April 12, 2012
The Case Against Kids
Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:
Barring infertility or other complications—and despite the best efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Senate Republicans—couples today, at least in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, can determine how many children they will have—five, four, three, two, one, or zero. Several recent books look at this decision from different vantage points, and come to surprising—some might say even alarming—conclusions.
In “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate” (M.I.T. Press), Christine Overall tries to subject that decision to morally rigorous analysis. Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we’re going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.
Of course, people do give reasons for having children, and Overall takes them up one by one. Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:31 AM | Permalink
Comments
Look, I'm sure Benatar is a reasonable human being who simply makes a negative value judgement on birth, and so are you, and maybe even
most antinatalists.
Although I defended the antinatalist argument against what I thought was an unfair line of attack (that they are hypocrites for not advocating
suicide/murder), I'm not an antinatalist myself, and I've been making arguments against antinatalism on this thread (the argument that the
multiverse makes it pointless to try to prevent particular lives from coming into existence, and the point that the antinatalist argument
about it being bad to cause pain but morally neutral not to create happiness seems to lead to absurd conclusions when it comes to things like
starting a romantic relationship, teaching someone to ride a bike, etc.)
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 17, 2012 3:56:39 PM
Raza, that was probably Don's point: that it's impossible to get prior consent from someone before creating them (unless you have a time
machine), therefore it's unethical to create anyone new, because prior consent is in his view an ethical requirement for exposing someone to a risk
of suffering. I don't agree, but the argument seems to be a coherent one given that premise.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 17, 2012 4:01:07 PM
And now, the case for kids:
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remembered not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.
Sonnet III
William Shakespeare
Posted by: reader | Apr 17, 2012 4:14:23 PM
What's so special about consent? I thought we only bothered with it because most of the time a person knows what's best for themselves. That's not always the case for children, for example, which is why parenting doesn't require consent. And it's certainly not the case for those who don't exist yet. So it doesn't seem to apply.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 17, 2012 4:30:22 PM
@Namit:
What's wrong with cat videos?
Posted by: Ruchira | Apr 18, 2012 1:47:14 AM
Sagredo, allow me to point out the glaring inconsistencies in your argument. You write:
'In that case, the duty to breed comes from the general moral intuition that joy is a good thing and should be given to others.'
You then say that 'People by and large do not create new life in order that it will experience joy, or that the progenitors will. Joy is a by-product.'
So you now admit people don't have children in order to create joy? So why do they procreate? Answer: to fulfill their own selfish desires, regardless of the risk to the by-product. There are many other ways to find fulfillment other than pitching someone else into the cauldron. As Bill Hicks said, 'Try loving the people who are already here'.
And as for an action being acceptable without a subject's consent if it produces more joy than harm, that opens the door to all sorts of abuse. And the most important point is THAT THERE IS NO GUARANTEE of a preponderence of joy.
You still cling to the assumption that all lives will contain more joy than suffering on balance, a completely unverifiable statement.
Again, procreation is an unnecessary risk. Unless you're religious, mystical, believe in 'project humanity', Gaia, or some other form of gush there is no reason for procreation. It is a selfish act, performed to satisfy the selfish desires of reckless individuals.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 18, 2012 3:44:29 AM
Karl, why are you so concerned about guarantees? We don't make decisions based only on certainties. I think if one believes that a preponderance of joy is merely likely, one is justified in breeding, and in fact regardless of one's actual motivations.
I certainly don't believe all lives will contain more joy than suffering on balance. That kind of certainty does not seem to me morally necessary. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who might want children for whatever reason and who also quite reasonably believe that their children will likely, but not certainly, experience more joy than suffering. Other externalities being equal, these folks should breed.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 4:03:32 AM
The value of a life to the person living it is their subjective well-being aggregated over time (let me denote this x for convenience). In that sense, whether life is worth living is subjective. But that's the extent of it. When you ask someone whether their life has been/is/will be worth living (i.e., whether x is positive), and they answer affirmatively, that doesn't mean their life actually has been/is/will be worth living. Here are some possible scenarios:
* They evade the question and so never estimate x. This can be conscious or unconscious; they might be offended by the question or take a mental shortcut and reply with some platitude that sounds good.
* Their estimate of x is biased. Take your pick.
* Their estimate of x is approximately correct, but they lie about it for e.g. the stigma associated with "being negative", or because they believe in positive thinking.
* Their estimate of x is approximately correct and they are honest about it.
People's answers are biased toward the positive end (take a survey in a burn ward sometime), but we have reasons to expect x to be negative. Evolution invented both the carrot and the stick to motivate us to pursue its pointless goals, but a carrot doesn't do anything for someone who isn't being beaten by the stick of hunger. Furthermore, when billions of people have to compete with each other for scarce resources, more of them will lose than will win. This is even more true among animals in general.
It is true that history is littered with examples of people claiming to know "what's best". This is unfortunate, but it is not a reason to dismiss what is actually best. People do not know very well what's best for themselves, and there is probably a point at which objective methods for determining what's best surpass people's own judgements.
Posted by: Tim Cooijmans | Apr 18, 2012 6:59:13 AM
Sagredo, guarantees are necessary because it's ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL'S welfare we're discussing. If one is acting only in regard to one's own life, we're free to do whatever we like (while respecting others). Procreators seek happiness through unnecessary risk-taking. It's akin to gambling with someone else's money and letting that person take the loss if you lose.
Again, it is a gamble FOR WHICH THERE IS NO NECESSITY. And if life is as joyful as you describe, why the need to procreate? Shouldn't an individual life be sufficient unto itself?
And as for 'other externalities being equal' are you referring to the world at large? The same world where 2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, where one million people commit suicide every year, where there are 27 million slaves (more than at any other point in human history) and where the past 100 years have seen more violent deaths than in all of human history combined?
Are you content to needlessly chuck someone into this, run the risk of it all going horribly wrong, and then shrugging your shoulders and saying 'oh well, they had a few nice moments and drank a few coca-colas'?
Posted by: Karl | Apr 18, 2012 8:43:12 AM
"Again, it is a gamble FOR WHICH THERE IS NO NECESSITY. "
Karl, could you address one or more of the examples I mentioned earlier, which were designed to point out a seeming problem with your moral intuition about whether it's ever acceptable to subject another to a risk of suffering? If you say that in any situation where action X has the potential to cause another suffering but also the potential to cause them happiness, it's always better to avoid the action since causing suffering is bad but not creating happiness is neutral, then that would seem to imply we should never enter a romantic relationship with anyone (assuming they are already accustomed to being single and it isn't causing them suffering), and never teach anyone a new skill or subject like riding a bicycle (assuming lacking this skill/knowledge won't itself cause suffering). Do you agree we should never do these things, and if not, how does that square with your position on never taking a gamble that could lead to another's suffering if it isn't a matter of "necessity"?
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 18, 2012 11:15:03 AM
"It is true that history is littered with examples of people claiming to know "what's best". This is unfortunate, but it is not a reason to dismiss what is actually best. People do not know very well what's best for themselves, and there is probably a point at which objective methods for determining what's best surpass people's own judgements."
Tim (or anyone else), would you care to address the thought experiment someone posed earlier? If, by pressing a button, you could obliterate all sentient and suffering life (in all multiverses, for you Dr. Who fans) would you consider yourself morally justified in doing so? Or, if there was a second button that you could press to eliminate all those whose lives are *objectively* not worth living, and at the same time wipe the survivors' brains of all memories of the deceased, so they would not suffer grief or fear at their loss, would you press this second button?
Ruchira: I am sure future generations will be amused (bemused?) by our cat videos.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 18, 2012 11:25:11 AM
Jesse-
Romantic relationships and bike riding are things that affect existing persons. Some suffering for existing persons is unavoidable (no love is often no fun, and bad relationships and lost love can be brutally lousy; and bike accidents are no fun, but being the only kid around who can't ride a bike isn't so hot either). Forcing suffering on "people" who do not yet exist and need not ever exist is truly, wholly avoidable, and truly, wholly unnecessary.
Posted by: R. Culver | Apr 18, 2012 12:20:49 PM
Ruchira,
If you are saying that inflicting cat videos on unsuspecting people is not increasing the pool of suffering in the world, I beg to differ. I mean, just look at how serious the problem has become! Intolerable, in fact. Worse, do we ever worry about how cats suffer themselves as we chase them around with video cameras? Is it ever joyful for them? No siree, it's all driven by our reckless, warm and fuzzy desires with nary a thought for the real and potential harm to both people and cats. I am really drawn to philosopher Bavid Denatar's moral case that we should create conditions for cats to not reproduce at all, thereby shrinking the overall pool of suffering in the world.
Posted by: Namit | Apr 18, 2012 1:17:06 PM
Agreed. Letting cats reproduce at will would be catastrophic.
Posted by: reader | Apr 18, 2012 1:32:18 PM
"Sagredo, guarantees are necessary because it's ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL'S welfare we're discussing."
Why does that make a difference? Surely we should take a gamble if we believe it's likely to pay off for someone?
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 1:55:29 PM
Jesse, R Culver answered your question perfectly. Risks are unavoidable for those are already here. Sadly, it's part of the life-structure for sentient beings. As R pointed out, needlessly creating a being that will be subjected to risks is something else entirely.
Sagredo, is it therefore ok if I were to take all of your money and invest it on the stock market because I thought it might make a profit? Would you be pleased if I lost it all for you? And even if I made a small profit, would you be happy if I took your money again some day to gamble with without your consent? The examples could be multiplied endlessly.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 18, 2012 2:10:00 PM
"Sagredo, is it therefore ok if I were to take all of your money and invest it on the stock market because I thought it might make a profit?"
Sure, unless there exists someone with a better idea of my financial needs.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 2:57:58 PM
""Sagredo, is it therefore ok if I were to take all of your money and invest it on the stock market because I thought it might make a profit?""
"Sure, unless there exists someone with a better idea of my financial needs."
Sagredo, if this thought experiment is to have any relevance to the issue being discussed here, you would obviously not be able to choose your investor. Still say "sure"? Feel free to post your SSN and bank account numbers.
Posted by: JA | Apr 18, 2012 3:38:29 PM
"The examples could be multiplied endlessly."
God I hope not. The counterexamples are too easy, and this thread will never end. What about the suffering of 3QD readers? Have you no pity?
Just be content that there are an infinite number of intelligent beings that will never exist. And try not to worry that they would object that nobody gave them the option.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 18, 2012 3:42:14 PM
"Just be content that there are an infinite number of intelligent beings that will never exist. And try not to worry that they would object that nobody gave them the option."
Do you worry about this, Carlos? Just wondering how nuts this is going to get.
Posted by: JA | Apr 18, 2012 3:48:57 PM
By the time this thread is finished we will all be too old to have kids.
Posted by: reader | Apr 18, 2012 4:14:47 PM
"Sagredo, if this thought experiment is to have any relevance to the issue being discussed here, you would obviously not be able to choose your investor. Still say "sure"? Feel free to post your SSN and bank account numbers."
