Have you read Better Never to Have Been (or at least chapter 2 of it)? It reads like you haven't. Benatar's argument does not rely on the procreation asymmetry! It relies on a quite different asymmetry, which, in my view, can account for pretty much all of the objections you raise against the procreation asymmetry.
Also, you pay no attention to the vast psychological literature that Benatar cites in Chapter 3 to show that positive assessments of quality of life are unreliable, and other arguments that our quality of life is generally very bad.
"Now, lots of anti-natalists rely on their experience of life when justifying this claim. This is not my experience. I find life to be awesome! I’m happy most of the time, and find periods of misery to be brief and mild. Most people I talk to think this way. And while I do not in general think it’s productive to psychoanalyze people, I will simply note: a lot of anti-natalists are depressed. I think this may be skewing their judgments."
I see this point get made often by pro natalists; Sam Harris has said something to this effect several times on his podcast. But can't the exact same thing be said in reverse? Couldn't the unique cushiness of the average philosopher's life be skewing their judgments about the quality of the average life? Why should we believe that a happy person is more capable of objectivity on this issue than a depressed person?
All of these arguments, especially those in the conclusion, are extremely shortsighted. In the long run, saving a life is merely delaying a death. Having cute wonderful babies sounds nice, but those cute wonderful babies become sick, frail, old people and then corpses. If we lived in a world where disease and death were not inevitable, maybe pro natal arguments would make sense. But given the inevitability of death, every baby is just a future corpse condemned to guaranteed suffering along the way.
For the record. I’m not depressed. I actually quite like my life on the whole. I’m incredibly lucky overall; the culture and time I was born into is truly a blessing compared to the many horrible alternatives. There are many things I enjoy on a day to day basis and I’ve had profound, beautiful, and even transcendental experiences. But I would never say that I’m glad I was born. It’s just not a meaningful or coherent thing to say. Given that I had no choice in being born, anything I say on the subject is a post hoc rationalization. I was completely untroubled by not having existed before 1987 because there was no me to be troubled by it. Taking the view from nowhere, I can see that I would not have been harmed by not coming into existence. There would be no me to be harmed! Nobody is missing out on happiness by not being born, but everyone suffers because they were born.
This is another issue I have with pro natal arguments. I don't think "happy lives" is a coherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. Happy lives are happy compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
All pro natalist arguments rest on the unfounded assumption that existence is preferable to nonexistence and that “lives worth living” is a coherent concept. Ultimately I think this all just comes down to one’s intuition. I’m aware that I’m in the minority, but to me it seems intuitively obvious that those assumptions are baseless.
Did you? I don't really see how any of these arguments don't rely on that bedrock. Which, like I said, seems to just come down to intuition.
As another commenter pointed out, I think you're getting Benatar's asymmetry a bit wrong in section 2. There were many assertions in there about what proponents of the asymmetry think that I have no idea where you got them from. For example:
"But this implies that if you’re deciding when to bring a child into existence—whether now or later—assuming they’ll suffer equal amounts, it doesn’t matter if you wait. If you can either bring one child into existence with 100 trillion units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, or one with no units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, anti-natalism of this variety would imply that it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Nuts! And it would imply that if you were choosing between creating someone with 100 trillion units of well-being and 60 units of suffering, or one with 50 units of suffering and no well-being, it would be better to choose the latter. This is completely insane!"
Anti-natalism argues you shouldn't bring either child into existence. It doesn't imply that if you *had* to choose that it wouldn't matter which you choose. I really don't understand how you arrived at that insane conclusion. I agree it's insane. Better is better than worse, even if you're anti procreation.
All of the thought experiments and arguments in section 2 take for granted the assumptions I mentioned, and some extras that I don't really get. So many of thought experiments stipulate something like "the created person won't suffer," which doesn't really help us in a world where suffering, even for the happiest of people, is guaranteed.
