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| title | alt_titles | date | techne | episteme | toc | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antinatalism Overview |
|
2012-05-25 | :rough | :speculation | true |
If only I could show you the places I have seen, you might understand the things I say. I have been to the desolate lands, wandered by those souls who still see the lands of the living but wear the cloak of the dead. Blind to their own ends, they cry, passing through one another like shadows in the dying light of day. I have travelled to where souls rot in torment, pierced with the jagged shards of life and vision, clinging to memory - regrets of the flesh. I saw that this prison was of their own making, and the key was in unknowing, in release. And still, I travelled on.
And finally, I came to the place where souls go to die, where the mirrored and worn spirits fall into an endless sea of grey, mirrored glass, and I lowered myself within, and lay there among them, and I almost did not return.
And do you know what I found there? There, among the silent and battered shells of the innumerable? Peace. Enlightenment. Truth. Only then did I realize that this place, this "Life", is an abomination, a horrible distortion of the natural order. This "Life", who mothered Pain, and Fear, and Envy - these twisted children who exist only because we are here to feed them, to nourish them. This "Life", this afterthought - a disturbance, a mere ripple in that great, dead sea. Not even the cause, but merely an effect, sending these souls upwards, screaming for release from the day they are torn from their waters! The effect of what?!
I do not know. Nor do I care.
Have you ever spoken with the dead? Called to them from this side? Called them from their silent rest? Do you know what it is that they feel? Pain. Pain, when torn into this wakefulness, this reminder of the chaos from which they had escaped. Pain - for having to live. There will be no more pain. There will be no more chaos.
-- [Kerghan][], about to end the world ([video][Kerghan Speech])
Why You Got Screwed
I've got bad news for you. According to some philosophers, there is a huge source of harm in the world. This harm is rarely addressed and marginalized in society. Even worse, you are already affected by it. The harm? Being born.
This position is called antinatalism.
There are many different arguments for antinatalism. It also poses a unique challenge to many ethical theories, and gives unusual answers to well-known problems. The purpose of this FAQ is to give an introduction to all of this.
But more importantly, it alls tries to accurately represent antinatalism. When I researched the position, I was surprised how few non-antinatalist sources actually cared to read the original arguments, relying instead on distorted summaries or second-hand texts. Maybe this FAQ will provide a better overview for the curious reader.
Some Notes
As a stylistic convention, I will refer to all good experiences as a "benefit" and all bad ones as a "harm". This is superior to words like "pleasure" or "pain", which can refer to either very specific sensations (e.g. having a toothache) or the whole category. So to prevent this confusion, everything bad is a harm. If I mean specifically just pain, I'll say so.1
I'd also like to stress that I use negations in their strict sense, i.e. "not good" does not mean "bad", but rather "either bad or neutral".
I try to limit the amount of details and disclaimers. For this I just refer you to the linked blogs and books, mostly [Better Never to Have Been][] and [The View from Hell][]. However, I do strive to cover all the arguments and their criticisms. [Contact][] me or leave a comment if you think I missed or misrepresented something, but consider the [Principle of Charity][] as well. Assume that obvious gaps are just omissions on my side for the sake of brevity, not fundamental flaws.
As this is a FAQ arguing for antinatalism, it focuses on the antinatalist arguments and treats pronatalist positions as rebuttals of specific assumptions or lines of reasoning.
(And yes, this isn't really a FAQ. Deal with it.)
What's Antinatalism?
In short, antinatalism (from lat. natalis, birth) is the position that coming into existence is a harm, and thus, it is generally morally wrong to have children. There are a range of positions about how bad this harm is, how universal it is and if it can be overridden in certain circumstances.
The names for these positions are mine, but are reasonably close to common versions. I've linked each position with its most relevant arguments, but I recommend you just follow the flow of the FAQ to get a general overview.
Pronatalism
It is never wrong to bring someone into existence.
Indifference
It isn't wrong to bring someone into existence, but isn't right either. Both outcomes are morally equivalent, so we should decide based on other considerations, like our personal preferences or economic costs.
Minor Antinatalism
There are some beings who are worse off, but on average, it works out. This seems like the majority view of humanity.
Major Antinatalism
Some beings are better off alive, but on average, the harm dominates. This position is not unusual among transhumanists, who might think that humanity has a possible good future, but so far has mostly suffered. It is not uncommon for people to hold off on having children because the world is too horrible at a given time.
Categorical Antinatalism
It is always wrong to bring someone into existence. Every being is worse off alive. Even [Yotsuba][].
A Note on Circles
One thing this overview won't address is any argument for the particular size of the ethical circle, i.e. the set of all morally relevant beings. It doesn't really matter for antinatalism whether you think [only you][Egoism] or [all animals][Animal Rights] matter, or if the circle is [expanding][Expanding Circle] or [narrowing][Narrowing Circle]. For simplicity's sake, I will assume the circle encompasses all humans, but most arguments can be trivially modified for any size.
Arguments for Antinatalism
The Asymmetry
The asymmetry is probably the most important argument for antinatalism for two reasons. First, it argues for the strongest form, Categorical Antinatalism. If it's true, there is no room for compromise. Existence is bad, period. And second, many other arguments can be reduced to or are overshadowed by it.
The asymmetry is [Benatar][]'s famous core argument. It's deceptively simple:
- The presence of harm is bad.
- The presence of benefit is good.
- The absence of harm is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
- The absence of benefit is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.
Or in table form:
| | Presence | Absence | | Benefit | good | not bad | | Harm | bad | good |
It should be clear that the first column (Presence) corresponds to existence and the second (Absence) to non-existence.