Why not? I prefer to place my money under the ultimate control of the person with the best idea of my financial needs. Just as the decision to breed is under the control of the people with the best idea of the child's future.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 4:38:41 PM
"I prefer"...
But that's just it, one doesn't get what one prefers in being born (there are no preferences to express yet, anyway), they just get what they get.
..."the decision to breed is under the control of the people with the best idea of the child's future."
Sometimes "the best" just isn't good enough. My parents' religious, philosophical, and political beliefs were/are among their primary influences, and I could hardly have less interest in living according to their best ideas. And no parent can know what diseases or accidents (etc.) may befall their child, so again, the people with the "best idea of the child's future" still have pretty much no clue.
Posted by: JA | Apr 18, 2012 5:13:27 PM
"But that's just it, one doesn't get what one prefers in being born (there are no preferences to express yet, anyway), they just get what they get."
Well, someone has to make the decision whether or not one is born. Best it should be the decision of those with the best idea of the child's likely future.
I really don't see the problem with making decisions that primarily affect others, when there happens to be no better person to do so. This happens all the time in child-care, for instance, when parents get to control children without their consent. Sure, sometimes parents make the wrong decision, but overall it works out better than allowing toddlers to do whatever they want all the time.
"Sometimes "the best" just isn't good enough. My parents' religious, philosophical, and political beliefs were/are among their primary influences, and I could hardly have less interest in living according to their best ideas."
Did your parents consider their child's likely quality of life when deciding to breed? If not, they should have. If they did, they presumably made the best decision with the information they had. This strikes me as ethical from the utilitarian perspective.
And deciding not to breed just as easily risks being the wrong decision, whenever the likelihood is that breeding will add more joy to the world. Risk cannot be escaped so easily. Suffering can, but only at the expense of joy, which might be the greater loss.
"And no parent can know what diseases or accidents (etc.) may befall their child, so again, the people with the "best idea of the child's future" still have pretty much no clue."
Equally, no parent can know what joys and happiness may come to their child. The ethical thing to do is to make the best guess one can. It's the same with my money. No-one can know what might befall some investment, but it ought to be under the control of the person with the best idea of my financial needs, and I should also mention, the most motivation to support them. In general this might not always be me: parents often invest on behalf of their children, and for some couples, one partner may deal with all the finances. Being absolutely risk-averse is never a good strategy in money or in life.
On the other hand, if you are arguing that the risk is almost always a bad one, i.e. that the expectation of life is of more suffering than joy, that's quite another matter. I don't know if that's true or not. The best I can say is that it seems not to be to me.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 6:07:24 PM
Not to discourage newcomers (or anyone else) from posting, but since I would guess that most of the commenters here have had time to offer what they think are their most significant thoughts and/or reactions on the matter, and since pretty much every thought expressed has been responded to (whether well or poorly; and sometimes in advance), and many thoughts have been expressed multiple times, and I haven't seen much indication that any minds are being changed one whit one way or the other...
I'm wondering whether or not a minimal consensus could be reached regarding procreation, around something like the term "morally problematic" (a term from a quote about a thousand posts ago). If "ethically/morally problematic" is too loaded, and/or one prefers not to use the language of "morality" or "ethics", maybe something like "responsibility-problematic activity" (ugh) or "a problematic/questionable bequest" (hopefully someone can come up with something better and less awkward), or maybe just "inherently problematic activity".
I think procreation is always a poor idea/choice/action, and I realize that most others who think about it at all think it's a wonderful idea/choice/action (or at least they think it's usually a good idea, or it's a good idea under certain circumstances). I'm just curious about whether or not any kind of middle ground is reachable (at least among the people visiting this site). If you can't agree with anything like what I proposed, feel free to propose your own. If no one's interested, no problem.
Posted by: JA | Apr 18, 2012 7:54:34 PM
Procreation has, from a utilitarian perspective, moral consequences.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 18, 2012 8:15:31 PM
Agree entirely with JA's last comment. Would just to stress again the vital distinction between risks taken by an agent in regard to themselves, as oppossed to unnecesary risks taken with regard to potential lives.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 19, 2012 7:27:09 AM
"Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive"
Patricia Churchland
Childless people can have no real idea of what it is like to have a child. Theorizing about it in the absence of real experience is precisely what gives philosophy a reputation for idle speculation divorced from reality. Only those who have had children are in a position to debate whether or not it is a worthwhile experience. Childless people who engage in this kind of debate simply don't know what they are talking about and are not worth listening to.
Posted by: reader | Apr 19, 2012 9:54:26 AM
reader: everyone has experience being a child though. I don't think all representing Team Kids on this thread have grasped the fact that the anti-natalists feel they are making a child-centric argument.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 19, 2012 10:19:58 AM
"reader", the subject of this discussion (and the subject of the original blog post) was not the question of whether or not procreating and raising one's own children is a worthwhile experience for parents.
Posted by: JA | Apr 19, 2012 10:25:25 AM
"reader", the subject of this discussion (and the subject of the original blog post, the article it quotes, and the book the article refers to) was not the question of whether or not procreating and raising one's own biological children is a worthwhile experience for parents.
Posted by: JA | Apr 19, 2012 10:32:21 AM
Sorry for the double (now triple) post.
Posted by: JA | Apr 19, 2012 10:37:09 AM
Vicki, thanks for pointing out the vital distinction. The parents here are arguing on behalf of parents and the non-parents are speaking mostly for the child. (Before anyone jumps on me, I am the mother of two but I can see the validity of some of the arguments arising from the other side)
Posted by: Ruchira | Apr 19, 2012 10:39:15 AM
I assume that the anti-natalists all had bad experiences as children!
I think my point is that the "case" for or against kids can not be made in a vacuum - it can only be made retrospectively by those who have actually had a child. I did not have a child until 45 and the thought of it did scare me at first. I have since found it is by far the best thing I have ever done. There is nothing at all wrong with not having kids. But why should we listen to a childless person's opinion of the experience? They have no clue and are engaging in idle speculation, probably to rationalize their decision not to have kids. As I said before, they are attempting to justify a person subject decision and make it a universal moral imperative. Why don't they just say "kids are not for me" and leave it at that?
Posted by: reader | Apr 19, 2012 10:39:31 AM
I meant "personal subjective decision"
Posted by: reader | Apr 19, 2012 10:40:55 AM
R. Culver wrote:
Romantic relationships and bike riding are things that affect existing persons. Some suffering for existing persons is unavoidable (no love is often no fun, and bad relationships and lost love can be brutally lousy; and bike accidents are no fun, but being the only kid around who can't ride a bike isn't so hot either).
Though it's true in a general sense that "suffering for existing persons is unavoidable", you seem to have missed the point of the specific examples I chose, which were intended to be cases where specific forms of suffering could in fact be avoided simply by not taking certain risks. For example, if no one ever entered a romantic relationship then no one would ever experience the heartbreak of being dumped, and if no one ever taught their kid to ride a bicycle then no kid would ever experience the pain of a fall, or the frustration of the early stages of the learning process when they still can't get it right. And again, as a hypothetical I specifically states I was assuming that we were talking about people who weren't suffering because they were single, or because they didn't know how to ride a bike (so your comments "no love is often no fun" and "being the only kid around who can't ride a bike isn't so hot either" were missing part of my premise--feel free to assume we are talking about a kid whose peers can't ride a bike either, for example). In this specific type of case where a person can avoid a specific type of suffering by not engaging in a particular activity (an activity which can also be very rewarding for those who do engage in it), and the person won't experience any suffering as a consequence of not doing the activity, is your moral intuition that it's wrong to encourage/help such a person in doing this activity? Even if the potential rewards are great, and the potential suffering would likely not be too horrendous for the person?
Karl, since you simply concurred with R. Culver's answer I assume you also missed the some of the point of my examples, so if you have the time I'd appreciate if you addressed this again now that I've clarified.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 19, 2012 10:51:23 AM
Of course the anti-natalists have experience being children, but so do parents. Being a child is a quite different experience from raising a child. People who may have had a miserable experience of childhood often go on to be excellent parents as they are determined to correct the mistakes their parents made. A bad childhood is no reason to make a "case" against kids.
Posted by: reader | Apr 19, 2012 10:51:31 AM
Do we know if this is the longest comment thread in 3quarks history? I've been visiting this site for a number of years now and I've never seen the little ">>" symbol that takes you to the next page of comments.
Posted by: Ben Schwartz | Apr 19, 2012 2:16:09 PM
No. There have been threads that ran to as many as 4 screens when some religious nut gets inflamed at something, or something, and won't shut up. Never anything quite as improbable as getting permission from someone who doesn't exist to bring them into existence, but pretty close.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 19, 2012 4:22:32 PM
I guess getting permission from someone who doesn't exist to bring them into existence is not much crazier than attributing one's existence to a supernatural being who doesn't exist. Luckily, there are books like Lawrence Krauss's "A Universe from Nothing" to retore sanity. I highly recommend it.
Posted by: reader | Apr 19, 2012 4:40:36 PM
Yeah, ditto. Great book. Even though something, by his own admission, is required for something to spring from "Nothing", let alone nothing.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 19, 2012 4:46:07 PM
The people who are claiming you have to be a parent to have an opinion are being extremely stupid. Should only people who've committed murder be entitled to discuss the ethics of homicide? We're discussing the morality of procreation, not the subjective experience of being a parent.
Jesse M, I really don't understand why you can't grasp the fundamental distinction of risk-taking that involves only one self and that which involves others, procreation being an example of the latter.
And besides, why the big deal about risk-taking within life? I know people who've eschewed romantic relationships because they don't believe it would pay off for them. There are millions who choose not to cycle in big cities because of the physical risks. How is this not logical? And again observe how you're assuming in your examples that the potential of harm is low and the potential pay-off great. This is begging the question. If an adult is killed in a cycling accident, then the 'low risk' of learning to ride a bike as a kid has dissolved, hasn't it? Similarly with those people who experience mental breakdown/ suicide etc. after romantic disappointments.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 20, 2012 5:02:40 AM
Jesse M, I really don't understand why you can't grasp the fundamental distinction of risk-taking that involves only one self and that which involves others, procreation being an example of the latter.
In the case of the romantic relationship I was thinking about the fact that you're subjecting the other person to a risk of future suffering if there's a breakup, and in the case of the learning to ride a bicycle example, I cast the reader in the role of the person who was teaching the skill to a kid, not in the role of the kid themselves. I think you're probably getting at the issue of "consent", and saying it's OK to subject another to a risk of suffering if they themselves have consented to that risk beforehand. If so, first there's the point that from a legal standpoint a child can't really consent to serious risks like signing a release form before skydiving, so if you argue in absolutist terms that subjecting someone to a risk of suffering (even minor suffering) is wrong without their consent, it seems weird that you would be non-absolutist when it comes to consent and say children can consent to risks of things like painful scrapes when learning to ride a bicycle (presumably you agree a child couldn't really consent to a life-and-death risk like skydiving, from an ethical standpoint as well as a legal one).