In any case, thanks for a thought-provoking article! This subject is one of my weird hobby horses. I hastily wrote this comment before going to a work obligation because I wanted to join the discussion. I wrote a lengthier comment after I was done with that about how I think death and inevitable suffering at the end of life is a big elephant in the room here. But I'll have to stew on this more and read your prior work on the topic to really flesh out a proper response to it. I can see a world in which I come around to a pronatalist stance, but it would have to be very different from our current world. But who knows? Maybe an AI utopia where we're immortal, have eliminated suffering, and reached transcendent landscapes of mind currently unknown to us is just around the corner.
Aha. I do agree with number 2 but that changes number 1 for me. I would say it's bad to create people with bad lives and also bad to create people with "good lives." This is because even the best possible life contains suffering which is unnecessary. A "good life" is still not better than nonexistence where nobody suffers and nobody misses out on good experiences. That's the asymmetry.
I don't think "good lives" and "bad lives" is a coherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. I don't think this complexity can be boiled down to "units of suffering" or "units of well-being." Good lives are good compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
Very curious to know, if you’re an antinatalist about animals but not about people, then at what point in history do you think human lives became worth living? Does the fact that there are now many lives worth living make life worth bringing into existence given the hundreds of millions of years in which there were very few worthwhile lives?
I'm pretty unsure! And to be clear, I don't think all animals have bad lives. I wouldn't be surprised if long-lived ones like deer have alright lives. The ones I'm pretty sure have bad lives are the ones who live for a week and then die painfully--like most bugs and fish.
he's one step away from antinatalism. animals' lives are *obviously* better than human lives, and anyone who believes otherwise should... i don't know, read zapffe.
I'd like to see you debate Lawrence Anton (see on youtube) on antinatalism. He is an antinatalist with a good level of phil and very intellectually virtuous, a conversion/debate between you two would be very interesting (he said already that he'd be open to talk to you) !
I know I should have thought more about the answer to this question, but I honestly haven't really investigated insect welfare that much: Are there any reasons to doubt, besides analogizing from our experience and making evolutionary arguments, that the pain felt by larval insects during their short lives is as intense as it would be if we underwent the same experiences + adjusting for welfare range?
That is, they might have a welfare range of, say, 0.001 (just using this as a placeholder), but that doesn't mean that every type of experience would have 0.001x the effect that the same experience would on us. It could be that their deaths are then not as painful as they would be to us plus adjusting for welfare range.
Of course, I know I'm making up a story here that might seem implausible. And I buy the argument that we might have a sufficiently high credence in this hypothesis, and that the sheer number of insects that are born and die overwhelms a low probability + welfare range. But I am genuinely curious about whether you know of evidence/arguments here that you find persuasive and that you could share (there's a lot written on this, and a lot of it seems really intuition-based, so I am just not sure where to look.)
Hi Laura--been a bit since we last spoke. How are you doing?
I think the best evidence is behavioral--when you watch an insect be killed, it sure looks like they're in lots of pain. They behave roughly as you would if you were being tortured. And besides, there's very strong evolutionary reason to think they're be extremely averse to damage.
I agree we should be somewhat uncertain about this--but though that uncertainty might make their pain less intense proportional to their pleasure, it also might make it *more* intense proportional to their pleasure.
I think your reply is entirely reasonable. I am most unsure about the juvenile stages specifically, but I will have to do some more reading on the life stages and ask around. I also, as you suggest, put a fair bit of credence in the undiluted experiences model. That plus the lack of research at this stage makes me think it's worth investigating.
Anyways, thanks for the article! I appreciate trying to seriously argue against asymmetry
Do you believe that choosing not to have a child is morally equivalent to killing a baby?
(For the sake of argument, assume that no one has any emotional attachment to this particular baby – perhaps their parents and relatives have all died – so that the only interest at stake is the baby’s own. Also assume that the method of killing doesn’t inflict pain.)
If the two things are not equivalent, then there must be some asymmetry somewhere.
Thanks for engaging with antinatalist (AN) arguments, Matthew! I'm confident that this is among the stronger counters against AN out there.
We agree on some (the) key points: I find wild animal antinatalism much stronger than its anthropocentric counterpart, and more important. I also think that many AN arguments have internal weaknesses which you rightly point out.