Says Benatar:
There is a common assumption in the literature about future possible people that, all things being equal, one does no wrong by bringing into existence people whose lives will be good on balance. This assumption rests on another - namely that being brought into existence (with decent life prospects) is a benefit (even though not being brought into existence is not a harm). I shall argue that the underlying assumption is erroneous. Being brought into existence is not a benefit but always a harm. When I say that coming into existence is always a harm, I do not mean that it is necessarily a harm. As will become apparent, my argument does not apply to those hypothetical cases in which a life contains only good and no bad. About such an existence I say that it is neither a harm nor a benefit and we should be indifferent between such an existence and never existing. But no lives are like this. All lives contain some bad. Coming into existence with such a life is always a harm.
In other words, by bringing a (so far) non-existent person into existence, according to the asymmetry, you cannot benefit them, for the absence of benefit is not a bad thing and they haven't been deprived of anything. However, you can and will now inflict further (even though maybe minor) harm on them, and so, their birth is strictly a harm.
The two common lines of criticism either deny the asymmetry, or attack the assumption behind personhood and bringing someone into existence. Let's have a look.
The first two claims about the presence of benefit and harm are uncontroversial. It's absence that's problematic. Benatar justifies them with the following intuition:
The asymmetry between (3) and (4) is the best explanation for the view that while there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being.
TODO similar argument from Duty
The asymmetry relies fundamentally on the intuitions that absence of harm must be good and that absence of benefit can't be bad. Disagreeing with either would have weird consequences - so Benatar - and doesn't match our actual behavior or intuitions2. But I think Benatar is not expecting enough from his audience. Both positions seem actually fairly sensible. Let's have a closer look.
Absence is Always Neutral
One way to resolve the asymmetry is to deny that the absence of harm is actually good.
| | Presence | Absence | | Benefit | good | not bad | | Harm | bad | not good |
After all, who is benefited? The hypothetical preferences of non-existent people can't matter, or we would also take their preference for benefit into account - and by assumption, we don't. So how does this benefit arise?
[Sister Y][Sister Asymmetry] gives us this thought experiment:
The Austrian Basement
E. F. has been kidnapped by her father and imprisoned in an Austrian cellar since her early adolescence. Her father repeatedly rapes her over the course of several years. E. F. gives birth to several children sired by her father. She reasonably believes that all these children have severe health problems, and that at least the female children will likely be abused by her father as they grow up.
In Year 10 of her imprisonment, with four children born and removed from her by her father, she discovers a box (unknown to her father) hidden under a floorboard in her cell, containing everything she needs in order to practice undetectable birth control.
Does she have a duty to practice birth control and avoid having more babies? Does she have a duty not to practice birth control, because she would be depriving her unborn babies of life (which, while it would have certain problems, would nevertheless presumably be worth living)? (Assume she would like the company of more babies, but fears the pain of more unassisted childbirth, and the "interests of the unborn children" is the concern that will break the tie, given her personal ambivalence.)
If you answer "yes, E. should use birth control", then why? She is preventing harm to her unborn children, but if you deny the asymmetry, how is this relevant?
So if absence of harm is not good (i.e. neutral), E. should have more children, who will subsequently be raped and beaten, but overall, will say they like living. That's a tough bullet to bite.
However, our intuition of what makes a life worth living can easily be biased. Argues [Robin Hanson][Hanson lift up]:
People keep asking me why I'm not horrified by a future of trillions of [digitally uploaded people] living at near subsistence wages. I've explained that "[poor folks do smile][Hanson smile]", that poor lives usually have plenty of joy and satisfaction, even if less than in rich lives. Most lives in poor societies are well worth living. But for many, such abstract words ring hollow – what they may need is to really see such lives for themselves. I haven't seen it yet, but the new movie Lift Up seems promising for this purpose:
The old man wanted them to find joy, even in the sadness that accompanies death. … An 82-minute documentary called "Lift Up," had its debut at the Haitian Embassy in Washington last month. Jean and Muse hope that, in its depiction of Haitians rejoicing despite the devastation dealt to their nation and their lives, the film evokes the spirit of their grandfather's request. …
The brothers hope the film will introduce U.S. viewers to another side of Haiti, one that goes beyond the poverty, violence and suffering so often depicted in mass media. Growing up in Port-au-Prince, they saw the dark side of humanity but also reveled in warm households filled with extended family, days spent playing outside with packs of friends and a rich tradition of passing stories from one generation to the next. …
Over five days, the filmmakers captured scene after scene of children playing and people smiling as they remembered lost loved ones. "I didn't see any of the negative things I had always heard about," Knowlton said. "I only saw people coming together."
Astronomical Waste
Why should the absence of benefit be considered "not bad"? Why not consider it an evil?
| | Presence | Absence | | Benefit | good | bad | | Harm | bad | good |
One transhumanist approach to this is called [Astronomical Waste][]. Says Nick Bostrom:
With very advanced technology, a very large population of people living happy lives could be sustained in the accessible region of the universe. For every year that development of such technologies and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is therefore an opportunity cost: a potential good, lives worth living, is not being realized. Given some plausible assumptions, this cost is extremely large.
[Sister Y][Sister Asymmetry] has another thought experiment:
Slum World
The Supreme World Leaders meet in Tokyo in 2100 and decide that the world has a choice. Either the 2100 world population of 3 billion can be maintained in relative splendor, with fresh kumquats and sensory implants for everyone, or the world population can be increased to 100 billion, with everyone living in conditions similar to the conditions of a 20th century slum, apparently endured by upwards of 900 million people circa the year 2000.
Which condition should the Supreme World Leaders choose?
