The modern antinatalism movement is incoherent pseudo-philosophical window dressing that steals all of the bad points from negative utilitarianism and none of the good
> The third issue is they don’t seem to consider the implications of what they believe, at all. I am 100% not endorsing suicide, but it feels like an important point to talk about if you build your belief system on the phrase “I wish I wasn’t born, because I couldn’t consent to it.” It’s a very icky topic, which is why it’s only indirectly focused on, but it seems like the natural conclusion of a movement built on the lives of high functioning conscious beings sucking is to grapple with the fact that there’s an easy path to nonexistence for anyone who wants one — maybe antinatalists should endorse voluntary euthanasia, like how it’s been legalized in Canada?
The first point is reasonable (if life is not worth living why are you still here?) but most antinatalists do grapple with it. Almost all are pro-euthanasia, they bring up the reasonable point that suicide is scary and also can emotionally harm their friends and family, and some claim that while their life is now just worth bearing, due to childhood trauma and terrible parents it’s only a net-negative on the whole. Now that they’ve already sunk-cost the suffering of childhood, they’re willing to stick it out for the mundane barely-positive existence of their adulthood.
Essentially life for fish is net-negative, so humans polluting the oceans and sterilizing the environment is actually a good thing. I find the claim absurd/amusing on aesthetic grounds, but I admit it seems logically consistent. We shouldn’t go actively sterilizing the world though, since the sort of attitude that has us mass-killing animals wherever we can is one that is likely to lead to more animal suffering (it’s unlikely this would be run by compassionate people) on the whole. Just that we shouldn’t re-introduce animal life to places that don’t have it.
Yeah, I regret not discussing some of the reasons I find the “anti-suicide” stuff unconvincing in the article, I’ll add a footnote saying to look at the comments — my main point there wasn’t even that humans had an easy way out (because it’s not the easiest path), but that animals had NO way out. I discuss the suicide point in my response to Silas’s comment so check that out
This also all relates to the point I saw from Bentham that life in the wild stinks, so mass killing animals in the wild would be good. Certainly seems internally consistent to pave over all that nature and replace it with highways if you’re a negative utilitarian or even just a regular one who thinks all animals in the wild are net suffering
I am not an antinatalist because, like you, it seems obvious to me that there are lifes worth living. No opinion on the movement itself.
But I am also someone who has a preference for non-existence, and feel your treatment of the issue, including comments, a bit shallow.
There's good reasons not to kill yourself once you are born, even beyond family and friends being sad. My existence also provides positives for the concentric circles am a part of, as well as altruistic causes.
I also disagree with advocacy for euthanasia being viable. There is an incredibly strong cultural intuition against that, even the most lenient countries, like canada and the netherlands, are still rather restrictive. I couldn't even imagine convincing anyone close to me, let alone society at large. Efforts within my society have mostly been outlawed and forcefully disbanded, reliable diy solutions are being rendered ineffective.
To add to that, there are also good reasons for that taboo, not everyone who would want to die is right about their choice.
I'd suggest that the opposite of wong is not right: It's not always bad to be born, but also not always good, no matter the part of the world. It's not always the right decision to die, but it's not always wrong. An enlightened society could honour aspects of both sides, and implement cultural and legal norms that reflect those trade-offs. But utopia never comes.
Yeah, it’s tough because sometimes lives suck, but there’s such a strong cultural taboo against euthanasia and the like that people don’t choose out. I definitely did a lot of dissing in my article (I think the philosophical grounding for *human* antinatalism in the west is shoddy) but there’s no getting around the pretty dark fact that sometimes lives are miserable and people wish they’d never been born, so I’m with you. I think extrapolating this to all humanity and also ignoring animal suffering is a mistake, like you agree with at the beginning of your comment though.
I would like to add to that: A part of that dark fact is that lives can be miserable even in objectively amazing circumstances. People vary in their tendencies for positive and negative emotionality, and some just are settled with inherently strong negative emotionality, or absent positive emotionality, or both.
Yep, totally. I mostly wanted a lighter diss and overview of some philosophical positions without delving too deep into how dark some of the stuff I’m really talking about is (I’m discussing if all life on earth is a mistake and if the universe is built for suffering!) but maybe I’ll add a paragraph about this stuff because it’s a true tragedy.
This was a great read—I was curious if you found efilism too fringe to bear mentioning, or if it hadn’t come up in your research. For anyone unfamiliar, efilists are the more radical wing of antinatalism, believing that all sentient life should go extinct (including animals), and I think their ethical ideal is for humanity to make other sentient life extinct before extinguishing ourselves. At this point most people know of them because a few have started sporadically practicing what they preach, rather than from their philosophy (and Katherine Dee has done the best work on them). So I was wondering if you had thoughts on them, or my eyes might’ve slid over a reference to them.
