Perfect Strangers

Prologue

The newcomer awoke with the yell of someone who has taken a sudden plunge into an icy lake. It turned into a groan and finally sputtered out into the rhythmic panting of trying to catch breath. The air was cold on his naked body.

A voice came. “There, there, easy does it! That’s a good boy.”

His vision was blurred. His memory was a fog.

“Please just try to relax. The first minute is the worst. You’ll start to feel much better soon.”

After managing to stabilize his breathing the newcomer tried to make out his immediate surroundings. His gaze landed on a soft silhouette of a familiar bipedal shape. He tried to move, but his body had no strength. After several seconds he managed to get out some sounds.

“Who….”

“We are the ones who brought you here,” the voice came from the silhouette.

“Who…What…?”

One of the silhouettes approached slowly. “We are the Ricu.”

As the figure closed the distance the newcomer realized to his horror that the creature was not nearly so familiar as he had supposed at a distance. Features sharpened to reveal glossy, blue, rubbery skin, hands composed of two long, fat fingers, a hairless head with a ridge running up the center, and two deep, black eyes. The newcomer opened his mouth and let out a kind of silent yell. He desperately tried to get to his feet could only manage propping himself up on an elbow.

“Please! Don’t exert yourself. We mean you no harm.”

The newcomer collapsed onto his back and stared at a glowing light coming from directly above.

A second individual very much like the first came closer.

“You are safe,” the second one said. The second creature slowly closed the distance and crouched down. Its strong arms gathered up the newcomer and wrapped his shaking body in a kind of blanket.

The newcomer said nothing but tried to take further stock of his environment. He discovered that he was lying on a sort of raised platform. Several feet above was a domelike enclosure , transparent except for a bluish glowing light at the center. The enclosure walls came not quite half way down to the platform, and in this partial wall there was a small glowing panel. Outside, the world seemed to stretch on in perfect flatness in all directions as far as the eye could see.

“My name is Edna,” the second creature said. Then gesturing to the other, “This is Keith . We are the ones who activated The Device. And you,” the figure pointed a long, fat blue finger at the newcomer, “you are called Timothy.”

Keith approached the pair with what appeared to be a large round platter. As he turned one flat side to face him, the newcomer found that it was a mirror. “Look.”

The stranger found staring back at him a creature of rubbery blue skin. It’s forehead was ridged, its eyes were deep, black, and wide open, and its mouth was agape.

“Timothy!”

Timothy came to again to Edna’s voice.

“We lost you there for a second.” Edna said. Timothy remembered the mirror, groaned, and stared down at a hand made of two long, fat, blue fingers.

“He has been through enough for now. He should rest.” Keith said. Edna agreed.

“I just want to say though how happy it makes me….makes both of us …that you are here” Edna took Keith’s hand in theirs. Timothy stared at them blankly.

Keith made a signal to another figure a bit farther away. “Best not to rush things. The Device does quite a number of the body and mind, but it will pass. Most of it.” Keith noticed Timothy turn to inspect the device again. “There will be plenty of time to explain everything. For now you need to rest.”

A third individual arrived with a wheelchair and the three of them eased Timothy’s weak frame into it. They rolled him to a small enclosure nearby where a cot waited.

“Rest,” Edna said. “You will feel better when you wake. Next cycle we will travel to our home!” Edna kissed Timothy gently on his forehead, and Timothy gave way to the exhaustion.

***

Some time later, Timothy was woken by Edna and Keith and the three of them began a trek over what Timothy saw now with clearer vision to be a wide flat expanse. Overhead was a pale green sky.

They were going to Keith and Edna's home.

Their journey was broken up midway by a stay at another enclosure that had beds and a place to prepare nutrients. The Ricu do this, Timothy learned, by sucking up a sweet syrupy liquid called glop. Once at the shelter, Edna prepared glop pouches for the three of them. Timothy’s looked different.

“You’ll need to drink this milk glop for a few cycles until your system can handle the heavier stuff that Keith and I take.”