This is really just an illustration of the problem, but a poignant one. However, someone already convinced of positive utilitarianism will simply accept the [Repugnant Conclusion][] and appeal to [Scope Insensitivity][].
TODO antinatalist answer to repugnant conclusion
TODO mere addition (plug locality concerns)
Even so, Benatar writes:
Whereas, at least when we think of them, we rightly are sad for inhabitants of a foreign land whose lives are characterized by suffering, when we hear that some island is unpopulated, we are not similarly sad for the happy people who, had they existed, would have populated this island. Similarly, nobody really mourns for those who do not exist on Mars, feeling sorry for potential such beings that they cannot enjoy life. Yet, if we knew that there were sentient life on Mars but that Martians were suffering, we would regret this for them.
Even most positive utilitarians don't feel saddened by the emptiness of space and don't feel a strong moral compulsion to fix this mistake. On the other hand, nor do negative utilitarians rejoice at all the matter in the universe that isn't used to torture people. So overall, maybe our feeling of regret or relief isn't such a great guide after all?
Should absence matter at all? (A Cake Metaphor)
Here's a thought experiment to question the assumption that absence of certain things is morally relevant at all. And don't worry, it doesn't involve any torture, rape or murder! What am I, an ethicist?3 It's only about pie.
<%= image("pie.jpg", "pie hole") %>
There are three different worlds. Let's call them Defaultia, Absencia and Lossa. They are all very similar, except for one little detail. In all three worlds there is a pie shop, and in this pie shop there is a careful pie maker. The pie maker is currently making another delicious pie for a customer. Behind the pie maker are three ingredients in three conspicuously similar pots, yet only one is needed for the pie. The pie maker will blindly grab one of the pots, make sure it is the right one and if so, use it. The pie will be delicious and the customer will be very happy.
And here's how these worlds differ.
In Defaultia, the pie maker is lucky and immediately grabs the right ingredient. Everything comes out right and the world is good.
In Absencia, the pie maker is not so lucky and takes the wrong ingredient at first. A pie with this ingredient would taste horrible! The customer would be very sad indeed. But the pie maker immediately notices the wrong pot, tries again and this time is lucky. The same pie as in Defaultia is produced and everyone is happy.
And finally in Lossa, the pie maker again picks the wrong pot. (What's up with that anyway? Maybe the pie maker should consider looking next time! Sheesh.) But it is not the pie-ruining ingredient this time, but unbeknownst to the pie maker, it would make the pie even more delicious! It is a totally weird coincidence and no-one in the whole world knows of this connection, so the pie maker again puts back the pot and picks the intended ingredient. As usual, the same pie as in Defaultia results. Sunshine, end scene.
Thus ends the thought experiment. And here is the question: which of these worlds is better? Remember that in all three of them, the exact same pie is produced, and both pie maker and customer are just as happy every time.
Yet if we believed the asymmetry, then there would be a clear winner - namely Absencia! In Absencia, there was a potential for great harm. Had the pie maker not noticed the wrong pot, then the customer's day would've been ruined. But fortunately, this harm was avoided and so, says the asymmetry, an additional good was produced for the customer. Ergo, Absencia is the best.
If we look at it from the perspective of Astronomical Waste, then the absence of benefits, even when there is no existing person being deprived, is still bad. Proponents of this view look at the universe and are disappointed by all the matter that isn't used for making people happy (or making happy people). It follows then, if the absence of pleasure causes a harm, then Lossa is clearly worse than Defaultia! After all, Lossa almost included a super-pie and super-happy customer, but then didn't after all.
In a third approach, we could ask Hardcore Consequentialist Robot 9000 what it thinks about these worlds. It would correctly reason that the pie makers initial choice of ingredients was truly random and that the resulting pie was already determined before picking anything. The pie maker will always end up using the intended ingredient and the same pie will be made. Thus, the state of the world is always the same, and as paths to a state don't matter to HCR 9000, all worlds are exactly equal in value. (This scenario is particularly frustrating for HCR 9000's evil archenemy Doctor Deontology. Paths matter, he says, but only random chance was involved this time, so he still has to choose. But how?)
So who's right? Or is everyone wrong and there's a fourth option? Maybe the idea of "prevention of harm" in a deterministic universe is a flawed one, and we should reject it. But then how do we construct morality?
What about future versions of yourself?
According to Benatar, there is a difference between "lives worth starting" and "lives worth continuing". Unfortunately for him, he doesn't actually offer any argument why these should be different.
Assuming materialist views of personhood, there can't be a continuous self over time, only a set of self-moments loosely connected by psychological similarity. How can one such self-moment blinking into existence be fundamentally different from another, just because one involves sperm and the other normal operations of the brain?
TODO better present this view
Many forms of naturalism face this problem. If antinatalism is true, then we have a responsibility for our future-selves in exactly the same way as for our children, and so, if we shouldn't have children, neither should we have future-selves. We ought to commit suicide right away. This by itself of course is not an argument against the correctness of antinatalism. It just puts pressure on living antinatalists to construct a meaningful conception of personhood, if they aren't just in it for the contrarian statu.
TODO argue that a Big World in which everything exists doesn't affect the antinatalist argument
TODO contrast with unconscious person
Non-Person Values
Not just people matter. We can value states of the world without experiencing them, or even if we don't exist. Thus, I (or rather, my values) can be harmed even if I never exist. Existence is not a morally significant hurdle.
For example, a soldier in war might sacrifice their life for their country, and it does not seem odd to say that the soldier would be harmed if their country lost the war afterwards. Similarly, we might care that a tradition or idea not go extinct even long after we ourselves are dead.