I intended to put a link to efilism when I was talking about how strong negative utilitarians grapple with the whole “kill earth” thing, but I forgot. It’s kinda a natural conclusion of strong negative utilitarianism, but I think it’s poisoned by how edgy its name is and its proponents are. Obviously it’s bad to cause a bunch of suffering for no reason like the efilist bombing that happened a few months ago, he’s not living up to a utilitarian framework even a little bit.
I think there’s a lot of people who think the world sucks and gravitate to philosophies like antinatalism, nihilism, efilism, miserablism, and negative utilitarianism without actually interrogating if the claims are… true! Or if they have good philosophical backing! This is an attempt to tease apart that — antinatalists and strong negative utilitarians are “edgy”, but I think if you’re an antinatalist you HAVE to focus on non-human life too or it’s more of a fashion statement over a good philosophical belief (or if you’re religious and don’t believe animals have souls that justifies focusing on humans too)
Very fair. Anecdotally but relevantly, I was antinatalist for a little while and that school of thought (and Benatar specifically) only seemed super rational because I was having personal issues related to having kids. Of course, I wouldn’t project my irrational motives on other people, but I’m not sure most antinatalist online communities are all that distinct from other odd ideological groups that are based on like, rationalising a shared anger at women/men/capital/religion because of [insert personal reason here].
Yeah, I think people’s morality is extrapolated from their situation most often. There’s nothing malicious about this — people want to feel like good people! — but it also leads a lot of these movements to claim they have the true moral answer to society with pretty shoddy reasoning from an outsider’s perspective.
I think you realizing that that was what was happening with you in the past is a very good thing.
Objectively correct take on weak negative utilitarianism. Though I do find that, in practice, some supposed ‘weak’ negative utilitarians just never talk about positive utility? Like they assume it simply can’t outweigh X amount of suffering so they don’t bother to add it up (usually when considering a single individual, event, etc.) Which, ya know, kind of fair, but also then you’re essentially deliberating like a strong negative utilitarian?
Yeah, there’s a certain point where even if they’re a subset of regular utilitarian, they act like a strong negative one when actually arguing for plans. It might be fair to have their own separate label if that’s the case.
Still, this “normalness” in still thinking happiness is morally good makes them vulnerable to a universe full of rats on heroin and other edge cases, baby. So still can be very different in practice.
Good post and I agree with a lot! On the suicide point Benatar at least has some things to say about why we still shouldn't kill ourselves or others (though perhaps not super convincing). But you're of course also concerned with the movement as a whole here, and I don't know what antinatalists more generally say
Yeah, I had some difficulty separating negative utilitarians from philosophical antinatalists from “the antinatalist movement” in the essay, because benatar is a big antinatalist and has made non-strong negative utilitarians arguments for it.
To be honest, I mostly didn’t include the critiques because I’m pretty unconvinced. One of his big quotes is that “life is worth living because death is bad” and death strikes me as pretty morally neutral, and his irreversibility critique doesn’t land for me either. It’s not even that painful with some of the drugs we have now.
What does land is his belief that death might be sad for your loved ones which has to be measured against your own suffering as a result of continuing living in a normal utilitarian way.
This leads me to the belief that maybe antinatalists should normalize euthanasia like in Canada in a social way not just a legal one? But this critique only works from a philosophical point if you can convince me of SNU or convince me this suffering specifically from not committing suicide OR from loved ones pain from the act (the less bad of the two) is bad enough to outweigh all the potential good in life from a normal utilitarian perspective, which is a difficult argument to make.
One would expect negative utilitarians to have been selected against, yes? What explains their presence — a gap between their theory and their own practice? So just the meme survives?
I doubt many of our ancestors were negative utilitarians — ideas in the modern age obey a cultural evolution divorced from the process of actual evolution. The internet enables a lot of very strange beliefs from this.
Lots of people are kid free because we understand so well the pros and cons of having kids nowadays, but in the ancient day there was certainly no birth control.
I don't really get the claim that weak negative utilitarianism is just another variant of classical utilitarianism. You note that classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about how to weigh pleasures and pains - so this isn't something unique to negative utilitarians. But this conflates two different senses of "weighing" pain vs. pleasure.
When classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about whether a given amount of orgasms would be enough to outweigh an instance of torture, they're not disagreeing about *moral values*. They both agree the action that leads to the most happiness minus suffering is morally best. The disagreement is over *non-moral* facts: how much suffering is generated by torture and/or how much happiness is generated by an orgasm.
