Lately I’ve become quite sympathetic to #antinatalism.
And yet I have two kids, and if I were to start over again I think I would decide to have kids again.
How’s that possible?
(thread)
Second, even though I think that life is mostly #suffering, including human lives, that is just a generalisation, an average. Some lives one can expect to be miserable in all likelihood, while others are set to be as good as possible — even a net positive.
I live in one of the most prosperous countries on earth. I earn well above the average salary here, and so does my wife. We are relatively healthy and free of major health conditions. No history of relevant communicable diseases in our families, no major mental health issues, addiction, or tendency towards violence. We eat reasonably well, we are calm, we don’t spend recklessly.
I expect our children to have lives that are better than the average human being’s. Perhaps even lives worth living, after all.
I identify as a #consequentialist and a (negative) #utilitarian, I suspect that existence is probably not worth it because of the asymmetry of #qualia, and yet I have no intention of ending my own life (and I think that’s rational). Why?
When we’re #children we don’t really understand what suffering is, and we don’t even know that living is a choice. So we live.
#Teens and young adults famously tend to get closer to one of two poles: either they’re disappointed, miserable, or lost (some of those do end their lives), or they are having a great time: they’re at their prime, disease and pain are unknown to them, they discover pleasures, etc (those are happy to live).
We #adults are usually so entangled in relationships by this stage of life that even if/when we decided that non-existence beat existence for us, we wouldn’t want to cause more suffering to those who love us and those who depend on us. So we (usually) live.
@tripu I think where you don’t really care about your life but don’t take active steps to end your life, but wouldn’t have minded if it ended right there and then, it’s called ‘passive suicidal ideation’. It’s actually common enough I believe, but not always healthy to have.
Yeah, that too. I suspect many people understand that not existing is painless, and may actually better than living. But they are prey to status quo bias and to primal instincts for survival, or they fear the actual difficulty and messiness of ending their lives.
Many philosophers think that above a certain level of suffering, it is better not to live. Negative utilitarians, and many others. People committing suicide certainly think so. I think it’s incontrovertible.
/cc @trinsec
Assisted suicide is possible in my country for those people who believe they’re suffering too much to live.
Really? I always thought antinatalism was nonsensical. You can't compare non-living because you can't experience it, being by definition the absence of conscious experience. For me it's the morality equivalent of mathematics "divide by zero", it's simply not valid, or a category error. I understand being in such a situation of absolute torture with no silver lining or possibility of escape that's it's better to stop experiencing that, but that's extremely rare.
“You can’t compare non-living because you can’t experience it, being by definition the absence of conscious experience.”
I think that’s evidently false. ie, you have to be able to compare existence with non-existence. If you throw your hands in the air and refuse to compare, you end up in very strange places, ethically.
Someone who commits suicide is doing that comparison (for themselves).
A couple who ends the pregnancy of a fetus who is known to carry an important incurable disease is doing that comparison (for someone else).
A family authorising euthanasia for a relative in a vegetative state is doing that comparison (for someone else).
The whole field of population ethics needs that comparison to be feasible, at least in certain cases. Public health policy, too.
@tripu
Not sure how we can say nonexistence "feels" better than existence, when it's the absence of feeling (as far as we know). We need to compare conscious feelings; non-conscious beings don't have those.
A suicidal person simply wants to stop feeling... bad. Why is not-feeling the only other option?
I suspect parents that abort fetuses do it more for selfish reasons - perhaps the child would have claimed life was wonderful.
People in vegetative state are already not consciously feeling...
“Not sure how we can say nonexistence “feels” better than existence, when it’s the absence of feeling”
Don’t get hung up on words. We can judge states of the world even when we don’t feel anything directly ourselves. eg, an accident that maims someone in the other side of the world is objectively worse than no accident happening. Even if that person doesn’t manifest their suffering, or if I never get to know them or hear from them.
@tripu
We can judge them because all of those situations involve conscious beings. Is it better to be a rock or a human? I think this a category-error question, because there's no such thing as "being a rock".
