind of pessimism is yet another indication that the argument is less about reason and more about embodied misanthropy. Some people get so disappointed in humanity they wonder if it’d be better off if humanity didn’t exist, ignoring that without humanity to exist there’s no one to even ask that question.
Completely psychotic straw man of antinatalism. You’ve simply conflated it with efilism / promortalism and pretended you’ve dealt with the sentient predicament.
Yours is the typical clown response to something that ISN’T a bunch of fitness payoffs, and is exactly what I expect from an atheist who has replaced the psychosis of god-belief and theodicy with an equally psychotic anthropodicy, and worship of darwinian evolution.
State A: no sentience. No harm possible.
State B: sentience. All harms inevitable. Death: terminal, irrelievable (barring some magical fantasy afterlife – you don’t believe in fantasylands like heaven, do you? Eh? I thought you’d matured past all that, my fellow atheist).
Procreation is a conversion from State A to State B. Every argument for procreation is necessarily an argument for the unnecessary infliction of pain, suffering and death.
It is incoherent to claim that state A can be improved upon.
It is psychotic to claim that once the conversion has happened, it is possible to return State B to State A (at all, let alone without harming it). State B entails some direct subjective experience.
The conversion is – effectively – an event horizon. There is no “going back” / undo.
Antinatalism is simply that observation. Nowhere sane does it follow that this means anything should die, or that dying somehow addresses the sentient predicament. You simply jumped there because (and this is normal for humans) you conflate a hypothetical “I never came into existence” with “I die.” Emotional. A “fit” response here in the darwinian hellscape, I grant that – but not a rational one. They are not the same scenarios at all.
Yes, there ARE insane antinatalists who insist that killing everybody off (and themselves) somehow addresses the problem. But the unstated major premise in their arguments is that death somehow produces a satisfaction state / relief to the harm of sentience. Their assessment is as delusional as yours.
Yes there are insane antinatalists who speak of “the unborn” as if such language described anything with a sake. Clearly they are mistaken.
Antinatalism: it would have been better none of us had ever been born. That is not, however, the situation we have. The lesson to learn is not to inflict the sentient predicament on new generations, and to fucking take care of each other, of what we can actually access in the forward light cone.
The solution to pain suffering and death cannot entail inflicting it on more people by breeding. It’s counterintuitive, but the evidence is there for us to see: procreation is the path to extinction. Not some kind of magical salvation. 99.9% of all species have gone extinct. Fossil sediment. That’s what darwinian evolution ultimately produces.
Not utopia. If you want that,you have to make it happen. And you can’t make it happen by breeding more dystopia.
Illogically, you aren’t even responding to my arguments here.
To get your conclusions, you have to ignore net good. Ignoring net good has all the consequences I lay out. You do not avoid those consequences with any of your legerdemain here. They remain, just as I demonstrated.
For example, you fail to get clear the distinction between saying antinatalists take a position (like wiping all life out and killing themselves) and antinatalists embracing a contradiction in their premises by not taking that position. The latter is my argument. I did not say antinatalists want to kill everyone and themselves, but that they maintain premises that entail they should, and when they abandon those premises, antinatalism goes with it. Hence there is no coherent antinatalism.
You repeat these same contradictory statements in your own attempt at a response, thus proving my point rather than answering it.
You either must accept the reality and value of net good, or deny it. But denying it entails no one’s life has any net good, not even your own. To avoid that conclusion requires abandoning that position and returning to affirming the existence and value of net good. But once you do that, all your antinatalist conclusions fail to follow. Catch-22. You cannot escape this crushing vice.
This is exactly what Christians do when they pretend the ‘abusive parent’ God knows best.
Pointing to the possibility for some harms to be relievable as an excuse to inflict them.
Does’t work, and clearly you know it when it comes to Christianity.
Imagine Alice ties Bob to a chair and abuses him for an hour. Then Alice stops for five hours (or any lenght of time, doesn’t matter).
Does this justify the beating? Does the fact that the harm might be relievable excuse or make the harm necessary?
Does the instrumental utility of being able to endure some range of pain and suffering somehow make pain and suffering not pain and suffering?
You write:
“You either must accept the reality and value of net good, or deny it. But denying it entails no one’s life has any net good, not even your own.”
There is no such thing as a “net good.” The concept is based on evolutionarily fit psychosis.
Hence the predicament of sentience.
Don’t complain to me about problems inflicted by natalists. That’s your problem, and one you have to try and justify.
Consider this:
What exactly is meant by “good” here?
It’s a benefit. It is always the relief of some privation.
State A: no sentience. It’s not missing out on anything, it is not a state of affairs which suffers. It is a state of affairs that cannot be benefitted.
Represent this state with 0.
Represent “harm” with negative numbers.
Repreesnt “benefit” with positive numbers.
Sentience cannot be instantiated without harm. It is nonconsensual, it is a state of striving for information to process even for those with relatively high self-reports of hedonic threshold.
In darwinian processes, nociception is almost always mediated by pain and suffering. And the process is naturally terminal. This is a cul-de-sac of increasingly diminishing returns on an investment one is forced to make, and yet cannot do without once the sentient “light” has been activated.
If we could go from 0 to +1 then we could have a “net good.”
We can’t, because the only thing interested in any benefit (“good”) is something in need/privation/harm-states. (represented by – numbers).
We have to harm first by instantiating sentience, and his immediately takes us into negative territory.
Even if there were an infinite afterlife of bliss represented by positive numbers, we must bias our sample set to omit the negative numbers in order to claim that the instantiation of sentience improved state A (non-sentience).
Presentism (philosophy of time) is false. So we cannot relieve sentience. Not even by dying. The claim that death somehow rescues us from the sentient predicament is like pointing to an empty room and saying “All the computers in the room are off.”
The asymmetery between harm and its relief requires, again, naturally-induced psychosis to deny (and no doubt you will keep denying it, despite the falsification of your claims.)
If you persist, don’t expect further reply from me. As, until you address these issues, you haven’t addressed antinatalism.
So how then does suicide or slaughter follow from this recognition? You don’t know. You haven’t made a sane argument for that at all.
Surely something like David Pearce’s abolitionist project, indefinite life extension, and some kind of robust nanotechnology follows as an attempt to ameliorate the sentient predicament as best as possible.
Symptom treatment may be the best we can do for those of us already born.
I genuinely respect and admire your work debunking other religious nonsense, especially that of Christianity.
Unfortunately, you’ve fallen for the most common religion of them all here: natalism.
You didn’t even listen to anything I said. Nothing you just wrote responds to it.
You are now officially wasting everyone’s time here.
If you continue to ignore what we say, you will be in violation of my comments policy and will be banned from commenting again on this blog. So please take this more seriously—or just stop trying.
Jackanapes: This is a gross strawman after you complained about them.
Your opposition is not saying, “Well, yeah, life is an unmitigated tragedy and constant pain all the time, but sometimes that gets mildly alleviated, in magical ways we can’t point to”. Your opposition is saying, “You are dishonestly only counting the bad parts of life and not the good. The good parts of life are not footnotes: they, plus benign experiences that don’t move the needle at all, overwhelm the bad. The bad is serious and for some people does eclipse any good, though even people considering ending their life from terminal illnesses actually still grapple with it because of things like fear and not wanting to hurt their family and not wanting to miss beautiful moments with their family even in their pain, but the vast majority of people are not dying of cancer or AIDs with a few months left to live”. So the comparison to Christian magical thinking is just dishonest.
And, no, a good is not a benefit of ending some privation. Take eating, for example. Do you know anyone who ever eats even though they aren’t painfully hungry at the moment? Because they, you know, like tasting food? When I taste an umami-rich eggy fried rice, I appreciate the fact that it reduces my hunger effectively not at all. I enjoy this new sensation. Again, your position hinges on trying to find some dishonest way to mathematically define away good experiences . Then you have the gall to say that mass murder doesn’t follow from your beliefs. Again, your position is effectively that all people are either in pain or about to be, and there is no other state . Yeah, that would arguably mandate mass assisted suicide, or at least exhorting everyone to die.
Then we get to the problem I brought up that you didn’t address. Non-sentience doesn’t really have a hedonic value of 0. It has a null hedonic value . It’s not comparable. Downthread you argue for doing the hypothetical comparisons, but you disingenuously defend this by pointing to cases where we test contrafactual scenarios all of which would accrue some state of real events . But non-existence isn’t that. A non-existence is not a state of events. It is a lack of that state. That’s why it’s meaningless to, for example, talk about consent. You’re not violating the right of a hypothetical person’s right to consent when you have a child, because hypothetical people don’t have that right . A non-existent person can’t have an opinion about existence any more (and in fact even less than) an amoeba can. You can’t ask them what they would prefer. And, as Richard pointed out to no response to you, there is precedent in such cases (such as an unconscious person with no sign of a DNR) that one assumes that such a person would think as the average person does. And that is to prefer living to non-living. Empirically.
Notice how, for all the guff you give about assessing hypotheticals, you never do that . You never actually count experiences, or try to refer to data. You point to the fact that all harms can potentially accrue to a living person and leave it at that. You don’t ever actually do empirical analysis, like Richard and I keep pointing to. That tells me that it’s a universal acid to your position. That your position cannot withstand empirical scrutiny . And you’re the one claiming to be strawmanned!
Think about it this way to try to maybe stir your benighted, broken empathy. Imagine a dear departed friend of yours having some beautiful moment with you once again. Maybe you had a view on a mountain that the two of you shared. I imagine you would give anything to be able to have that moment with your friend one more time. What do you think your now-passed friend would do ? If you really can’t imagine such a scenario, then maybe you’ve had an awful enough life that it shouldn’t have happened, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are there. But I don’t think you are, Jackanapes. I think you can get this.
Even saying that creating harm by instantiating sentience is nonsense. You think babies have no joy, dude? You think a fetus is in constant pain? The benefits of life always accrue. But, again, why should we count things the way you do? In the real world, we actually routinely accept that temporarily imposing pain onto someone in order to massively increase their total happiness in particular contexts is acceptable. If someone is about to get hit by a car and get mangled and die horribly, you may push them out of the way of the car even if it breaks your ankle and their arm! Because that would still be preferable to the last fearful gasps of someone dying horrifically, even without their consent . You put the issue this way because it lets you cheat. If you don’t get pleasure moment one of life, then all subsequent moments don’t count. Sorry, that’s bankrupt. You have to count life satisfaction across the life course. Knowing that you don’t do that tells me, again, that you know you’re full of crap.
Jackanapes: Have you read the philosophical literature on anti-natalism? If you do, you’ll see Richard is actually being exceedingly charitable. I argued similarly above until I read Benatar.
“All harms” aren’t inevitable. Every single person alive doesn’t get hit by depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, a tornado, a hurricane, and being dismembered by a lunatic. This is what Richard and other people responding to your position mean when they say that your position requires distorting the empirical evidence. Yes, all harms are possible to a person who is born, but not all will ever accrue, practically by sheer logic. And you count none of the good. Which is exactly the problem. Empirically, do most people live lives so worthless they’d kill themselves? No. We can tell because even in doldrums suicide rates are not that high.
Non-existence is not a meaningful state. Creation is not conversion. So the comparison cannot be made as meaningfully as state A or state B.
And how is it incoherent to say that “state A” can’t be improved upon? Fucking seriously?! Have you ever had an experience you would like to keep going but you had to leave because you were tired and had work or had another obligation or things were wrapping up? Non-existent people have a hedonic index of 0 for all possible non-experiences. It is nonsense to claim that the hedonic index of all possibly human experiences is 0 or less. It’s so wildly beyond what actual people experience that it suggests that your emotional commitment to pessimism and misanthropy warps basic understanding of the world.
Then you try to deny that mass murder doesn’t follow. But come on, dude. Your own premises are that there is nothing in life with a positive hedonic index. Death would be a mercy at that point.
And so when you bring up the insane anti-natalists, you don’t even bother explaining why they’re wrong. Because you can’t.
Your snide portrayal and lack of intellectual charity would be maybe okay if you’re right. You’re not.
Doesn’t matter.
The article begins with a straw man and a non-sequitur Richard should be ashamed of posting. He would (rightly so) not tolerate such from a theist.
“Antinatalism holds that being alive causes suffering, such that not being alive is better. This entails killing everyone, and yourself.”
This is akin to the strawman of atheism:
“Atheism holds that there is no god, so there is no meaning, such that we can do whatever we want. This entails killing everyone, and yourself.”
No.
Antinatalism observes that being alive causes suffering. IF any arbitrary state of “being alive” had never begun, such suffering would not have occurred.
It is a comparison between a hypothetical state of affairs and the real world (to our capacity to model/measure it).
It is the same thing we do in ANY moral reasoning when we learn from a tragedy: compare “if things had been different” so that the next time we encounter similar states of affairs or are faced with engaging in similar causal mechanisms, we can AVOID repeating the mistakes or causing the harms.
There is a fundamental difference between the harm of starting a life, and the options available to a life once one has been started. Though it is a harmful situation, because it is “a life” there is no way to solve the problem. For it to get relief of any of its symptoms, it must remain alive.
So the notion that observing the predicament of sentient things somehow entails killing everything off is psychopathic, psychotic, and may be one of the most unimaginative and glib non-sequiturs I’ve encountered.
It is natural and normal to social-signal that non-sequitur. I don’t doubt that (I’ve done it myself in our relative past).
It is not rational.
Again, I write all this with genuine respect to Richard Carrier for their keen work debunking religious nonsense. It’s unfortunate (but normal) that those sharp skills have failed us on this particular subject.
Jackanapes, you are just slinging insults, repeating the same refuted assertions, and not responding to anything we are telling you.
You are just a broken record at this point. Which suggests to me you are not capable of rational conversation.
If ever you become rational again, simply read what I just wrote already: it already refutes everything you just repeated above.
Dude, Jackanapes, seriously. I’ve already addressed this. Richard isn’t strawmanning anyone just because he’s not talking to you. This is a mistake I keep seeing on the Internet and it needs to stop. A strawman of a large school or position is only that if a person never addresses the strongest case and implies that no such case exists, and if such a case is in fact readily available. It’s a pretty hard claim to make as compared to strawmanning a person. This is what flat Earthers and Israel Only nutters and all sorts of other cranks do: Claim that you are strawmanning them because you didn’t reply to their very specific version of the argument. Richard cites sources like Benatar who really do make the kind of bad arguments he is rebutting here.
Again, upthread I steelmanned antinatalists as best as I could, and Richard and I still came to the same conclusion. If you have some radically different point to make, then just make it.
So you say, “No.