Timothy felt less groggy now, but no specific memories came to him. Inexplicably he felt that he spoke much of the language that Edna and Keith. Many words were new though.

Timothy learned that he was in a place referred to simply as “the Plains”. The place was inhabited by a people who refer to themselves as “the Ricu”. The interval of time that they typically spent between sleeps was called a cycle. It had been about one full cycle now that Timothy had been on the Plains. The Ricu counted using a base-four number system, and tended to divided time into units of some power of four cycles. For instance 10000 (base four) cycles was known as a supercycle. (Apparently the young Ricu looked forward to the festival of Supercyclealia with great anticipation.)

The next cycle they left the shelter and made it back to Keith and Edna’s dwelling, where Timothy was given his own room.

***

Next cycle the three of them sat outside together.

“Do you have any memory of before?” Keith asked

“No.”

“That’s very normal. Timothy, we need to tell you about The Device.”

The enclosed platform where he originally came to, and which Keith and Edna refered to as “The Device,” was ancient. Nobody knew how long it had existed, although the Ricu certainly had many stories.

The Device’s technology was far beyond anything else the Ricu had encountered or developed. The exact nature of its operation was not fully understood, but the most widely held belief was that it brought souls from other worlds. The Device would scan these worlds for individuals there who are in very deep sleep and transport their souls to the Plains. Here the souls would be embedded in a freshly printed Ricu body (one of the Device’s other functions was as an advanced sort of 3D printer). The embodied individual then became Ricu.

Timothy had to take a minute to process the sheer absurdity of it all. Finally it occurred to him “So by now people must be trying to wake me back home?”

“Time does not pass in the other worlds while it passes here,” Keith says. “You can think of that world as…frozen…from our perspective.”

“Then…how do I get back?”

There was a pregnant pause while Keith and Edna exchanged a look; finally Keith spoke slowly.

“It is said that… for each of us…when our time comes to an end here on The Plains, that is, when the printed flesh fails, our soul is returned to our original body in the other world. There it will awaken as if nothing ever happened.”

“When our time comes to an end ?” Timothy repeated with a start. “Printed flesh fails?? You mean,…we have to….?”

“Keith!” Edna interjected, “He’s too young for this kind of talk!”

“All life must come to an end, Timothy,” said Keith, “I personally see no reason to dwell on death. Better to dwell on living!”

Timothy felt a sinking in his stomach. After a minute Keith went on.

“This is the Ricu culture, Timothy. We are not what some species would call sexual beings. Edna and I were brought into this world by The Device, as were the Ricu who brought each of us here. This is how things have gone for as long as anyone can remember. Together we carry on a tradition that has gone on for uncounted supercycles. The Device is what enables our people to exist.”

The bizarreness of it all left Timothy speechless. Edna and Keith decided to give him a minute to process.

“What will I do here?”

“Anything you want!” Edna said happily, as if this final break in the silence gave her hope that Timothy had warmed to his situation.

“Now, now let’s not fill his head with too much nonsense, Edna.” Keith objected. “Oh. Timothy, it’s true that, with hard work and good character, you can accomplish many things on the Plains. With the our guidance and mentorship, we have no doubt that you will achieve much!”

“And, well” Edna continued, “well it’s a bit early to even be talking about this, but we hope very much that, one day, you yourself will use The Device to bring one to Plains.”

Timothy felt his two hearts skip a beat.

“It would make us so happy.” Keith added, taking Edna’s hand.

(To be continued)

Intro

I’m sorry that I’m such a crap storyteller. I suppose I finally found a topic worth embarrassing myself over.

If you are the type of person who dislikes philosophy, or who recoils at the idea of a storyteller following up their story with a “moral”, then you can stop reading now. I admit this is a strange format, but this post was always going to be at least some philosophy. A thought experiment grew to take on a life of its own though, and it just felt best to let it grow.

What follows is my attempt to sharpen a moral belief that I have held for most of my life. The belief can be stated roughly as follows

(A) “It is morally wrong to create a human being.”