Contrast this with the disagreement between negative utilitarians and classical utilitarians. The disagreement between them *is* one about moral values. A negative utilitarian could fully agree with a classical utilitarian about the non-moral claim that a given amount of orgasms results in a higher amount of pleasure than an instance of torture does suffering. Nevertheless, they may come to a different value judgment: the instance of torture is more bad than the orgasms are good.
The distinction between weak negative utilitarianism and classical utilitarianism is not marked by their views on non-moral claims about how much pleasure or pain are generated by certain actions. Their disagreement is about the *moral* claim that happiness and suffering are morally symmetrical. Classical utilitarians hold that X amount of happiness is just as morally good as X amount of suffering is morally bad. Negative utilitarians deny this.
As an analogy, consider a utilitarian and a non-utilitarian who disagree about the moral status of punching a Nazi vs. giving an anti-fascist activist a paper cut. They both may agree that punching the Nazi results in more suffering than giving the anti-fascist a paper cut. Nonetheless, they may come to divergent moral judgments.
This is because they have differing normative views when it comes to desert. The utilitarian thinks we should count everyone's interests equally - the non-utilitarian believes we should count the interests of bad people less than the interests of good people. This is similar to the respect in which a weak negative utilitarian and classical utilitarian disagree about the weight of a given pleasure vs. pain.
Now compare this to two utilitarians who also disagree about the moral status of these actions - but only because they disagree about whether the paper cut or the punch results in more suffering. One of the utilitarians is under the belief that the Nazi has congenital insensitivity to pain and so the paper cut resulted in suffering. If you could convince this utilitarian they were wrong about this, they would come to the same moral judgment as their fellow utilitarian. This is the sense in which classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about the weight of a given pleasure vs. pain.
As an aside, I also don’t think the Axiological Asymmetry is an argument for strong negative utilitarianism. If anything Benatar’s Axiological Asymmetry is straightforwardly *incompatible* with strong negative utilitarianism. For the Asymmetry claims that pleasure is good when it’s experienced by an already existing conscious being - but strong negative utilitarianism claims that pleasure has *no moral weight whatsoever*.
> The third issue is they don’t seem to consider the implications of what they believe, at all. I am 100% not endorsing suicide, but it feels like an important point to talk about if you build your belief system on the phrase “I wish I wasn’t born, because I couldn’t consent to it.” It’s a very icky topic, which is why it’s only indirectly focused on, but it seems like the natural conclusion of a movement built on the lives of high functioning conscious beings sucking is to grapple with the fact that there’s an easy path to nonexistence for anyone who wants one — maybe antinatalists should endorse voluntary euthanasia, like how it’s been legalized in Canada?
The first point is reasonable (if life is not worth living why are you still here?) but most antinatalists do grapple with it. Almost all are pro-euthanasia, they bring up the reasonable point that suicide is scary and also can emotionally harm their friends and family, and some claim that while their life is now just worth bearing, due to childhood trauma and terrible parents it’s only a net-negative on the whole. Now that they’ve already sunk-cost the suffering of childhood, they’re willing to stick it out for the mundane barely-positive existence of their adulthood.
Glenn has a good post on the steelmanned negative Utilitarian argument as it applies to how we should treat nature: https://open.substack.com/pub/statesofexception/p/against-clean-water?
Essentially life for fish is net-negative, so humans polluting the oceans and sterilizing the environment is actually a good thing. I find the claim absurd/amusing on aesthetic grounds, but I admit it seems logically consistent. We shouldn’t go actively sterilizing the world though, since the sort of attitude that has us mass-killing animals wherever we can is one that is likely to lead to more animal suffering (it’s unlikely this would be run by compassionate people) on the whole. Just that we shouldn’t re-introduce animal life to places that don’t have it.
Yeah, I regret not discussing some of the reasons I find the “anti-suicide” stuff unconvincing in the article, I’ll add a footnote saying to look at the comments — my main point there wasn’t even that humans had an easy way out (because it’s not the easiest path), but that animals had NO way out. I discuss the suicide point in my response to Silas’s comment so check that out
This also all relates to the point I saw from Bentham that life in the wild stinks, so mass killing animals in the wild would be good. Certainly seems internally consistent to pave over all that nature and replace it with highways if you’re a negative utilitarian or even just a regular one who thinks all animals in the wild are net suffering
I am not an antinatalist because, like you, it seems obvious to me that there are lifes worth living. No opinion on the movement itself.