Second, the argument of most anti-natalists who argue their case intellectually (as opposed to just making a more emotional case that life is mostly terrible and thus not worth it) always suggested to me they were thinking in very utilitarian terms about morality, where all that matters is whether an action will increase suffering. For a strict utilitarian, "consent" should not play any essential role in their moral considerations, except insofar as it affects suffering--for example, a person may suffer less mental anguish about some harm they experience if they had known there was a risk of harm and consented to take the risk, so in that sense it's better to get people's consent about risks. Still, since everything comes back to suffering/happiness for utilitarians, then if anti-natalist utilitarians also adopt the position that it's always better to take the course of action that will lead to less experiences of suffering (regardless of whether that action also has the potential to lead to many experiences of happiness that wouldn't have occurred otherwise), I don't see how a person's consent to a risk would change the conclusion that it's wrong to subject them to it.
If you do not ultimately justify all your ethical arguments in utilitarian terms, then do you have some other overall ethical framework (like basing everything on the categorical imperative), or do you have no broad theory of how ethical arguments should ultimately be justified and so you're just arguing based on case-by-case moral intuitions? I'd think that if one were making as radical an ethical argument as the anti-natalists, one should really have some sort of carefully thought-out framework for judging ethical questions which many philosophically-minded people would agree on, and then the strategy would be to show that the anti-natalist conclusion seems inescapable in this framework, so if you accept the basic ethical premises you have to accept the conclusion. Simply arguing based on seat-of-the-pants moral intuitions isn't going to convince many people, since most people's moral intuition obviously does not agree with the idea that it would be "good" if the entire human race stopped having children, or if no human had ever been born in the first place. And more generally I don't think most people would share the moral intuition "Taking an action that will subject others to a risk of suffering without their prior consent is always wrong, even if the action also has the potential to increase their happiness and the odds strongly favor the possibility that they will end up being grateful you took the action, BUT the absolute wrongness of taking such an action is completely nullified if they consent to it first." The absolutism of the first part would seem bizarre to most people, and the fact that this absolutism suddenly goes away when the magic word "consent" is invoked seems pretty ad hoc and arbitrary.
And again observe how you're assuming in your examples that the potential of harm is low and the potential pay-off great. This is begging the question.
Do you disagree that with both bike-riding and romantic relationships, even though there is some potential for really serious harm like death/clinical depression, the probability of such serious harm is quite low? (think of the ratio of people who are seriously injured while biking to bikers overall). Whereas the probability of experiencing many pleasurable moments (even if not ecstatic or life-changing) while biking or in love is high? I was including such probabilistic considerations in my use of the word "potential" in the statement "Even if the potential rewards are great, and the potential suffering would likely not be too horrendous for the person", and also note my use of the word "likely" there.
In any case, it's an open-ended question designed to explore the consequences of your views on the ethics of subjecting others to risk. If you do indeed think the small risks of serious harm in biking and romantic relationships make it universally wrong to subject another person to these risks regardless of whether they consent, then just say so, I was asking you rather than begging the question by assuming no sane person could think these things are universally wrong.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 20, 2012 10:44:02 AM
Jesse M, in your first paragraph, you write "I think you're probably getting at the issue of "consent", and saying it's OK to subject another to a risk of suffering if they themselves have consented to that risk beforehand." If there's consent between parties, there's no 'subjection' of the other. Subjection implies having no choice. If an agent consents to an action, the only subjection is that of the agent subjecting himself. My point about the death of cyclists and love suicides etc. is that to assume a low-risk in practically anything is unjustifiable due to our ultimate inability to forsee all consequences.
In your second paragraph, you write "Simply arguing based on seat-of-the-pants moral intuitions isn't going to convince many people, since most people's moral intuition obviously does not agree with the idea that it would be "good" if the entire human race stopped having children, or if no human had ever been born in the first place."
A) What the majority thinks is utterly irrelevant and has no bearing on the truth of a matter. If our thoughts lead us to the conclusion that it would be better that no one had ever been born, so be it.
B) Anti-Natalism is based on the premise that needlessly engineering a situation where an agent other than oneself is guaranteed to suffer for no verifiable reason is morally wrong. I would wager that this is a pretty universal position. We know for a fact that all lives will contain some amount of suffering; there is no guarantee of joy. Therefore procreation is an unnecessary and unjustifiable act. The point is perfectly simple.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 20, 2012 4:35:20 PM
I get the impression that people defending procreation are doing so on utilitarian premises. Utilitarian justifications for procreation are generally put forward on two grounds:
A) The majority of lives contain more good than bad, therefore procreation is justifiable in terms of individual aggregate utility.
B) All sentient beings are guaranteed to experience some amount of joy, therefore procreation adds to the aggregate amount of joy in the world, no matter how much suffering there may be. This holds even if the amount if joy in an individual life is miniscule compared to the suffering experienced therein.
Problems:
A is unverifiable. Not only do we not have access to the information necessary to arrive at such a conclusion, but the statement is incoherent even in terms of an individual life for the following reasons:
i) Assessments of whether one's own life contain more pleasure than suffering are subject to continual change due to shifting perspectives in one's conception of joy/happiness, whether the experience of joy can somehow nullify pain and vice versa, and so on.
ii) As well as the above, there is no ultimate final point of reckoning available due to death. The individual cannot make a final judgement on his life. (This is the essence of Herodotus's epigram 'Call no man happy unitl he is dead'.) Furthermore, there is no particular reason why we should grant credence to a third party's assessment of another life, either during the duration of that life or afterwards. Whether X judges that I am having a good life while I am alive, or believes I had a good life after my death is nothing but X's subjective judgement based on his partial perspective, his lack of access to my experiences and possible conflicts between his perception of the good and mine.
Therefore is A is unverifiable and ultimately incoherent.
B results in conclusions that I believe a majority of individuals would find morally repugnant. This being so, it strongly suggests that B is incorrect. Take the following example:
X and Y come together. Both are sadists who derive pleasure from child torture. They decide they will procreate in order to create a being they can torture in order to generate more joy for themselves. A child, Z, is born. Z is raised normally for the first four years of its life and experiences a certain amount of joy. Then from aged four, Z is tortured, raped and abused for eight years until he is murdered. The eight years bring great joy to X and Y. On an agreggate utilitarian approach, X and Y have experienced 16 years of joy (plus whatever joy they may have had in the four years pre-torture); Z experienced 4 years of joy before the torture period. That creates a total of 20 years of joy from the act of procreation. Subtract Z's 8 years of torture and we are still left with a total benefit of 12 years of joy. Therefore from the perspective of B the actions of X and Y were justified.
(Lest anyone think the example is too extreme, I have a friend who informed me that if his daughter of two were kidnapped, tortured and finally murdered after 10 years he would still believe that her life had been worthwhile due to the pleasure both she and he had derived from her pre-torture period.)
If X and Y's actions were to be deemed acceptable by a majority, I can only assume that all manner of acts that involve inflicting torture and suffering on individuals would become acceptable. For me, such an outcome would lead to an utterly nihilistic and even more chaotic world than we have at present. Not to say that this is an impossible outcome (think of the millions of individuals sacrificed in Stalin's USSR, for example, on the basis of a form of Benthamite utilitarianism).
So in conclusion the utilitarian arguments in favour of procreation as exemplified in A and B are untenable.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 21, 2012 8:16:26 AM
I can see no reason for prejudicing human suffering over the suffering of other species. Are you then recommending we work towards the "humane" extinction of whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, great apes, etc., since they can't do it for themselves?
Even killing them all outright, painfully, would be less suffering than the overall suffering of subsequent generations.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 21, 2012 9:16:59 AM
JA asked a couple days ago if common ground could be had by defining procreation as a "morally problematic activity." The problem I see with this is that if we accept the arguments of the anti-natalists, we can't simply stop at calling procreation "morally problematic"; it would be necessarily a crime, on a par with reckless endangerment at the least.
JA, if you're still around, or Karl, since you agreed with his comment: can you make any argument for why procreation should not be considered a crime? I'll consider any reference to political infeasibility a weasel answer, just fyi.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 21, 2012 2:01:27 PM
"how you can get prior consent from someone who has not been created yet."
You can't (foretell what they want).
Therefore,
you shouldn't (do unto them).
In that sense, the entitlement you derive from your self-appointed custody is not much different from using a position of capacity to:
• inseminate a comatose, because she can't actively exercise ownership of her womb
• convince a child of having sex with you, because it can't yet understand all it is getting itself into.
If there's no informed consent, a decent person would leave it (un)be!
The preceding would also provide supplement to the following contention with someone's earlier abstraction:
comparing conception to gambling a small amount of (your own) cash and having great odds stacked in your favor paints a very distorted picture, whereas the morality of the vicarious wager is more akin to sneaking into your baby brother's room, nicking his marble collection while he's sleeping, so you could win that marble (that you want to boast to him someday) by gambling your baby bro's marbles at a game. Would anyone here dare defend that one's intent/hope/wish to lose none of one's brother's treasure, to a risk he didn't consent to, make this gamble morally excusable?
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 21, 2012 3:19:57 PM
Vicki Baker,
though I was not solicited and I speak for myself here, I would like to reply nevertheless:
Yes.
Yes, procreation should be considered a crime; 'grave' I would add.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 21, 2012 3:51:12 PM
Jesse M, in your first paragraph, you write "I think you're probably getting at the issue of "consent", and saying it's OK to subject another to a risk of suffering if they themselves have consented to that risk beforehand." If there's consent between parties, there's no 'subjection' of the other. Subjection implies having no choice. If an agent consents to an action, the only subjection is that of the agent subjecting himself.
But here you have completely ignored the sole point I was making about "consent", namely that it doesn't seem to have primary importance in utilitarianism (if I can take some action without your consent that will increase the general happiness and decrease general suffering, most utilitarians would say I should do so, although perhaps indirect utilitarians like those who believe in rule utilitarianism and two-level utilitarianism would disagree), and that anti-natalist arguments generally seem utilitarian to me. You've just given me some assertions about your beliefs about the ethics of consent and subjection, but you haven't told me whether you justify these beliefs in a utilitarian ethical system, or some non-consequentialist ethical system, or whether your beliefs are just based on assorted personal moral intuitions with no attempt to understand these intuitions as derived from some all-encompassing ethical system. Can you please address this issue of whether you ground all your various ethical claims in a utilitarian framework, some other system, or no system?
My point about the death of cyclists and love suicides etc. is that to assume a low-risk in practically anything is unjustifiable due to our ultimate inability to forsee all consequences.
If "risk" is defined in terms of statistical likelihood of specific outcomes like serious injury, we can determine the risk empirically by looking at large collections of people and seeing the fraction that experience these outcomes (like the fraction of all people who have been taught to bicycle who experienced serious injuries as a result). When you say we can't "foresee all consequences" are you referring to the fact that we don't know what will happen in any one person's specific case (even if we can reasonably estimate the probability of certain harmful consequences like injury is very low), or are you suggesting there could be other not-so-obvious negative consequences (spending time biking leading to some subtle psychological changes which reduce the person's potential for happiness, somehow), or something else?