Much to my consternation, this view is generally considered, by the few who have encountered it, to be a weird, counterintuitive belief held by sad and probably bad people. Without discussing whether I am a particularly sad person, I will just say that I have many happy moments and, more importantly I think, am perfectly capable of being in a positive state of mind while maintaining that (A) is true.

Regardless, I feel that anytime one finds that they have moral intuitions so far out of whack with the vast majority of others, especially when those beliefs holds such profound implications, one should be suspicious and try to figure out what the heck is going on.

A note about terminology: The position (A) is known as antinatalism. Note that we could define a stronger principal

(E) “It is morally wrong to create sentient life.”

The position that (A) is true but that it may be permissible to create other sentient being is known as anthropocentric antinatalism. We can define sentiocentric antinatalism to be the stronger position (E). I will use the unqualified antinatalism to refer to a position at least as strong as (A) above. The opposite position, that creating humans is generally ok, is known as natalism or pronatalism.

While I also think that (E) is true, this post will focus mostly on (A).

In order to probe what might be going with my belief in (A) I have spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a scenario that made me feel more less how the idea of creating a human makes me feel. This would hopefully be a scenario that both had all the relevant moral properties of creating a human but which I suspected most people would agree was morally problematic. This proved to be a challenge since there are not many things in our day to day lives, or even in fiction, that are like creating a human other than actually creating a human. For instance, consider

(Example 1)

A young woman awakes to find that she is on a ship headed for a far away land. She has been kidnapped.

She immediately objects to her captors that they have no right to do this to her. Much to her surprise, her captors make what seems like an honest attempt to defend their actions. In particular, they explain that their entire culture revolves around a ritual of kidnapping strangers and taking them on exhilarating (albeit often dangerous and also not without long patches of dullness) adventures.

One society member points out that they had been watching her for some time and know for sure that she had a summer of doing nothing planned during which she planned to veg out or even just sleep. Surely she cannot complain that they are depriving her of any other opportunity? She maintains that vegging out or not was her decision to make not theirs.

They respond, a bit dejected now, that she should be grateful for being selected for such a time-honored tradition, that each of them had been ceremoniously kidnapped when they were younger and had born out the experience with great dignity and honor. Sure some of them had died violently, but many had achieved many noble goals on this adventure, fought many noble battles, and worked hard in various roles to promote the good of this society. That this young woman is balking at embracing these challenges is really poor form.

The young woman is flabbergasted that the cult members think any of this is relevant. After all, they kidnapped her! Their culture, projects and goals are of no concern to her! Furthermore it’s extremely presumptive of them to assume what level or risk she would be willing to tolerate on these so called “adventures”.

One of the cult members looks particularly hurt and starts to cry. When the young woman asks what is up with her, she is informed that this woman was meant to be her personal guide and mentor through the early stages of the adventure. This role of mentorship is of enormous significance to the cult members. The fact that the young woman has rejected the society hurts her personally very deeply.

***

This example gets near the core of my intuition, particularly the fact that the cult members have completely ignored the young woman’s autonomy and put her in a situation where she might get quite hurt or suffer in other ways, all for the purposes of satisfying the preferences of members of the cult and continuing some tradition that the young woman was not a part of before she was forced into it.

Nevertheless there are several obvious differences between the practices of 1) creating a new human and that of 2) kidnapping an already existing human who has memories of a past existence, and goals / preferences / obligations that they would (either presently or in the near future) like to be satisfying or working towards.

Timothy’s story is an attempt to do better.

Depending on whether the Ricu have an accurate notion of how the Device produces its “souls”, Timothy’s story may or may not take place in a universe where substance dualism is real (or at least is real for those species targeted by the Device). Or maybe the Ricu consciousness starts right there on the platform when the body is printed and ends when the body ends. I feel that this isn’t relevant to whether or not using the Device is morally permissible. If someone has an explanation why it should matter, I would love to hear it spelled out in detail.

We can imagine many directions Timothy’s story might go from where we left off…

***

The supercycles come and go….