Antinatalism observes that being alive causes suffering. IF any arbitrary state of “being alive” had never begun, such suffering would not have occurred.”. Right. And going outside means that you could get rained on. Of course, you could also not get rained on. Absolute harm avoidance is childish. Harm mitigation and benefit maximization is how rational people behave. So, yes, we all agree that non-existent people can’t suffer. That’s not enough to establish anti-natalism. If that’s all anti-natalism is, then anti-natalism is tautologically trivial.
The point is that we’re doing exactly what you talked about: comparing the actual fucking harms . And when you do that honestly, anti-natalism cannot be empirically defended. Because, and I cannot stress enough that this level of argumentation was launched at Benatar and other anti-natalists because their position sucks this bad, not all things that humans experience are bad . This is as basic as it gets. So one would need to count the average (and maybe bottom and top quintile or something) hedonic index of a person. It’s dishonest to only count liabilities and not assets. And when one counts the average experiences that people have, even in awful situations, most people do not lament living. So, again, unless anti-natalism reduces to something like “Don’t have a child during an active famine where the child will just pointlessly die and suffer to a probability approaching 1”, there is no argument to discuss.
You didn’t address any of this. You just repeated what we all agree on: you have to actually count the hypotheticals. And that means you have to do that . Not just pay lip service to doing it. You need to look at, say, how many people would commit suicide if it caused no harm to anyone else and could be done painlessly. When you find that number is empirically always very low, you see that anti-natalism can’t be justified.
Even by your own accounting, Richard isn’t strawmanning. He disagrees with anti-natalists on the very modeling you’ve discussed. I really think you need to reread the article more charitably and then try to make a more specific objection.
No, Richard, the article is beneath your standards of excellence, and you should retract it immediately.
You’ll delete my comments only because they falsify humans’ psychopathic excuses for procreation.
I have offered 0 insult, only description. That you feel insulted by an honest account of the sentient predicament is hardly the falsification of it.
It’s that simple.
Lol. Sorry, that’s not how the internet works. And hypnotic mind control doesn’t exist as a thing. Least of all by text. You can’t eliminate facts by assertion. Nor command others’ obedience to your silly demands. Good luck in your irrational life.
Hey, Jack. Are you going to concede you’re wrong when he didn’t delete your comments?
No?
Maybe that means that you actually were just being a jerk?
Just sayin’.
“Maybe that means you were actually just being a jerk? Just saying.”
This completely ignores the fact that he just said he has respect for Richard for writing against religion. Lol.
Embarrassing. Just embarrassing.
Sorry, I don’t watch random rambling videos. Can you explain why that video pertains here and what we are supposed to know about it or why we should bother watching it?
Ah, yes, so many awesome red flags!
“They say a bunch of words and use a bunch of jargon”. Translation: The argument is actually nuanced and complex, and requires some background knowledge, and the person isn’t insulting me by dumbing it down, and I’m emotionally invested in not liking them or their position for whatever reason, so I’m just going to complain that they took time! Never mind that if they didn’t take the time I’d make some lame “gotcha” that isn’t actually a response and then complain when they pointed that out!
“They’re really stupid” and “[Daniel Dennett] is a moron”. Translation: I have a woobie and I don’t like to extend intellectual charity to people who disagree with me!
Sam Harris annihilated free will? By essentially not even addressing compatibilism and just by arguing that it changes the topic when in fact compatibilists are arguing that it’s libertarian free will that is changing the topic?
And then he never actually shows what he disagrees with Richard specifically on. It looks like he got mad that Richard is a compatibilist and then ranted about a bunch of topics.
I do agree that most anti-natalists fail to create a coherent argument because most of them rely on a version of negative utilitarianism that would entail them killing all humans alive today.
Obviously, most of them think that this is evil so they end up condemning the act of killing every member of the human race which results in them creating an incoherent argument. That being said, I do think that it is possible for anti natalists to both condemn the act of killing all humans while also believing that it’s immoral to procreate without contradicting themselves. The negative utilitarian FAQ makes a non contradictory case for antinatalism. While the FAQ itself doesn’t explicitly endorse anti-natalism, it’s clear that based on the beliefs of the FAQ’s author(s), they would endorse it in theory. That being said, I still think that their case is terrible and can’t be honestly defended.
Basically, the FAQ argues that rather than thinking of negative utility as suffering, they argue that negative utility should be thought of as the thwarting of one’s preferences. Thus, the more negative utility one has, the more of one’s preferences have been thwarted. Suffering would in this case be one manner in which one would have one’s preferences thwarted. However, death would also be a manner in which one’s preferences would be thwarted since death would obviously prevent a person from being able to realize or indulge in any preferences they had before death such as their long term goals. This would mean that this version of negative utilitarianism(which the authors of the FAQ dub negative preference utilitarianism or NPU) would condemn the mass killing of humans.
However, this then brings up the obvious issue that allowing humans to live and procreate would create future human beings that would inevitably suffer/die and get their preferences thwarted. The FAQ correctly argues that NPU would entail that it’s better for the human race(and perhaps all forms of life) to become extinct to prevent preferences from being thwarted. Anti-natalism is the only method by which the long term preferences of existing humans could be fulfilled while preventing the preferences of potential future humans from being thwarted. The FAQ doesn’t directly state that antinatalism is the solution to the extinction issue but it’s pretty clear that the sections following the author’s discussion of human extinction are meant to be counterarguments against any objections to antinatalism. Unfortunately, this is where the author cocks up completely and stops offering any valuable ethical insights.
If you think Belshaw’s response to his Martian thought experiment was stupid and reeked of insanity, wait till hear from this author that it’s better to not bring into a world where all individuals are living in 99% ideal conditions. The author argues that , “ how life will go as a whole changes nothing for all the consciousness-moments that are in misery. Given a reductionist view on personal identity – a “person” is just a grouping of consciousness-moments according to some degree of spatio-temporal proximity and/or causal dependence and/or qualitative similarity and/or memory referencing – it would be discriminatory to treat consciousness-moments differently merely because they belong to a particular person-cluster.” The first reason why this argument is terrible is because it’s nearly a tautology and pretty much dodges the objection of the author’s critics. Obviously, the net amount of utility a person will experience over their lifetime cannot get rid of any moments of suffering that said person will endure. Of course, the author could argue that we ought not be “biased” towards individual “persons” and focus our efforts on preventing the conscious moments that comprise “people”. After all, it would be equally mistaken to argue that one should place the well being of a corporation over the well being of the employees that comprise the corporation. Unfortunately, by doing this, the author makes his entire argument completely incoherent because if the author’s goal is to prevent conscious moments from suffering, then he ought to believe that all existing humans should be killed in order to prevent any future conscious moments from potentially suffering. After all, non-existent conscious moments can’t suffer if they will never exist. This neatly segues to the second issue which is that conscious moments are just what a conscious was/is like during a certain brief period of time and not some subunit that comprises a larger whole like a person. Arguing that a person is composed of conscious moments is equivalent to arguing that a car is made up of all the different locations that the car was located in throughout its history. You can argue that a person is made of cells, issues, organs etc. that all work together to produce an organism capable of suffering and possessing a consciousness but you can’t argue that a person is made up of the various conditions that their consciousness was in throughout the person’s life which is obviously nonsense. The author then tries to use a seperate thought experiment to demonstrate that creating new life is immoral by arguing that if we are unwilling to bring into existence a world that has a 99% chance of being a perfect utopia for its inhabitants and a 1% chance of being a nightmarish hell, then it should also be immoral to bring people into a world that is 99% ideal for every living being. The author attempts to justify this argument by claiming ,“Utilitarians are risk-neutral and place no intrinsic value on how experiences are distributed among individuals, so there should be no difference in theory.”, This is completely and utterly wrong. The 1st world with 99% ideal conditions has a 0% chance of being a nightmarish hell while the 2nd world has a 1% chance of being a nightmarish hell. The latter is infinitely more probable than the former so any utilitarian with any shred of moral dignity ought to choose the 1st world. This is because any action that is guaranteed to increase net utility(like creating the first world) should be done while any action that has a significant probability of drastically causing a net decrease in utility ought to be avoided. The author is completely thus completely mistaken in believing that his 2nd thought experiment shows that utilitarianism implies that people have no imperative to create new life. Also, any individual that is indifferent to risk cannot call themselves a utilitarian because they obviously don’t care about net utility being possibly reduced.
This is extremely idiotic and something I would expect someone strawmanning utilitarianism to claim, not from someone trying to defend a form of utilitarianism. This is when it became clear to me that whoever wrote the FAQ was clearly morally bankrupt and had no right to claim that they were a utilitarian. I skimmed through the rest of the FAQ and the author later ditched defending NPU and just started defending regular NU and later went full Cthulhu cult mode, seriously arguing that it was virtuous to exterminate the human race to prevent suffering.
I would just stop at the simple fact that if thwarting a future hypothetical loss of preference-realizations is bad enough to act to prevent, then so is thwarting future hypothetical preference-realizations. The same reasoning thus entails the opposite conclusion: you should want there to be more humans, not less, and to always be humans, not none, simply to have more preference realizations; otherwise, you are acting to thwart future preference-realizations, the very thing you are supposed to be claiming is so bad you should act to stop.
It’s thus not possible to construct any coherent form of anti-natalism, not by any attempted legerdemain like this. It just ends up creating more premises that entail the opposite conclusion.
This is why it seems certain no one is an anti-natalist because of reasoning. They want to be for some irrational emotional reason. Then they build elaborate, poorly-analyzed ideological constructs to convince themselves their position is rational, and thus hide from their real reasons.
What a terrible and horrible response. The author of the FAQ obviously doesn’t believe that humans are literally physically made of periods of time or different states of existence. The author is instead arguing that any individual human that exists right now will disappear once their satisfaction state sufficiently changes. Thus, any historical individual like George Washington that we erroneously believe to be george washington is really just a massive collection of separate persons that we happen to group into a person cluster called “George Washington”. If you bring into existence any person cluster, you also going to cause persons to also suffer for their entire existence. If you believe that its immoral to make people happy off the backs of other peoples suffering, then you logically have to be against bringing a person cluster into existence since the only way that the happy persons in said clusters can be happy is if the unhappy persons in the cluster are made to suffer by making them exist. You seem to have a naive physicalist view of personhood in which case you really ought to check out Derik Parfits work on personal identity. Since I know you are too dishonest to read his work, consider this simple thought experiment that Parfit made. If I gradually replace all the cells in your brain with brain cells from a clone until your brain has been replaced, then you must logically believe that you have died and replaced by a clone who now controls the rest of your body. If you object, then you are contradicting yourself since your body is no longer made up of the same cells. If you agree, then its clear that a “person” isn’t just made up of physical matter.
I think you’ve lost the plot.
Your response isn’t even addressing the issues, but inventing new ones, as if by distraction.
Holly Jesus, what a massive failure of critical thinking and basic biology education. The fact that you believe that organisms like human beings(i.e. a person) will cease to exist and get “replaced” by another operson when most of the matter that comprise them right now no longer comprises their body at a future point in time is both incredibly sad and hilarious. The biggest difference between organisms and inanimate objects is that living organisms are a Self organizing system that is autocatylic , able to maintain a distinct form by itself, and continuously absorb new materail/energy and expel waste material or energy. Arguing that living beings cease to exist when their bodies are made of enough different matter is like arguing that a high school anime club will “disappear” and be “replaced” by a new one every four years because all the members will eventually graduate and get replaced by new students. Doing so ignores the fact that things like organisms and school clubs are actually systems and thus not entirely dependent on the constitution of physical components because systems are by definition just a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. They do not need to be made of the same components for their entire existence as they derive their existence from a clearly distinguishable, unique group of elements that are behaving according to some detectable rules that work together to create a whole greater than the sum of their parts. Failing to regonize the existence of organisms as systems is a massive error that empty individualists like you make whenever you guys claim that fearing non-existence is irrational, our justice system is just a massive scapegoating system , or that people cease to exist due to a change in their satisfaction state. If your account of personhood was true, then there shouldn’t be any massive difference between a “person” ceasing to exist because they went from being in pain to being happy and a person ceasing to exist because they got vaporized which there obviously is. Appealing to the psychological view of human identity also won’t rescue your position because the psychological view also largely views human identity as just a system of mental elements that come together to create a unique mental pattern with a causal history. You should really check out the current literature on the ontology of biological organisms or the current state of the debate on personal identity instead of just spending your time reading the quora or blog posts of terrible philosophers like David Pearce. Richard is right, you’ve really lost the plot.
“I would just stop at the simple fact that if thwarting a future hypothetical loss of preference-realizations is bad enough to act to prevent, then so is thwarting future hypothetical preference-realizations.”
I’m kind of confused by what you mean. Are you saying that if your goal is to maximize the amount of preferences realized or the number of preferences that can possibly be realized, then you ought to ensure that hypothetical future preferences ought to be prevented from being thwarted. If so, then I would agree. Preventing preferences from being thwarted is the same thing as saying that you want to maximize the amount of preferences that are realized or can possibly be relized. Since the latter two options cannot occur if preferences are prevented from existing, then you ought to ensure that future humans are brought into existence so antinatalism should be a no go for you.
That being said, the author does attempt to address this arguement by arguing that the purpose of ethics should be concerned with existing people, not potential people. To roughly paraphrase the author, we should make people happy, not happy people. The author attempts to justify this assertion by pointing to the various repugnant conclusions that have been come accross by philosophers debating population ethics. Unfortunately, this is a case where the author erroneously thinks that the solutions to a problem(what should the nature of the future human population be like)are worse than the problem so we shouldn’t bother addressing the problem(ie, not apply ethics to hypothetical future people). This is extremely dumb and a massive failure.
Hi richard,
While I do think that antinatalists that attempt to utilize negative utilitarianism to justify their views fail and are incoherent, I don’t think that indicates that all antinatalists are incoherent. A lot of antiantalists I’ve seen justify their views using deontology so they think making someone be nonexistent by killing them is inherently wrong while making someone be nonexistent by preventing their births isn’t. Of course, their views are still subject to the normal critiques that most cranky deontological beliefs are susceptible to but it doesn’t mean that they are incoherent in the sense that their views entail them supporting a position that they currently don’t.
I already address that version (“you can’t get antinatalism on a deontological approach”). There is no way to build a coherent deontological justification like that (this was part of my point in my previous comment).
The problem always arises when you have to explain “why” it is “good” to prevent people living. It is also a problem when you also have to simultaneously explain “why” it is “good” to not be alive and yet “bad” to stop life. The latter is also a problem. But you can’t get around it to the conclusion by any device, because you are still then stuck with the first problem.