Again, I think you get to absurd situations if you refuse to compare existence with non-existence, or consciousness with no consciousness.
Several ways to see that:
For rhetorical purposes there is such a thing as “being a rock”. It means having zero consciousness. It is almost equivalent to “being a corpse”. Someone with a sledgehammer could easily turn you into the functional equivalent of a rock right now. Are you indifferent towards that proposition, since you can’t compare consciousness with “being a rock”?
Is there such a thing as “being an amoeba”? Or “being a nematode”? Consciousness is pretty much a continuum. If you don’t accept “being a rock” as a hypothetical, I guess you won’t accept “being a protozoo”, either. Unless you are drawing a line somewhere, you can’t consider “being an elephant” or “being that brown-haired person across the street”, either. How could you possible be that other person? You can only be you. And yet intuitively you know that you have to compare what is against what could be, all the time. You know that a sterile, rocky planet “is worse” than a planet teeming with creatures living in permanent bliss.
Beings that could plausibly exist in the future are not “conscious beings” either. Like rocks. Isn’t that a problem, if you refuse to consider them at all because they don’t exist? Why care about your great-nephew at all, then?
@tripu
Yes, I think we're not talking about the same thing. I'm not indifferent to losing consciousness, I just meant we can't talk about the experience of nonexistence.
OK, not the experience of nonexistence, which is impossible by definition. We don’t need to use those verbs you keep on fussing about: “feel”, “experience”.
I want us to agree that we can evaluate those states of the world, and compare them. Even when in some scenarios some creatures don’t exist and in others they do.
@tripu
Yes, I agree we can try to badly guess counterfactuals in which different people exist or don't exist.
I’d say many of those guesses aren’t bad at all. Many counterfactuals involving creatures existing one hour from now, or not existing at all, are straightforward, and sometimes hugely consequential.
“We need to compare conscious feelings; non-conscious beings don’t have those”
Thought experiment #1:
You are starving in the woods. You stumble upon an animal hibernating on top of some edible plant. You can either kill the animal instantly and painlessly and eat it, or eat the plant. Assume both options will provide the exact same nutritional value and taste equally good to you. Since there’s no suffering involved, and because according to you you can’t compare sentience (the animal) with non-sentience (the plant), the decision is a coin toss. Even if it’s a hundred little slumbering animals you have to kill to guarantee your survival vs. a single very fruitful plant, it’ll still be a coin toss.
Thought experiment #2:
You give someone a drug that instantly puts them in a vegetative state for life. Defending yourself in front of the judge and the jury, you tell them that the current state of that person (absence of feeling) is no worse than their previous state (feeling). The judge counters that it’s not in your power to decide that on behalf of the victim. You then correct the judge: your defence is not even based on a subjective preference; it is simply impossible to compare those states, therefore nobody can prove that you did anything wrong at all. It doesn’t matter how the jury feels.
Do you agree? If not, why?
@tripu
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "not comparable". I meant the subjective experience of living can't be compared with the subjective experience of death, because there's no such thing as the latter (as far as we know). To say that people that have never been born are better off, is nonsensical to me. I thought that's what antinatalism is about.
If “people that have never been born” (yet) don’t count, why worry about the future at all?
What would stop you from setting a ticking bomb that would destroy the entire planet in a thousand years from now, out of sheer boredom, if you knew that all conscious creatures that do exist today will be dead by then?
@tripu
I never said they don't count, did I? 🤔😀
@tripu
You're the antinatalist, not me! 😄
But I’m not.
I’m just sympathetic towards those arguments, more open to them than most people. And I think more people would make better decisions if they considered antinatalist ideas.
@tripu
Oh ok 😄 maybe I misunderstand the arguments. And what better decisions with what ideas?
Ideas: the ones I’m defending in this discussion 😆
Decisions:
If more people were more thoughtful about the lives their descendants are likely to lead, we’d see fewer broken homes, fewer children dying of famine, fewer childless couples in prosperous nations, and more people adopting instead of having natural children.
If more people were more thoughtful about the asymmetry between suffering and pleasure, #suicide would carry less of a stigma, and would be easier to communicate, plan and execute.