Also, you haven't really answered the basic question about whether you do think a consequence of your views about the ethics of subjecting others to risk is that we should never teach children to ride bicycles (or other skills) if not knowing isn't causing them to be actively unhappy. Can you please answer that?
A) What the majority thinks is utterly irrelevant and has no bearing on the truth of a matter. If our thoughts lead us to the conclusion that it would be better that no one had ever been born, so be it.
So you believe there is objective truth in ethics? How do you think we can arrive at that truth? By trying to ground them in some set of basic ethical axioms like those of utilitarianism, or solely by relying on moral intuitions whose source is mysterious to us and which we can't justify in terms of anything more basic? In the latter case, then the intuitions of the majority presumably would have some relevance, since that view assumes humans have some kind of intuitive ability to perceive ethical truths directly. And in the former case, what I'm saying is that if you want to make a coherent argument that the majority is wrong, you need to actually spell out what your overall ethical framework is and argue how your conclusions follow from the basic assumptions of that framework, rather than simply making arbitrary pronouncements that you don't attempt to derive from anything more fundamental, like your pronouncements about the ethics consent and subjection above.
B) Anti-Natalism is based on the premise that needlessly engineering a situation where an agent other than oneself is guaranteed to suffer for no verifiable reason is morally wrong. I would wager that this is a pretty universal position.
I would bet that very few people would accept that position, if they realized how sweeping and absolutist it was meant to be; in other words, few would accept it if it were clarified that it implied the following:
"Needlessly engineering a situation where another agent is guaranteed to suffer, even if you (and most others) think there is very good reason to believe the suffering is extremely likely to be quite minor and infrequent and that the situation will increase that agent's long-term happiness and satisfaction in life, is always morally wrong."
Do you deny that your statement above is absolute enough that it would have my statement as an implication? Do you think you could gain near-universal assent to my statement? (note, I am not saying the suffering associated with an entire lifetime is "extremely likely to be quite minor", I'm just exploring the consequences of your statement in a general sense)
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 23, 2012 4:47:41 PM
Jesse M, my core moral axiom is that it is wrong to needlessly create pain. If you're going to keep asking for further proof there is none. As Wittgenstein said, there comes a point when one has to put down one's shovel and say there is no deeper place to dig to. You seem to believe in utilitarian systems, but utilitarianism, like all other moral systems, is initially grounded on individual conceptions of right and wrong. I believe that the creation of pain is wrong; that all utilitarian systems fail for the reasons I've outlined above and that there is no good, convincing moral justification for procreation.
You have yet to outline any coherent reasons for procreation. Instead you continue to refer back to majority positions and what you believe to be acceptable risks. You also continue to evade the actual issue of procreation by referring to in-life situations. Seeing as how non-procreators are not altering the state of the world and procreators are by their actions, the burden of proof is on you. So would you kindly care to address the core issue under debate here and elaborate why you think procreation is justifiable and what purpose it serves?
Posted by: Karl | Apr 24, 2012 4:16:56 AM
I believe that the utilitarian position would be that it is right to needlessly create pain if one can expect to thereby create more joy than the pain.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 24, 2012 4:30:42 AM
Jesse M, my core moral axiom is that it is wrong to needlessly create pain.
What defines whether the creation of pain is "needless" or "needful"? Wouldn't your axiom imply that even with a person's consent, it would still be wrong to do anything that might cause them pain? And you still haven't told me whether you think this does in fact imply we shouldn't try to teach children (or adults) anything new if they aren't suffering for lack of knowing it, and the struggle to learn it will create at least some minor mental pain.
You have yet to outline any coherent reasons for procreation.
I don't think there need to be any "coherent reasons" for people to do whatever they wish to do, as long as there aren't coherent reasons not to do it. So, in that sense I think the burden of proof is on the anti-natalists here, and I don't find your absolutist moral axiom about the wrongness of causing pain, even when a necessary part of something that will cause a lot of pleasure and that the recipient is likely to be grateful for on the whole, to match my own ethical intuitions. And I am trying to explore whether even you faithfully follow the axiom in all circumstances, even those unrelated to procreation.
You also continue to evade the actual issue of procreation by referring to in-life situations.
This is not evasion, it's an attempt to explore the general consequences of your moral axiom to cases other than procreation. I am not some sort of absolute "pro-natalist" (in fact I argued against a commenter named "Nathan" who held such an absolutist position on this comments thread) so I don't see the need to build a case for procreation, other than saying I don't see anything particularly wrong with it if it's what some people want to do. If you have any other specific question about procreation I haven't answered, please repeat it and I'll try to answer it.
Also, I don't know if you read my comments earlier about the multiverse, but I do find it likely that some sort of multiverse theory is true (see the 4 possible types outlined here), and I think this implies that any attempt to reduce the number of distinct conscious experiences in reality would be futile even if the anti-natalist case made sense in a single unique universe; every possible conscious entity is guaranteed to exist (an infinite number of copies of them, in fact) and there's nothing we can do about that, our actions can only influence the probabilities of some experiences relative to other ones (even on an infinite set, different outcomes can have different measures), so we should try to take actions that reduce the probabilities of painful experiences relative to happy ones.
Seeing as how non-procreators are not altering the state of the world and procreators are by their actions, the burden of proof is on you.
I don't think it's coherent to say that some actions "alter the state of the world" but others don't. Either everything we do alters the state of the world by creating a future different from what would have occurred if we had done something different, or nothing we do alters the state of the world since whatever we do is an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature operating on earlier states of the world (going all the way back to the Big Bang).
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 24, 2012 8:41:37 AM
"I don't think there need to be any "coherent reasons" for people to do whatever they wish to do, as long as there aren't coherent reasons not to do it. So, in that sense I think the burden of proof is on the anti-natalists here"
Jesse M,
Are disease, rape, murder, theft, hunger, cold, ageing, despair and grief not proof enough that life is absolutely not an innocent object?
The ball is in the natalist court, for you to warrant the exposure of unsuspecting humans to this hazardous material.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 24, 2012 9:24:52 AM
Are disease, rape, murder, theft, hunger, cold, ageing, despair and grief not proof enough that life is absolutely not an innocent object?
I never said life was an "innocent object", whatever that means. But simply listing bad things that can happen in life is an emotional argument, rather than a philosophical/ethical argument that one has a duty not to procreate. It carries no more weight than someone listing all the bad things that can happen in a romantic relationship and saying "therefore, it's our duty to never initiate such a relationship", or someone listing all the wonderful possibilities of life and saying "therefore, it's our duty to procreate". Like I said, my default is that people should do what they want to do unless there is some good argument against it, and simply listing bad things associated with an action while ignoring good things (or vice versa!) is not really an argument. You need to tell me what general ethical principles you take as axiomatic, and show that when applied to the case of procreation, they lead to the conclusion that we should never procreate.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 24, 2012 9:43:02 AM
Karl,
We know you are against procreation. What does your partner think? Have you considered adoption?
Posted by: reader | Apr 24, 2012 9:46:14 AM
Philip Kitcher: "There is no mountain to climb, no final compendium of ethical truths, but only a central human predicament, from which we escaped by learning—imperfectly—to regulate our own conduct."
http://www.tnr.com/article/books/magazine/99529/on-what-matters-derek-parfit
Posted by: Tim B. | Apr 24, 2012 11:12:30 AM
Jesse M,
"And you still haven't told me whether you think this does in fact imply we shouldn't try to teach children (or adults) anything new if they aren't suffering for lack of knowing it, and the struggle to learn it will create at least some minor mental pain."
Again you're sticking to in-life scenarios. Life is unfortunately structured that we are obliged to choose what we believe to be lesser risks over greater ones and so on. And yet again, you ignore everything I said in my long post about utilitarian calculations on the 21st and assume only 'minor mental pain'. Circular reasoning.
"I don't think there need to be any "coherent reasons" for people to do whatever they wish to do, as long as there aren't coherent reasons not to do it."
So basically you're going to wilfully ignore everything I and others have said regarding the pitfalls of pro-creation in the name of self-will and volition. At least you're coming clean now, you're a form of nihilist who doesn't care about the consequences of his actions as long as your volition is satisfied and you can ignore the potentially harmful effects of your actions upon others.
"a necessary part of something that will cause a lot of pleasure and that the recipient is likely to be grateful for on the whole"
Once again, assuming what you're trying to prove and what has yet to be demonstrated.
"any attempt to reduce the number of distinct conscious experiences in reality would be futile even if the anti-natalist case made sense in a single unique universe; every possible conscious entity is guaranteed to exist (an infinite number of copies of them, in fact) and there's nothing we can do about that"
What a blatant cop-out from moral responsibility based on an unverifiable mathematical hypothesis that has no absolutely no relevance to how we live our lives. Can you honestly be serious about this nonsense?
"Either everything we do alters the state of the world by creating a future different from what would have occurred if we had done something different, or nothing we do alters the state of the world since whatever we do is an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature operating on earlier states of the world"
Another attempt to evade moral responsibility. And creating a life stands alongside ending a life in terms of the actions we can commit that have most impact on another person. Why don't you address the reality of that instead of these evasions into multiverses, laws of nature, majority opinions and all the rest of it?
reader, I do believe the act of adoption and fostering (by carefully vetted candidates) is a better option than leaving unwanted children to die on the streets or rot in state care. A pity that the parents of those unfortunates hadn't considered what they were doing in the first place when they decided to procreate.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 25, 2012 5:23:18 AM
"simply listing bad things that can happen in life is an emotional argument, rather than a philosophical/ethical argument that one has a duty not to procreate. It carries no more weight than someone listing all the bad things that can happen in a romantic relationship and saying "therefore, it's our duty to never initiate such a relationship", or someone listing all the wonderful possibilities of life and saying "therefore, it's our duty to procreate". Like I said, my default is that people should do what they want to do unless there is some good argument against it, and simply listing bad things associated with an action while ignoring good things (or vice versa!) is not really an argument."
Jesse M,
can you invalidate the Benatarian Assymetry? If not, then the bad is something to avoid and the good is only worth mentioning once the bad is no longer evitable as a whole for a potential person.
The subject of antinatalism (i.e. "the case against kids") is all about prevention, so the ensuing palliative care, cliniclowns, euphoric delirium and other "on the bright side of death" are -completely- irrelevant to Hazard Reduction ('outsmarting perils' being the fundamental axiom of human sapience).
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 25, 2012 10:39:07 AM
Again you're sticking to in-life scenarios. Life is unfortunately structured that we are obliged to choose what we believe to be lesser risks over greater ones and so on. And yet again, you ignore everything I said in my long post about utilitarian calculations on the 21st and assume only 'minor mental pain'. Circular reasoning.