So the negative utility problem is that “life is better than death” contradicts “death is better than life.” But this problem exists even without negative utility. You can’t get to “death is better than life” and still argue “life is better than death” so as to defend refraining from killing. But you also simply can’t get to “death is better than life.” That premise is simply provably false—without an argument from negative utility. And round and round it goes.
True, but that’s only if they make preventing births and stopping murders overt deontological principles. They could argue that creating life makes the worse by a certain amount and that the long life of a person cancels out a lot but not all of the “bad” created by their birth. For example, they could argue that giving birth to a person makes the world suffer -100 units of “badness” and that all humans who endure some amount of suffering will create less than 100 units of goodness over the course of their lives which will cancel out a lot but not all of the badness caused by their birth. This would imply that giving births is bad while also implying that killing someone before their natural death is bad since you are preventing them from maximizing the amount of goodness their life creates and thus increasing the amount of badness that their life fails to cancel out.
No, there is no way to get that conclusion without negative utility. Without negative utility, life is net good, and there is then no way to get to “we should prevent it.”
You can’t get there with “less” utility arguments. If there is no negative utility, there is no way to get to the principle that we should prevent life.
If you think anti natalism is incoherent, then you must also logically believe it’s incoherent for people to think that killing children born from rape is wrong while also believing that their mothers shouldn’t have been raped since that would logically entail them also believing that rape children should have never existed. After all, this implies that they believe that making the children be in a state of nonexistence by preventing the rape of their mothers is good while also believing that making the children be in a state of nonexistence by killing them is bad. According to your logic, people who have these beliefs must be incoherent since they are somehow believing that nonexistence is good and bad at the same time. Simply counterarguing that the children were created from unwanted suffering simply won’t justify the latter belief since that would also imply that saving a person’s life at the cost of causing a random person to suffer without their consent (like causing them to get raped) is bad and should never be done, no matter how little pain or anguish they feel. In other words, you would have to argue that people have no right to exist if their existence entails causing any amount of suffering to anyone else.
I fail to see any applicable analogy.
There is no reason to think children conceived from rape (as persons) should not exist. There is also no reason they should either (that’s a fallacy: mothers choose whether to manufacture a person or not based on their own utility functions).
So there simply is no connection between how a child is conceived and whether it should be brought to term. That decision hinges on the same factors as any other children. Any social stigma attaching to “children conceived by rape” is simply irrational an thus can form no premise in any logical argument. So it’s simply false.
Since there is no reason to prevent a “child conceived in rape” being born merely because they were so conceived (there can be many other reasons, same as with anyone), there is no analogy to antinatalism, which does require such irrational values. An antinatalist would have to irrationally say a “child conceived in a rape” should not exist because their life would be a net bad and thus they are better off not being alive. Which is simply false. Which is why antinatalism is false. My entire article establishes that. So go back and read it.
It is only additionally the case that antiatalism is incoherent. Because it can only become coherent by endorsing mass murder: because it holds that it is better to be dead than alive, it should “mercy kill” everyone, producing a net good.
When antinatalists balk and say “but that would be bad,” they can give no rational or coherent argument why it would be bad. They can’t appeal to the value of people alive now staying alive, as that would entail it is false that they are better off dead, which destroys antinatalism entirely.
Q.E.D.
I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. By “shouldn’t exist”, I didn’t mean that the mothers shouldn’t have kept the child but that the child shouldn’t have been conceived in the first place. If you believe that the mother shouldn’t have been raped, then you must also believe that the child shouldn’t have existed as the child would’ve never been conceived if the childs mother wasn’t raped. It doesn’t matter if the childs mother decided to keep her rapists child. You can’t keep the child of your rapist if you were never raped in the first place. Anyone arguing that a woman shouldn’t have been raped is also indirectly arguing that any rape child that she gave birth to shouldn’t have existed. To deny doing so would require one to claim that there was nothing wrong with the manner in which the child was conceived which would contradict ones beliefs about the immorality of rape. If one believes that the child shouldn’t have existed, then according to your logic, they would be incoherent if they also thought it was wrong to kill the child.
As for William Zhao, your approach is interesting but I fear that it is too vague to be of any real use. How would you determine if something is a primary value scale and what is not one? Also, what happens if your primary value scale has a big problem? You didn’t explicitly say so but it seems like you are a traditional utilitarian. If that’s the case, then do you think it would be right to cause a few individuals immense suffering so that the majority of people can feel immense amounts of pleasure? Your value scale system seems way too niche and specific to handle most moral conundrums and only specifically tailored to address the issue that I raised in this thread which is why do you guys think its coherent to believe that human nonexistence is bad and should be prevented yet also believe that its impermissible to force people to reproduce as much as possible so that as many people as possible can exist and experience a worthwhile life (even if their lives are barely worthwhile). The latter belief would seem to imply that human existence is bad (even if you experience a net positive amount of utility) which conflicts with your former belief that human nonexistence is bad and should be prevented.
You have gone so far off topic at this point there is no need to reply. Get back on point.
The facts remain: you can’t simultaneously hold that it is better to be dead than alive and it is better to be alive than dead; and you can’t empirically defend the premise that it is better to be dead than alive.
All antinatalism falls to either or both of those facts. There is no escape. And you have offered none. Just false analogies and impertinent assertions.
I fail to see how my analogy is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The point that I was trying to make with it is that if you’re going to claim that antinatalism is incoherent, then you must also believe that it’s incoherent to believe that bad things(like the rape) that made it possible for current individuals to exist shouldn’t have occurred yet also believe that the people that can only exist today because of said bad events have the right to exist. Doing so requires one to believe that the world would be better off without their existence yet also believe that they make the world better by existing so they shouldn’t be killed.
Also, I know by “death”, you probably mean human nonexistence but given the amount of times that you claim that antinatalists simultaneously believe that life is better than death and death is better than life, I want to make sure that human nonexistence is what you really mean by death. Otherwise, your argument would be false as death is by definition when a living thing ceases to exist. Something that never lives cannot die as a thing must be alive at one point in order to die. Antinatalists just want to stop human life from existing in the first place so they don’t want dead people, only nonexistent people which is why you think their beliefs are incoherent as that would entail them desiring to end the existence of every person alive right now in order to make them nonexistent.
No, we are not committed to any of the weird things you are saying about abortion ethics. There is simply no analogy there either. I’ve explained this already.
There is no relevant link between what I think of rape and what I think of abortion. There is no logical connection between rape and having an abortion. And abortion is an individual decision about the use of one’s own body and assuming their own responsibility for creating a person; it is not a social concern about mass extinction or propagation.
There is no connection here to either the principle “it is better to be dead than alive” or the principle “it is better to be alive than dead.”
There is therefore no analogy here whatsoever to antinatalism.
My analogy was never about abortion. The point that I’ve been trying to make is that once you make the reason why some believe something broad enough, you can always claim that they’re incoherent because there’s always going to be some belief that conflicts with said reason. For example, you can make the case that people who think that causing death is bad yet think that giving birth isn’t bad are incoherent. Giving birth to someone ultimately means guaranteeing their death since people aren’t immortal and will inevitably die. The counterfactual proves that this must be the case. If someone like Lincoln was never born, then they would have never died. The point I’ve been trying to make is that you can consider anyones beliefs to be incoherent if you try hard enough so “incoherency” can’t be the standard by which you judge which beliefs are right or wrong.
You did not make that point at all.
I think you have confused yourself.
Now you are using even worse false analogies. Childrens’ “inevitable” deaths are not “caused” by mothers and fathers. Nor is it anything they want. It is not in their value system that “Children should die.” Their death is a tragic consequence of forces beyond their control.
This bears zero analogy to Antinatalism, which by definition wishes them dead.
Rational people (as in, people who aren’t antinatalists) weigh the net positive utility of any life produced. That utility is not negated by their death, so that they will die is irrelevant to the assessment. The difference between getting to have lived and not can be considerable. But only if the number and situations of births are kept within resource-means.
Hence that is a decision people have to make for themselves: do they want to exhaust their lives and resources on making new people; or indeed, even can they. They are not morally compelled to do that. Doing so is only supererogatory, not mandatory; “good,” not “required.” There is no incoherence in this. It is perfectly coherent. And perfectly rational.
Whereas “No one should have children because all children are better off dead than alive” is simply a false belief (that is simply not a true statement about children); and holding that false belief at the same time as believing “No one should kill children because they are better off alive than dead” is holding an incoherent belief as well.
You are not even touching at this defect. Your false analogies are irrelevant to it.
Richard, you’ve just given me the means to make antinatalism coherent. Many antinatalists like me only see having children as antisuperagatory, meaning that it’s “bad” but not something people are required to refrain from doing. If it’s coherent to believe that it’s very bad to kill someone but only superagtory to give birth to someone, then you have to consider the beliefs of most antinatalists to be coherent. The antinatalists that do think not having children is required only make up a minority of the overall antinatalist community and their beliefs,like forcing all pregnant women to get abortions, are not shared by most antinatalists. Your claim that antinatalists are incoherent, at best, only applies to a small number of antinatalists and is thus a big misrepresentation of what most antinatalists believe.
That is simply repeating both fallacies.
First, it’s false. There is no way to get to “bad” in either sense without “being dead is better than being alive.” And that premise is false.
You thus can’t escape that problem.
And that statement contradicts the premise “being alive is better than being dead” that you require to argue against killing everyone. So you can’t coherently claim all you mean is that it is antisuperagatory. That simply repeats the contradiction.
I’ve been getting Nonce errors whenever I post comments on google chrome. Only Firefox seems to work on my PC.
Try clearing cookies and history and refreshing.
I’d also like to add that even if you “strengthen” your analogy to use children born from women forced to have babies like the handmaid’s from the handmaid’s tale, your thought experiment still doesn’t prove that believing forcing women to have children is bad and killing the children of those women is bad is incoherent.
In fact, even if you went the whole 9 yards and accused us of being incoherent for believing we shouldn’t be forcing everyone to reproduce until we end up in Derek Parfit’s repugnant world where the human population is so big that every person lives a barely worthwhile life, you still would be wrong. This is because any net max utility value can come from numerous different population makeups. It came come from some happy people or a lot of barely happy people.
Since there are different possible ways to achieve max net utility, you need other value scales to determine what methods to use for determining which population distributions are preferable. In my opinion, populations where peoples’ consent are respected as much as possible are better than those that don’t even if they all have the same max net utility a group of people can have.
Antinatalism on the other hand doesn’t enjoy such a defense because it doesn’t even have a coherent primary value system like utility that is always used first when determining what should occur. Antinatalists argue that future humans shouldn’t exist which implies that they believe that life has disvalue yet they inveigh against ending the lives of existing people which implies that they believe that human life has value.
Since they have no coherent primary value system, no secondary value system can justify their beliefs and fix the contradiction in their primary value system as any of the principles in their primary value system would by definition override conflicting principles in their secondary value system. Antinatalists are thus incoherent and can’t legitimately defend their position.
Hi Richard,
While I do disagree with David Benatar on many things and I think it’s shame that he’s become the face of antinatalism since some of his well known arguments are bad or too easily misinterpreted, I don’t think your blog post is the take down of antinatalism that you think it is. While I do vehemently object to your claim that antinatalists are incoherent, I have no interest in debating that particular claim as too many people upthread have already argued with you on that issue so I don’t think it’s very productive to continue debating that particular topic. The main argument I want to contest today is your argument that David Benatar(and other antinatalists by implication) is delusional for believing that the risk of a person living an unworthwhile,miserable life is enough to justify not bringing anyone into existence. I believe that you are interpreting Benatar too uncharitably since I don’t think he’s insinuating that all people are worse off being born but that when the right to have children is universalized, it is simply a statistical inevitability that miserable people who live bad lives will eventually be brought into existence. This is what me,Benatar, and most other antinatalists really mean by “we shouldn’t have been born”. It’s not that we believe that being not alive is better than being alive and thus should desire suicide but we realize we couldn’t have existed and experienced “goodness” without inevitably some other people ending up having a miserable life. We thus realize that we and all of the pleasures and freedoms we experience have effectively existed at the expense of a few unlucky individuals being made miserable by unfortunately being given a miserable life via their birth. In order for them to have never experienced or continue to experience a miserable life, everyone on earth today or in the past had to have not been born. Most other antinatalists like me thus consider human procreation to be very immoral and no different in principle from the torture of a few to benefit of the many or preventing raped women from getting abortions so the fetus’s inside of them can turn into people who then experience massive amounts of pleasure over the course of their lives. We thus believe that happy, content future people have no right to exist because they can only exist if miserable people are also brought into existence alongside them. This is akin to acknowledging that while Auschwitz today is a valuable museum that provides lots of value to both visitors and the employees working there so it shouldn’t be demolished, it’s still a place that only existed because of the Holocaust and thus shouldn’t have existed so we ought to ensure that similar places like Auschwitz do not arise in the future,even if they were to provide value after they stopped being used as concentration camps. I now will address 2 other counterarguments that you brought up during your critique of benatar.
1.It’s wrong to restrict some activity just because it has a small risk of causing someone else harm
This argument fails because it assumes that the risk of suffering occuring goes down when such an activity is restricted so the only reason why we would object to such restrictions is that they decrease pleasure which proves that antinatalists like me believe that pleasure can sometimes indeed trump the risk of causing suffering. Once again, you only look at the consequences from the perspective of a single individual and not the societal effects once such a restriction is universalized. With your leaving the house example, it’s quite obvious that if everyone was not allowed outside, then food production and transportation would become impossible since farmers and truck drivers couldn’t leave their homes. The odds that everyone would eventually starve to death would skyrocket so everyone would be more likely worse off in terms of suffering. A more analogous reducto would be if strict gun regulations that you support were enforced throughout the entire US. While such regulations would rob many people of the ability to shoot high power weapons, neuter the thriving American firearm industry, and make a ton of libertarians feel like they’ve had their rights infringed, it’s clear that you would support such measures because the suffering such regulations prevent would ethically outweigh the pleasures they thwart. Your argument thus fails to refute Benatar’s claim.
2.Giving Birth doesn’t cause Suffering
This argument fails for the same reason that the popular anti gun control argument that people kill people and guns themselves fails. The issue with the latter argument is that it assumes that people are only shot because of the actions of the others and not the result of other factors that made such an occurrence possible. If you make a possibility exist for long enough or on a large enough scale, that possibility is going to become an actuality somewhere at some time. This is why it makes sense to blame lax gun regulations for mass shootings because if enough transactions of dangerous guns are allowed to occur frequently enough, then it’s simply inevitable that a bad guy is going to get ahold of a powerful firearm and cause a mass shooting. Just because it’s the mass shooter’s decision to ultimately carry out a mass shooting doesn’t mean that we can’t also blame lax gun laws. Lax gun laws always ensure that it’s a statistical certainty that some other bad guy would’ve eventually got their hands on a dangerous gun and thus committed a mass shooting if the mass shooter did not carry out his plans. This logic equally applies to allowing people to be created. If enough people are born, then some of those individuals are going to live a miserable, unworthily life. Human procreation thus ensures the existence of miserable people which is why we antinatalists believe that it should be stopped.