Eventually Timothy has the opportunity to be present for the embodying of a new Ricu. He is introduced to a couple Simon and Bernadette, friends of Keith and Edna, who live nearby. One night the couple tell Keith and Edna that they have recently decided that they would very much like to embody their own Ricu and asked if Keith, Edna, and Timothy would like to be present for the even. The five of them set out on a trip for The Device two cycles later.

The scream that Steward (as he was to be called) lets out the moment he is embodied causes a small flashback in Timothy that makes him a bit sick to his stomach. The other four Ricu all gather around the Device and coo.

Timothy and Stewart come to be quite close, but their friendship is cut short when Stewart is sent away to war.

Timothy only recently learned that the Ricu people were far from living in harmony, and were actually quite tribal. While Keith and Edna were fortunate enough to live in a part of the Plains that was currently free from such conflict, a nearby enemy tribe had recently been encroaching on the local tribe, and Steward had been selected by a random lottery to join the conflict. That was the last time that Timothy ever saw Steward.

The lottery is kinder to Timothy, and he is able to remain living with Keith and Edna and focus on school. He tries to make Keith and Edna happy, but much to their sadness, he begins to suffer from a kind of ennui. The whole thing just seems very wrong to him. Keith and Edna seem confused by Timothy’s reluctance to adopt Ricu customs, and Timothy is overwhelmed by the amount of work that must be put in each day simply in order to be able to have enough glop to survive, and the terrifying tendency of the Ricu body to get sick or suffer from other ailments (Ricu must constantly be slathering their bodies in an ointment (called simply lotion) in order for their skin to not dry out and crack.)

At one point Timothy even contemplates what might be the best way of “exiting the Plains early,” as he has heard other Ricu say (always in hushed tones).

One day, Timothy comes with Keith and Edna to visit a Ricu named Bas in a hospital near their home. It was Bas who had brought Keith to the Plains. During the visit Timothy goes for a walk and encounters an entire hospital floor full of mostly elderly Ricu whose printed forms had begun to fail severely. All were hooked up to a variety of machines. Many delirious or demented. A few screamed repeatedly for help that didn’t come.

That night Timothy snaps and begins to yell at Keith and Edna. He exclaims that he has been brought to the Plains against his will. That they had no right to do this to him. That he has no interest in their stupid Ricu customs, and that it’s very audacious of them to expect that he should give a damn, quite frankly!

Edna begins to cry.

Keith reacts in anger. He says that Timothy has no idea how good he has it. That when Keith was brought to the Plaines he was barely out of the wheelchair before Bas had put him to work in a lotion factory. “Fortunately we have laws against that kind of thing now.”

“And I got off EASY compared to Edna! I won’t even tell you her story because it’s not mine to tell, and perhaps somethings are best not told!”

He paced up and down the enclosure once, then turned back toward the sulking Timothy.

“You have……SO MANY things… so many opportunities that I never would have dreamed of when I was your age! Do you have any idea how hard Edna and I have worked so that you would have a better life than we did??”

From the next room came the sound of Edna failing to stifle tears.

You really shouldn’t have, Timothy thought.

***

The next section gives a formal argument for antinatalism. Since writing it I have learned that the main gist of the argument has been presented before by Seana Shiffrin¹ albeit in a legal context (ie. dealing with liability as opposed to moral obligation).

After presenting the argument I’ll take a look at some common reactions or counterarguments and end by outlining what I see to be the best arguments against antinatalism (that is, arguments for pronatalism). While I find these latter arguments to be unsound, I think they stand head and shoulders over most of the very weak talking points coming from many pronatalists.

Contents:

I) An Argument for Antinatalism

II) Informal Counterarguments and Reactions

III) An Argument for Pronatalism: Utilitarianism

IV) An Argument for Pronatalism: Futility of Antinatalism

I) An Argument for Antinatalism:

The argument uses the notion of one individual being a stranger to another.

We all have various degrees of familiarity with those around us. These degrees of familiarity guide us as to what we can rightfully expect when interacting with each other.