However, I still mostly agree with human-centered AN (it's bad for humans to be created). A few cruxes which help me understand why your takes are coherent in your worldviews but don't really work in mine:
- You adopt a framework which believes that "positive value" exists morally. As an EA, I find minimalist views that focus on problematic / unproblematic states much more intuitive (mostly because I find it hard to "weigh" death camps against dance parties). In that view, unproblematic lives can exist, but they do not weigh against extreme suffering.
- I disagree that "very good" moments can outweigh extremely negative moments. It seems intuitive to me that years of chronic pain cannot be "compensated" by weeks of holidays had ten years before. However, I'd love to read your counterarguments to that, and I'm sure that they will come soon.
- There is, in this world, a significant chance that one's child will endure terrible, uncompensated harms. The statistics for sexual abuse, assault, and chronic pain all remain high, and as an EA, you should probably be more inclined than most to believe that great power war, or other catastrophes, are likely in the next 80 years. (So-called "risk argument", much better than Benatar's stuff, imo)
- Aversion regarding creating preference frustration (kind of too fuzzy to me, but Antifrustrationism and related views)
- Having children is an enormous opportunity cost in altruistic endeavours, and a large cause of value drift
Strongest arguments against AN for me:
- The animals, as you mention (but I'm not sure this weighs on AN as a philosophical position)
- The "selection pressure" argument (from David Pearce), that AN is self-defeating as it will select itself out of the gene pool, while also selecting concern for suffering out of the gene pool (which seems bad on the surface)
This is kind of thrown out there, I absolutely don't aim to convince you (plus, I prefer your wild animal-AN position to the classic AN position). My aim was to share why people may disagree, as I suppose people scrolling to the comment section are interested in this.
In general, yes: I think more kids is good in that regards, especially if we expect the future to be similar to the present (if there are transformative changes soon, such as AI tiling the earth with energy plants, I'm less sure that this is significant - I guess influencing that would be the most important thing one could do for wild animals). So when I say I "mostly agree" with human-centered AN, it's specifically the idea that having kids is not good for the humans created (I think it's probably good overall).
However, if you care a lot about doing good, you probably shouldn't have kids, as this will take away an immense amount of time and money from those efforts, and having children often hastens value drift.
(In short: probably, I agree with AN theoretically, but not really in practice)
Off-the-rails thinking. This is not value-add for a society but something that should remain in a circle with other like-minded people that need mental health treatment.
I’m curious about why you think people should be vegan if you care about insects. It seems like eating meat kills many more insects than eating plants (as eating some meat results in more plants being destroyed than merely eating the plants of a calorically similar meal) and if you think these are net bad and think it’s good to kill net bad lives, then you should think it’s really good to eat meat.
Lmk if you think I’m getting something wrong here, tho.
I broadly agree with this but it's still unclear that humans would just decide to "rewild" all previous crop fields and pasture lands if they end animal farming in the future. I do think that this is enough to make veganism morally unclear (and I'm vegan, probably because of taking precautions under uncertainty).
It might be more impactful as an individual to be a vegan eating low-suffering crops.
I agree with your takedown of antinatalism as a whole (I'm even more convinced than you that almost all humans have positive lives), but am a little confused about the argument that it's weird for the asymmetry to allow choice 2 conditional on choice 1's nonexistence.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have typical American food preferences. I offer you the choice of either a Red Delicious apple or an orange. It's valid for you to pick either the apple or the orange, because they're different things. Now suppose I add in a Honeycrisp apple as another choice. These are typically considered to be better, so now it's valid for you to pick either the Honeycrisp or the orange, but not the Red Delicious because it's strictly dominated by the Honeycrisp.
It's sort of awkward to make it work formally if you're a purely hedonic utilitarian, but for those of us who aren't, is there any reason to assume that childbearing choices can't work like food choices?
utilitarianism disgusts me to such an extent that my discomfort is worse than 10000000000000000000000000000 humans being tortured. please keep this in mind from now on.