But I am also someone who has a preference for non-existence, and feel your treatment of the issue, including comments, a bit shallow.
There's good reasons not to kill yourself once you are born, even beyond family and friends being sad. My existence also provides positives for the concentric circles am a part of, as well as altruistic causes.
I also disagree with advocacy for euthanasia being viable. There is an incredibly strong cultural intuition against that, even the most lenient countries, like canada and the netherlands, are still rather restrictive. I couldn't even imagine convincing anyone close to me, let alone society at large. Efforts within my society have mostly been outlawed and forcefully disbanded, reliable diy solutions are being rendered ineffective.
To add to that, there are also good reasons for that taboo, not everyone who would want to die is right about their choice.
I'd suggest that the opposite of wong is not right: It's not always bad to be born, but also not always good, no matter the part of the world. It's not always the right decision to die, but it's not always wrong. An enlightened society could honour aspects of both sides, and implement cultural and legal norms that reflect those trade-offs. But utopia never comes.
Yeah, it’s tough because sometimes lives suck, but there’s such a strong cultural taboo against euthanasia and the like that people don’t choose out. I definitely did a lot of dissing in my article (I think the philosophical grounding for *human* antinatalism in the west is shoddy) but there’s no getting around the pretty dark fact that sometimes lives are miserable and people wish they’d never been born, so I’m with you. I think extrapolating this to all humanity and also ignoring animal suffering is a mistake, like you agree with at the beginning of your comment though.
I would like to add to that: A part of that dark fact is that lives can be miserable even in objectively amazing circumstances. People vary in their tendencies for positive and negative emotionality, and some just are settled with inherently strong negative emotionality, or absent positive emotionality, or both.
And ofc the opposite can also be the case.
Yep, totally. I mostly wanted a lighter diss and overview of some philosophical positions without delving too deep into how dark some of the stuff I’m really talking about is (I’m discussing if all life on earth is a mistake and if the universe is built for suffering!) but maybe I’ll add a paragraph about this stuff because it’s a true tragedy.
This was a great read—I was curious if you found efilism too fringe to bear mentioning, or if it hadn’t come up in your research. For anyone unfamiliar, efilists are the more radical wing of antinatalism, believing that all sentient life should go extinct (including animals), and I think their ethical ideal is for humanity to make other sentient life extinct before extinguishing ourselves. At this point most people know of them because a few have started sporadically practicing what they preach, rather than from their philosophy (and Katherine Dee has done the best work on them). So I was wondering if you had thoughts on them, or my eyes might’ve slid over a reference to them.
I intended to put a link to efilism when I was talking about how strong negative utilitarians grapple with the whole “kill earth” thing, but I forgot. It’s kinda a natural conclusion of strong negative utilitarianism, but I think it’s poisoned by how edgy its name is and its proponents are. Obviously it’s bad to cause a bunch of suffering for no reason like the efilist bombing that happened a few months ago, he’s not living up to a utilitarian framework even a little bit.
I think there’s a lot of people who think the world sucks and gravitate to philosophies like antinatalism, nihilism, efilism, miserablism, and negative utilitarianism without actually interrogating if the claims are… true! Or if they have good philosophical backing! This is an attempt to tease apart that — antinatalists and strong negative utilitarians are “edgy”, but I think if you’re an antinatalist you HAVE to focus on non-human life too or it’s more of a fashion statement over a good philosophical belief (or if you’re religious and don’t believe animals have souls that justifies focusing on humans too)
Very fair. Anecdotally but relevantly, I was antinatalist for a little while and that school of thought (and Benatar specifically) only seemed super rational because I was having personal issues related to having kids. Of course, I wouldn’t project my irrational motives on other people, but I’m not sure most antinatalist online communities are all that distinct from other odd ideological groups that are based on like, rationalising a shared anger at women/men/capital/religion because of [insert personal reason here].
Yeah, I think people’s morality is extrapolated from their situation most often. There’s nothing malicious about this — people want to feel like good people! — but it also leads a lot of these movements to claim they have the true moral answer to society with pretty shoddy reasoning from an outsider’s perspective.
I think you realizing that that was what was happening with you in the past is a very good thing.
Objectively correct take on weak negative utilitarianism. Though I do find that, in practice, some supposed ‘weak’ negative utilitarians just never talk about positive utility? Like they assume it simply can’t outweigh X amount of suffering so they don’t bother to add it up (usually when considering a single individual, event, etc.) Which, ya know, kind of fair, but also then you’re essentially deliberating like a strong negative utilitarian?