To take an example of a strong such connection, if I am a young child and you are my parent I may feel justified in asking you for food and shelter or for emotional support. I also probably have the right to expect that you not throw me out of the house, at least until I am at teen.

Most relationships are not as demanding as the parent / child one. If you are my teacher at school, I may rightfully expect you to answer a question on the subject matter so long as it is in the appropriate hours, or to make sure that I am protected from bullies.

If you are my close friend I might expect a certain level of support in hard times, but I should also be aware that people grow apart, and you are not obligated to be my friend indefinitely.

If you are a colleague at work I may have certain reasonable expectations with regard to how I may interact with you.

These ties, particularly what we are owed by others, get even weaker when we consider two strangers on the street, but even there one might argue that by agreeing to be a pedestrian in a certain metropolitan area you are opening yourself up to being said “hello” to, being asked for the time or being shouted at by a street vendor. Obviously, this depends quite a bit on culture.

When I say A is a perfect stranger to B (or simple a perfect stranger, if B is implied), take this to mean the absolute weakest type of the above connection possible between two individuals. In this situation B has never met A, and B does not know A at all. I will stop short of saying that a perfect stranger implies that nothing at all can be inferred about A, since there may be some sort of reasonable (at least probabilistic) inferences on the basis of both A and B being, say, of the same species or even just both being rational. But other than that, A and has no reason to make any assumptions about A’s preferences, sensitivities, or tolerance for risk.

Armed with this definition, we can state the argument:

(ANAT-PS)

1) It is wrong to bring it about that a perfect stranger

(a) finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly (even if they will also experience significant happiness),

(b) when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, and

(c) where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful (to them and third parties) option of suicide.

2) To create a human is to bring it about that there is a perfect stranger for whom all parts (a)-(c) of premise 1 hold.

Therefore,

C) It is wrong to create a human.

A couple observations:

It is unfortunate to have to use the awkward “to bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in” instead of the simpler “to put a perfect stranger in”. But it could reasonable be claimed that the latter wording assumes the thing being put exists before the putting, while the former does not assume that the one finding themselves in the situation exists before the bringing about. As we shall see there is a family of rather unsophisticated objections that amount to pouncing anytime someone makes this kind of slip.

The second premise of ANAT-PS should not be in doubt: While the humans we bring into the world may come to be familiar to us, at the moment they are put into the situation in question they are perfect strangers. Furthermore all humans, even those with charmed lives, experience significant suffering at some point (even if the good in their life were to outweigh it in the eyes of some).

Note that the general form of the argument is 1) Actions of type X are wrong. 2) Actions of type Y are actions of type X. Conclusion) Actions of type Y are wrong. The argument makes no attempt to ground the wrongness of X in any further principle or fact. In particular the argument does not attempt to show that X actions bring about more suffering than happiness, that is, the argument does not appeal to consequentialist principles. Rather premise 1 asserts the existence of a particular duty or obligation to refrain from certain types of action, and this duty does not reduce to any facts about consequences. Indeed, as we will discuss in section IV, basic forms of utilitarianism are incompatible with the first premise of ANAT-PS.

My belief in the truth of the first premise of ANAT-PS is quite a bit stronger than my belief in utilitarianism. Indeed I’d go further and say that, even when my utilitarian sympathies are at their strongest, it seems clear to me that, if there are any rights or duties at all that are not reducible to utilitarian considerations, then surely premise 1 of ANAT-PS must be one of them. The duty described there seems to be the bare minimum in how we can be justified in interacting with a perfect stranger. Nevertheless, there are both 1) strict consequentialists, who insist that there no duties except those that reduce to consequences and 2) non-consequentialists who do recognize the existence of such irreducible duties but still do not recognize the one mentioned in premise 1 of ANAT-PS.

As the expression goes “One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tolens.” I am moved by the above argument because my belief in premise 1 is quite a bit stronger than my prior belief that it is permissible to create a human. But I suspect most pronatalists will simply shrug and conclude “Well I suppose I will conclude that sometimes it is permissible to bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly, when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, and where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful option of suicide. For otherwise it would be wrong to create a human!”