If you can address these 3 points in a successful manner, then I’ll admit defeat.
I find that when cranks can’t respond to what you have said their replies get more and more elaborate, respond less and less yet purport to be answering, yet become more and more verbose, until they evolve into complete time-wasting word-walls.
This is what you have just descended to. Nothing here responds to anything we’ve actually said. You are now just wasting everyone’s time.
I found a recent paper that claims to have found a new argument for anti natalism.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-of-healthcare-ethics/article/imposing-a-lifestyle-a-new-argument-for-antinatalism/D31CFBA4E8BB207D7C24A68E415A8AB0
I didn’t read most of it but they cited your blog article(this particular one) so it seems that they have attempted to respond to your particular claim of anti natalism being incoherent.
I’ll take a look when I get a chance, but at a glance it appears founded on fallacious reasoning such as “because euthanasia is sometimes justified, therefore no one’s being alive is better than being dead,” which is simply a non sequitur.
I have also found a paper that defends the new version of consent argument for antinatalism.
https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/esploro/outputs/9913048207691
Here is the conclusion of that paper:
That commits the same fallacies.
Since, in actual fact, being alive is better than being dead, procreation is relevantly like saving a life. And therefore the attempt here to trivialize it as merely some enhancement to someone already living fails. And it fails because of the antinatalist dependence on the same false premise: that being dead is better than being alive. Which false premise would justify killing people, contrary to the antinatalist’s insistence to the contrary.
Their reversion to consent only exposes this fact: if you have to ask someone’s consent, you are admitting they might like being alive more than being dead. You are therefore acknowledging your premise is false.
Otherwise, even the trivialization fails, because we give gifts to people without their consent all the time. That is not “immoral.” The only taboo is to give someone a gift they can’t divest themselves of, which does not apply to life (if life actually were so bad, it is easily exited, which is the entire basis of euthanasia). Hence on that, as usual, the antinatalist conflates genuine doom (actually justified euthanasia or self-sacrifice) with false beliefs (such as a depressed person killing themselves because of a false belief about their future or their available alternatives). Which is typical of antinatalism: contrafactual and illogical.
Hi Richard,
What’s your opinion on the argument that the unborn cannot be deprived of anything because they don’t exist and thus actually can’t be deprived of anything because they aren’t people yet. Most antinatalists use the following definition of deprive: to remove or withhold something from the enjoyment or possession of (a person or persons). They thus argue that it’s impossible for the unborn to be harmed/deprived of anything via the prevention of their births so there’s no problem preventing their births (since they can’t be deprived of anything due to them not being people yet) while existing people can be harmed via murder as murders deprive them of their existence. Do you think this argument is valid or is it just a semantic trick?
That doesn’t solve their problem.
The only reason people can be harmed by murder is that it is better to be alive than dead. Antinatalism requires adopting the opposite premise, that it is better to be dead than alive. That makes killing equal to euthanasia (a moral act of compassion), not murder (deprivation of goods).
In other words, if it is better to be dead than alive, killing does not effect any deprivation of goods. To the contrary, it increases the good. Like giving someone money rather than taking it away.
The fault is in the premise “it is better to be dead than alive.” That premise is simply false. And since it is false, so is Antinatalism.
All attempts to get around this fail.
One should also note negligence of perspective is also a fault in Antinatalism. The reason euthanasia requires the informed and competent consent of the killed is that only they can reliably assess the relative value of their continued life.
Outsiders can’t tell them what they feel or should think about their own lives; they can offer advice as to how to determine that, but they cannot dictate the result, any more than an outsider can tell you the sky is green when you yourself are looking at it and it’s blue. Only you have reliable access to your own internal perspective (certainly in the face of irreversible error).
Antinatalists reject this, and declare everyone’s life a net evil, completely disregarding every individual’s own perspective. They don’t even want to ask what future generations think about being brought into existence. Because their core premise entails those people can never give them a correct or true answer; life is just always a net evil, evidence be damned.
Antinatalists are thus in effect the ultimate gaslighters.
Hi Richard,
I think I finally figured out why antiantalists do not see themselves as incoherent. The biggest issue is that they constantly abuse the motte and bailey fallacy depending on what claim they want to defend. For example, when challenged as to why it’s okay to prevent future people from being born without their consent, they almost always claim that the question itself is invalid because it presupposes that future people already exist when they obviously don’t. Here, it’s quite obvious that they are interpreting the term “future people” in the narrow sense as in an actual group of people that are alive in the present whose consent was violated. However, when they need to make the case for why bringing future people into existence is unethical, they will usually resort to some kind of argument about how children are brought into the world without their consent and why that’s immoral. Here, they obviously use the term “future people” in the broad sense to indicate the fact that people obviously cannot receive consent from their children if none of them exist in the world yet. I realized that antinatalists frequently engage in this tactic when I challenged a few of them to explain how I would not be worse off being prevented from existing or becoming alive without being consulted. They all argued that my claim was invalid because if I never existed, then there would’ve been no “me” in this world that could be made worse off or not consulted and that the question itself was akin to asking if the current king of france is bald. I then pointed out this undermined their justification for why procreation because they(as in the antiantalists I was speaking to) didn’t exist during or before their creation so there was no “them” in the world whose consent was violated or harmed when their parents decided to have children. This basically sent them into a rage so they shifted their interpretation of “unborn people” back to the broad sense in order to rant about how their parents harmed them.
Good catch. You are right, that equivocation fallacy has come up more than once here; even if not explicitly, implicitly enough.
-:-
It’s ironic because there is a sense in which “having children” would be unethical if the world worked differently than it does (but it doesn’t, so it isn’t); but even in that alternative world, making “future people” would not require “having children,” and consent-seeking could be made readily available (see How Not to Live in Zardoz).
Moreover, this alternative world is achievable: we are likely to get there within a few hundred years (barring setbacks, which would only extend the timeline, not end it). Antinatalists tend to ignore the prospect of human-driven improvement in our conditions. If you sent them back in time a thousand years, and showed everyone they spoke to what kinds of lives would be accessible to them now (and will be to their descendants), they’d laugh the antinatalist’s argument right out of court. And that’s with a relatively small improvement in conditions, compared to where we could get to yet still.
When faced with the options “burn it to the ground” or “make it better” rational people choose the latter, having seen that it works, even if slowly (as history has shown us clearly for thousands of years). Antinatalists are just emotionally stuck on the former. Hence they must resort to fallacies to maintain their position.
Hi Richard.
A common argument that antinatalists employ to argue against applying the concept of hypothetical consent to the unborn is that they by definition, don’t exist yet so it’s logically impossible for them to hypothetically consent to anything the same way no hypothetical baceholor can be married. After all, if you establish by definition that someone doesn’t exist, then there is no “someone” who can hypothetically consent. Because of this, procreation is somehow especially bad and cannot be justified by the usual arguments used to justify intervening on someone’s behalf when they are unable to give or withhold consent. Do you think this is a valid arguement?
No. You don’t have to have consent to save someone’s life (vs. leaving them for dead, the functional equivalent of refusing to give anyone life). Or giving them any other gift (universal basic income, universal healthcare, roads, fire departments). You only have a responsibility to ensure they get a net good out of it (so, parents and society have obligations toward the born).
The antinatalist argument is incoherent here because it depends on the straw-man premise that suicide is forbidden. But that isn’t true. Blanket prohibitions on suicide are immoral and thus not legitimate. All advanced moral systems allow for warranted suicides (e.g., the euthanasia movement; but we already had this in suicide-as-salvation, e.g. war heroes).
If you give someone something they didn’t ask for, and they genuinely don’t want it, they can give it away. Thus consent is not violated. They still get to choose whether to keep the gift. This is the function of suicide. Those given the gift of life, like those given the gift of money, still can choose whether to keep it.
And if one is concerned about doomed and miserable children, guardians could follow the antinatalist’s own reasoning and take responsibility for their euthanasia, if palliative care is impossible; but it is exceedingly difficult to actually find any real case that dire: almost all doomed children actually tend to gain a net good out of even their limited life. Antinatalists depend on painting all the born with the conditions experienced by literally almost none of them.
One can still argue that suicide is irrational when it is ill-informed (e.g. someone shredding a million dollars they were given because they believe it is cursed, rather than giving it to charity); hence suicide is in rational societies medicalized (it is a symptom of mental illness and thus has victims we have grounds to rescue) except when it is rational (when life is genuinely no longer a net good and has no prospect of becoming so, hence euthanasia principles; this is the only condition subject to the antinatalist’s “consent” principle).
Antinatalism thus keeps depending on the premise that life is a net evil, not a net good. Which is empirically false. It also becomes contradictory when they try arguing you should never give anyone the gift of life. They are thus defending a selfish premise: that we should never do good by anyone else by sharing life with them; we should hoard it for ourselves and ultimately extinguish it for everyone. We should shred the million dollars because it is cursed.
While I do think that you could make the argument that being born is a good in the sense that the expected value that almost any future person is going to derive from being alive is positive, a lot of people, not just Antinatalists, probably are going disagree which such thinking because it would imply that any action or right is justifiable if the expected value it brings to every single person is net positive. For example, you could make the argument that making the world a utopia by stabbing a random person(or doing anything that directs causes somebody significant suffering) is okay if the expected positive utility such an action gives each person on the planet is greater than the expected disutility.
I don’t follow your argument. The stabbing random people thing neglects to measure the very utility the antinatalists are also ignoring (such as who you become when you act or endorse a certain outcome).
See my article on Trolley Problems for example. And my Open Letter on how utility is to be completely measured.
Trying to effect utopia by mass murder is precisely the backwards thinking the antinatalists are engaging in. It effects a net negative utility, not a positive one—and precisely because human life is valuable, the very utility metric they have to pretend doesn’t exist in their evaluation of right action.
Update: I have added two new paragraphs, integrating material from one paragraph being thus replaced, in order to address the published arguments of Häyry and Sukenick. The new paragraphs start with the one citing them.
Hello Richard! What do you think about Verbose Stoics’s argument for antinatalism? It is rather short.
https://verbosestoic.wordpress.com/2022/11/18/antinatalism/
I don’t see anything there not already refuted here.
Can you isolate (by quotation or paraphrase) some argument in that long-winded article that says anything I haven’t already addressed?
Easy solution for the Antinatalist is to just bite the bullet and accept that mercy killing the whole planet is the preferable course of action. We don’t have the actual means to accomplish this right now, so it’s kind of a moot point for the time being
It is a legitimate question to ask if Antinatalists are dangerous. If were in a room with a button that would destroy the planet, what is the probability that they would push it rather than destroy it?
I would never let one into that room to find out.
Did you receive 2 comments from me (one yesterday, one today both about antinatalism)? It said something about an error
Not under the name or email address you used for this comment.
Did you use different credentials?
Or if not, did you get a specific error message when trying to submit a comment?
Hopefully, this time there will be no errors.
I’ve heard another argument from antinatalists. One of them even told me, that it is their “main” one. So it goes like this:
What do you think about it?
That’s an even more illogical argument.
“Let’s kill everyone to prevent a few people having bad outcomes.”
That’s like “We have to destroy the village to save it.” There is no rational argument to that conclusion.
They are advocating killing masses of the innocent to rescue a few (replicating the moral crime of the Gaza War). They are also crediting the parents of the fringe few who die badly with a crime that they could have prevented, which is illogical (there is no way parents could know or have any good reason to expect that outcome; and good character demands they choose the highest expected return, not the lowest).
Even if these nutters come up with some equally illogical hypocritical reason not to kill the innocent on this same reasoning (and they can’t; we’ve been over this), they would still be advocating depriving others of a future chance to enjoy what we have, for a wildly incommensurate benefit: preventing a scant few who somehow had such exceptionally shitty lives that a few days of torment would outweigh their own value for all their prior days, and yet who still (somehow) valued their shitty life enough to (a) not exit it prior to such a hypothetical bad outcome and (b) still choose to put themselves in that harm’s way (like becoming a soldier).
They can apologetically abandon their position and retreat to the even scanter few who didn’t choose the risk (so, coerced child soldiers, victims of serial killers, people hit by drunk drivers, and the like). But either way, still the number of people who meet all these conditions is tiny compared to the population as a whole.
“I must shoot you now to spare you the microscopic risk you will be paralyzed in a car accident sometime in the future” is irrational; indeed, literally insane. Yet that’s the same madness as saying “you should not have children because of the microscopic risk one of them will be paralyzed in a car accident sometime in the future.” There is no rational argument to that conclusion.
Meanwhile, everyone else will take a few days of torment for years of even a mildly good life. And anyone who does not agree can exit their lives now; though that would again be irrational. “You should kill yourself now because of the microscopic risk you will be paralyzed in a car accident sometime in the future” is not just irrational, it’s, again, literally insane.
Risk outcome reasoning requires choosing the highest expected gain. Kids rarely end up in this extremely rare and bizarre outcome, so your highest expected return is for far better outcomes; and even deontologically, abandoning utility as a metric, withholding and depriving the many of a good life to prevent the rare few having a bad one is a poor character choice (no one alive would wish this choice to have been made, so we should respect them and not make it).
Only individual risk assessment would rationally justify otherwise: no one should have kids who does not have good warrant to believe they can ensure high odds of a good outcome; and any outcome that is a net good or exitable is a good outcome. So by this “new” argument almost no outcomes are bad, since the scenarios imagined are rare and bizarre and don’t last long anyway.
Refraining from an action with high odds of positive gain to avoid an extremely low odds loss is called selecting a negative opportunity cost: you are losing more, by turning down an opportunity, than you gain by avoiding it. So one should bet on the high odds of a high return; not the high odds of a negative return (in opportunity cost).
This is the correct rational decision for individuals themselves (for example, anyone choosing to become a soldier, or drive down the street, or go swimming). It therefore has to be the correct rational decision for the people who give them this opportunity (provided they did ensure it would be that odds scenario; hence, not everyone should have children, only those well positioned to, and only to within population capacities of the modified environment, and so on, considerations that don’t apply to everyone, so no universal imperative can result from them).
So this reflects a really poor understanding of risk, relative cost, and the actual structure of human obligation.
