Anti-Natalism and the case for human extinction

Great Debates
1

In this post I will outline the reasons why creating new human beings is wrong. If everybody followed my moral philosophy, the human race would go extinct. However, I will argue that this is the most preferable outcome for humanity.

David Benatar, in Better Never To Have Been, The Harm of Coming Into Existence, makes the best case I’ve seen so far
against babymaking. It’s a principle he called “Asymmetry.”

Point 3 may seem ludicrous. How can something be GOOD if it’s not good for someone? In support of point 3, I’ll give the example of a married couple who are carriers for Tay-Sachs, a horrible heritable condition whose victims nearly always die before the age of 5 and who suffer excrutiating pain as their physical and mental faculties deterioriate. If they choose permanent sterilization rather than taking the chances of creating a Tay-Sachs baby, I think virtually everybody would declare the absent pains of the never existent child to be “good”, even though that child was not conceived.

In support of point 4, we don’t get particularly worked up over the trillions of possible children that did not become actual and the pleasures these possible children could have enjoyed. In order to avoid bringing in the contentious issue of abortion, I’m referring to all the possible sperm/egg combinations that did not happen. The absent pleasures in this case are “not bad.”

All human lives, virtually without exception, contain some level of suffering within them. Every person who is born is destined to die, and the process of dying can often be a very unpleasant affair. Each death causes several other people to be bereaved. It follows that bringing someone into existence is always a serious harm, and this serious harm could easily be prevented. Vasectomies are only a few hundred bucks and can literally prevent lifetimes of suffering from happening.

The most immediate rejection of this viewpoint is “Why not just kill yourself then?” Suicide can be a rational response to this line of argument, and ones own personal future expected suffering would have to outweigh that to do more harm than good. Once a person is alive, attachments to that person form. A never existent person never forms any attachments and thus it’s better to never be than to be and then commit suicide. Choosing to remain alive and get sterilized could very well have more utility, because it sets an example for others and might prevent even more lives from happening.

2

I don’t think I would. I would think it would be a “bad” were the child to be born, but just nothing if the child were not conceived. It might well be a good choice to be sterilized, but the non-birth and the non-suffering is a moral non-event for me.

3

Wouldn’t the avoidance of “bad” be considered “good” though?

4

Not “seems.” Is. You’ve left the issue of probability out of this discussion entirely, so in the end, this idea doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality as people experience it.

5

Amending the last paragraph of my post… the five minute timer expired.

6

Not in the way I read you as using the terms. Someone not suffering is a good thing. A person suffering is a bad thing. A person who never exists not suffering is not, as far as I can see, either good or bad.

There is also the major problem of quantifying here. Not all bads are equal, and not all bads are equivalently bad to exactly counterbalance a good…

7

Only in the same way that the avoidance of “good” would be considered “bad”. If you’re trying to derive an asymmetry, you couldn’t use this kind of reasoning.

8

What I’m attempting to show is that while there is a duty, at least under certain circumstances, to prevent suffering people from coming into existence (if the suffering is great enough), there is NO corresponding moral duty to bring happy people into existence.

If we look at people in a distant land who are suffering, we regret their suffering. However, we don’t look at uninhabited areas of the globe and feel sad for the happy people that could have existed. That’s because there’s an assymetry between pleasure and pain.

9

That’s a childish outlook, or at least a reflexively timid one.

10

Are lives typically so full of suffering that we have a duty to prevent there from being any more? I suppose that is your argument, but who accepts this premise?

I mean, of course lives typically have some suffering in them, but I do not think it generally crosses this threshold.

11

Just as much as we do not generally consider one morally deficient for failing to have a child that will experience the pleasures of life, we do not generally consider one morally deficient for having a child that will experience the typical pains of life (counterbalanced by the typical pleasures). If you’re going to appeal to our usual moral practices…

12

No, it’s because it is real people suffering, and imaginary people not being happy. That’s not an assymetry between pleasure and pain, it is an assymetry between people and non-people.

13

First of all, there’s a psychological principle called “The Polyanna Effect” that skews people towards optimism. The overwhelming majority of people, when asked how happy they are, will say “above average”. But logically speaking this can’t be right. So peoples subjective sense of well being is not an accurate indicator of how well their lives actually are.

Secondly, approximately 2% of all deaths are suicides, and it’s not to much of a stretch to assume that there must be even a higher percentage of people who are strongly dissatisfied with their lives but are still unwilling or unable to take their own lives. Let’s say 1 in 20 lives are highly miserable. Why place “Russian Roulette” with ones own future potential offspring when the alternative (not procreating) would not be bad?

14

They might have a great sense of how their own lives actually are, and not a great sense of how humanity in general is. They realize that they themselves are happy, but what they don’t realize is that most people are happy as well; they don’t realize that “average” is happy. Still sounds like a pretty good world to me.

15

Oh, nonsense.

The argument rests on the premise that there is only “bad” and “good” without levels,and furthermore that they’re determined in a way that would seem very strange to most people. In truth most of us view our lives as good, and the short times of pain as an interruption to those overall good lives. The good outweighs the bad

Not always.

Not always. (Also, in his vision, is it good or bad when a person experiences pain and pleasure simultaneously.)

Meaningless. Is a rock’s existence therefore good? It’s existence includes an absence of pain, but only because it includes an absence of anything.

[quote=The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.]

Meaningless again.

Further objections.

  1. I do not suppose that measures of pain and pleasure are the only purpose of human existence. Judging a human’s existence as good or bad based only on the presence of pain and pleasure would be as meaningless as judging a meal to be good or bad based only on the presence of ketchup and mustard.

  2. I and many others intend to enjoy an eternal life without pain, which is notably absent from Benatar’s analysis.

16

Funny how things work out. I only recently heard of the VHEM. Then I was reading something entirely different that referred to Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Then, I see this thread. Weird.

Anyway, this is from the poem.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.

And, this:

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

  • William Blake
17

It suggests people don’t know how happy other people are, but that has no bearing on the issue of whether any individuals are happy or not.

18

I wish there were more martyrs to the anti-natalism cause, people who would put their money where their mouth is and use suicide as a political statement.

19

Pain is only bad in that it is detrimental to life, if you are arguing to kill yourself, then your cure is worse than the disease.

20

Well, there is some interesting stuff written about the imperative to be happy that might influence how people answer that.

See: Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek ‘Imperative to Enjoy’