I do not talk only about in-life examples, I talk about procreation as well. You, however, seem to absolutely refuse to elaborate on how your axiom about it always being wrong to needlessly cause pain would apply to any situation other than procreation. Is this really a general axiom that could cover multiple situations, or just a sort of rhetorical rationalization for your preexisting feelings about procreation that cannot meaningfully be applied to any other situations? If it really is intended to be a more general axiom, I ask you again to please tell me, yes or no, whether you think your moral axiom implies it's wrong to teach a child to ride a bicycle if they are not suffering due to lack of knowledge. I think a basic principle of civil, rational discussion is that each person be willing to address any specific question asked about the implications of their views, no? If you keep avoiding answering questions like this, I'll tend to conclude that you're not really interested in a thoughtful rational discussion of the issues, and your purpose is more just to make a lawyerly rhetorical case that's intended to make your position sound good and opposing positions sound bad. So while it's up to you whether to answer the questions I ask, I will probably drop out of the discussion if you continue to refuse to answer them. And as I said, I will certainly answer any specific question you ask about my own position.
As for your comments about utilitarianism in that post from the 21st, the first part was quite similar to your comments about not being able to "foresee all consequences" in the other post from the 21st which I did respond to, and in that case I didn't fully understand what kind of uncertainty you were referring to and how your general comments would apply to any specific case like mine of teaching a child to ride a bicycle. That's why I asked the following question:
When you say we can't "foresee all consequences" are you referring to the fact that we don't know what will happen in any one person's specific case (even if we can reasonably estimate the probability of certain harmful consequences like injury is very low), or are you suggesting there could be other not-so-obvious negative consequences (spending time biking leading to some subtle psychological changes which reduce the person's potential for happiness, somehow), or something else?
If you want to continue the argument about uncertainty in utilitarian calculations, I would ask you to address this question as well. Also, regardless of what type of uncertainty you're referring to, a utilitarian is not committed to the idea that we must know for certain the consequences of our actions, only that we should do our best to predict them and take the course of action that we believe is going to lead to more happiness and less suffering. You seem to acknowledge that we have to do our best to muddle through and make what we think will be the best choices based on limited information when you say above that "Life is unfortunately structured that we are obliged to choose what we believe to be lesser risks over greater ones and so on", so why do you think a utilitarian can't respond the same way?
The other argument in your post from the 21st, about whether a utilitarian would say it's OK to torture one person if this increases the happiness of two or more other sadists, only works as an attack against the specific form of utilitarianism that is interested in maximizing some measure of "general happiness" which is just taken as a sum over the happiness of each individual. I don't agree with that form of utilitarianism, in part for the reason you mention. My approach is something closer to John Rawls' veil of ignorance, where we imagine what actions we would favor if given temporary amnesia so we didn't know which of various individuals we would "wake up as". I, and most others I think, would not be willing to take take the chance of waking up as the tortured person, even if the odds were more in favor of waking up as a happy sadist doing the torturing. Secondly, in most situations I tend to favor rule utilitarianism over act utilitarianism (although I think something like act utilitarianism is needed when deciding what rules are best to adopt), and it's pretty clear that "don't torture people" is a rule that is more likely to produce more happiness than "torture people if it gives you pleasure". Finally, I would also say that not all happiness is created equal, and that happiness that is associated with "personal growth" in the sense of a long-term constructive quest for mutual understanding, and understanding of the world around us, is better than non-constructive selfish happiness like a heroin high or the pleasure of a sadist, both of which would probably be more of an obstacle to personal/moral/intellectual/spiritual growth. This idea also has a long history in utilitarianism--John Stuart Mill, one of the main founders of utilitarianism, once said that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."
"I don't think there need to be any "coherent reasons" for people to do whatever they wish to do, as long as there aren't coherent reasons not to do it."
So basically you're going to wilfully ignore everything I and others have said regarding the pitfalls of pro-creation in the name of self-will and volition. At least you're coming clean now, you're a form of nihilist who doesn't care about the consequences of his actions as long as your volition is satisfied and you can ignore the potentially harmful effects of your actions upon others.
I can't tell if this is just poor reading comprehension, or if you're just intentionally trying to smear me without caring whether the attack is really a fair one (making the type of "lawyerly rhetorical case" I described above). Of course I don't say that we can do whatever we want "in the name of self-will and volition", I just say that we should do whatever we want unless it is morally wrong, as you do too, probably (if an action doesn't conflict with the moral axiom you stated or any other moral rules you believe in, do you think we still need a "coherent reason" to do it other than the fact that we want to and it will give us pleasure? Do I need a "coherent reason" to do something utterly trivial like going outside for a walk on a nice day?) But as I already made clear, I disagree with you on a basic level about what it is, specifically, that makes an action morally wrong. I don't agree with the idea that it is always wrong to take a course of action that will lead to suffering if that suffering can be avoided (and I think even you yourself may not consistently apply this rule to any situation other than procreation, as your continued evasion on in-life examples shows); instead, I think it's wrong to take an action that will cause suffering if that suffering is not a necessary side-effect of something that you believe is likely to lead to a greater amount of pleasure for the individual who experiences the suffering, such that if the individual can later reflect on it they will likely to be glad that you took this action. I would apply this rule to any course of action that might cause suffering, and avoid any actions that I think would violate it, even if I might want to take them otherwise; so clearly I am no more of a nihilist than you, I just have a different set of criteria for when an action is wrong because it causes "needless" pain.
Speaking of which, you also never answered my question about what defines whether pain is "needless" or not. If someone said the pain of life is "needed" as a side-effect of being able to experience the pleasure of life, do you have any clear criteria for what "needless" means here that would show them wrong, or would your response be more of a subjective one that you don't "feel" it is needed, but can't offer any clear definition of needless/needed that would clearly show it's not?
"a necessary part of something that will cause a lot of pleasure and that the recipient is likely to be grateful for on the whole"
Once again, assuming what you're trying to prove and what has yet to be demonstrated.
No, because "likely" here just means "likely according to my best judgement", not "I have perfect ability to calculate the true probabilities of different possible consequence of my actions, and thus have absolute certainty that the pleasure/pain ratio is far more likely to favor pleasure, and that the probability the person will be grateful is far higher than the probability they will wish I hadn't subjected them to this." As I said, I think of morality in terms of muddling through and making the best decisions we can based on incomplete information, not in terms of needing absolute certainty about the consequences of our actions.
"any attempt to reduce the number of distinct conscious experiences in reality would be futile even if the anti-natalist case made sense in a single unique universe; every possible conscious entity is guaranteed to exist (an infinite number of copies of them, in fact) and there's nothing we can do about that"
What a blatant cop-out from moral responsibility based on an unverifiable mathematical hypothesis that has no absolutely no relevance to how we live our lives. Can you honestly be serious about this nonsense?
"Cop-out from moral responsibility" once again sounds like an attempt to smear me, are you not capable of civil disagreement with people who don't think exactly like you do about moral questions? I have thought that multiverse theories were much more likely than not (there are good grounds for thinking so in modern science) long before I ever considered the issue of natalism vs. anti-natalism, so if you're suggesting I just started believing this as a convenient way to (in your view, operating from your moral axioms) "evade moral responsibility", you couldn't be more wrong. And how can you say it has "absolutely no relevance to how we live our lives" without simply begging the question of its irrelevance to the anti-natalism question? Are you saying that even if it were not an "unverifiable mathematical hypothesis", even if you knew for a fact that it was true that every being that could possibly come into existence does in fact come into existence in some part of the multiverse, you would still say we have a moral responsibility not to create new lives on our section of the multiverse? That seems incoherent to me, the whole basis for not creating new life is the idea that we want to minimize the number of distinct conscious entities in existence since each one will have its own unique brand of suffering, if we knew that was futile the argument for reducing the amount of suffering in existence by not procreating would fall apart.
In any case, I only brought up the multiverse issue because you were so insistent that I give my thoughts specifically related to procreation, as opposed to other "in-life" examples designed to explore the moral axiom you proposed. Why ask for my thoughts but then berate me when they appear strange to your own way of thinking? Anyway, I don't see the multiverse argument as in any way essential to my argument about procreation not being wrong, so I'd be fine with dropping this particular subject and assuming for the sake of argument that there is only a single unique world.
"Either everything we do alters the state of the world by creating a future different from what would have occurred if we had done something different, or nothing we do alters the state of the world since whatever we do is an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature operating on earlier states of the world"
Another attempt to evade moral responsibility.
Not at all, I am a compatabilist about free will, so I think we have plenty of moral responsibilities even if all our actions (or the probabilities we will take different actions) are ultimately determined by the laws of physics and the state of the universe shortly after the big bang. I just don't think it is meaningful to distinguish between actions that "change the state of the world" and those that don't, and to use that as a criterion for whether an act needs moral justification or not. Having a causal influence on the state of the world (different from "changing" it) by not taking some particular action demands exactly the same types of moral consideration as having an influence by taking that action.
And creating a life stands alongside ending a life in terms of the actions we can commit that have most impact on another person. Why don't you address the reality of that instead of these evasions into multiverses, laws of nature, majority opinions and all the rest of it?
"Address the reality of that" is vague, it doesn't tell me what you think I need to address that I haven't already, or why my previous responses fail to do so. Like I said, ask a specific question and I will answer it. And "evasions" is a hostile smear, in each case I sincerely believed these were relevant to the discussion. And while for me the multiverse is directly relevant to the question of whether one is reducing suffering by not procreating, in the other examples you label "evasions" I didn't bring them up because I thought they were directly relevant to the issue of procreation, but rather because they seemed relevant to the arguments you made. In the case of majority opinions, I brought them up not because I thought this was of any central importance to the rightness or wrongness of procreation but because you appealed to common moral intuitions in trying to justify your axiom about it being universally wrong to cause "unneeded" suffering. Likewise, I only brought up the laws of nature because you seemed to suggest that the question of whether procreation needed justification turned critically on the fact that it "changes the state of the world", a pretty abstract argument that seems far removed from "creating a life stands alongside ending a life in terms of the actions we can commit that have most impact on another person."
Again, if you want a short summary of my opinions on procreation, it's that I think people should generally take actions that will make them happy unless the actions are morally wrong, and that as I said, "it's wrong to take an action that will cause suffering if that suffering is not a necessary side-effect of something that you believe is likely to lead to a greater amount of pleasure for the individual who experiences the suffering, such that if the individual can later reflect on it they will likely to be glad that you took this action". By that criterion I would say it's generally not wrong to procreate, unless you have reason to think that your child is likely to suffer far more than is typically "necessary" in order to experience the pleasures of a human life (say, because both you and your partner have genes for cystic fibrosis).
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 25, 2012 12:16:26 PM
can you invalidate the Benatarian Assymetry? If not, then the bad is something to avoid and the good is only worth mentioning once the bad is no longer evitable as a whole for a potential person.
Does Benetar provide any justification for this claimed asymmetry, or just assert it as a moral intuition? If the latter I would just say it's an intuition I don't share. As I said, I think it would lead to intuitively absurd conclusions, like the one that you should never try to teach a child to ride a bicycle if they are not suffering due to lack of knowledge, since by not teaching them you will ensure they avoid some minor suffering (scraped knees and such) that is a near-inevitable result of the learning process.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 25, 2012 12:21:29 PM
Jesse said: "My approach is something closer to John Rawls' veil of ignorance, where we imagine what actions we would favor if given temporary amnesia so we didn't know which of various individuals we would "wake up as". I, and most others I think, would not be willing to take take the chance of waking up as the tortured person, even if the odds were more in favor of waking up as a happy sadist doing the torturing."