In the end, anyone who argues like this simply sucks at Trolley Problems.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t Hayry’s argument also suffer from the appeal to extremely fringe cases in order to refute a general concept? They say:
Isn’t this like saying that the possibility of manipulating/brainwashing the voter is enough to refute the concept of democracy? Or like saying that the possibility of manipulating people into drinking acid is enough to refute the concept of chemical industry?
I don’t see these examples as related in any discernible way.
First, there is waffling here on what counts as “manipulation” (is honest persuasion “manipulation” and if so why is “manipulation” now bad once we have removed anything one could be opposed to?). This looks like word games to me: redefining a pejorative word to include non-pejorative outcomes in an attempt to transfer the emotional pejorative assessment to those other outcomes. That is semantic game-playing and not honest reasoning (formally, it implicates an equivocation fallacy).
Second, it’s unclear how any person can even be persuaded to drink acid. Without more context (which would have to be incredibly elaborate), it’s impossible to evaluate what these people are even really being asked to do or why, or what reasons they have for complying, and hence what those reasons’ merits are or aren’t.
Third, why are we talking about “brainwashing”? What has that to do with antinatalism or anti-antinatalism?
But yes, appealing to fringe cases to argue against a general imperative is at least potentially fallacious. I qualify only because there is a valid way to appeal to fringe cases to argue a reform in a general imperative (to reduce or mitigate the fringe cases), but to tell these apart (valid and fallacious appeals) we would need a concrete example to evaluate. And the seeming irrelevance of the three examples so far given does not give us one.
To illustrate: “due to the fringe case of a ship sinking, it should sail with sufficient lifeboats” is a valid appeal to fringe cases; whereas “due to the fringe case of a ship sinking, no ships should ever be built again and all those we still have should be destroyed at once” is an invalid appeal to fringe cases.
I agree that those are not valid reasons for antinatalism. As to how they are related: antinatalists say that if we accept future consent as valid, because the child would consent to being born when it grows up, then parents could just manipulate their child into giving such consent when they grow up. However, in my opinion such manipulation is not bad, because it is just called responsible parenting and making your child happy. I don’t see anything wrong with it. I am not even sure it is really a manipulation.
Per the analysis I just gave:
That argument is fallacious when generalized and only valid when specified. But when specified it does not support their position.
It is valid that parents should (indeed, because children are irrational, have to) train and imbue them with values and wisdom and behavioral patterns that will do them well (and harm them if not learned). But that is only valid because it is true. Take away it being true and it becomes a moral crime, e.g. terrorizing children with fears of hell as a form of behavior control toward a set of toxic rather than healthy values. That is morally condemnable. If you add “manipulation” so that the child upon maturing can never discover they were lied to, then it becomes even more immoral, not “defensible.”
This Antinatalist argument is another equivocation fallacy, trading on a good thing (proper parenting), handwaving a switcheroo that replaces that with something evil (vile parenting), and then hopes you will emotionally transfer your feelings of the one to the other. That is certainly manipulative. But it’s also illogical and, therefore, literally wrong (in every sense).
Greetings! I come here from Reddit. I’ve been told that you are one of the best defenders of conditional natalism. I want to test that evaluation. I will give you 2 of my best anti-natalist arguments. If you can refute both of them without committing any fallacies, then I will admit that I was wrong.
a) 1. An individual is justified in subjecting someone to potential harm only if either: (a) they provide informed consent, (b) such is in their best interests, or (c) they deserve to be subjected to potential harm
2. Bringing someone into existence is potentially subjecting them to harm
3. Individuals that do not exist: (a) cannot give their consent to being brought into existence, (b) do not have interests to protect, and (c) do not deserve anything
4. Hence, procreation is not morally justified
b) 1. Creating a desire and fulfilling it is not better then never creating a desire in the first place
2. Creating a desire and not fulfilling it is worse then never creating a desire in the first place
3. One’s future potential children will realistically have some unfulfilled desires
4. Hence, procreation is not morally justified
Your premise (a)1 is false. Indeed, it is routinely false. Almost all of society is built with the understanding that potential harms may come to those who didn’t explicitly consent to things until after the fact. All public infrastructure and entire economies are built on this understanding. Indeed the entire concept of government is itself based on this principle.
This poorly articulated consent argument was already addressed in the article you are commenting on. Please read it. Consent as a subject is also addressed further in comments above. You should read those to catch up, too—rather than jump in completely behind and uninformed.
Meanwhile, your second argument is formally invalid (the conclusion does not follow by modus ponens or modus tollens or any other identifiable formula). The word “moral” exists in none of the stated premises, and premise (b)3 does not logically integrate with the previous two premises. At sight, it’s a non sequitur that violates the Law of Excluded Middle (it fails to account for mixed conditions). So you have a lot more work to get that one to argue anything.
That was a thoughtful reply 🙂 I completely agree with your criticisms of my second argument. However, I still have some reservations about the first one.
The society as I view it is build on pro-natalist fountations. If there were no kids, then there would be no society left in a few generations. Pubic infrastructure is likewise build upon the assumption that there will be people who will use it.
Besides that, anti-natalism hasn’t been a recognized philosophy until recently. Could it be that the society just didn’t have enough time to adapt?
Even if neither of my replies above are satisfactory I’d argue that anti-natalist solutions also couldn’t have been implemented due to their relative unpopularity. There is (and probably never will be) enough support to democratically implement such measures.
That’s all worth asking. But it’s getting away from the point: does your premise correctly capture any justifiable understanding of consent, and what exactly actually is the consent status of being born?
And that has been discussed here already quite a lot, from the original article and on into the comments before yours. So that’s where you need to turn your analysis.
For example, it is not a given that we morally should not expect things from people for the public good. Hence, the fact that we need children for public welfare, because we need the adults they become—not just to maintain things but to move the ball forward (all progress in knowledge and moral understanding has required thousands of years of people)—is itself an overwhelming good, and in fact a duty we can expect people to take. And even then those who don’t want to, can exit the deal.
So consent, even in material terms, does not warrant the antinatalist position. It is usually at this point that the antinatalist retreats back to their original argument, about lives being net negative, which fails to track factual reality, and arrives at the wrong duties (that there are abused children, for example, does not entail killing all non-abused children or even just not having children; it entails a duty upon all adults to reduce child abuse and its effects—which requires there be adults).
It is also an exceptional good that life has no alternative mode, you either exist to enjoy and make something of it, or you do not. All goods (literally all of them) arise only from someone being alive to value things. Absent people, there is no morality and nothing has value. Indeed not even knowledge exists, much less of moral facts, or of what even could be of value, much less is. Consequently, antinatalism is wrongly asking for all valuable things to be destroyed, indeed even the possibility of valuing things, in some irrational hope that this will clear some inconveniences. They have the wrong end of the stick. The only way to have any choice about anything, so as to pursue anything of value, much less the most valuable state, is to have people alive (and pragmatically, that means, a lot of people, not just a few). It is therefore self-contradictory to claim that destroying literally everything of value is the greatest value-outcome to pursue.
This is the problem that antinatalists are trying to run from: that being alive is such an extraordinary and first-order good compared to all other goods. You can’t devalue it with handwaving about statistics and inconveniences. It is therefore not subject to the same reasoning about consent that we are familiar with, other than in directly analogous cases, e.g. do we save the lives of the critically wounded who are nor conscious to consent to it, or do we just let them die of the harebrained reasoning that their survival is worse than their death? The correct answer here is obvious to all but the antinatalist.
Taking into the account your criticism I will attempt to salvage the argument to make it formally valid.
Fulfilled desires add 0 utility to the utility pool
Unfulfilled desires add negative utility to the utility pool
Procreation involves creating desires
From (1) and (2): Creating desires is worse than not creating desires, unless all created desires are fulfilled
All created desires after procreation are not fulfilled (realistically)
The morally right action is the action that maximises the total utility in the utility pool
From (3) (4) (5) (6) Therefore procreation is not the morally right action
“Fulfilled desires add 0 utility to the utility pool” is obviously false. All positive utility consists of fulfilled desires. That is, in fact, the only definition of utility that could ever motivate anyone to any imperative; and without a motivated imperative, you can have no moral directive to recommend them.
“All created desires after procreation are not fulfilled (realistically)” is also obviously false in the sense required (i.e. your argument needs none fulfilled; but many are). The amount of fulfilled desires in even a single life is extraordinary, in both quantity and quality; the more so under a sound life regime (good advice, good life philosophy, and a well-ordered society), but even without it. Failing to grasp this fact is the core failure-mode of all antinatalists.
“Unfulfilled desires add negative utility to the utility pool” is also not true. Desires are mostly fungible. The inability to have one object of desire can produce the pursuit of a different desire replacing the first one. The net utility is then positive. You only get a net negative when there is no replacement. And even then that negative can also be too trivial to measure (that I can’t get my favorite taco chips in Georgia is not a killing offense; it hardly even registers in any utility equation, which is why I live in Atlanta, rather than where I can get my favorite taco chips). Moreover, utility is overall-net, not isolated-by-desire (which is again why I choose to live in Atlanta sans favorite taco chips).
Given these defects in the premises, the turnkey premise “Creating desires is worse than not creating desires, unless all created desires are fulfilled” is unsound.
It is also technically still not valid, though at least at this point one could fix that with some semantic work. For example, there is no premise about why negative experienced utility is worse than no experienced utility, or why “all” created desires after procreation have to be fulfilled for any net positive utility. By not stating premises arriving at these elements, you have no formally valid syllogism. But that’s fixable (I think reasonable premises could be introduced to fill these gaps in the structure of the argument). It’s just that these can be fixed only by introducing more false premises—so validity is accessible, but not soundness.
And that’s before we get to the question of why “morally right action is the action that maximises the total utility in the utility pool” or what these terms even mean (whose utility pool, and why? how is total utility being measured, and why? etc.). I think one could “define terms” in extremely broad ways so as to get the premise to be true, but then it would not mean what you need it to mean (see, for starters, Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same and The Objective Value Cascade).
I have re-read your replies several times and I can’t come up with any objections. Those were my 2 strongest arguments. It seems that anti-natalism doesn’t have a philosophical leg to stand on.
People rarely convince me to change my mind, but I think you’ve managed to do just that. I guess I will have to move to a more moderate position (being child free for myself) and drop anti-natalism.
I appreciate the feedback. Your outcome is not usual. It suggests you were taking an antinatalist stance for genuinely rational rather than emotional reasons; because usually emotion blocks all reason in these exchanges. That’s refreshing. I find most antinatalists have an ulterior objective of some kind (in the same way flat earthers do).
i have been redirected here by fifi and i see you had a discussion. i have just one question. how can you have a child for the sake of a child and not something else? an unborn child does not have any preferences. it does not prefer being alive to being not alive. it does not prefer pleasure to absence of pleasure. this one does not make sense to me.
All our decisions are made with future outcomes in result. Having children serves the interest of the future person that results (as well as the society that benefits from them joining it). Just as, for example, my effort to leave books for people to benefit from has in mind even future people who do not exist yet—indeed, the value of my books will be a function of how many people do benefit, including millions of people not even yet born but who will be, and will read them.
If I can help a future person in even so trivially a way as that, I can certainly help a future person by arranging their entire existence. This places obligations on me (to ensure they are raised up well), and requires me to have means (to be able to ensure they are raised up well), but once those conditions are met, there remains the value added to the universe by adding more people to it who can then enjoy and explore and help it. Since all value comes from the existence of persons, making persons is one of the most important mechanisms by which we can add value to existence altogether.
or what about this. in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we are permitted to inflict lesser harms on a
person to prevent him experiencing greater harms. in contrast, we are
not permitted to inflict harms to bestow benefit.
We are often permitted to inflict harms to bestow a benefit (e.g. surgery on a trauma victim; taxation; self-defense; jury-awarded punishments).
In fact, almost all decisions inflict some harm due to the principle of opportunity cost.
The only rational metric is net good and consent. Both conditions are met. Most people who are made experience net good; and they can leave any time they want, ensuring consent. That’s actually more than is even ethically required (e.g. law enforcement and taxation do not derive from direct but collective consent, e.g. we do not ask a criminal to consent to their punishment or a citizen to consent to what they owe in tax, as their consent derives from a collective democratic system, establishing “consent of the governed,” but not sovereign citizens who get to individually pick and choose what laws to follow).
i am not sure about self defense. you are allowed to defend yourself to prevent greater harm to yourself from happening. it is not necessarily to bestow benefit, since generally a person which was never attacked and consequently never self defended is in a better spot than a person who was attacked and had to use self defense.
That is still a benefit. Indeed, it is precisely the same kind: a net positive atop a negative; and no one asks the consent of the criminal actor before acting against them in self-defense or defense of another.
Remember, because of opportunity cost, almost all decisions are Trolley Problems.
And most collective actions can only be subject to deferred consent (e.g. in a democracy, you can be outvoted, and thus must accept outcomes, even if harmful, that were the opposite of what you consented to, because you have the right to persuade your peers to change that outcome; individuals don’t even have that hurdle, they can withdraw consent from life immediately and unilaterally, and thus are in an even better position than a citizen of a democracy or a shareholder of a company or a member of a family or any other collective undertaking).
one last thing. a few years ago I wrote a defense of one of the arguments for antinatalism. I believe that this argument is the strongest one. interested in hearing your thoughts.
https://archive.md/vFwt0
That is already refuted in the article you are here commenting on.
Everyone is consenting by choosing to keep the gift they received. They can return it at any time.
And having the opportunity to engineer greater good for oneself requires existing. That has far more value than the complete absence of value. Zero can never be more than a positive number.
your responses make a lot of sense for someone who subscribes to natalist philosophy. I am struggling to see what is wrong with them. I might’ve underestimated you and overestimated myself. I have to think more about your other responses, because they seem accurate and I feel like they shouldn’t. with that said…
you said that everyone is consenting by choosing to keep the gift they received and that they can return it at any time. but what about people who couldn’t? this 2 year old girl was fatally beaten to death by her father. (https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/man-gets-life-for-fatally-beating-2-year-old-he-tortured-that-poor-little-girl/)
If she is dead, she has exited.
But regardless, if she was given a net negative two years by her father, the crime is her father giving her a net negative two years, not their neighbor giving their children a net positive two and more years.
That there are criminal parents cannot justify non-criminal parents not having children. The most you can build on this is an advocacy for regulating who can be parents or how society monitors parents for criminality to improve protections for children.
or this. someone on reddit wrote a direct rebuttal to this article.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/13zsmx6/comment/jmukksh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Reddit is a garbage pit of useless inanity. If that is your source for anything, you are in trouble.