Yeah, there’s a certain point where even if they’re a subset of regular utilitarian, they act like a strong negative one when actually arguing for plans. It might be fair to have their own separate label if that’s the case.
Still, this “normalness” in still thinking happiness is morally good makes them vulnerable to a universe full of rats on heroin and other edge cases, baby. So still can be very different in practice.
Good post and I agree with a lot! On the suicide point Benatar at least has some things to say about why we still shouldn't kill ourselves or others (though perhaps not super convincing). But you're of course also concerned with the movement as a whole here, and I don't know what antinatalists more generally say
Yeah, I had some difficulty separating negative utilitarians from philosophical antinatalists from “the antinatalist movement” in the essay, because benatar is a big antinatalist and has made non-strong negative utilitarians arguments for it.
To be honest, I mostly didn’t include the critiques because I’m pretty unconvinced. One of his big quotes is that “life is worth living because death is bad” and death strikes me as pretty morally neutral, and his irreversibility critique doesn’t land for me either. It’s not even that painful with some of the drugs we have now.
What does land is his belief that death might be sad for your loved ones which has to be measured against your own suffering as a result of continuing living in a normal utilitarian way.
This leads me to the belief that maybe antinatalists should normalize euthanasia like in Canada in a social way not just a legal one? But this critique only works from a philosophical point if you can convince me of SNU or convince me this suffering specifically from not committing suicide OR from loved ones pain from the act (the less bad of the two) is bad enough to outweigh all the potential good in life from a normal utilitarian perspective, which is a difficult argument to make.
Pretty much agree!
One would expect negative utilitarians to have been selected against, yes? What explains their presence — a gap between their theory and their own practice? So just the meme survives?
I doubt many of our ancestors were negative utilitarians — ideas in the modern age obey a cultural evolution divorced from the process of actual evolution. The internet enables a lot of very strange beliefs from this.
Lots of people are kid free because we understand so well the pros and cons of having kids nowadays, but in the ancient day there was certainly no birth control.
I don't really get the claim that weak negative utilitarianism is just another variant of classical utilitarianism. You note that classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about how to weigh pleasures and pains - so this isn't something unique to negative utilitarians. But this conflates two different senses of "weighing" pain vs. pleasure.
When classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about whether a given amount of orgasms would be enough to outweigh an instance of torture, they're not disagreeing about *moral values*. They both agree the action that leads to the most happiness minus suffering is morally best. The disagreement is over *non-moral* facts: how much suffering is generated by torture and/or how much happiness is generated by an orgasm.
Contrast this with the disagreement between negative utilitarians and classical utilitarians. The disagreement between them *is* one about moral values. A negative utilitarian could fully agree with a classical utilitarian about the non-moral claim that a given amount of orgasms results in a higher amount of pleasure than an instance of torture does suffering. Nevertheless, they may come to a different value judgment: the instance of torture is more bad than the orgasms are good.
The distinction between weak negative utilitarianism and classical utilitarianism is not marked by their views on non-moral claims about how much pleasure or pain are generated by certain actions. Their disagreement is about the *moral* claim that happiness and suffering are morally symmetrical. Classical utilitarians hold that X amount of happiness is just as morally good as X amount of suffering is morally bad. Negative utilitarians deny this.
As an analogy, consider a utilitarian and a non-utilitarian who disagree about the moral status of punching a Nazi vs. giving an anti-fascist activist a paper cut. They both may agree that punching the Nazi results in more suffering than giving the anti-fascist a paper cut. Nonetheless, they may come to divergent moral judgments.
This is because they have differing normative views when it comes to desert. The utilitarian thinks we should count everyone's interests equally - the non-utilitarian believes we should count the interests of bad people less than the interests of good people. This is similar to the respect in which a weak negative utilitarian and classical utilitarian disagree about the weight of a given pleasure vs. pain.
Now compare this to two utilitarians who also disagree about the moral status of these actions - but only because they disagree about whether the paper cut or the punch results in more suffering. One of the utilitarians is under the belief that the Nazi has congenital insensitivity to pain and so the paper cut resulted in suffering. If you could convince this utilitarian they were wrong about this, they would come to the same moral judgment as their fellow utilitarian. This is the sense in which classical utilitarians disagree amongst themselves about the weight of a given pleasure vs. pain.
As an aside, I also don’t think the Axiological Asymmetry is an argument for strong negative utilitarianism. If anything Benatar’s Axiological Asymmetry is straightforwardly *incompatible* with strong negative utilitarianism. For the Asymmetry claims that pleasure is good when it’s experienced by an already existing conscious being - but strong negative utilitarianism claims that pleasure has *no moral weight whatsoever*.