Thus, we should respect the values even of non-existent people. They would want to live (or so they would tell us), so we are harming them by denying them the opportunity.
However, this view seems very hard to actually apply. For every possible mind X, there is a possible mind Anti-X that values exactly the opposite. If you bring X into existence because X wants to live, then you are ignoring Anti-X who wants X to not live.
If you prefer a specific selection of minds (say, minds with the same political stance), then you are really just imposing your own values. Then it's not about unborn people, just you.
Life Sucks
This is a really straightforward argument. Life sucks, therefore it is bad to create more beings, for their life will suck too. There is nothing categorical about it. In principle, life could be awesome and then we should have plenty of children. It's just our world of suffering that we don't want to force upon further victims.
It starts to get tricky once you start asking questions like "How much does it suck?", "Is there an acceptable level of suck?" or "Does it suck for everyone?".
How bad is life?
Says Benatar:
Whether or not one accepts the pessimistic view I have presented of ordinary healthy life, the optimist is surely on very weak ground when one considers the amount of unequivocal suffering the world contains. [...]
Consider first, natural disasters. More than fifteen million people are thought to have died from such disasters in the last 1,000 years. In the last few years, flooding, for example, has killed an estimated 20,000 annually and brought suffering to 'tens of millions'. The number is greater in some years. In late December 2004, a few hundred thousand people lost their lives in a tsunami.
Approximately 20,000 people die every day from hunger. An estimated 840 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition without dying from it. That is a sizeable proportion of the approximately 6.3 billion people who currently live.
Disease ravages and kills millions annually. Consider plague, for example. Between 541 CE and 1912, it is estimated that over 102 million people succumbed to plague. Remember that the human population during this period was just a fraction of its current size. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed 50 million people. Given the size of the current world human population and the increased speed and volume of global travel, a new influenza epidemic could cause millions more deaths. HIV currently kills nearly 3 million people annually. If we add all other infectious diseases, we get a total of nearly 11 million deaths per year, preceded by considerable suffering. Malignant neoplasms take more than a further 7 million lives each year, usually after considerable and often protracted suffering. Add the approximately 3.5 million accidental deaths (including over a million road accident deaths a year). When all other deaths are added, a colossal sum of approximately 56.5 million people died in 2001. That is more than 107 people per minute. [...]
Although much disease is attributable to human behaviour, consider the more intentionally caused suffering that some members of our species inflict on others. One authority estimates that before the twentieth century over 133 million people were killed in mass killings. According to this same author, the first 88 years of the twentieth century saw 170 million (and possibly as many as 360 million) people 'shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, ... [hanged], bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners'.
[...]
Nor does the suffering end there. Consider the number of people who are raped, assaulted, maimed, or murdered (by private citizens, rather than governments). About 40 million children are maltreated each year. More than 100 million currently living women and girls have been subjected to genital cutting. Then there is enslavement, unjust incarceration, shunning, betrayal, humiliation, and intimidation, not to mention oppression in its myriad forms. [...]
TODO better estimates, more mundane suffering too
TODO optimism bias
However, says [Bryan Caplan][Caplan hedonic]:
Almost everyone says they're glad to be alive. Through the magic of hedonic adaptation, even the desperately poor and the severely disabled seem to find great joy in life. When movie villains threaten to "Make you wish you'd never been born," they aren't threatening to make you slightly worse off. They're threatening massive harm. The threat resonates because almost everyone realizes that the gift of life is way better than non-existence.
Consider also the argument from Hedonic Treadmill.
Is some level of harm acceptable? (#calculations)
TODO utilitarian / max-harm argument
Life has harms and benefits. Instead of denying all life because some harm exists, why not just weigh it against the benefit? If the good outweighs the bad, then life might still be worthwhile, even if you accept the asymmetry. The non-existent have the advantage of always non-negative utility (because they can't be harmed), but maybe the sum of utility the existent experience is still much greater, despite the handicap?
Let's call the magnitude of benefit B and of harm H. Benatar assumes (quite naturally) that the absence of harm must be exactly opposite4 in value to the harm done by its presence, i.e. no harm has utility +H and harm has -H.
| | Presence | Absence | | Benefit | +B | 0 | | Harm | -H | +H |
Therefore, existence has a total value of (+B) + (-H) = B-H and non-existence has (0) + (+H) = H. So for existence to be better than non-existence, we must have B > 2*H. In other words, the benefits must be more than twice as good as the good we attain through the absence of harm.
(If, however, you also deny the asymmetry by saying that the absence of benefit is itself bad, then the benefits merely have to outweigh the harms.)
Benatar argues that - given the asymmetry - this simple calculation will never work.
But maybe they are comparable. Why not try the calculation?
Given the known large amount of harm and the fact that the benefit has to be twice as good, the burden of proof sits on the pronatalist side. And while this isn't an argument against the position itself, in my experience, almost no one who makes claims about utility actually ever calculates it.
As long as a distribution of numerical values exists that could favor whatever view a particular person is arguing for, they're happy. It's really rare to see one actually do the math, and even rarer for one to do the math for multiple problems and use the same numbers every time.
If you haven't done the math, how can you claim that it is in your favor, especially when a priori this seems somewhat unlikely? Where does this knowledge come from?
If you have done a utility calculation, I'd love to hear about it! (Seriously, [contact][Contact] me or leave a comment. I can't even decide on the rough order of magnitude for many relevant values!)
Without slaves, Rome would collapse!
One example of how harm might be acceptable is commonly put this way:
I need children to care for me once I am old. Our social system needs enough young people or the old will starve.