But regardless, all that garbage is already refuted here, either in this article already, or in the comments.
So, if you can find anything in there not already refuted here (in the article or comments), then please succinctly present it.
i will copy the most important part here.
1) Carrier: Antinatalism is the view that the human race should let itself go extinct; more particularly, it should do so because that outcome is “better”; and therefore having children is immoral
Reddit: Literally the first sentence, and it mixes up the order way things go. Carrier’s version, (1st and 2nd clauses swapped, since 1 assigns 2 as causation for 1) is [Extinction is a better outcome, this means humanity should go extinct, therefore procreation is immoral]. This is incorrect. Antinatalism is the idea that [Procreation is immoral, therefore humanity should not procreate, and thus go extinct as a result]. The most important difference here is that the argumentation for antinatalism is almost entirely based on harms to the hypothetical person or harms by the hypothetical person, rather than arguing that extinction is ideal and that’s the reason procreation is immoral.
2) Carrier: Antinatalism holds that being alive causes suffering, such that not being alive is better.
Reddit: First sentence of the first section and there are issues in this as well. Specifically, what “not being alive” means. If “not being alive” means not having ever existed, then it checks out, but due to the next sentence, I doubt that’s what Carrier intended. Instead, “not being alive” implies death. Carrier’s argument here is stating that antinatalism holds that being alive is so full of suffering that it is always better to be dead. This is incorrect. Antinatalism holds that procreation is immoral due to the suffering in life, not necessarily that the suffering in life is so great that it outweighs the good. Antinatalist conclusions can be formed using arguments based around the prevention of any suffering, rather than the prevention of a net negative life, though the latter can be used. Even if the bad in life was greater than the good, that does not necessitate suicide, nor do I believe that everyone who is miserable should immediately kill themselves, I find that thought absurd since it does not even permit the possibility of any reasons for staying alive.
3) Carrier: This entails killing everyone, and yourself.
Reddit: This is also incorrect. Antinatalism, again, is about the immorality of procreation, it is not that everyone should die. There is presumably little reason why someone with a happy and fulfilled life should kill themselves, that the person was created by an immoral act is not relevant, thus I do not think being born of rape necessitates suicide. Whether killing another or yourself is morally permissible or obligated is a completely different thing. While antinatalism is often argued on universal deontological grounds, such that procreation is always immoral, killing and suicide are almost always conditional, in that whether someone should kill another or themselves is not always yes or no, but dependent upon the situation, like if the killing is in self-defense, or if the suicide is due to a terminal disease.
There are sets of thought under or related to antinatalism that state “killing everyone” can be good, but those are not necessarily entailed by antinatalism, for the same reason that involuntary drugging everyone for pleasure is not necessarily entailed by utilitarianism.
4) Reddit: There’s the first section completed. All of what Carrier said about antinatalism was wrong. Literally every single point. Carrier even references the IEP at the beginning, which in addition to the first sentence “Anti-natalism is the extremely provocative view that it is either always or usually impermissible to procreate.”, which unsurprisingly isn’t about death being better than being alive, it also has this little bit in a separate section “However, it seems doubtful that any of the main arguments for anti-natalism entail pro-mortalism.”
Which requires the arguments I identity and refute: false utility metrics and false premises about the availability or role of consent. Already refuted. You are simply repeating the arguments my article destroyed.
This is your inference. I make no such equation in my article. My article stays on point. Yours does not.
You present no justification for this exception. This is already argued in the article here and you have made no response to it. You are just repeating the arguments here refuted. Indeed, you aren’t even responding to the most pertinent argument, that the only way to justify the second statement is to adopt premises that refute the first statement. You simply can’t make an exception for killing that doesn’t negate the claim that creating life is immoral. There is no logical way to do it.
For example, if not existing is better than existing, how can you justify self-defense, which is then just like procreation: a harmful act preserving a greater harm. And if mercy killing is ever justified, on your premise that same justification warrants all killing as mercy killing. The only way to escape these consequences is to abandon the premises on which antinatalism depends, by admitting that existing is better than not existing (and causing some harms without prior consent, as in self-defense and mercy killing or even trauma surgery or rescues, is sometimes moral). And round and round it goes.
This is already fully explained in the article you are claiming to respond to but clearly have never read and have no actual response to.
there is also the fact that one can regret being being, but one cannot regret not being born.
That is of no relevance to anything. You also cannot enjoy being alive if you are not alive.
The only significant reality is that anyone who genuinely, rationally, would prefer not to exist can do so at any time. So there is no irreparable harm. But in reality, almost no one is even actually in this condition (almost no one genuinely, rationally, regrets being alive), and the opinion of a fringe minority cannot dictate over the preferences of the vast majority.
So there is no argument here.
And this was already explained in the article you claim to be commenting on. Which by this point leads me to believe you never actually read my article but are merely reacting emotionally to its existence. Which does not bode well for your ability to rationally adjudicate anything.
i will try to explain why antinatalism doesn’t end with suicide. I cannot directly reply to your comment, because we’ve reached the limit.
some people might want to end their life there and then, but they realize that that would greatly upset their relatives. this doesn’t mean that they enjoy life. they just don’t want to make their relatives suffer. so for them either option is not ideal.
That is a myth.
Beliefs must be based on reality. Not mythology.
No one avoids suicide “solely” because of their family’s feelings. And those who avoid it at all for that reason clearly have positive reasons to stick around that exceed the negatives of whatever supposed misery you are hypothesizing for them—otherwise they would not care what their family thinks.
That is, after all, the antinatalist’s supposed point: that we should not care about what other people feel about it when deciding whether to stay alive or have kids. So you can’t have it both ways. Either we shouldn’t care (and the hypothetical person should, on your own reasoning, exit) or we should (and antinatalism is entirely false).
after much thought I will concede all my previous points in light of your responses. instead I think I found 2 issues that really highlight our issues. I will put them in 2 different comments to make it easier to parse. the first one is a direct quote from some blog. I think it puts it way better than I ever could.
I find it plausible that negative experiences have negative value for an individual; more specifically, it is plausible that some experiences have a negative hedonic tone (quality) and that they are bad for the individual who has the experiences. A related form of hedonism is that experiences have a negative, neutral, or positive hedonic tone. Now, someone might object, if there are experiences with a negative hedonic tone that are bad for an individual, why are experiences with a positive hedonic tone not good for an individual? Because there are no experiences with a positive hedonic tone, and there will never be any. To be clear, I do not deny the existence of pleasure in the Epicurean sense of katastematic (static) pleasure, which includes tranquillity and the absence of pain, trouble and worry, and which ‘can be varied, though not increased’ (Annas 1993, 188, 336). In daily life, it is common to use phrases such as ‘this is very pleasant,’ which is fine; I do not object to that usage of words. If I were at a spa, I would perhaps say that my experience is pleasant, but I would not mean that the experience has a positive hedonic tone or quality or that it is above neutral. I would be comparing it to other experiences that I often have, which have more negative aspects, such as feelings of discomfort. When I carefully consider my experiences, I cannot detect that I have ever experienced anything that I would say is or warrants being called positive, on the plus side, above neutral or the like. This includes what are commonly considered peak events in life, such as major accomplishments. At such times, my main feeling has been relief, sometimes combined with excitement about what I will do in the future, but the feeling has not had a positive quality (being excited need not feel positive). In contrast, I often have decidedly negative experiences. Actually, the phrases ‘negative well-being’ and ‘negative experiences’ are unfortunate because if something is negative, it sounds as if there is a positive counterpart. Better names may be ‘problematic moments in life’ and ‘problematic experiences,’ because unproblematic, which seems to be the opposite of problematic, does not imply positive.
None of that helps your case.
i am pretty sure it does. if there are no positive experiences and all experiences are merely problematic or unproblematic, then the least problematic possible experience is only as good as the absence of the experience. anything more problematic would actually be worse.
“If there are no positive experiences” is false. So you cannot use that premise to get to any form of antinatalism.
You simply aren’t describing any relevant metric here.
the second issue.
in front of you there is a big red button. if you press it, you will create 1 planet populated with beings that are suffering the worst computationally possible torture. you will also create a N planets where people are living normal slightly good lives. if N is high enough and if you accept that bringing people into existence can be good, then you will press the button.
if you accept the problem above, then there is an even bigger problem. this time you already have N planets where people have good lives. if you press the button, you will create 1 planet populated with beings that are suffering the worst computationally possible torture. you will also increase the amount of happiness of each inhabitant of N planets by a tiny margin. here by the reasoning above you will press the button. but look where we are. we are creating a whole hellish planet where people suffer horrible tortures just to slightly increase happiness of already happy people.
p.s. none of the inhabitants of the above planets can interact with each other or with humans.
That is not the option before us. So it is irrelevant to any present real-world decision-making.
i merely took your proposal and applied it to another case to show that it is absurd. so really there are only 2 options: either I made a mistake and your proposal doesn’t lead to the absurd conclusion or the conclusion is not absurd after all. whichever option you think is the correct one, i’d like to hear why.
You did not accomplish any such result. You simply invented false premises to reach a false conclusion. Which is of no relevance to reality and hence to the actual issues we are supposed to be discussing.
I think that you are misunderstanding the argument, and doing so deliberately. By and large, antinatalists and their arguments primarily revolve around the prevention of suffering and they go to great lengths to argue against suicide and genocide, with the most widespread reasoning behind this being that such a thing is a matter of consent – “no one asked to be born, therefore it should be their choice when and how to die”.
As an antinatalist who does genuinely believe in the “end existence” button thought experiment and has argued the case among the antinatalist community, I feel uniquely qualified to state that the majority of people who are against procreation are also against my specific position because they regard being brought into existence in the first place as the problem and that suicide and genocide only compound the whole mess rather than solve it.
Furthermore, Benatars “asymetry” argument is probably the worst example of the any argument towards antinatalism I have ever seen. Admittedly a wild conjecture on my part, but I also believe this to be on purpose: he has presented a simple, rather tame argument towards a topic that, if argued with the full weight of evidence in its favor, would not only mean professional suicide, but also would be so unpalatable to the public at large that it would not even be read. As will surprise no one, a race spawned by natural selection and evolutionarily programmed towards reproduction and survival at any costs do not take kindly to the idea that they should cease having children and allow their race to go extinct.
Benatar has become a fad in recent years because his position is relatively unheard of to the public at large despite being around since the time of Buddha. His arguments, as I have stated, appear to deliberately avoid the rough stuff in order to at least get the idea talked about among members of the public.
The best logically concise argument in favour of antinatalism is that of Norwegian philosopher and naturalist Peter Wessel Zapffe who uses biology as his method, writing two relatively unknown texts on the topic – a short essay entitled “The Last Messiah”, and later a much more expanded version of his arguments akin to a doctoral thesis named “On The Tragic”.
Zapffe argued that human consciousness, particularly our ability to linguistically communicate and intuitively feel concepts that are outside of the parameters of physical possibility, is an evolutionary mistake that has caused far more suffering than it has benefited our species and that this irresolvable inner conflict renders human existence a wholesale tragedy.
To clarify, the uniquely human needs of self realization, cosmic significance, inherent meaning and justification for suffering cannot be satisfied in any way by our natural environment, leaving us with a hypertrophied self-awareness that uselessly generates the sense that we are far more than biological machines trapped within the confines and limitations of physical reality and rendering us longing for God, Heaven and Soul in a reality that specifically prevents such things from occurring.
Zapffe argued that this natural contradiction, and our need to escape it, formed the basis of the vast majority of humanity’s spiritual movement towards the future – that all “progress” in light of such a fact is nothing but a fiction devised to specifically prevent humanity from simply ending its own existence and with it, the no-win situation it has been placed in. He also argued that humanity’s drive towards the future, and the inevitable conflicts of ideology, from religious to political, that derive from it has produced so many corpses and so little result that it would be far more in line with human values to simply call the whole thing off rather than carry it on, given that mankind’s desperation for a world that aligns with our needs only gets worse the more it dawns on us that physical existence will never satisfy.
For his own part, Zapffe provided the most “scientific” argument for the position, but his philosophy was a drop in the water compared to the dozens of arguments that have been put forward and still seem irrefutable to this day.
Schopenhauer and Leopardi, for example, put forward the argument of “negative-pleasure” and “negative-reason”, respectively. Schopenhauer described pleasure as deriving more from the satisfaction of biological need than it being simply enjoyed for its own sense. Leopardi posited that the more we discover about the set-in-stone reality of the world, the lesser it becomes in our mind – imaginary concepts soon give way to physical limitation and for this reason the entire scientific enterprise has done more harm than good by reducing the world in our minds to a wonderland of possibility to a solid nothing of atoms and mechanical laws, creating a spiritual vacuum that has been created by science but cannot be resolved by it.
Buddha argued that human beings crave permanence and substance in a universe of emptiness and finitude and so have created fictions of the self, God and an eternal afterlife in order to mask the truth from ourselves.
I could go on, but the essential point is this: the natural ontology we are exist in has created so many problems, starting with the fact that it exists at all, that life is essentially impossible. No matter which way we turn, the starting point is nature, and the end point is annihilation.
We long for justification for suffering in a world where chance, not justice, has the final word in every life’s fate, no matter how innocent or how guilty. We long for permanence in a universe that is being slowly destroyed by entropy. We long for something to confirm our species uniqueness in a world where everything is simply atoms. Perhaps most tragically, what we long for most of all is for something to confirm the hopes and dreams about life we had as a child, which is why religion still manages to retain its hold over our species: the psychological underpinning behind God is a loving, paternal figure and the Kingdom of Heaven a world of eternal innocence.
Anyone who argues the case against antinatalism is forced to tie themselves in knots of logic in order to refute the fundamental existential problems rather than simply admit that it would have been better to a) have an existence that did not suffer from them or b) to have never existed at all. And given that, as naturalists in our day and age are happy to remind you, this specific form of existence known as naturalism is “the only game in town”, anyone in favor of continuing the human project has to argue the ridiculous notion that a life of irresolvable problems, meaningless suffering, inevitable death and the mere fact that this kind of existence is the only one that is allowed is perfectly fine, and certainly far more desirable to its opposite.
None of us became antinatalists because we were predisposed to it, we became antinatalists after we realized that we were trapped in an ontology that renders life a futile war against everyone and everything, including the very reality it exists in. Happiness, innocence, love, human accomplishment – all of those are frivolous additions that we spend our entire lives desperately trying to attain – but on the other hand, suffering and death is the only certainty in life, the one thing in life that you don’t even have to put any effort into in order for it to happen. If you doubt this state of things, simply sit down where you stand and wait and see which arrives first.