I usually don't think psychoanalyzing people with differing opinions is helpful, but since you've already provided an object-level takedown of antinatalists' beliefs here, I'll do it anyways. I feel like a lot of antinatalism is just people projecting their own desire to have never been born on others. But I never fully understood why they argue against having kids instead of arguing in favor of assisted suicide .
A lot of people clearly have good lives and are happy that they were born. So why does the fact that some lives suck say that nobody should ever be born and have the chance to have a good life as opposed to saying people should have the means to peacefully end their own lives if they so choose? Let people try life out and if they don't like it, they can opt out. Why aren't antinatalists advancing this position?
I think it probably comes from antinatalists fearing death. They figure that they wouldn't even have to worry about dying if they were never born, hence why the focus is on not having kids. That's my thinking on their motivations. I could be wrong.
Even with assisted suicide being pretty normalized it'll always be a tough choice to make. Some people will decide to suffer thru life to avoid making those they love sad. Plus, unless you're willing to allow children to take that option they may be stuck suffering for ~18 years.
Antinatalists may also be the extreme flank to the more easily accepted view that if you had a bad life and expect to pass on serious burdens to your kids, it's ok to not have them at all.
I think this question is pretty much dominated by 1) the far future (especially in the total antinatalism/voluntary extinction case) and 2) the effects on wild animals (especially in the marginal antinatalism right now case). I’d be interested to see how you compare the first-order effects of humans on wild animal populations to the effects of, for example, climate change (which may increase wild animal populations). I’d also be interested in what you think of arguments that the expected value of the far future is net negative due to s-risks faced by, say, future digital minds. I also wonder what the effect of population growth is on existential risk — if the semi-endogenous growth models are right, it might accelerate long-run productivity growth, which has unclear effects on overall existential risk. I’m inclined to agree with you overall though!
> I think this question is pretty much dominated by 1) the far future (especially in the total antinatalism/voluntary extinction case) and 2) the effects on wild animals
If you assign full weight to future lives and animals (similar to BB), shouldn't you say this about literally any moral question?
I guess you could 1) believe in deontic side constraints or 2) be uncertain enough in practice about those effects to still assign weight to other issues.
1) I'm slightly less convinced by the arguments that rational people would not "skip" most of their lives given the choice (Paul Bloom's thought experiment). I think a very large number of, say, factory labourers in lower and middle income countries would "skip" their working hours--often over half of their waking hours. And I can't escape the sense that people have slight positivity biases across all these questions.
2) Also, beginning and end-of-life suffering is neglected in your arguments. End-of-life suffering is fairly obvious. Having a premature baby recently brought infant suffering to mind, and has made me marginally more antinatalist, mainly in terms of wild animals, but slightly in terms of humans as well. (https://torchestogether.substack.com/p/most-of-the-world-is-an-adorably).
3) The wild animal suffering argument is potentially persuasive, but of course implies that having a child is very suboptimal! Having a child is an incredibly bad choice because it takes valuable resources away from the targeted destruction of insect habitats!
Have you read Better Never to Have Been (or at least chapter 2 of it)? It reads like you haven't. Benatar's argument does not rely on the procreation asymmetry! It relies on a quite different asymmetry, which, in my view, can account for pretty much all of the objections you raise against the procreation asymmetry.
Also, you pay no attention to the vast psychological literature that Benatar cites in Chapter 3 to show that positive assessments of quality of life are unreliable, and other arguments that our quality of life is generally very bad.
I read it a while ago--though I think my arguments against the asymmetry also clearly apply to Benatar's version.
"Now, lots of anti-natalists rely on their experience of life when justifying this claim. This is not my experience. I find life to be awesome! I’m happy most of the time, and find periods of misery to be brief and mild. Most people I talk to think this way. And while I do not in general think it’s productive to psychoanalyze people, I will simply note: a lot of anti-natalists are depressed. I think this may be skewing their judgments."
I see this point get made often by pro natalists; Sam Harris has said something to this effect several times on his podcast. But can't the exact same thing be said in reverse? Couldn't the unique cushiness of the average philosopher's life be skewing their judgments about the quality of the average life? Why should we believe that a happy person is more capable of objectivity on this issue than a depressed person?