Overpopulation and lack of natural resources would be less of a problem.
Discussions about public health and demographic changes would be easier. eg, people now assume that it’s just bad when population shrinks (often for no good reasons), or that incurable diseases and painful chronic conditions deserve huge attention and resources (when a utilitarian calculus would say otherwise).
Our attachment to life would be more rational, in general.
@tripu
Ah okay, I am on board with most of those ideas, I just didn't see them as antinatalist, simply good decision making. I thought antinatalism regards all procreation as morally wrong.
You said that it is nonsensical “to say that people that have never been born are better off”. I assume it’d be equally absurd to you to say that they are worse off.
Since you can’t say whether any life is worth creating in the first place or not, what would stop you from setting the world for destruction in the near future, so that all possible future lives never occur? What arguments are left against (or in favour of) instant and painless sterilisation of all creatures?
Or the opposite: since those comparisons are nonsensical to you, how could you argue against bringing many more children into the world? What’s wrong with encouraging women to have more kids, and putting all those children in hospices?
You refuse to admit that it is A Good Thing that the happiest person who ever lived, indeed lived. Or that it is bad when people living in hell (famine, disease, war), have (often many) children who will very likely face the same hardships and have short and miserable lives.
In that sense I meant that it seems to me that “people that have never been born” (yet) don’t count at all for you.
@tripu
I meant it's nonsensical “to say that people that have never been born *are* better off” because those people *aren't* at all, so they can't *be* anything. That's all.
And I honestly don't know when I have refused to admit those things...
“A suicidal person simply wants to stop feeling… bad. Why is not-feeling the only other option?”
Who says it’s the only option? Of course it isn’t. Most people try lots of other things to improve their situation, or simply resign to live. Suicide is rare.
“I suspect parents that abort fetuses do it more for selfish reasons - perhaps the child would have claimed life was wonderful”
So, according to you, the most resourceful, generous and selfless parents, those who would not mind sacrificing for the rest of their lives to care for a child living in agony, those people would have no tools, no arguments, to inform their decision to abort or not. Since they can’t possibly compare the (conscious) life of their child against the (non-existent) child who is never born in the first place, it’ll be a coin toss. Right?
Notice that you don’t have to get to the extreme (misery and pain for life) to hit reductio ad absurdum: you can play the game with any expectation of a future life, and according to your “division by zero theory” you are hopeless in trying to decide as a parent whether that child should exist or not. Turn the dial to “life barely worth living” or “moderate unhappiness in the aggregate” or any other level, and you have no arguments against or in favour of terminating that pregnancy (or getting pregnant in the first place). Isn’t that weird?
@tripu
Not sure I understand your point. If they don't mind sacrificing everything for their child's life, then they will probably not abort, obviously. That's the decision of many extreme christian parents, and they take it quite happily.
I meant I think most parents decide to abort because they think a child with a birth defect will be more hassle and less enjoyable for them, and the worth of the child's life is an excuse, since they can't ask the child and they're simply assuming.
Yes, I don’t deny that prospective parents will consider their own well-being, too.
But I think you’re minimising the extent to which that decision (to abort or not) will be made thinking of the well-being (or lack thereof) of that child who could be born.
To me, fundamentalist Christians who would not abort under any circumstances, and 100% selfish parents who would terminate pregnancy when faced with the tiniest of inconveniences, are equally morally wrong, because both fail to compare the two scenarios for that child (existence vs non-existence).
@tripu
Agreed, there are states in which it's probably better for a being not to try to keep it alive, and to force it out of zealotry is morally wrong. I'm not talking about the parents that abort in those situations.
First of all, I’m not that convinced that antinatalism is true. I still have major doubts or objections. At the same time, my instinct is to want to have children.
I don’t think that is hypocrisy. I usually want to be as rational and detached as possible. But when reasons seem weak or risky, and intuition plus tradition plus social norms plus advice from those close to me point somewhat strongly in the opposite direction, the gut can override the brain, and I think that’s indeed reasonable.