This is fundamentally a very selfish argument. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that you can't have any pretence that you care about the well-being or rights of others if you make it.
Benatar thinks this argument might well be correct. He argues that, even though we should fade out human existence, we might have to bring some people into existence purely so we can facilitate this extinction.
TODO isolation of the last humans
Regardless of its correctness, [Dunbar's Number][] provides evidence that a population of a few hundred people is still large enough to not feel lonely. If so, then we can decrease our 7+ billion people a lot before these problems become dominant.
Are harm and benefit even comparable?
Benatar actually argues that we can't compare benefit and harm. He offers the following analogy:
C
If benefit and harm are comparable, then Sick can be better than Healthy.
This presumably would be the case where the amount of suffering that (2) saves S is more than twice the amount S actually suffers. But this cannot be right, for surely it is always better to be H (a person who never sick and is thus not disadvantaged by lacking the capacity for recovery). The whole point is that (2) is good for S but does constitute an advantage over H.
Or as [two posters on LW][LW dust] said it:
Put simply - a dust mote registers exactly zero on my torture scale, and torture registers fundamentally off the scale (not just off the top, off) on my dust mote scale.
You're asking how many biscuits equal one steak, and then when one says 'there is no number', accusing him of scope insensitivity.
and:
For a more concrete example of how this might work, suppose I steal one cent each from one billion different people, and [someone else] steals $100,000 from one person. The total amount of money I have stolen is greater than the amount that [the other] has stolen; yet my victims will probably never even realize their loss, whereas the loss of $100,000 for one individual is significant. A cent does have a nonzero amount of purchasing power, but none of my victims have actually lost the ability to purchase anything; whereas [the other thief]'s, on the other hand, has lost the ability to purchase many, many things.
I believe utility for humans works in the same manner. Another thought experiment I found helpful is to imagine a certain amount of disutility, x, being experienced by one person. Let's suppose x is "being brutally tortured for a week straight". Call this situation A. Now divide this disutility among people until we have y people all experiencing (1/y)*x disutility - say, a dust speck in the eye each. Call this situation B. If we can add up disutility [...], the total amount of disutility in either situation is the same. But now, ask yourself: which situation would you choose to bring about, if you were forced to pick one?
Would you just flip a coin?
Another illustration to underline the implausibility of direct comparison is the existence of sacred values.
TODO sacred values, i.e. not paying any price to violate something holy
Similarly, there are also negative sacred values, i.e. things so bad we can't accept them, ever. This is one of the few situations where a torture example is really appropriate. Imagine being tortured horribly, but with the promise that once the torture is over, you will be given access to paradise full of pleasure and cute puppies.5 Is there a torture so bad that nothing could make up for it? Even if you knew the torturer were trustworthy and the paradise really great, is there some point where you simply give up?
Furthermore, denying this and accepting the direct comparison forces you to deal with [Pascal's Mugging][].
TODO present pascal's mugging, make it clear that probability falls slower than utility increases
But I like Russian Roulette!
Maybe not everyone is affected by dominating harm. If you are already an upper-class parent with no history of mental illness, then maybe your child does have a good shot at a worthwhile life.
This is fundamentally a utilitarian argument. You take the probability of your child having a sucky life, multiply it with the negative value of all the expected harm, do the same thing with the chance of a good life and compare the two. It's fundamentally like Russian Roulette, but if the odds are good enough, why not play?
Of course, if you accept this argument, I'd like you to show me these calculations.
TODO non-utilitarian rebuttals
TODO caution principle, low predictability of mental illness
Synthetic Happiness is Real Happiness
[Dan Gilbert][Gilbert TED] argues that we fabricate "synthetic happiness" when we don't get what we want, and that this is as good as "real" happiness. Thanks to the [Hedonic Treadmill][], we will adapt to any change in life and go back to our happiness set point.
If this happiness research is right, then our life circumstances are largely irrelevant when considering how happy we are. Only one thing matters: our happiness set point.6 And because most people say they like living, they probably have a sufficiently high set point and weren't harmed by whatever life we forced on them. And if you have a transhumanist bend, you might even think that [modifying the set point][Wireheading] is not too far off.
TODO rebuttal from desire fulfillment and standard anti-wirehead arguments
Additionally, many people independently reject wireheading. Given the (hypothetical) choice between a Happy Pill that makes you feel like your loved ones are ok and your loved ones actually being ok, most people claim to choose the first option. But if this is the case, then you can't also accept synthetic happiness. Either truth matters or it doesn't.
Furthermore, Sister Y provides [yet another][Sister golem] illustration:
Say we make a golem out of clay, like in the old days. We bring it into existence to suffer a life of misery, as golems are want to have. But we endow it with a very special characteristic, along with life: the preference to exist. No matter what tortures we or the world inflict on our golem, it will keep on preferring to exist.
Is that moral? Can we create a Foxconn megafactory of such golems and keep them alive for miserable decade after miserable decade, with clean consciences?
Your suffering is a First World Problem.
An anonymous commenter on [The View from Hell][] provides an example of this common argument:
I think your blog's title is a total misnomer: if you're still able (emotionally, physically and financially) to enjoy drugs, sex, running and talking about philosophy as you yourself claim you clearly haven't got the slightest notion of what hell consists of.
In other words, if there are many people who are much worse off than you, you can't claim to suffer.
I find that a very strange argument to make. If even privileged people suffer greatly, isn't that an argument for antinatalism, namely that even greatly improved average circumstances don't fix suffering? Shouldn't we therefore conclude that many more people suffer than we typically think?