All of these arguments, especially those in the conclusion, are extremely shortsighted. In the long run, saving a life is merely delaying a death. Having cute wonderful babies sounds nice, but those cute wonderful babies become sick, frail, old people and then corpses. If we lived in a world where disease and death were not inevitable, maybe pro natal arguments would make sense. But given the inevitability of death, every baby is just a future corpse condemned to guaranteed suffering along the way.
For the record. I’m not depressed. I actually quite like my life on the whole. I’m incredibly lucky overall; the culture and time I was born into is truly a blessing compared to the many horrible alternatives. There are many things I enjoy on a day to day basis and I’ve had profound, beautiful, and even transcendental experiences. But I would never say that I’m glad I was born. It’s just not a meaningful or coherent thing to say. Given that I had no choice in being born, anything I say on the subject is a post hoc rationalization. I was completely untroubled by not having existed before 1987 because there was no me to be troubled by it. Taking the view from nowhere, I can see that I would not have been harmed by not coming into existence. There would be no me to be harmed! Nobody is missing out on happiness by not being born, but everyone suffers because they were born.
I mean, that only really applies if you don't believe in an afterlife
Every happy person is happy because they were born though.
Are they happy about having to die?
This is another issue I have with pro natal arguments. I don't think "happy lives" is a coherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. Happy lives are happy compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
All pro natalist arguments rest on the unfounded assumption that existence is preferable to nonexistence and that “lives worth living” is a coherent concept. Ultimately I think this all just comes down to one’s intuition. I’m aware that I’m in the minority, but to me it seems intuitively obvious that those assumptions are baseless.
But I gave a variety of arguments that *don't* rely on that!
Did you? I don't really see how any of these arguments don't rely on that bedrock. Which, like I said, seems to just come down to intuition.
As another commenter pointed out, I think you're getting Benatar's asymmetry a bit wrong in section 2. There were many assertions in there about what proponents of the asymmetry think that I have no idea where you got them from. For example:
"But this implies that if you’re deciding when to bring a child into existence—whether now or later—assuming they’ll suffer equal amounts, it doesn’t matter if you wait. If you can either bring one child into existence with 100 trillion units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, or one with no units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, anti-natalism of this variety would imply that it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Nuts! And it would imply that if you were choosing between creating someone with 100 trillion units of well-being and 60 units of suffering, or one with 50 units of suffering and no well-being, it would be better to choose the latter. This is completely insane!"
Anti-natalism argues you shouldn't bring either child into existence. It doesn't imply that if you *had* to choose that it wouldn't matter which you choose. I really don't understand how you arrived at that insane conclusion. I agree it's insane. Better is better than worse, even if you're anti procreation.
All of the thought experiments and arguments in section 2 take for granted the assumptions I mentioned, and some extras that I don't really get. So many of thought experiments stipulate something like "the created person won't suffer," which doesn't really help us in a world where suffering, even for the happiest of people, is guaranteed.
In any case, thanks for a thought-provoking article! This subject is one of my weird hobby horses. I hastily wrote this comment before going to a work obligation because I wanted to join the discussion. I wrote a lengthier comment after I was done with that about how I think death and inevitable suffering at the end of life is a big elephant in the room here. But I'll have to stew on this more and read your prior work on the topic to really flesh out a proper response to it. I can see a world in which I come around to a pronatalist stance, but it would have to be very different from our current world. But who knows? Maybe an AI utopia where we're immortal, have eliminated suffering, and reached transcendent landscapes of mind currently unknown to us is just around the corner.
Thanks! There are two different versions of the asymmetry:
1) It's bad to create people with bad lives and neutral to create people with good lives.
2) The badness of creating a person is solely a function of their suffering.
I argue against both!
Aha. I do agree with number 2 but that changes number 1 for me. I would say it's bad to create people with bad lives and also bad to create people with "good lives." This is because even the best possible life contains suffering which is unnecessary. A "good life" is still not better than nonexistence where nobody suffers and nobody misses out on good experiences. That's the asymmetry.