Jesse, I think this is a pretty good argument for refraining from procreation. Since we ourselves wouldn't want to wake up as a tortured person, it stands to reason that we wouldn't want to roll the dice (whatever the odds) and create people who may have to "wake up" (so to speak) to a tortured life.
Posted by: Laura Kramer | Apr 25, 2012 12:55:36 PM
I think the veil of ignorance argument only makes sense in terms of randomly waking up as some existing person, not in terms of randomly being assigned to become one member of the set of all possible people, and if that possible person was never really born you get to have blissful nonexistence. That seems to be stretching the analogy too far--"amnesia" I can sort of make sense of as a thought-experiment, but making moral decisions based on being unsure whether you exist or not, and hoping you don't, seems a bit too incoherent.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 25, 2012 1:23:09 PM
This thread fails to make a case against kids, but makes an excellent case against philosophers.
Posted by: reader | Apr 25, 2012 2:21:00 PM
Hi Jesse,
I understand that I am stretching Rawls' idea farther than he probably intended, but I don't agree that my extension of the idea is incoherent or stretched too far to be meaningful or useful; indeed it seems perfectly sensible and "humane". Which part of what I said seems incoherent to you?
Posted by: Laura Kramer | Apr 25, 2012 2:52:42 PM
Laura, first of all it just seems impossible in principle to imagine myself as unsure whether I exist or not, my consciousness of the question must mean the answer is that I do. But I think a somewhat more concrete objection is that a lot of what you're doing with the veil of ignorance is calculating risk, which requires actually being able to count up number of people who experience outcome X vs. number who experience outcome Y; for existing people it's not a problem, but how are you supposed to count the number of non-existent people, in order to do things like figuring out what you need to do to maximize the ratio of non-existing to existing people? Would you look at the ratio of possible human genomes that get born to possible human genomes that don't, or the ratio of existing vs. non-existing arrangements of particle worldlines in spacetime that could possibly qualify as a human lifetime, or the ratio of the volume of space in the universe filled up by humans to the volume of space not occupied by humans, or what? Your method of counting might lead to different strategies to maximize the ratio, for example counting by distinct genomes could mean there's no problem with cloning existing people, and counting by volume of space might mean that if it's physically possible to increase the rate of spatial expansion of our universe, or to inflate new universes which will create a lot of extra space but with a lower probability than our universe of any region of space containing a sentient being, we should make every effort to do so (even if developing the technology to do this requires maintaining a large population for the forseeable future). And any answer you give to the method of counting non-people would seem rather arbitrary, what would recommend that answer over others?
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 25, 2012 5:39:25 PM
Jesse,
I don't claim to be a philosopher or a scientist, and I can't really understand how your last post is a response to my question, "Which part of what I said seems incoherent to you?" (if that's what it was intended to be). (I certainly didn't intend to say anything about whatever you are talking about in your most recent post.)
If I understand the "veil of ignorance" thing correctly, it's just sort of saying to yourself, "I could end up in that situation (or I could have ended up in that situation), so I should keep people who are in that situation in mind when I make my decisions." So, for instance, when one sees young children with leukemia, one could legitimately think, "I could have ended up in that situation. I will live in such a way as to not cause anyone to end up in that situation; I will not procreate.". Certainly, one could also (or instead) think, "I could have ended up in that situation. I will become a doctor (or a donor to cancer charities, etc.).", but I don't see why the former decision is any less coherent than the latter.
Posted by: Laura Kramer | Apr 25, 2012 6:35:56 PM
If I understand the "veil of ignorance" thing correctly, it's just sort of saying to yourself, "I could end up in that situation (or I could have ended up in that situation), so I should keep people who are in that situation in mind when I make my decisions."
I may be going beyond how Rawls stated it, but I had thought the veil of ignorance specifically meant you were imagining you would be randomly assigned to someone's life, with an equal probability of being each person (or if you are an amnesiac, you have no reason to think you're more likely to find yourself as any given person than another when you regain your memories, so it's reasonable to think as if you're going to be randomly assigned an identity, as in the self-sampling assumption). If it doesn't have this random component, I don't really see why having 1% suffer from some bad outcome would be any better than having 20% suffer from that outcome--either way you could imagine ending up in that situation and feel sorry for those that do. But in the "random allocation" version, the 1% scenario is preferable since at least you're lowering the chance of suffering from that outcome.
So, it's under that interpretation of the veil of ignorance that your idea seems incoherent to me, since there isn't any meaningful way to count how many nonexistent persons there are relative to the number of existent persons, in order to figure out what my chances of being allocated to the nonexistent group would be under random assignment. The only way I can make sense of this idea of random allocation is that I am going to be randomly allocated to become/wake up as one of the existing persons.
So, for instance, when one sees young children with leukemia, one could legitimately think, "I could have ended up in that situation. I will live in such a way as to not cause anyone to end up in that situation; I will not procreate."
If you want to be careful to avoid being the direct cause of a life that involves great pain, that's certainly a coherent wish, but I don't see that this has any real connection to the veil of ignorance--there's no amnesia being imagined, for example (and even if my idea of being randomly assigned an identity doesn't match Rawls' original formulation of the veil of ignorance, certainly the idea of having amnesia and not being sure what your identity will be when you regain your memories was a central part of it).
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 25, 2012 7:21:51 PM
"Does Benetar provide any justification for this claimed asymmetry, or just assert it as a moral intuition?"
Jesse M,
of course, the by Professor David Benatar's discerned assymetry no less than the product of uncompromising reason drawn to its conclusions:
From
• suffering is bad (positive utility, if you may)
• gratification is good (negative utility, say)
follows that
• the avoidance of suffering is good
• deprivation of gratification is bad.
When it comes to comparing existence with nonexistence however, the resulting scales are not in the state of equilibrium that is commonly claimed:
in the averaged existence,
• living through some suffering adds towards the bad outcome (-X utility)
• living through some gratification adds to the good outcome (+X utility)
• avoiding some other suffering adds to the good outcome (+X utility)
• suffering from the deprivation from unobtained gratification adds towards the bad outcome (-X utility)
resulting in a neutral net outcome for the average life;
but with non-existence in contrast,
• no suffering is endured (-0 utility)
• no gratification is experienced (+0 utility)
• the avoidance of suffering adds towards the good outcome (+X utility)
• the avoidance of gratification, however, does NOT cause suffering (-0 utility)
resulting in a positive net outcome for non-existence.
Because of the assymetry in levels of preferentiality between existence and non-existence, procreation LOWERS the beneficial state of non-existence to the in-principle neutral valor of life.
The inescapable conclusion thus is that procreation is not only pointless (produces 0 yield), but also a bad thing (reduces utility).
And this is only one of the conclusive arguments against having kids!
I would put forth the inequal distribution of suffering and gratification amongst individuals as at least as important an argument, if not more: for your oversaturation in utility, another is thrown in the negative state of undersaturation.
Procreation is fundamentally injust.
"This thread fails to make a case against kids, but makes an excellent case against philosophers."
reader,
because you say so?
I would argue that your trolling adds to the case against kids:
are we really doing good in filling the church, putting flatulent arseholes next to sensitive noses?
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 26, 2012 1:31:56 PM
"This thread fails to make a case against kids, but makes an excellent case against philosophers."
The hypocrisy of the anti kid position is completely obvious: everyone who is against having children because doing so increases the suffering in the world should logically decrease that suffering by immediately committing suicide. Not only that, but they should kill as many people as possible to save them from such suffering. By your standard, people like Breivik are heroes. That you do not understand this makes a compelling case against "philosophers" like yourself. You supply the rope that hangs yourself.
Posted by: reader | Apr 26, 2012 1:50:16 PM
but with non-existence in contrast,
• no suffering is endured (-0 utility)
• no gratification is experienced (+0 utility)
• the avoidance of suffering adds towards the good outcome (+X utility)
• the avoidance of gratification, however, does NOT cause suffering (-0 utility)
resulting in a positive net outcome for non-existence.
I mentioned in my last post to Karl on the 25th that I don't agree with that brand of utilitarianism that judges actions by summing over the happiness and suffering of each individual to produce some aggregate "utility" function (I prefer an approach that involves the "veil of ignorance", so that we will avoid causing extreme suffering to a small number of individuals to make a larger number happy, because we wouldn't want to end up as one of those individuals). But even for those utilitarians that do think in these terms, I doubt most would agree that "negative" events--failure to cause suffering, failure to cause happiness--should be counted in calculations of utility; the fact that actual suffering decreases utility should be enough to prefer courses that don't cause suffering, you shouldn't need a separate boost in utility for picking an action that avoids causing suffering. And even if you do count "negatives" events in your utility calculation, it seems that Benetar is simply begging the question by saying that avoiding suffering increases utility but avoiding pleasure doesn't decrease it--this just looks like cooking the utility "rules" to get the conclusion he wanted to begin with (that it's better not to create new life), not something that would appear at all natural or intuitive to those who don't agree with the anti-natalist stance in the first place.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 26, 2012 1:59:18 PM
Wrong. From
• suffering is bad
• gratification is good
follows that
• the avoidance of suffering is not bad
• deprivation of gratification is not good
If something is avoided, deprived of, or otherwise doesn't happen, then the utility is zero, which is neither bad nor good.
So no asymmetry has been shown.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 26, 2012 4:33:07 PM
"• the avoidance of suffering adds towards the good outcome (+X utility) "
What outcome is that?
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 26, 2012 5:24:29 PM
"everyone who is against having children because doing so increases the suffering in the world should logically decrease that suffering by immediately committing suicide. Not only that, but they should kill as many people as possible to save them from such suffering."
reader,
"heroics" is not something I subscribe to. I -too- am but a miserable bastard, which is another reason not to force others into coexistence with me. If I were able to override my entire humanity, then yes, maybe I should do the things you suggest (but not without declaring my war to the world).
However ... don't you know that part to the human condition, is to be chained to a psychology? I can't change myself profoundly enough to bear that murderous frenzy, nor override my half-a-billion y/o survival instinct.
Antinatalists are pragmatists: we know restraint is the FEASIBLE approach.
And no, Breivik was your typical natalist Cro-Magnon, just killing to make lebensraum for his tribe.
Also, you got a long way still, to arrive at 'justifying procreation' from perceiving 'hypocrisy in antinatalists'.
"it seems that Benetar is simply begging the question by saying that avoiding suffering increases utility but avoiding pleasure doesn't decrease it--this just looks like cooking the utility "rules" to get the conclusion he wanted to begin with (that it's better not to create new life), not something that would appear at all natural or intuitive to those who don't agree with the anti-natalist stance in the first place."
Jesse M,
by all means,
then, make your case for the avoidance of unwanted suffering 'not being positive' OR the avoidance of unwanted pleasure 'being negative'!