What the arguments seems to be doing is to criticize people for expressing a desire for help. Basically, if someone else needs help much more than you, you shouldn't bring your pain to our attention. You're just wasting resources that way. That's not a bad point, but it is not an argument against preventing births. If less people are made, less will suffer and we can take better care of the rest.
Children are Expensive
We've heard utilitarian arguments about benefit outweighing harm, so why not try the other side? Are there egoistic reasons7 to not have children?
TODO cost, happiness statistic, pregnancy photos
TODO https://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/reasons-not-to-have-childrenreasons-to-have-children/, https://vblackledge.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/reasons-to-not-have-children-and-reasons-to-debunked/, etc.
Humans are Parasites
A variant of "life sucks" is that it isn't human life that's so bad, but the horror we inflict on the rest of the planet in order to sustain ourselves. Most life would be better off if humanity went extinct.
TODO [Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT)][VHEMT]
TODO wildlife is much worse off than farm animals
Of course, if you think that only humans have moral value, then the whole argument is moot to begin with.
Utilitarianism is Wrong
Instead of providing a specific utility calculation for/against antinatalism, one can also attack the underlying assumption of utilitarianism. This is not the right place to fully cover these attacks or their merits, as they don't affect antinatalism directly.
Escape from Kaldor Hicks
Says [Sistery Y][Sister Kaldor]:
All the utilitarian justifications come down to this: we must punish people, make them suffer, so that overall, people in society suffer less. What this assumes is that we have a right to make people suffer against their will for the greater good. This assumption is wholly unsupported, and can never, in my view, be supported. [...]
[Pareto efficiency][Pareto] is the idea that a transaction is just (and we should encourage it) if it helps someone and hurts no one. Any fully consensual transaction should have this characteristic, so a contractual exchange would be a Pareto improvement. (However, the justice of any transaction relies on the justice of the initial distribution, which is, in reality, totally unfair.)
[Kaldor-Hicks efficiency][Kaldor Hicks] comes from a recognition that consent is hard to do. With Kaldor-Hicks, we jump from requiring a transaction to help someone and not hurt anyone - that is, to be fully consensual - to allowing the transaction if the gains for some outweigh the costs to others, so that theoretically the losers could be compensated. (It doesn't matter if, in reality, the losers are compensated.) Many non-consensual transactions can be justified under Kaldor-Hicks; the good for some just has to outweigh the bad for others. For instance, rape is never a Pareto improvement, but if the rapist enjoys it more than the victim suffers from it, it could be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. It is my contention that Pareto has a shot at being just, but Kaldor-Hicks is churched-up evil.
But even a market based on actual consent is not grounded or justified in any way that should make us ethically comfortable. A market or social system may provide for individual choice in any given transaction, but a participant cannot decide whether to be part of a market economy. It's not consent all the way down, you might say.
TODO elaborate a lot more
Rights are Inalienable
TODO no utility overwrites your rights
Potential People have Rights too
Why should we consider it a right not to be harmed, but not a right to live?
You know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? 'Cuz we're alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don't see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We're not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What's the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. 'Cuz JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They're fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It's a self serving, man-made bullshit story.
-- [George Carlin][Carlin Sanctity]
See also the asymmetry.
But most people don't want to die!
If you ask people if they would like to die, most disagree.
Following Caplan's "logic," kidnapping is justified, if it elicits Stockholm Syndrome, beating your child is okay, as long as he buys the "I turned out okay" rhetoric later in life, and cult brainwashing is not a problem at all.
-- [Francois Tremblay][Francois Caplan]
TODO bias argument
I can't help but feel that culture too rarely [makes the case][Wasting The Dawn] for antinatal positions and that feeling regret for having to live is always treated as a mental illness, not a possible position to defend.
TODO argument from conformity and "I don't want to vote" before universal suffrage
Epicurus called, he wants his argument back
Says the [Bro][Bro Epicurus]:
Why the fuck are people so obsessed with what happens when you die? Look, once you're dead you can't feel a goddamn thing, so get over it.
Basically, the Epicurean position on death denies it any moral value. We have seen how one might deny that absence of anything is bad. This is a generalization of this idea: only things that happen to people are ever relevant. If there is no person, there is neither harm nor benefit.
Thus, a non-existent person is never harmed, and so bringing them into existence is also not wrong.
However, this position has many counter-intuitive implications. Notably, murder doesn't harm the victim - because they are now dead. It is thus hard to see why killing someone should be considered bad.
You Can't Harm the Non-Existent
Benatar present this potential counter-argument:
- For something to harm somebody, it must make that person worse off.
- The 'worse off' relation is a relation between two states.
- Thus, for somebody to be worse off in some state (such as existence), the alternative state, with which it is compared, must be one in which he is less badly (or better) off.
- But non-existence is not a state in which anybody can be, and thus cannot be compared with existence.
- Thus coming into existence cannot be worse than never coming into existence.
- Therefore, coming into existence cannot be a harm.
TODO argue for supporting personhood views
Furthermore, this argument relies on relative harm, not absolute harm. I'm not making you worse off if I bring you into existence, regardless what that existence looks like, but you might still suffer in absolute terms.
So while death is not a bad thing under the Epicurean perspective (and I would tend to agree), birth still can be bad. Insisting that it technically isn't worse is really just [arguing about words][LW words], not morality.
Practical Implications
Beyond the raw arguments, we should also consider the consequences of an antinatalist world-view.
However, remember that implications of a belief are never an argument against the belief. Just because it would inconvenience me if the street were wet doesn't tell me anything about whether it does in fact rain or not.
Are antinatalists just being contrarian?
