neural douche

 Antinatalism is the view that creating new, sentient life is an act of cruelty. The philosopher David Benatar argues for antinatalism using the argument from asymmetry. The asymmetry argument is best summarized as claiming that while existence entails some good and some bad, nonexistence entails no good (which is neutral) and no bad (which is a positive.) He uses several common intuitions to back up this claim. For one, he notes that while individuals who are able to provide a good life for a child do not have a duty to have children, we generally consider those who cannot provide for a child as having a duty not to have children. Benatar also claims that while it is possible for life to go so wrong that we may conclude some unfortunate individuals would have been better of not being born, we cannot regret the non-lives of the non-existent.

Much of Benatar’s argument can be traced back to a quote by Arthor Schopenhauer, “… it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world; for the mere existence of evil decides the matter…” This conclusion comes from one of Schopenhauer’s assumptions about the nature of happiness and misery. In line with ancient Buddhist thought, Schopenhauer claims that happiness is merely the satisfaction of desire and is therefore wholly negative in its nature. Contrary to those who claim that evil is merely the absence of good, Schopenhauer claims that goodness is the absence of evil. Rather than claiming that evil is there to make us appreciate the good in life, he claims that what little good there is in life is meant to seduce and tempt us that we may prolong our sentences in a world he considers essentially a penal colony.

Desire (and therefore pain) is the positive feeling. We do not notice the health of our entire body compared to the incessant nagging of a sore throat, nor do we notice our freedom until we are deprived of it. How does this relate to the asymmetry argument? I personally find Benatar’s intuitions unconvincing on their own, the asymmetry I see is this: Misery is worse than nonexistence and happiness is not better than nonexistence. True happiness is being completely free of desire, a state that is equal to nonexistence as it is defined inherently by what it lacks. If the one who comes into existence will experience any misery, pain, unfulfilled desire, etc… they are worse off than not having been born.

Naturally, this is not a view I was born with. I have always asked questions regarding the meaning of life, always wanted to do the right thing and wondered what that might mean. In high school, one year, I decided to try on my “atheist glasses” for a week, deciding that I would try to look at the world through a strictly "scientific" lens. It took a few days, but eventually it clicked. At an even younger age, I remember being deeply stricken with the idea of death. That not only I and everyone I know would die, but even the buildings, the trees, everything that I ever knew would be consumed by the maw of blackness enveloping the Earth. Being secular doesn’t necessitate philosophical pessimism, but as I gradually learned more about history, politics, and the suicidal destruction of our natural environment, I found less and less to believe in.

Humanity, it now seems to me, is no different than the Easter Islanders who cut down every tree on the island until they starved themselves. Life consumes, reproduces, and consumes until it suffocates in its own excrement, not unlike beer yeast. There are 100 billion stars, each with 3-4 planets and microbial life seems relatively abundant. The hunger inherent to all living things, the drive to consume which is only better enabled by intelligence, this may be why the universe is silent. How many planets, once teeming with complex life, are now mere graveyards, circling unlit stars in the abyss?

The conclusion that it is better never to have been is generally abhorrent to most people. It is not difficult to argue that there is more suffering in the world than happiness, the majority of humans in the world live in unimaginable poverty, the majority of wild animals live in fear and starvation, farmed animals are hardly faring any better -living in a holocaust of unimaginable scale (in less than 2 years, more factory farm animals are raised, tortured, and slaughtered than the total estimated number of humans to have ever existed.) However, if our lives had some sort of meaning or higher purpose, then our suffering might be justified.

Those who argue that our lives are not meaningless (as a scientific/ physicalist view would naturally conclude) believe that there is a force, either God or simply the Universe/ Fate, that is guiding the world. Either we are being tested, or that this plane of existence is somehow helping us spiritually mature. There are others who argue that if we could see the whole of the cosmos, we would understand that the contrast of suffering and happiness makes the whole more beautiful and glorious. Finally, there are the more callous arguments that typically rely on victim blaming in some form or another; from Augustine’s concept of Original Sin to the Stoic doctrine of Assent.

To me, it seems immediately obvious that these sorts of arguments reflect wishful thinking. We naturally want to know that our pain serves a purpose, otherwise we would not want to endure it. We work for a wage, we exercise and deny ourselves certain pleasure for our health, we compromise with our loved ones because we want them in our life. The idea that our entire race is merely one among a multitude of contingent species that will leave no significant mark on the cosmos is inherently threatening to our ego, our fear of death, and our cultural narratives. Some may ask, “Why even get out of bed in the morning?” as if we first assess the value of our lives and then decide to carry on; rather, we typically live first and require some sort of justification after the fact.

An important difference between me and those who disagree with me (that is, the majority of mankind) is likely in our own deep processing of life. For most, life is almost synonymous with beauty and goodness. We are taught to love life and to defend it. In the abortion debate, neither side even questions whether a nonexistent person would reasonably want to come into a world like ours. One side is pro-life (because who wouldn’t be?) while the other side is pro-choice. The pro-life side might just as well be called the “pro-death” side, since it is the eventual outcome of all life and the pro-choice side might just as well acknowledge that the person most affected by the decision to abort or not is never given any choice. Throughout history, there have been debates over morality, over God or gods, over gender roles, dietary choices, who deserves freedom and equality, etc… There is only one value that is seemingly never questioned, and the entirety of humanity conspires against those who dare to peer into the abyss.

There are several factors that contribute to Pollyannaism. We often fail to remember our negative memories, or the extent of them. We are routinely optimistic about our personal futures. We compare ourselves to others in our lives and so long as we are relatively better off than they are, we are happy. We also have a baseline level of happiness. An individual can win the lottery or lose a limb and within 2 months, be just as happy or miserable as he was before the sudden adjustment. There may also be cultural reasons that cause us to try to see ourselves as better off than we are. We may wish to conform to cultural values about happiness and success, even if we don’t feel that way in our more reflective moments.

Coming back to Benatar specifically, a philosopher from the analytic tradition, many people have a difficult time meeting his argument on a strictly logical level. The conclusion is abruptly counterintuitive and seemingly absurd as it would lead to extinction in a single generation. We know that biological organisms essentially exist to create copies of our genes; and while that is not all we are, it is part of our core being. For these reasons, many respond to Benatar’s arguments with autonomic thinking, while Benatar is operating with controlled thinking and employing analytic intelligence. Further, we cannot even visualize the category of nonexistence, and this often obscures the sorts of logical conclusions we ought to draw regarding our judgements of nonexistence.

All of that said, the opposite of a cognitive bias is not objectivity, but usually an opposing cognitive bias. I certainly have my own autonomic associations with the concept of “life,” as well as certain cognitive difficulties. There is no objective way to determine the value of life itself, even if we agreed that the balance of pleasure and pain was the determining factor. As such, any arguments pro or con the hedonic value of life are subject to confirmation bias and cherry-picked data. Human beings tend to find beauty in tragedy, a common example is that of terminal children, who are often claimed to be the most hopeful people one will ever meet. There is a body of research showing that a certain amount of irrational optimism is indeed part of a healthy mind. I tend to tell myself that I value the harsh reality over a happy fiction, but the truth is that I may simply lack that power to find beauty in negative spaces.