I don't think "good lives" and "bad lives" is a coherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. I don't think this complexity can be boiled down to "units of suffering" or "units of well-being." Good lives are good compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
all assumptions are "baseless". or, to put it in a more interesting way, *they are the base*
Fair enough. I should have said wrong instead of baseless.
Very curious to know, if you’re an antinatalist about animals but not about people, then at what point in history do you think human lives became worth living? Does the fact that there are now many lives worth living make life worth bringing into existence given the hundreds of millions of years in which there were very few worthwhile lives?
I'm pretty unsure! And to be clear, I don't think all animals have bad lives. I wouldn't be surprised if long-lived ones like deer have alright lives. The ones I'm pretty sure have bad lives are the ones who live for a week and then die painfully--like most bugs and fish.
he's one step away from antinatalism. animals' lives are *obviously* better than human lives, and anyone who believes otherwise should... i don't know, read zapffe.
idk insect lives seem like they suck ass
I'd like to see you debate Lawrence Anton (see on youtube) on antinatalism. He is an antinatalist with a good level of phil and very intellectually virtuous, a conversion/debate between you two would be very interesting (he said already that he'd be open to talk to you) !
You’re in luck! We’ll be debating soon!
I know I should have thought more about the answer to this question, but I honestly haven't really investigated insect welfare that much: Are there any reasons to doubt, besides analogizing from our experience and making evolutionary arguments, that the pain felt by larval insects during their short lives is as intense as it would be if we underwent the same experiences + adjusting for welfare range?
That is, they might have a welfare range of, say, 0.001 (just using this as a placeholder), but that doesn't mean that every type of experience would have 0.001x the effect that the same experience would on us. It could be that their deaths are then not as painful as they would be to us plus adjusting for welfare range.
Of course, I know I'm making up a story here that might seem implausible. And I buy the argument that we might have a sufficiently high credence in this hypothesis, and that the sheer number of insects that are born and die overwhelms a low probability + welfare range. But I am genuinely curious about whether you know of evidence/arguments here that you find persuasive and that you could share (there's a lot written on this, and a lot of it seems really intuition-based, so I am just not sure where to look.)
Hi Laura--been a bit since we last spoke. How are you doing?
I think the best evidence is behavioral--when you watch an insect be killed, it sure looks like they're in lots of pain. They behave roughly as you would if you were being tortured. And besides, there's very strong evolutionary reason to think they're be extremely averse to damage.
I agree we should be somewhat uncertain about this--but though that uncertainty might make their pain less intense proportional to their pleasure, it also might make it *more* intense proportional to their pleasure.
I am well, thanks! Hope you are too
I think your reply is entirely reasonable. I am most unsure about the juvenile stages specifically, but I will have to do some more reading on the life stages and ask around. I also, as you suggest, put a fair bit of credence in the undiluted experiences model. That plus the lack of research at this stage makes me think it's worth investigating.
Anyways, thanks for the article! I appreciate trying to seriously argue against asymmetry
Just observe the psychophysical laws
Do you believe that choosing not to have a child is morally equivalent to killing a baby?
(For the sake of argument, assume that no one has any emotional attachment to this particular baby – perhaps their parents and relatives have all died – so that the only interest at stake is the baby’s own. Also assume that the method of killing doesn’t inflict pain.)
If the two things are not equivalent, then there must be some asymmetry somewhere.
Thanks for engaging with antinatalist (AN) arguments, Matthew! I'm confident that this is among the stronger counters against AN out there.
We agree on some (the) key points: I find wild animal antinatalism much stronger than its anthropocentric counterpart, and more important. I also think that many AN arguments have internal weaknesses which you rightly point out.
However, I still mostly agree with human-centered AN (it's bad for humans to be created). A few cruxes which help me understand why your takes are coherent in your worldviews but don't really work in mine:
- You adopt a framework which believes that "positive value" exists morally. As an EA, I find minimalist views that focus on problematic / unproblematic states much more intuitive (mostly because I find it hard to "weigh" death camps against dance parties). In that view, unproblematic lives can exist, but they do not weigh against extreme suffering.