Until you come with some counterargument, you are just whinging at a solid argument.
And you are also getting yourself in a knot, sanctioning what you denounce: reproduction creates an uneven distribution of utility, thus even if you dismiss the Benatarian Asymetry (making all reproduction bad), you'd still produce a negative existence for the horribly poor 3 quarter of mankind. And against that, you got a minority that is also forced into a dreadful role: that of the parasite/oppressor (and the occasional tragic hero). Even though it's easier to get used to receiving the long stick, aren't either deplorably bad existences?
"If something is avoided, deprived of, or otherwise doesn't happen, then the utility is zero, which is neither bad nor good."
Sagredo,
you're going to have a hard time convincing that avoiding to get hit by a corn mower being or being deprived of potable water being 'neither bad nor good'. I know for myself that I'd rather avoid the first and get access to what I'm deprived of in the latter; and I'm sure that's universally the same among humans - but do prove me wrong on this.
It's only when either outcome won't be regretted, that it is truly 'neither bad nor good': and the inexistant don't regret getting no share of the rantions.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 26, 2012 5:38:35 PM
"What outcome is that?"
Karlos,
the one where you won't be screaming, bleeding, crying or cursing.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 26, 2012 5:47:10 PM
Jesse M,
First up, I'm sorry if you feel that I was attempting to 'smear' you. I wasn't and I'm sorry you may have received such an impression. I've genuinely enjoyed our debate; it's made me reflect on my own ideas and shape them up in the light of exchange, so it's been worthwhile and I thank you for this.
To the core topic. Rather than go through everything point by point, I'll summarise what I think may be going on here and you can correct me if you think I'm misrepresenting your position.
From what I can judge from all of your posts, you're a positive utilitarian who believes there exists a moral duty to enhance the amount of joy in an individual life. You think that a certain amount of risk is acceptable if a sufficiently large payoff in the shape of resultant joy ensues. I have no problem with that in theory. But in practice I think it's far more complicated than you appear to. To take your bike-riding example, you shift your position between
"I ask you again to please tell me, yes or no, whether you think your moral axiom implies it's wrong to teach a child to ride a bicycle if they are not suffering due to lack of knowledge."
and
"I think it's wrong to take an action that will cause suffering if that suffering is not a necessary side-effect of something that you believe is likely to lead to a greater amount of pleasure for the individual who experiences the suffering, such that if the individual can later reflect on it they will likely to be glad that you took this action."
So if the child was terrified at the prospect of learning to ride a bike to such an extent that it kicked, screamed, wet itself, suffered mental distress at the thought of mounting a bike etc, would you still believe you had the right to enforce bike-riding? On a greater level, if yes, this implies that you believe that you are justified in causing harm to others if you reasonably believe greater benefit will ensue, regardless of the lack of consent of the agent. If you do believe this, then that opens the door to all sorts of questionable behaviour.
You also state that
"I think people should generally take actions that will make them happy unless the actions are morally wrong"
But if you're a utilitarian right and wrong are defined by the outcomes of actions. Your comment exposes the fundamental flaw in utilitarianism, which is that it seeks to have it every which way. On the one hand, actions are deemed good if they produce overall good results, yet you say an action is morally correct if there is a 'reasonable belief' that it will produce an overall good. So there appears to be no wrong action that a utilitarian can perform. If the outcome produces an overall amount of good, then the action was good and the agent correct. If the amount of suffering outweighs the good, then that was due to faulty calculating, not due to the original intention, which has already been deemed to be good, so the action and the agent are still morally correct. Apparently 'reasonable belief' is everything. Yet how do we quantify a belief as reasonable? And where do utilitarians derive their original aims and moral judgements from? Utilitarianism, at best, appears to be a form of instrumentality, not morality. It assumes the matter of good and bad have been decided and then just tries to evaluate how to get there. That tells us nothing about morality. Can you address this, please?
Also, is there, in your opinon, a duty to create joy, or just a duty to create joy within lives that have been initiated? If the latter, that doesn't really answer the question as to why new lives should be created in the first place. If there's no life, there's no need to create joy, so why wouldn't antinatalism be the preffered choice? No one loses anything and no risk has to be taken. You stated you're not an aggregate utilitarian, meaning there's no duty to create life for the sake of joy, so why create a life at all?
Posted by: Karl | Apr 26, 2012 6:05:41 PM
by all means,
then, make your case for the avoidance of unwanted suffering 'not being positive' OR the avoidance of unwanted pleasure 'being negative'!
I didn't say anything about avoiding causing pleasure/pain them being negative or positive in the colloquial sense of being good or bad, just that for the majority of utilitarians, I don't think they would make a positive or negative contribution to the utility function. As I understand it, expected utility is meant to be pretty closely analogous to something like expected earnings in gambling or game theory problems; just as the gambler tries to pick a strategy that will maximize his expected earnings, the utilitarian tries to pick actions or ways of organizing society that will maximize the expected value of the utility function. Failing to lose money is not the same as gaining money, but the gambler will still avoid strategies that are more likely to lose money because they decrease the expected earnings; similarly failing to decrease utility is not the same as gaining utility, but the utilitarian will avoid actions that are more likely to cause suffering because they decrease expected utility.
Until you come with some counterargument, you are just whinging at a solid argument.
You have provided no "argument" for why Benetar's way of calculating utility is superior to what I think is the bog-standard understanding of how it's calculated among utilitarians who think in terms of maximizing some utility function. Since this standard way is simpler, more analogous to other cases where we want to maximize the expected value of something, and more commonly assumed among utilitarians, I think the burden is really on you/Benetar to explain why this modification is needed. (For example, can you think of any cases other than creating a new life where this way of assigning utility would lead to different conclusions than the standard way, and you would argue that your conclusions better match our moral intuitions than the conclusions of the standard method?) Either way, it's not remotely convincing to just assert that this should be the preferred method with no justification, then claim that this is a "solid argument" and bluster your way out of addressing questions about why this makes more sense than the standard method (or a similar modification that includes decreases in utility for preventing to do things that increase happiness) by saying that such questions are just "whinging".
And you are also getting yourself in a knot, sanctioning what you denounce: reproduction creates an uneven distribution of utility, thus even if you dismiss the Benatarian Asymetry (making all reproduction bad), you'd still produce a negative existence for the horribly poor 3 quarter of mankind.
How am I "sanctioning what I denounce", exactly? I do think it's bad that happiness in life is so unevenly distributed, but if everyone failed to procreate it wouldn't produce a better average expected outcome under the "veil of ignorance" assumption of being randomly assigned an identity from the entire population of existing people, though (the veil of ignorance approach does not include the possibility of being assigned the identity of a non-existent person and thus avoiding the suffering of being alive). Instead, as time went on and the population aged it would produce a worsening outcome for almost everyone. And I think there has been some amount of "progress" over the generations, in the sense that I'd rather be randomly assigned an identity out of the population in 2012 than the population in 1912 or 1812, when I think the fraction of the world living in poverty, suffering various medical ailments and so forth was greater.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Apr 26, 2012 6:22:41 PM
"you're going to have a hard time convincing that avoiding to get hit by a corn mower being or being deprived of potable water being 'neither bad nor good'."
I'm avoiding getting hit by a corn mower right now, simply by being very far from one. Is that a good thing?
There are billions of tonnes of potable water on Earth, and I am right now deprived of almost all of it. Is that a bad thing?
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 26, 2012 8:22:49 PM
Jesse M,
In your gambler's example, 'Failing to lose money' may not the same as 'gaining money' in a quantitative sense, but functionally it amounts to the same: either keeps you from losing and allows you to play another round.
If your creed too is to "avoid actions that are more likely to cause suffering", then you too should be antinatalist, because it's the course that avoids more suffering.
However, you seem to be fixated on "expected utility" (there has to be ... because there has to be?), which would make your utilitarianism not rational, but dogmatic.
You should not compare apples and oranges; the same standard does not apply to both: the state of unbeing is fundamentally different from that of being alive, in that the former is without vulnerability - safe the possibility of being brought into existence, which opens the door the all derailment of utility possible through life.
The Benatarian Assymetry is solidly grounded in the realisation that invulnerability is superior to vulnerability; to me, this is sound.
You expect your assertion, that an aging population means a worseing human condition, to be swallowed without questioning? I would think that a maturing average will lead to a increasingly peaceful and sensitive winding down of mankind: no more violent youth, no more ignorance pooring in from fertile wombs and an indusrty that will follow the aging demographic and gear towards elderly care instead of the tons of useless kiddie gadgets.
And what is your point in comparing evil and lesser evil? Both are still evil, no? The trend you are willing to have more humans saccrificed to, is that of making suffering infinitesimally smaller. But if you know your math, you know that infinitesimally approaching the target value will never get you to actually reach it: no matter how small, the refinement of civilisation will never extinguish suffering, only make it smaller. And what good reason is there keep producing any amount of suffering till the end of time?
Sagredo,
you tell me, if it is a good thing that you're far from corn mowers instead of under one. But you know what would be even better? Not to need hanging around in a world where corn mowers can err towards their vegetarian habits.
And I would think you not to be deprived of potable water, as long as you have plenty in your easy reach; try asking again when you are really out of water and I would say: yes, the grocery store might temporarely alleviate your incurred deprivation (or you could just try and pass a week without any source of potable water, to prove me wrong).
But you could also insist on wanting the water on the other side of the fence (because you want world's largest swimming pool?), a craving which would be a psychological deprivation resulting from the wants injected into you, as a consequence of being birthed a susceptible lifeform.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 26, 2012 8:59:58 PM
"you tell me, if it is a good thing that you're far from corn mowers instead of under one. But you know what would be even better? Not to need hanging around in a world where corn mowers can err towards their vegetarian habits."
There's no doubt that not being hit by a corn mower is better than being hit by a corn mower. But that's because not being hit by a corn mower is neutral, while being hit by a corn mower is bad.
"And I would think you not to be deprived of potable water, as long as you have plenty in your easy reach"
Are you talking about water or gratification? It's perfectly simple:
Suffering is bad.
The avoidance of suffering is neutral, which is better than suffering.
Gratification is good.
The deprivation of gratification is neutral, which is worse than gratification.
Again, no reason for any asymmetry.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 27, 2012 2:42:00 AM
"On a greater level, if yes, this implies that you believe that you are justified in causing harm to others if you reasonably believe greater benefit will ensue, regardless of the lack of consent of the agent. If you do believe this, then that opens the door to all sorts of questionable behaviour."
In this case, one only need believe that one is justified in causing harm to someone if one reasonably believes that greater benefit will ensue to that same person, regardless of consent. It might open the door to questionable behaviour, but without it, it is impossible to justify some basic parenting of (already-born) children.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 27, 2012 2:51:07 AM
Sagredo,
"It might open the door to questionable behaviour, but without it, it is impossible to justify some basic parenting of (already-born) children."
So basically you're saying you can't justify it, but you need to believe it's justifiable.
