Value-Null Antinatalism [pdf]
dusted.dk
dusted.dk
Not necessarily. Parents aren't the only source of beliefs: as an extreme example indoctrination in forced boarding schools for young children can nearly totally eliminate parental influence.
So if anti-natalists want to beat evolution, they've got a window right now to crank up the indoctrination to keep humanity on a glide path towards extinction. IMHO, procreation has historically driven by a desire for sex, but technology has decoupled those. It'll take some time for explicitly pro-natal psychology to get equivalently powerful.
The guilt of this selfishness, however, is not entirely weightless either.
My child being created is, 50% my doing, I created them into a world I cannot control, without their consent. Every pain they will experience, will rest on my shoulders, until I die, and even from beyond my death, it will be due to me.
I will do everything in my power to prepare them to achieve a good life, this does not mean shielding them from pain, because experiencing pain is part of life, and learning how to deal with it appropriately, increases the quality of life they can have. This is the worst from both worlds, it is the parent who feels all their pain, and it is the parent that recognizes that it is part of becoming a full human.
My parents were very loving and caring, they wanted to have me, they wanted a child, and they gave me life. I am not grateful for them giving me life, in fact, that they did that is something I do not appreciate. But I am grateful for the love and care they showed me, and I love them very much, despite them creating me.
If you feel there are contradictions here, think harder.
"Evolution wins in the end", well, in the end I guess entropy wins.. But, you attribute a goal to evolution, but evolution, as a concept, really boils down to "the laws of physics also apply to life", it's not like we know it to be trying to do something in particular.. the life that continues is the life that continues, it's not that life really finds a way, it's just that there's enough variance that some of it will likely survive a change, not that every species does that.. but I don't really think that matters to whether knowingly creating life is moral or not.. it's not like nature or life is inherently moral.. it'd probably be a stretch, but one could say that, at least when perfectly executed, the least moral are most likely to succeed.
Anti natalists are people who wouldn't want to be born if their parents had asked them. This means that anti natalism is the flip side of natalism.
A natalist can only succeed if they give birth to natalists and the only way they can do that is by giving their children a body and life worth living, making them anti natalists in disguise.
Which is a tactic for manipulating people to change their beliefs that I see often: don't argue for your position directly, but focus on more distant propositions that your target isn't as guarded about.
From the paper:
> moral authorisation has to come before the imposition.
What's the expression... tell me you're a Millennial without telling me you're a Millennial...?
The anti-natalist movement and it's reactionary natalist counterpart are perfect case studies in how people's beliefs are shaped by their cultural environment.
Given all that, it's expected that a large number of people--in particular, those of the same or adjacent generations--would share these beliefs and even analysis; and an even larger number sharing similar framing, even if coming to opposite conclusions.
It's disquieting when you come to the realization that so many of one's beliefs are, in a sense, predetermined, or at least channeled by a cultural experience shared with millions of other people. This of course applies to myself no less than any other. I long ago stopped considering any of my thoughts rare, let alone original. I read half of the literary output of people from my generation and think, "gee, I was saying that 20 years ago"; and the other half, "gee, I was arguing the opposite 20 years ago". Well, of course I was, and so were they.
That's not to say there aren't novel exceptional moments, cases, and people. Just very few and far between. And the whole natalism debate is definitely not the exception.
The wikipedia article from where I snagged that quote has a few more examples that go back to like, ancient Greece. Check it out!
P.S. it does sound like you have at least a mild disdain for millennials and also an opinion on the matter - share your thoughts, tease out those details! dismissing a topic as a generational "odd thing" isn't fun, and is definitely a common and unoriginal idea.
This doesn’t hold up. It is effectively denying that people will be born in the future, which of course they will be since antinatalism is not universal and fertility rates are above zero. There are valuable things that can be done today that will help those people but not anyone alive today (e.g. preservation of media that is well-known and widely distributed today but may not be in the future when it is more historically valuable).
It is safe to assume that new people will be born at some point in the future (given current conditions) and will then be “identifiable”, so you have to account for their future existences when making moral decisions with future consequences.
I only try to enhance the argument that there is no moral duty to create them.