- On most people living good lives: complicated (not confident that my answer would be the "correct" one), but not compelled by the optimistic case. Part III of this article reviews MacAskill's defense of this and coming to different conclusions: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/paq/article/38/1/22/387044/Effective-Altruists-Need-Not-Be-Pronatalist
- I disagree that "very good" moments can outweigh extremely negative moments. It seems intuitive to me that years of chronic pain cannot be "compensated" by weeks of holidays had ten years before. However, I'd love to read your counterarguments to that, and I'm sure that they will come soon.
- I disagree that it's evident that positive, awesome lives exist out there, especially considering "hidden" suffering, like that in nursing homes (I like this article by Vinding where he replies to a friend of your blog on this point: https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/reply-to-chappells-rethinking-the-asymmetry/#Do_the_intrinsically_awesome_lives_contain_suffering_or_other_bads)
Best arguments for AN for me:
- There is, in this world, a significant chance that one's child will endure terrible, uncompensated harms. The statistics for sexual abuse, assault, and chronic pain all remain high, and as an EA, you should probably be more inclined than most to believe that great power war, or other catastrophes, are likely in the next 80 years. (So-called "risk argument", much better than Benatar's stuff, imo)
- Aversion regarding creating preference frustration (kind of too fuzzy to me, but Antifrustrationism and related views)
- Having children is an enormous opportunity cost in altruistic endeavours, and a large cause of value drift
Strongest arguments against AN for me:
- The animals, as you mention (but I'm not sure this weighs on AN as a philosophical position)
- The "selection pressure" argument (from David Pearce), that AN is self-defeating as it will select itself out of the gene pool, while also selecting concern for suffering out of the gene pool (which seems bad on the surface)
This is kind of thrown out there, I absolutely don't aim to convince you (plus, I prefer your wild animal-AN position to the classic AN position). My aim was to share why people may disagree, as I suppose people scrolling to the comment section are interested in this.
Do you think that actually-existing people should have kids because that reduces animal populations?
In general, yes: I think more kids is good in that regards, especially if we expect the future to be similar to the present (if there are transformative changes soon, such as AI tiling the earth with energy plants, I'm less sure that this is significant - I guess influencing that would be the most important thing one could do for wild animals). So when I say I "mostly agree" with human-centered AN, it's specifically the idea that having kids is not good for the humans created (I think it's probably good overall).
However, if you care a lot about doing good, you probably shouldn't have kids, as this will take away an immense amount of time and money from those efforts, and having children often hastens value drift.
(In short: probably, I agree with AN theoretically, but not really in practice)
Off-the-rails thinking. This is not value-add for a society but something that should remain in a circle with other like-minded people that need mental health treatment.
I’m curious about why you think people should be vegan if you care about insects. It seems like eating meat kills many more insects than eating plants (as eating some meat results in more plants being destroyed than merely eating the plants of a calorically similar meal) and if you think these are net bad and think it’s good to kill net bad lives, then you should think it’s really good to eat meat.
Lmk if you think I’m getting something wrong here, tho.
Spreading values is probably more important and animal agriculture=warmer temperatures=more insects.
I broadly agree with this but it's still unclear that humans would just decide to "rewild" all previous crop fields and pasture lands if they end animal farming in the future. I do think that this is enough to make veganism morally unclear (and I'm vegan, probably because of taking precautions under uncertainty).
It might be more impactful as an individual to be a vegan eating low-suffering crops.
https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-animals/#A_specific_attempt_at_ranking
I agree with your takedown of antinatalism as a whole (I'm even more convinced than you that almost all humans have positive lives), but am a little confused about the argument that it's weird for the asymmetry to allow choice 2 conditional on choice 1's nonexistence.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have typical American food preferences. I offer you the choice of either a Red Delicious apple or an orange. It's valid for you to pick either the apple or the orange, because they're different things. Now suppose I add in a Honeycrisp apple as another choice. These are typically considered to be better, so now it's valid for you to pick either the Honeycrisp or the orange, but not the Red Delicious because it's strictly dominated by the Honeycrisp.