Is this just a contrarian position? Are antinatalists merely signalling how deep and unconventional they are? After all, even professional ethicists aren't more ethical on average8. And some antinatalists keep on insisting that their position is a great taboo.
If life is so horrible, why don't you kill yourself?
<%= image("likebeingdead.jpg", "sleep is death") %>
Revealed preference: it's easy to kill yourself, yet only about [0.016%][WHO suicide], or 1 in 63, kill themselves each year.
TODO if life is so awesome, why do so many people kill themselves? Why does the suicide rate go up in richer countries? Why does it go up as suicide gets easier?
TODO about 20-50% of schizophrenics die of suicide - is this evidence?
TODO suicide censorship, illegality in most countries
TODO sources! (statistics, Sister Y)
If the harm is mostly suffered directly at birth, as the argument from consent and the asymmetry argue, then a longer life doesn't add much additional harm by itself. In those cases, immortality might well be the preferred solution.
Abortion
<%= image("prodeath.jpg", "Antinatalist Antelope is Pro-Death") %>
How does this translate into the abortion issue? If it is a priori wrong to start new human lives, then we should prevent human lives from coming into full personhood, through abortion, or we should prevent human lives from existing at all, through contraception. When the latter fails, the former becomes our duty.
-- [Francois Tremblais][Francois Abortion]
TODO When, exactly, is the harm done?
TODO Benatar's position
Moral Consequences
I once read a summary of the game [Vampire: The Masquerade][Vampire RPG]. In it, you are a recently turned vampire who has to feed on the living to survive. Your constant hunger for blood makes it likely that you will one day lose control and kill whoever you're feeding off or any amount of other innocents. You must exploit and endanger a large number of humans merely to survive. You know that this is wrong, yet your own need to survive makes you do it anyway. You might tell yourself all kinds of clever reasons why this is acceptable. But really, no one believes you, not even you. You know that you could do the right thing any time and just step out into the sun. You don't have to exist. You can just die. Yet you don't. No matter what you tell yourself, you are evil.9
This is basically the antinatalist world-view.
TODO actual consequences of such a view
Harm is Socially Constructed
The fact that diseases can be invented (or, as with homosexuality, uninvented) and their criteria tweaked in response to social conditions is exactly what worries critics like Frances about some of the disorders proposed for the DSM-5 - not only attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome but also binge eating disorder, temper dysregulation disorder, and other "sub-threshold" diagnoses. To harness the power of medicine in service of kids with hallucinations, or compulsive overeaters, or 8-year-olds who throw frequent tantrums, is to command attention and resources for suffering that is undeniable. But it is also to increase psychiatry's intrusion into everyday life, even as it gives us tidy names for our eternally messy problems.
-- [Source][Karl Harm]
If we perceive life as harmful because we talk about it, then accepting antinatalism will makes us like life even less.
I caRe aboUt SuffERing whicH is WhY I trY to MakE PeoPle HorRibly DepRessEd.
-- [AntiANTrollbBot][AntiAN tweet depression]
As far as we can tell no human has ever been born without the propensity to develop cancer. That people don't die of cancer is purely a function of the fact that they die of something else before the cancer gets them. So, why is cancer not just a part of life? Part and parcel with being a multicellular organism? The simple answer is that it causes death, disability and pain. These are widely recognized as bad and so is cancer. What about feeling sad? To my knowledge no human has ever been born without the propensity to feel sadness. Is sadness simply part and parcel with life? The answer from my corner is, not if you don't want to be sad. This is the rub in all mental illness. It is the malady of not wanting to experience the world as we do. And, it raises the deepest questions about what it means to improve wellness.
All talk about mental problems, including depression and a lack of satisfaction with life, is really normative talk in disguise.
TODO [Disease post by Yvain][Yvain Disease]
TODO Szasz, [Caplan's paper][Caplan Szasz]
Apocalyptic Imperative
The fact that only [few][Dawrst] antinatalists call for the end of all life, in some form or another, is a bad sign. It requires a fairly complex argument to think that being born is bad, but total extinction isn't worth it. Instead of that particular combination being exactly right, it seems much more likely that you really just picked an unusual belief as a contrarian signal, but don't want to upset the status quo too much. Gods forbid you actually have to live according to your expoused morality10
TODO rebuttal: changing the world is hard, let's go shopping
Religious Analogies
This section isn't completely serious. It doesn't provide actual arguments, really. Just because some religious scholar or old ascetic supported something doesn't make it right. But I still find it interesting how common the position actually is. There is obvious [memetic][meme] pressure to remove antinatalism from any religion, but it still survives for some reason.
Christianity
Even Jesus was an antinatalist.
Jesus said, "The example of whosoever demands the world is like those who drink sea water. The more he drinks the more his thirst increases until it kills him." -- [al-Ghazali][]
A minor remark. Antinatalism also provides a solution to Anselm's ontological argument, like so:
- God is the greatest possible being. (Definition)
- It is best to not exist. (Antinatalism)
- Therefore, God does not exist.
Death of God theology
TODO "Jesus/God actually died on the cross" position
TODO Mainländer, the universe is the suicide of God (also, finally get a copy of Philosophie der Erlösung)
Shakers
TODO How not to do it. Compare also early Gnostics.
Greeks
TODO Stoics, Cynics (get quotes from Pre-Nicene New Testament)
Buddhism
Furthermore, as if the monk were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground — one day, two days, three days dead — bloated, livid and festering, he applies it to this very body, 'This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate'...