Why on earth would you put anyone, least of all a child, into this ridiculous situation?
Because it isn’t ridiculous. Your characterization of life is ridiculous. All human beings can directly take stock of their lives and the lives of those around them and directly, empirically, confirm your account is false. Life is a net good for almost everyone; and everyone else can leave at their own choosing. So there is no way to argue that you should deny the gift of life to anyone, present or future.
Actually they retreated to the consent argument after their original argument was refuted. The original argument was that life is suffering therefore it is better not to live. Then they contradict themselves by saying that ending life is suffering, so it is better to let people live. But those two statements cannot be true. Either life is worth living (and thus dying is suffering a loss), or death is not suffering a loss (and thus life is not worth living). So there is no way to get the conclusion. Life simply is a net positive gift, not a pointless pit of suffering. So euthanizing everyone, present and future, has no moral justification.
And the consent argument is even less plausible than the original argument. Because it completely gets wrong how consent works, and the relative value of consent and living. Consent is derivative of the value of life, not prior to the value of life. Consent is simply a mechanism for regulating harm to the living. So there is no logical way to justify blotting out life on the grounds that its consent is merely delayed.
We don’t require consent to save the life of an unconscious person. We don’t require consent to assign care for the mentally incompetent. We don’t require consent every time we apply community rules and laws. We don’t require consent to be kind to others or to respect their rights.
Turning the argument into a trivial complaint about consent just substitutes one false claim of suffering for another. The only reason consent is ever morally required is because of irreversible harm—it is a mechanism for limiting that. But saving someone’s life does not cause irreversible harm, and thus does not require consent—only the heeding of a will. Because an individual can still consent out of that, before as with an DNR (which is why those are legal in all progressively moral communities), and after, as with noble suicide (which is why voluntary euthanasia is legal in all progressively moral communities).
So there is no harm to police here.
There is therefore no issue of consent that would warrant ending all human life. Life is a net good. Gifting life is not an irreparable harm. Those who begin temporarily unable (children) we have a moral and legal system in place to protect, meeting our basic responsibility to them, and the outcomes for most are a net positive, to which most human beings consent as soon as they are able, and the rest leave. There is no moral argument against any of this.
Yes, it can. I would suggest reading “Optimistic Naturalism: Scientific Advancement and the Meaning of Life” by Dan Weijers. It lays out the case for meaning and significance in purely naturalistic worldview.
Not really. Zapffe completely skips the part of everyday joy, life achievements, time spent in a pleasant and enjoyable way (board games, reading books, learning a skill). These are all things that are considered worthwhile by many humans. Furthermore, even people in really unfortunate circumstances (e.g. victims of war) don’t always wish that they had never been born. I am currently living in a country torn by war, where you don’t know if you will wake up tomorrow, where you don’t know if you are going to be captured by enemy militias. The thought “oh man, I wish I hadn’t been born” didn’t cross my mind a single time. And I live in circumstances much worse than that of an average developed country.
I don’t know about Schopenhauer, but I very much enjoy pleasure for its own sense. I don’t have a biological need for pleasure in the same sense that I have a biological need for food or sleep. There is a biological limit on how much you can go with no food. Where is the biological limit for pleasure? Soldiers go for years without any pleasures through miseries of trench life and they aren’t dropping dead. I can directly feel the goodness of pleasure. One can argue that pleasure is intrinsically good. For extended discussion see “Happiness as the Only Intrinsic Value” by Yew-Kwang Ng.
With that also comes the ability to use the world for our benefit. We have smartphones, rockets, quantum physics, etc. So far the more we learn about the world the more we learn there is to be learned. There are thousands if not millions of unanswered questions about the world around us, our fate, our universe, etc. Some of those questions might not ever get an answer and will remain speculative. Also, all the physical limitations are already set in stone. Cavemen couldn’t fly, just because they didn’t know about gravity. The understanding of universe is something to be pursued, not feared. The more we learn about the world, the more we learn how to subdue it.
The mere existence of some problems does not by itself lead to the antinatalist conclusion anymore than a wrongly-colored brick in a wall leads to the demolition of the entire house. And that’s not how you solve problems in real word either. If you have a hair that is annoyingly long, you cut your hair, you don’t end your life. So clearly at the very least some problems can be solved by, you know, solving them, instead of complaining about the mere existence of problems.
As Richard said, the situation isn’t ridiculous. Your characterization of life is ridiculous.
Richard, I appreciate the thoughtful critique. It gives me a lot to think about. However, I still don’t understand what is wrong with nonexistence. Nonexistence is wonderful; there’s nothing wrong with it. People who never exist aren’t sad that they don’t exist.
You might say that if such people existed, they would be glad to have been created. Sure, but if paperclip maximizers existed, they would be glad if you filled the universe with paperclips. I don’t therefore find it morally urgent to fill the universe with paperclips. What’s the morally relevant difference between desires for pleasure and desires for paperclips?
Nonexistence cannot be “wonderful” because it is the absence of all things—including wonder and thus wonderfulness.
The metric is not “should every possible person exist” (we cannot accommodate or achieve that, so the answer to it is no). The metric is “should as many people as we can well accommodate share with us the chance to experience existing and knowing and loving and enjoying” (we can and should achieve that, so the answer to it is yes).
Depriving all people of life is simply selfish, keeping the gift to yourself, and destroying everything that is of value—because value only comes from existing people; so destroying all people destroys all value, and thus renders the universe utterly valueless. Only by existing can we manifest anything of value and thus make this universe worth something.
As to why a sentient person experiencing life is objectively more valuable than a mindless paperclip maximizer see The Objective Value Cascade and Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life.
It isn’t simply “pleasure,” but valuing in and of itself that requires people to exist. And any objective analysis as to what the best sources of pleasure should be arranged to be, won’t get you to “making paperclips.” It will get you to love, joy, friendship, community, knowledge, discovery, awareness, and self-improvement.
Mojojojo:
I think it’s misleading to present it as happy people exploiting miserable people by bringing them into existence. I don’t think anyone ever deliberately creates a miserable child! What’s going on is rather that life is a gamble.
Every morning we wake up, there’s a (hopefully tiny) risk that something awful could happen to us. But most of us think that risk is worth taking. We don’t want to die, just because our future isn’t guaranteed to be good. We’re willing to take our chances (and vigorously guard against risks that threaten to end our lives prematurely). And many of us — I think reasonably and even generously — decide to extend that gamble to our children, to give them a chance at life too. Even though it isn’t guaranteed to work out, we think it’s worth the shot.
It’s tragic that sometimes the gamble fails, and some people (extremely few, I hope) end up so miserable that their life is “worse than nothing”. In some cases, they may be able to mitigate the damage by voluntarily ending their life. (I think physician-assisted suicide should be available to aid those who are not physically capable of implementing the decision for themselves.) But sad as it is, this tragedy is like nothing compared to how tragic it would be for all the goodness in the world to cease to be — to end all love, music, beauty, and knowledge; all striving, determination, creativity, and discovery; all gratitude, mentorship, kindness, and companionship. I’m more than willing to endure a proportionate share of sadness in exchange for a proportionate share of the great goods in life, and I would think it a kind of cowardice to choose otherwise.
We should certainly do what we can to prevent great harms from occurring in future, only… taking care not to equally prevent all that is good.
I am very excited to speak with someone willing to provide philosophical pushback. The argument is solid, but I don’t agree with the central premise. I don’t think there is as much happiness and goods in life as is claimed. I think that a lot of the things we think we do in order to become happier, we actually do to avoid suffering from the deprivation.
For example:
We do not eat just for pleasure, but to prevent hunger. The fundamental thing about a meal is to calm hunger.
We do not have sex solely for pleasure but to avoid the pain caused by the frustration of unresolved sexual tension.
We do not look for a companion just for being happy together but also for not being sad and lonely.
We do not go on vacation once a year to a distant country only to enjoy new experiences, exotic foods, and paradisiacal places, but to avoid the boredom and frustration of staying in the usual city, always doing the same.
If I became convinced that people do the majority of their life activities in pursuit of happiness, pleasure, or eudaimonia and not because they want to avoid suffering associated with not doing said activities, then I would concede that antinatalism is philosophically undermined.
Then you are simply wrong.
We have cited abundant data. You have none.
That means your methodology is broken.
Likewise when you confuse how we ended up taking pleasure in certain things with that we can now do so. If you are confused as to why we should enjoy things that we were only accidentally kitted out to enjoy, and which things those should be, that is the entire point of my article The Objective Value Cascade. Being an accidental consciousness does not make you not a consciousness.
Likewise when you confuse the fact that we do a thing for multiple reasons, with only doing it for some of those reasons. That is illogical. Just because we seek companionship not to be lonely does not mean we do not also gain being happy together and enjoying and exploring the world together. We get all of those things, not just some, and that is why it is objectively good, as any rational cascade would conclude.
But this is all moot. You seem to be trying to move the goal posts. The only thing that matters is: is it better to be alive than dead. The answer is empirically yes. It does not matter why it is yes to the fact that it is yes.
If a machine accidentally becomes conscious, it will have no rational reason to kill itself, but every rational reason to enjoy its existence as given, and seek out the objectively best ways to do that—because otherwise nothing exists, and nothing values anything, and thus nothing is of value. Existence itself is what allows value to be assigned to anything at all, and thus allows anything to be valuable and thus preferable in the first place.
Which is also why consent is irrelevant to this. The machine being accidentally conscious means it did not consent prior (as that would be logically impossible), but it can consent posterior, and as long as it has sufficient rational resources, it always will. And everyone we meet confirms this.
You have been trying to negate that obvious premise with false claims of how everyone is miserable. Which is factually false. They are not. Almost everyone likes being alive and prefers it to being dead, and for entirely factual and rational reasons. The world happiness index shows this. Cultural and psychological case studies show this. Even just asking around shows this.
This means being alive is better than being dead. And therefore there is no basis for the antinatalist thesis. It is contrafactual and self-contradictory.
The last two comments have not been me.
“Richard, I appreciate the thoughtful critique. ”
“I am very excited to speak with someone willing to provide philosophical pushback.”
It resembles a chatGPT bot more than an actual person, so I can only conclude that somebody is using my identity falsely for whatever bizarre reason. I have been working which is why I haven’t bothered to reply to any substantial degree.
They are logging in with a different email address. So I think they just have the same name and aren’t paying attention to the fact that someone else is using that name in this thread. But that is causing confusion.
If you want to avoid that, you can use an additional moniker (any codename added after Kris) to distinguish you here. If they then steal that, then they are in violation and I can ban their IP’s.
Hitler was also someone’s child. Hitler’s parents had no idea that they were raising a maniac. They were in the same epistemic position as most, if not all parents. That alone is enough to conclude that humans shouldn’t reproduce, right?
That makes no logical sense. First, Hitler’s parents might have been racist antisemnitic horrors themselves, and thus their own specific decision to raise a child can be criticized simply because their objectives in doing so were immoral (a condition that doesn’t apply to everyone and thus cannot be generalized as you want). Second, alternatively, Hitler’s parents may have simply failed to do it right, but we have ample evidence that is unusual (most parents succeed in not producing Hitlers), so again the condition (the risk) cannot be generalized to everyone as you want.
Just as the best way to deal with a dysfunctional town is to reform it, not destroy it, so also the best way to deal with the risk of a child being a psychopath or a villain is to help parents not do that and put systems in place to deal with cases that slip by anyway (i.e. prevent Hitlers from coming to power or continuing to abuse power, as we do criminals and villains generally), not to kill all the parents.
The same ill logic applies. Destroying a town would certainly remove its problems; but at enormous and inexcuable moral cost. Likewise, killing everyone would certainly end all misery; but at enormous and inexcusable moral cost. It’s like saying we should just gas our prisons, because it doesn’t matter how many minor offenders and even innocent people we kill, we will be sure to kill a lot of genuinely bad threats to society. If you cannot defend that (and morally, you can’t; because those other lives do matter), then you can’t defend your antinatalist position either.
To prevent all good people existing and having a chance to enjoy life merely to prevent the few bad people existing is not only illogical, it’s immoral. It literally makes you the villain.
Where do we draw the line, though? There is a non-zero chance that a given couple will create the next Hitler, even if the couple are loving and caring and generally good parents. Would it be fair to reproduce to all the people who would die in horrible pain as the result of the second Hitler? Basically it would mean that these unlucky people paid the price of continued human civilization. Is that really fair and moral? What about those who died as a result of interrogation with torture?
You are asking about risk management. We all make decisions based on net good, and risk is a metric in calculating the net. Mathematically, the probability of the risked negative is multiplied by the cost of that negative (and cost can be measured in any way, as long as the metric is consistent and scaled) and the product compared to the alternatives, and the highest total score (the highest net good or lowest net evil) is the correct action. This can be demonstrayed objectively.
And in liminal cases, where the values and their error margins strongly overlap, then the right course is indifferent (you can choose either and it’s as good). But you aren’t talking about close calls, so that’s moot here.
For more details see my articles on The Real Basis of a Moral World and Your Own Moral Reasoning, but also Everything Is a Trolley Problem.
Also, if only the potential suffering of the child counts (but not the potential happiness), then a reproductive decision is merely a choice in favor of your selfish desires vs the potential suffering of the child (since we don’t count the potential happiness).
You’ll have to explain what you mean. Are you criticising the antinatalist for ignoring relevant data (“the potential happiness”)? Or are you confusing the compassion involved in wanting to spend resources (both time and money and the emotional labors and responsibilities) to bring a new person to enjoy life, safely and well, with some obscurely defined “selfish” alternative motive, and thus are you the one ignoring relevant data?
I will try to explain what I mean by saying that potential happiness doesn’t count, but it might sound a bit weird. Hopefully that’s ok. So imagine a rock. Just a simple, ordinary rock. Now, imagine that this rock could suddenly begin to suffer. We’d all be really sad for poor rock. On the contrary imagine that a rock could feel happiness. We wouldn’t feel happy for the rock, because the rock had no desire to be happy. So in this analogy the rock would be the person before they were born.
Everything counts, Frenchie. You can’t delete information and expect to reach a correct conclusion about anything. That is fundamentally irrational.
As for potentially happy rocks, those already exist: they are called computers. Which are made of rocks and are thus essentially just a rock. But they can in theory be configured to be sentient and thus achieve satisfaction states. And moral people very much do care about that, and should. Veritably every movie about abused (as opposed to merely evil) AIs explores this fact. Blalderunner 2049 and 2010 are prime examples.
For more on that scenario, see The Objective Value Cascade and Will AI Be Our Moses.