And again this form of double-think brings us back to the core issue, which is why start the experiment in the first place? Why generate this scenario where people put themselves in the position of having to impose risk on others for a dubious outcome? More importantly, why should people be created who become the gambling chips of others? Why disturb nothingness? I've yet to hear a single good reason from anyone here as to why this should be done or why it is justifiable.
Someone would have to demonstrate how the pre-life universe was somehow 'deprivated' by not having sentient life in in.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 27, 2012 5:28:15 AM
'in it' rather.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 27, 2012 5:29:34 AM
I think the positive benefits of existence are pretty self-evident, even without gratification (I mean, what if you were to decide you wanted to DO something?).
All in all, the teeming world is a pretty amazing and beautiful place. The things life has been able to accomplish, the beauty of it, the exuberance of it, are all a testimony to its worth and value. "Of course," all life proclaims. "Of course life should continue."
From time to time, traits arise in life that are not useful to the herd. I suspect anti-natalist tendencies will not provide fitness over time, which may be a shame, as they seem to possess a sensitivity to suffering that would make them very good counselors, ministers, nurses and others called to alleviate suffering, unless they shy away from suffering at a personal level.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 27, 2012 6:51:07 AM
Carlos, 'amazing' and 'beautiful' are entirely subjective impressions of a certain amount of living creatures. It has no bearing on the issue of whether people should be created or not.
And what are the 'beautiful things' to which you are refering? And if someone is going to mention the 'not-so beautiful' things like the Holocaust, rape, murder, starvation etc. what are you going to say to that?
"Of course," all life proclaims. "Of course life should continue."
Hmmm, much and all as I strain my ears, I hear no such voice. What frequency do I have to tune in to to pick it up? All I see is life reproducing, regardless of the consequences.
And the 'herd' remark gives the game away. Mindless life worship. And as for ANs not participating in suffering alleviation, plenty that I know do, so less of the assumptions, please.
Your remarks demonstrate a pretty commong tendency to filter out and ignore all unwanted negative evidence as to life's fundamental mindlessness and indifference to the suffering of its bearers. I suggest you take the blinkers off.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 27, 2012 6:59:57 AM
"The deprivation of gratification is neutral, which is worse than gratification."
Sagredo,
this one is easiest to prove otherwise:
deprivation (of gratification) is a state cluster that is recurrent at a high frequency throughout life, as it is the stick and carrot (withheld) that compel the animal to get into action - action necessary to alleviate deprivation temporarely, which needs to be repeated over and over until the end.
Far from neutral, staying in a deprivated state will afflict a human being with loneliness, depression, boredom, anxiety, jealousy, aggregated frustration and debilitation:
jail time is punishement,
underprivilege is psychosomatically harmful
and unfulfilled ambition will eat at you.
Humans (and other sentient animals) are not made to "be neutral" to neutrality. Rather than experiencing neutrality, 'deprivation' is always experienced as distinctly negative (just try and find a meaning to the term that is not negative).
We're not balanced creations, but tools of acquisition afflicted with desire, the root cause of deprivation:
"standing still is going backwards" applies all throughout mortal existence; neutrality is biologically not permitted.
Life is binary.
There's no escaping the assymetry.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 27, 2012 12:25:40 PM
"deprivation (of gratification) is a state cluster that is recurrent at a high frequency throughout life, as it is the stick and carrot (withheld) that compel the animal to get into action - action necessary to alleviate deprivation temporarely, which needs to be repeated over and over until the end.
Far from neutral, staying in a deprivated state will afflict a human being with loneliness, depression, boredom, anxiety, jealousy, aggregated frustration and debilitation: "
That's not (or not just) deprivation of gratification. That's deprivation of other things, such as social contact, that has the consequence of causing suffering.
Something that has the consequence of depriving gratification and causing suffering is bad overall, because the deprivation of gratification consequence is neutral, and the causing of suffering consequence is negative.
To speak of "deprivation" tends to compare not having something to having something. One can say that not having something is worse than having something, but that does not necessarily mean that not having things is bad.
For instance, there are billions of cookies in the world, and I only possess one. Therefore, I am deprived of billions of cookies. And yet I suffer not at all from this: my deprivation of each cookie is neutral to me. If someone somewhere makes more cookies, they add yet more cookies I am deprived of. And yet the effect of this additional deprivation on me is entirely neutral.
So being deprived of a cookie is a neutral thing, though worse than the good thing of having a cookie. So it is with gratification.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 27, 2012 11:56:37 PM
""It might open the door to questionable behaviour, but without it, it is impossible to justify some basic parenting of (already-born) children."
So basically you're saying you can't justify it, but you need to believe it's justifiable."
Karl, are you serious? Supposing I have a toddler who is very interested in playing with something dangerous, such as a sharp knife. I have a choice whether to stop her, which will unavoidably cause her annoyance, or not, which will allow her about a one in three chance of cutting herself.
Should I, without her consent, cause her the minor suffering of frustration, given that I believe it would be to her greater expected benefit of avoiding injury?
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 28, 2012 12:06:03 AM
Sagredo, nice try, but no cigar. That's an example of a being with little rationality and practically no self-awareness putting ITSELF into a position of harm. It is therefore the minimal moral duty of those who engineered the scenario where harm could occur, ie the parents, to prevent that harm from occuring.
What we're discussing is the disputed right of agents to actively impose their will on passive others if they believe they know what's best for that other.
Why not try addressing the more serious issue of the child suffering great mental distress at bike-riding?
Or better still, why not try address the biggest question that no one here seems to want to tackle and which I'm obliged to repeat yet again: why start the experiment in the first place? Why generate this scenario where people put themselves in the position of having to impose risk on others for a dubious outcome? More importantly, why should people be created who become the gambling chips of others? Why disturb nothingness? I've yet to hear a single good reason from anyone here as to why this should be done or why it is justifiable.
Posted by: Karl | Apr 28, 2012 4:27:22 AM
Just dropping back in here, perhaps unwisely...
Karl:
"Carlos, 'amazing' and 'beautiful' are entirely subjective impressions of a certain amount of living creatures."
I have a question for you: how could the fact that something is subjective disqualify it from counting in favour of a life?
When you give your answer to this question, try to keep in mind that you yourself, just after giving voice to this idea, tried to call attention to a child's "great mental distress at bike-riding" as something that counts against the creation of a life.
So, you've created a constraint for yourself: when answering my question, you must say why the subjectivity of beauty disqualifies it from counting in favour of life-creation, while the subjectivity of mental distress does not. I genuinely look forward to your answer.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Apr 28, 2012 11:50:56 AM
Nick Smyth,
subjective discovery of beauty is not missed pre-creation, thus cannot be counted as a reason for someone to be created. Mental distress is pretty much guaranteed a (recurrent/chronic) subjective experience for a human being and thus counts as a reason not to create that subject.
"For instance, there are billions of cookies in the world, and I only possess one. Therefore, I am deprived of billions of cookies. And yet I suffer not at all from this: my deprivation of each cookie is neutral to me. If someone somewhere makes more cookies, they add yet more cookies I am deprived of. And yet the effect of this additional deprivation on me is entirely neutral."
Sagredo,
that has been demonstrated to be untrue over and over through real life. If I take a neutral you and a neutral other, and even though neither is hungry, I give the other person a cookie for him/her not to share with you,
you will be sour.
Nothing was taken from you, but the mere fact of not getting a dessert will substract happiness/utility.
This is why poor people in rich countries are found to be unhappier than even poorer people in poor countries.
This is why people who went from millionaires to Joe average in 1929, far from going from positive to neutral, felt so horrified they jumped from buildings.
This is why all you wannabe-good-guys fail -hard- at abandoning all the luxury that comes at the price of a Third World (whom we we want out of poverty) and Global Warming (reducing your desired progeniture's vital habitat).
You either have cookie or you don't; there's no cookie-neutral beyound inexistence.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 28, 2012 2:28:12 PM
Please, no more argument, the site seems to be saying :)
Posted by: M73 | Apr 28, 2012 3:01:04 PM
"why start the experiment in the first place?"
Because the expectation is of more joy than suffering. Or when it isn't, one shouldn't.
Consent is irrelevant, as the parenting examples show.
Risk is irrelevant, provided the odds are in the favour of joy.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 28, 2012 3:40:01 PM
Bazompora, your asymmetry is artificial:
Either you should go this way:
• the avoidance of gratification does NOT cause suffering (-0 utility)
• the avoidance of suffering does NOT cause gratification (+0 utility)
Or this way, which makes no sense to me, but is at least consistent:
• the avoidance of suffering adds towards the good outcome (+X utility)
• the avoidance of gratification adds towards the bad outcome (-X utility)
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 28, 2012 3:51:12 PM
Bazompora,
Your answer is both confused and ill-directed. I was asking, specifically, about how the fact that something is subjective has anything to do with its counting for or against a life. I hope that Karl arrives and answers my question a little more carefully.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Apr 28, 2012 4:22:33 PM
"• the avoidance of gratification adds towards the bad outcome (-X utility)"
Sagredo,
you cannot generate that negative utility for the nonexistent, for the simple fact that the inexistent is invulnerable towards deprivation.
The exististent, however, will incur the negative consequence of deprivation.
Nomatter how you calibrate the scales, there remains an assymetry in quality/utility, whether you deduce inexistence as superior or existence as inferior.
The avoidance of suffering, on the other hand, has the same effect for both the nonexistent and the existent, in that it prevents/removes a negative consequence. Whether you count this as a 0 or a +1 for both changes nothing to the assymetry caused by negative consequences of deprivation on the living.
"Because the expectation is of more joy than suffering."
So, if I expect to win and share the gain with him, it would be 'good' if I were to "borrow" and gamble my brother's money without his consent?
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 28, 2012 4:41:10 PM
"Your answer is both confused and ill-directed."
Nick Smyth,
I'm sorry I interpreted that as a question pertaining to the topic and failed to understand that you were trying to nail Karl on a peripheral detail.
Have your way.
Posted by: Bazompora | Apr 28, 2012 4:56:02 PM
One could equally argue re "the avoidance of suffering adds towards the good outcome (+X utility)":
You cannot generate that positive utility for the nonexistent, for the simple fact that the inexistent gains no benefit from relief. The existent, however, will incur the positive consequence of relief of suffering.
The avoidance of gratification, on the other hand, has the same effect for both the nonexistent and the existent, in that it prevents/removes a positive consequence.
...not that I believe this either, but it's equally credible.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 28, 2012 5:00:09 PM
Oh, good, another Internet Tough Guy. I am starting to understand anti-natalists better and better: if I had their social-communicative skills, I'd probably end up concluding that life is endless suffering, too.
Bazompora, Karl clearly thinks that subjectivity is an important concept, here. I am trying to understand what role it is playing in his argument. If you think it is "peripheral", take it up with him, not with me.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Apr 28, 2012 5:03:29 PM
"So, if I expect to win and share the gain with him, it would be 'good' if I were to "borrow" and gamble my brother's money without his consent?"
That would depend on whether you or your brother has the best idea of what's good for your brother.
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 28, 2012 5:03:41 PM
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