Or again, as if he were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground, picked at by crows, vultures and hawks, by dogs, hyenas and various other creatures... a skeleton smeared with flesh and blood, connected with tendons... a fleshless skeleton smeared with blood, connected with tendons... a skeleton without flesh or blood, connected with tendons... bones detached from their tendons, scattered in all directions — here a hand bone, there a foot bone, here a shin bone, there a thigh bone, here a hip bone, there a back bone, here a rib, there a breast bone, here a shoulder bone, there a neck bone, here a jaw bone, there a tooth, here a skull... the bones whitened, somewhat like the color of shells... piled up, more than a year old... decomposed into a powder: He applies it to this very body, 'This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.'
(...) [His mindfulness is established][Nose Snail], and he lives detached, and clings to nothing in the world.
-- excerpt from the [Satipatthana Sutta][]
A monk who is constantly mindful of death will be diligent. He is disenchanted with all forms of existence. He has conquered attachment to life. He abhors all evil. He is not greedy and does not hoard requisites. The perception of impermanence grows in him, followed by the perceptions of suffering and non-self. Others who have not developed mindfulness of death become victims of fear, horror and confusion when the time of their death arrives. They may feel suddenly seized by wild beasts, ghosts, snakes, robbers or murderers. However, the monk dies fearless, without delusion.
-- excerpt from the [Visuddhimagga][]
[Mara:] Why don't you approve of birth? Once born, one enjoys sensual pleasures. Who now has persuaded you of this: 'Bhikkhuni, don't approve of birth'?
[Cala:] For one who is born there is death; once born, one encounters sufferings - bondage, murder, affliction - hence one shouldn't approve of birth.
The Buddha has taught the Dhamma, the transcendence of birth; for the abandoning of all suffering he has settled me in the truth.
As to those beings who fare amidst form, and those who abide in the formless - not having understood cessation, they come again to re-becoming.
-- excerpt from the [Cala Sutta][]
Judaism
Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!
-- saying
It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions: If the author were really committed to the idea tha virtue isn't always rewarded, shouldn't the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything?
-- Ted Chiang
Absent a translated reading copy of the text, I can only speculate as to what exactly Job's retention of faith in the alternate version looks like - it seems wholly implausible that it would be the kind of faith one sees being sold like a drug at the tax-exempt megachurches that hawk drive-thru salvation. I imagine Job would feel something like the Zen master who finally woke up one day and burned all his scriptures and cursed the day he heard the Buddha's name, after wasting decades trying to square the spiritual circle. Your enlightenment may come, that is for sure, but it won't be the cheap dopamine perma-fix you thought it would be. Happiness is a high, but Truth is Truth. And the handmaidens of Truth are disenchantment, disillusionment, and death-awareness.
I say that for the truly faithful, God must be seen as nothing other than a yawning void in place of an answer, an untouchable mystery which for no reason at all churns out gasping life, then drowns it in final eternity. This is not the God that anyone would ever go looking for, but the ones who look, who actually look instead of just trying to trap their cognitive dissonance in yet another layer of spiritual nonsense, will find this one. Only seek this God if, like Job, you have absolutely no other choice - if you're not ready to throw your entire terror management apparatus out the window, with all the suffering and despair that entails, you're better off at the megachurch.
-- Chuck G.
It's also interesting that many scholars consider Job to be the oldest book of the bible. Satan seems to be God's official prosecutor and right-hand man. The happy ending does seem tacked on, even more so when considered in the philosophical context of Ecclesiastes, whose message boils down to 'life sucks, then you die, so you probably ought to go ahead and worship God... just in case'.
-- metamorphhh
([Source][Sister Job])
TODO Ecclesiastes
TODO Benatar's commentary
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Another reason I prefer this categorization into benefit/harm is [anhedonia][Anhedonia] in its various forms. It doesn't make much sense to speak of "pain" during states of emotionlessness, but one can certainly still be harmed. ↩︎
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Personally, I'm slightly worried by Benatar's appeal to intuitions. He spends much of his book on how counter-intuitive his position of antinatalism is, and how we are biased towards optimism, but then he argues that the asymmetry actually matches many of our intuitions (astronomical waste isn't bad, we have no duty to procreate, but a duty to prevent bad births, etc.). You can't have it both ways. ↩︎
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As [PlaidX observes][PlaidX torture]:
↩︎The use of torture in these hypotheticals generally seems to have less to do with ANALYZING cognitive algorithms, and more to do with "getting tough" on cognitive algorithms. Grinding an axe or just wallowing in self-destructive paranoia.
If the point you're making really only applies to torture, fine. But otherwise, it tends to read like "Maybe people will understand my point better if I CRANK MY RHETORIC UP TO 11 AND UNCOIL THE FIREHOSE AND HALHLTRRLGEBFBLE"
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Should the negative value of harm and the positive value of its prevention really be exactly opposite? What about [Risk Aversion][]? The important thing to note here is that risk aversion is typically measured with regards to money or some other quantity, not direct utility. By definition, utility is always risk-neutral, but the things that bring utility don't have to be (and typically aren't). ↩︎
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This is not too different from certain Christian world-views. After all, having to endure earthly existence is nothing but torture compared to future heavenly delights. ↩︎
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All you depressed people hopefully realize how devastating this is. Life sucks and it will keep on sucking. Under [normal circumstances][Happiness Stochastic], happiness is largely constant. Happy endings are for other people. ↩︎
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As Kant correctly noted, essentially all reasons to have children are egoistic, of course. It's really hard to make a child without treating it as a means. ↩︎
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See [Schwitzgebel's various studies][Schwitzgebel Ethics]. ↩︎
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The same goes for pronatalists, of course. If life is so awesome, why aren't you making much more of it? Why stop at 2 kids and not at 2000? Costs? What, I thought birth is always good? ↩︎