Expanding on my previous comment, since life has suffering there are only 2 kinds of life: problematic and unproblematic. Problematic lives are those that have suffering and unproblematic are those that don’t. The best possible life is merely unproblematic. The void of not existing is also 100% unproblematic (people who don’t exist don’t suffer). This means that the best possible life is merely as good as never existing, right? And most lives contain at least some suffering. Which means that most lives are strictly worse than never existing.
That’s called a “black or white” fallacy: assuming there is “only” an all perfect life or a life not worth living. This violates the Law of Excluded Middle, by excluding the vastly larger number of people for whom neither is true. Making up excuses to ignore them is irrational and suggests you have no interest in the truth, but have some emotional need for antinatalism, and are just flailing around for rationalizations.
Case in point: this now goes in a circle all the way back to where we started: the article you are supposed to be commenting on, which already refuted the argument that “a life with any amount of suffering is not worth creating, allowing, or living.” That statement is simply false. And that’s the end of it.
I kind of agree with your previous two comments after thinking about it. Nothing to add there. The points you brought up make sense to me.
That’s why I will try to bring up 2 new arguments to consider. One of them is a sort of Kantian argument. The other is about value complexity.
The Kantian argument is about hypothetical vs categorical imperatives related to suffering and happiness. With suffering you have categorical imperatives. You want to reduce suffering. Period. Nothing else. With happiness, however, you have hypothetical imperatives. Every goal that is related to happiness is just a part of a chain (or a loop). Furthermore such goals often enough end up with the main goal of reducing suffering. For example one might want to earn money in order to have a place to live in order to not suffer from being homeless. I think if true this shows an asymmetry.
The second argument is about how suffering is universal and simple, while happiness is subjective and complex. Most humans don’t like pain. Most humans don’t like suffering. You don’t really need to specify further. On contrary, with happiness it starts to get complex. For some it is hedonistic pleasure, for others it is meaningfulness, for others yet it is aesthetic value. I think if true, this also gives reasons to think there is an inherent asymmetry.
The fact that you keep inventing new arguments is a sign that you are stuck in motivated reasoning and do not actually have a defensible position. If your position were defensible, you wouldn’t have to keep making up arguments for it. You should already have had those arguments.
Keep that in mind.
Your tactic is called moving the goal posts, BTW. It’s a sign of delusional thinking, a trap you might have gotten stuck in. You might want to self-reflect your way out of that trap.
But as to your new goal posts:
(1) Kantian categoricals actually are hypotheticals; they make no difference to anything we’ve been discussing. It’s just a different language with which to describe the same exact considerations (see Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same).
(2) Suffering is not universal or simple. It is just as complex as joy or contentment; and just as variable in its degrees (from the irrelevant on up). And it is just as extraordinarily difficult to find any person in a state of total suffering as it is to find any person in a state of total contentment. And a state of total suffering with no prospect of escape is solvable (e.g. euthanasia); while almost all actual states experienced are with ample prospect of escape. We have widespread evidence miseries can almost always be escaped for joys, and the principal limits to such escape have more to do with the organization of a society and not its mere existence.
Which means the correct solution to any problem is not genocide, but Rawls: we ought to aim for and support the organization of our society in such a way that no matter who in that society we were, we would agree no better arrangement could be made.
Thus, for example, if we don’t get to choose if we will be disabled, then which is better, a society that makes being disabled easier or one that does not? Nowhere on this scale of better choices do we find “end all existence.” So that will never be the rational choice. Once we are on the scale from worst to best societies, no point on the scale of increasingly better societies do we find “no society at all,” least of all at the top of the scale. So antinatalism can never be a rational choice. We ought instead make exactly the opposite choice: to build a better society; not erase society altogether.
Short and sweet argument against consent-based antinatalism:
(1) Ought implies can
(2) If you ought to ask for a consent of a non-existent being before procreating, then you should be able to ask for a consent of a non-existent being
(3) You are are not able to ask for a consent of a non-existent being (regardless of whether you believe in souls)
(C) Therefore, you don’t have to ask for a consent of a non-existent being before procreating
That is a valid analysis but moot because their recommended behavior is not that you ought to ask, but that you ought to avoid if you can’t ask. So one can perform the moral directive they commend.
The question remains whether their directive is moral (you ought to avoid if you can’t ask). So you still have to confront the fact that they have no evidence that that directive is moral (at all, much less obligatory; indeed, counterexamples suggest the opposite is obligatory, e.g. saving the life of an unconscious person). This thus gets into meta-ethics: why is any moral claim true?
That I cover elsewhere (e.g. The Real Basis of a Moral World)
I do think that antinatalists are sort of committed to that claim if they want to make an argument from consent. If they say that you ought not to procreate without consent, the next question for them is whether procreation would be permissible if we somehow managed to get the consent.
If the answer is “no”, then according to them there are reasons for why procreation is impermissible regardless of consent. So then that would be their actual argument and they would have no distinct argument from consent.
If the answer is “yes”, then they claim that procreation is permissible given the consent of the future child. So then according to them, in order to permissibly procreate, you ought to gain the consent of the future child. And that’s the claim being targeted by my original argument.
That’s a valid approach, if a bit convoluted.
I think it grants then too much rationality, to be honest. I suspect if you tried to get them to admit to one or the other fork, they would evade and obfuscate. Because they don’t actually have a rational, thought-out position. They only have the emotional appearance of one. That’s why their arguments are so shallow.
For example, when they make the consent argument, it’s not because that was always their argument, but because they are getting destroyed on their original argument and are grasping for any emotional straw they can pull at. But in result, they fail to do even rudimentary empirical analysis of consent in society (and thus “forget” that lots of things are moral without consent; indeed some things are even obligatory without consent). Because they aren’t actually interested in the truth here. They are only interested in coddling their delusion, which is motivated by something other than reason.
The same shallowness shows in their “forgetting” that suicide is totes easy, and only objected to when irrational; but since their entire thesis entails everyone should commit suicide (since not existing needs for them to be better than existing), they can’t really admit this (that suicide can be sometimes wrong and sometimes right, depending on the actual, rather than perceived, uncorrectable direness of one’s state). So they evade every mention of this fact, too.
The same shallowness shows in their “wrong remedy” framework (it’s a “we must destroy the village to save it” mechanism, rather than making actually saving the village the moral directive instead, which is obviously more rational; but that then entails work, because it isn’t “simplistic” enough for them).
There is nothing deep or well considered in their ideology.
Reading through the comment section, I think you arguing against a weaker version of the argument from risk that only concerns one generation. Here is a much stronger version:
For all we know, one’s potential children will have children of their own and those will also have children of their own. So even if the risk of one’s children leading miserable lives is quite small, the risk of at least one of your descendants leading a miserable life is quite high. We are facing all sorts of threats like climate change, rogue AI, wars with authoritarian countries etc. So it would be appear, if the chance of at least one of your descendants having a miserable life is pretty high, then that descendant will be paying the price for your procreation. And that’s immoral.
This is failing at math again.
You can’t get a net bad from a net good. It doesn’t matter if you do it on the x axis (someone now is miserable) or the y axis (someone sometime will be miserable). Net good argues against antinatalism. All the same points apply: the escapably miserable can exit (so the cost is trivial) and the inescapably miserable are too few to justify denying to billions all potential life goods.
There just isn’t any way to get to “you should never create any people” because “one in a million of them will be too miserable.” By that logic you should oppose vehicles and driving and be pell mell lobbying Congress to outlaw both. As well as literally everything else that exists and kills or hurts a few people, from sidewalks to buckets.
So, unless you plan to seriously argue cars, buckets, and sidewalks are immoral, your logic isn’t even internally coherent. And even if you fixed that, by correctly calling those things immoral, your definition of immoral becomes externally false (there is no way to argue that your judgment of the matter is true, because there is no coherent and true metric to get morality to work the way you want).
Looking at the comment section ,I see that you have encountered philo sophically dishonest anti–natalists. They try to come up with convoluted arguments that all don’t stand in the face of basic scrutiny. especially that Benatar’s argument is weak. I am a philosophically honest anti-natalist, so I will admit that only viable, correct, honest but also completely sufficient argument for anti–natalism is a very simple universal observation that suffering-avoidance is the only intrinsic goal. Happiness, joy or whatever else people call it just doesn’t exist. It is an illusion created so that we feel less bad about our lives.
There is no way to establish this as a true statement in any sense relevant.
This is obviously false, and appears to be playing semantic games (using words like “joy” and “illusion” bizarrely), which suggests you, too, have emotional motives and are not arriving at these conclusions by any valid rational method.
Fair enough , I was very hasty when I said that and I take it back. Sure, happiness “exists” , but it still has much less value than suffering. I know that you res pect empirical science. Well, in this case , empirical science agrees with me (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-013-0171-2).
Direct quote from the article:
First, that is not science; it’s a philosophy article. No scientific study or experiment is in that article confirming its thesis; it is purely speculating on what maybe some hypothetical science might find. Most philosophy is bullshit (the field has alarmingly low standards). So it cannot be cited as an authority on anything. (See Is Philosophy Stupid?).
Second, that is not a quote from the article. It’s the abstract of the article. If you don’t know the difference or understand the dangers of confusing them, you need to update your epistemology.
Third, that author is articulating a bogus model of pain-pleasure trade-offs that ignores all the actual literature on this issue, and in service of a biased effort to argue against animal experimentation. Their thesis is that suffering is a good if it prevents greater suffering, but pleasure at the cost of suffering is never good. This thesis would entail all working for pleasure (literally every job on the plenet anyone undertakes) is evil and thus should be forbidden. This is exactly the nonsensical failure of antinatalism. You basically found someone making the same easily refuted and baloney argument you are. It’s still refuted baloney.
I challenge that! From a strictly impartial view the predominance of suffering is rather confirmed than refuted. I have specifically written a short article arguing for that point:
https://www.socrethics.com/Folder2/Prevalence-of-Suffering.htm
-Bruno Contestabile
No one was talking about “the predominance of suffering.” That suffering commonly exists does not matter here.
That you have jumped to this irrelevant point and evaded the entire thread of argument up to now does not bode well for your ability to reason here.
You need to identify an actual fact in that unscientific think-piece you just cited (which is just another word-wall you yourself wrote) that actually relates to your point. You can’t just cite random internet nonsense and claim to have said anything pertinent.
If you try to actually find anything factual and relevant in your external essay to bring in here, you will find your external essay makes all the same mistakes you have been making here and that I have been continually pointing out.
So you need to actually try harder than just repeating the same refuted arguments over and over again.
The core claim of the essay is that our very real world contains the amounts of suffering that are not outweighed by the amounts of happiness as per intuitions of ordinary people. This extremely relevant. You yourself write:
World Happiness Report paints a picture that turns out to be relatively dystopian as per intuitions of the participants of the experiment (Caviola 2022).
I will spell it out. A group of randomly sampled participants answered that for a world to be positively evaluated, there needs to be 60-75% happy people. We have seen that the World Happiness Report shows only 56% happy people in the period 2005-2011 and that the database is biased towards happiness (participants who are suffering the most are less likely to participate in the survey).
I have combed through all of the comments and not a single one of them made such an argument with reference to the experimental philosophy.
That was never my point. “Suffering commonly exists” is indeed an uninteresting claim.
What have I evaded? I chose a part of your article which I had wished to comment on and… commented on it. I don’t need to comment on every single sentence from your article, especially given that I agree with most of it (I don’t find Benatar’s, Belshaw’s or Häyry & Sukenick’s arguments to be persuasive).
The argument hasn’t been visibly refuted anywhere in the article or in the comments. That’s because… I came up with it and brought it to your attention. I heavily doubt that someone read my relatively unpopular blog and then came here and made a similar comment. I haven’t seen anything like that in any of the comments. I haven’t even seen the name of the author of the study (a central point of my argument) mentioned anywhere here.
-Bruno Contestabile
You’re just making all that up, though.
I’ve already covered this. It’s been refuted multiple times here already. It simply is not true that suffering outweighs the values and joys of life.
Just repeating yourself does not rescue your argument from being bogus.
In addition to my previous argument, I will make an additional one. I will write it in great detail to avoid accusations of repeating refuted arguments. Please, do not tell me stuff like “it has already been refuted”. If you think it is wrong/counterfactual/incoherent/stupid, then please point out what is wrong with it and we can discuss that.
Neutrality thesis tells us that creating people with bad lives is morally wrong, but creating people with good lives is morally neutral. Suppose, for the sake of an argument, that we accept neutrality thesis (please, do read past this sentence, we are just accepting it for the sake of an argument here). From this, it follows that creating a baby is an action that we has negative expected value. Why? Because best case scenario, we do a morally neutral action and worst case scenario we do a morally wrong action. Given that there is a risk of it being a morally wrong action, we can expect it’s value to be less than 0. From this we can conclude that procreation in general is morally wrong IF WE ACCEPT NEUTRALITY THESIS (I am writing this in caps lock to emphasize that this is a conditional statement).
Just by accepting neutrality, I can derive antinatalism. So that means to decisively refute antinatalism, there needs to be some reason to deny the neutrality thesis.
Let’s dissect the neutrality thesis. It consists of 2 claims.
1) creating people with bad lives is morally wrong
2) creating people with good lives is morally neutral
Claim #1 seems to be universally shared. After all, very few people would say that creating a baby straight into a torture machine is good.
So this leaves us with claim #2. For procreation to be permissible, it pretty much has to be false. But figuring out why it is false is quite tricky. After all, if you decide not to create a person, they wouldn’t regret it in any way (since they wouldn’t exist to regret it).
So for procreation to be permissible, there has to be something impersonally and intrinsically good about happy lives. It has to be impersonal, because it makes no sense to say that never existing is bad… for the person who never existed. If you don’t believe that happiness is what matters and you prefer something like virtue or meaning, then the same problem remains. There has to be something impersonally and intrinsically good about virtuous/meaningful lives. There has to be a reason why you could say that creating people with happy/virtuous/meaningful lives is morally good, despite them not being able to regret it in the scenario where you don’t create them.
This brings me to a very important question: what is intrinsically and impersonally good about happy/virtuous/meaningful lives?
-Bruno Contestabile
Now you are doing what all delusional people do: you’ve been trounced and refuted so thoroughly and repeatedly here, that you are now resorting to endless word walls, to assuage yourself you have made your case. But the number of words by which you say disproven things does not undo their being disproven.
Merely repeating yourself is not an argument.
I have left 2 comments around 5 days ago. However, I cannot see them now. Have you deleted them?
-Bruno Contestabile
No. My father died. I’ve been preoccupied. Things have sat in queue.
That can happen a lot here, for various reasons. Patience is warranted.