It's sort of awkward to make it work formally if you're a purely hedonic utilitarian, but for those of us who aren't, is there any reason to assume that childbearing choices can't work like food choices?
Maybe it's clearer with careers. You have two offers of employment:
- stocking grocery shelves at $12/hour
- cashiering at $12/hour
It's reasonable to have different preferences between them. But now I add in
- cashiering at $14/hour, with the same terms and conditions
Now that clearly dominates Choice 2, so there are still only two choices left.
utilitarianism disgusts me to such an extent that my discomfort is worse than 10000000000000000000000000000 humans being tortured. please keep this in mind from now on.
I have so much schadenfreude about your discomfort that it all balances out 😎
I usually don't think psychoanalyzing people with differing opinions is helpful, but since you've already provided an object-level takedown of antinatalists' beliefs here, I'll do it anyways. I feel like a lot of antinatalism is just people projecting their own desire to have never been born on others. But I never fully understood why they argue against having kids instead of arguing in favor of assisted suicide .
A lot of people clearly have good lives and are happy that they were born. So why does the fact that some lives suck say that nobody should ever be born and have the chance to have a good life as opposed to saying people should have the means to peacefully end their own lives if they so choose? Let people try life out and if they don't like it, they can opt out. Why aren't antinatalists advancing this position?
I think it probably comes from antinatalists fearing death. They figure that they wouldn't even have to worry about dying if they were never born, hence why the focus is on not having kids. That's my thinking on their motivations. I could be wrong.
Even with assisted suicide being pretty normalized it'll always be a tough choice to make. Some people will decide to suffer thru life to avoid making those they love sad. Plus, unless you're willing to allow children to take that option they may be stuck suffering for ~18 years.
Antinatalists may also be the extreme flank to the more easily accepted view that if you had a bad life and expect to pass on serious burdens to your kids, it's ok to not have them at all.
I think this question is pretty much dominated by 1) the far future (especially in the total antinatalism/voluntary extinction case) and 2) the effects on wild animals (especially in the marginal antinatalism right now case). I’d be interested to see how you compare the first-order effects of humans on wild animal populations to the effects of, for example, climate change (which may increase wild animal populations). I’d also be interested in what you think of arguments that the expected value of the far future is net negative due to s-risks faced by, say, future digital minds. I also wonder what the effect of population growth is on existential risk — if the semi-endogenous growth models are right, it might accelerate long-run productivity growth, which has unclear effects on overall existential risk. I’m inclined to agree with you overall though!
I have an article about this https://benthams.substack.com/p/long-run-human-impact-on-wild-animal
> I think this question is pretty much dominated by 1) the far future (especially in the total antinatalism/voluntary extinction case) and 2) the effects on wild animals
If you assign full weight to future lives and animals (similar to BB), shouldn't you say this about literally any moral question?
I guess you could 1) believe in deontic side constraints or 2) be uncertain enough in practice about those effects to still assign weight to other issues.
1) I'm slightly less convinced by the arguments that rational people would not "skip" most of their lives given the choice (Paul Bloom's thought experiment). I think a very large number of, say, factory labourers in lower and middle income countries would "skip" their working hours--often over half of their waking hours. And I can't escape the sense that people have slight positivity biases across all these questions.
2) Also, beginning and end-of-life suffering is neglected in your arguments. End-of-life suffering is fairly obvious. Having a premature baby recently brought infant suffering to mind, and has made me marginally more antinatalist, mainly in terms of wild animals, but slightly in terms of humans as well. (https://torchestogether.substack.com/p/most-of-the-world-is-an-adorably).
3) The wild animal suffering argument is potentially persuasive, but of course implies that having a child is very suboptimal! Having a child is an incredibly bad choice because it takes valuable resources away from the targeted destruction of insect habitats!
Having kids is good -- if you are prepared for it. If you're not; DON'T! Just Don't!!
Having kids because others forced you to is bad on every level.