Moral value is for those who exist, and given that we know more will come to exist, even though their creation itself is (in my view) morally negative, it does not conflict with acknowledging that they will, and to make the world as good as possible for them.
No, it merely denies that people that do not exist can have moral duties owed to them.
I would ask them to contemplate Kant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
I am pretty sure it would be impossible for that to occur, unless you are talking to a non-human (in which case they very much might want that.)
If we are waving away the natural laws of the universe (which we must for the hypothetical to be possible) than the consequences can be anything anyone in the sevate chooses them to be, because there is no longer any rule between cause and effect.
But if that had happened, none of us would have been born to care anyway.
I'm not arguing for antinatalism, but this seems like a strange argument.
There will be persons in the future, and those persons, you do have an obligation toward.
But the argument here, is about whether there is a duty to create a person, so that they can have good.. And, as there is no person before that person has been created, there is nobody to be owed this good, therefore, there is no obligation to create that person..
The Value-null perspective is that it's not needed to consider the life-outcome, the moral wrongness of creating someone stands without it, and so, eliminates the weak side of Benatar's asymmetry argument.
However, I don't believe morality and policy should always go hand in hand, and my stance on policy is that, people should be allowed to have children if they wish so, but they should do it with the implications in mind, and they must be able to stand up to the duties involved.
I am a parent myself, I feel a tremendous responsibility, duty, towards my child, I do not regret having them, I do not wish that they were never born, I love them more than anything. People do wrong things all the times, often for the right reasons, but people should understand what they're doing, and why it might be wrong, before making the decision, they should understand the responsibility, both practical and morally, that comes with their actions.
I'm not arguing that this means to prevent your child from all pain in the world, but to prepare them for life in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they have a good life. I'm merely arguing that life in and off itself is not inherently a gift (though it can certainly be a net positive), and that there responsibilities therefore reach widely beyond the fact of having created the kid and kept them alive.
I’m not saying it is okay, I’m saying that, for people who reject a moral duty to non-existent people, any argument that it is not okay must rest on something other than a duty to hypothetical people that may or may not ever come into existence depending on events that have not yet occurred (and which may include the very thing whose moral acceptability is being debated.)
> If that thinking passed muster we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's obviously maladaptive.
I mean, if chattel slavery never existed, we (the specific people having this conversation) wouldn't be having this discussion, either, but I don’t think “it is in the course of history leading up to the present discussion” is an argument for an idea being correct.
That would be true, if there was an actual pool of unborn people, like, some metaphysical vault of people yet to be born, waiting for their turn.. In _THAT_ case, we _would_ have a duty to create them, so that they can have good lives, and experience all the amazing stuff we get to experience..
However, since there's no such vault, there is no duty to create them, there is nobody that is owed life on the grounds that if they do not get it, they are deprived of it.. because people that are not born yet, do not actually exist in any way.
That does not eliminate any duty towards the unspecific mass of people that will indeed be born in the future, regardless of whether creating them is wrong or right, there is still a moral duty to attempt to make the world as good a place for them to be in..
You win either by slinging undue complexity and forcing others to tap-out of the discussion in an awkward pause, or if a counter argument is made, you claim they do not understand your original argument.
I feel like the author is really trying hard to justify why they are not having kids. Fine! that is their preference, there is no need to justify it.
That pontification just feels pulled out of thin air.
Suppose I just need S to take over the family fortune? Also pulled out of thin air.
You know, like, if you don't take a loan, you don't owe any money on that loan, it's not like there is already loans made in your name, with debts waiting to be paid off, that you must go to the bank and take, so that you can pay them off.. I don't know how many different ways there is to say the same thing, but if the _THING_ does not exist, then it really has no rights, and you really have no duty towards it.. Those start only if you make the thing exist..
If you have a fortune, and nobody to inherit it, then you don't have any obligation to create a heir, you can chose to do that (even if I argue that it's morally bad to do, I will amend that it's probably less morally bad to do than if you created them so they could inherit the debt you don't have enough time to pay off during your own life)
That part is obvious and incontrovertible.
The idea that such a duty must exist, or is even relevant, is just something someone made up.