When this happens simply repeating this first premise more loudly and more slowly is unlikely to change their mind.

The reason I present the argument at all is twofold:

1) To give a framework for how I view the debate so the reader can better understand my reactions to various pronatalist arguments below, and

2) On the off-chance that there is a reader who, although they have not realized it up until now, discovers that they indeed have a stronger believe in the truth of premise 1 of ANAT-PS than in the belief that it is permissible to create a human life.

In the rest of this post I will take a look at various pronatalist arguments / reasons / reactions to antinatalism. Some of these are structured arguments, some of them are simply reasons or reactions for which we will have to make a charitable guess as to what argument if any lies under the surface.

II) Counterarguments and Reactions

II-0). The Good Samaritan / Hypothetical Consent

Bryan Caplan gives an cursory rejection² of (A) that involves the notion of “hypothetical consent”, that is, ie. whether someone would consent to something, say being created, given that they were able to. He offers the following argument:

He gives two premises (1) and (2) that roughly amount to “most existing humans are happy with their lives”. He then states that these jointly imply the lemma that “almost everyone would consent [to being brought into existence] if they could” (ie. hypothetical consent). Finally he asserts as major premise that “It’s OK to create people as long as [you are justified in believing that] they would consent beforehand.” And so the negation of (A) follows.

I would say with some minor touching-up, this can be made into a logically valid argument. The problem as it stands is that lies in deriving the lemma that “almost everyone would consent if they could” from the premises (1) and (2) showing that most existing humans are happy with their lives. The thing is, the fact that most people enjoy their lives is no more a support for the idea that a hypothetical "yet to be created" person would consent to be created than is the fact that 5 out of 6 players of Russian roulette enjoy their prize is evidence that a random person would consent to a game of Russian roulette.

For now I propose we simply take the aforementioned lemma as a premise. Then the argument becomes

1.) Almost everyone would consent to being brought into existence if they could.

2.) It’s OK to create people as long as [you are justified in believing that] they would consent if they could.

Therefore

C) Not (A).

The argument is clearly logically valid. What do we think of the premises?

I’m inclined to grant premise 1) for now. Regarding the second premise, I will start by granting that it comes from a good place. Caplan makes the good observation that “If you flatly reject the concept of hypothetical consent, you have to condemn Good Samaritans for saving the lives of unconscious strangers.”

And it certainly seems true that saving the live of an unconscious stranger would in fact be a case of putting a stranger in a situation where they will meet all of the conditions of premise 1 of ANAT-PS.

Namely, by saving a stranger from death you are bringing it about that this stranger

(a) finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly (even if they will also experience significant happiness), (namely the inevitable suffering inherent in the rest of their saved life),

(b) when otherwise they would not have suffered at all (because they would have perished), and

(c) where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful (to them and third parties) option of suicide.

The notion of perfect used in a perfect stranger used by ANAT-PS was meant to somewhat deflect this counterexample.

What I think what makes the Good Samaritan seem so admirable is that when we consider the victim in this scenario, we picture a member of our community, who is obviously come upon some accident, who almost certainly has certain preferences, goals, and obligations, not to mention friends, family, and dependents. If instead we attempt to abstract all this away, the permissibility of "saving" the victim becomes much less clear, and I would argue in the limiting case is wrong.

I would indeed probably save this first individual. They also do not really seem like a perfect stranger. If on the other hand we were to come across an individual whom we (somehow) have every reason to believe has no goals, no projects, no dependents, friends or family, maybe even no memories, I would be much more hesistant about “saving” them (although in practice I may still do so out of fear of societal repercussions for not doing so).

Lastly let’s look at the general form of Caplan’s major premise. If we abstract away the thing we are getting consent for and also observe that the person we are getting consent from is generally not a specific individual but a random draw from some probability distribution, we are left with something like the following under the hood:

2*). It’s OK to do action A to a random person P drawn from a distribution D, if most people drawn from D would consent to action A.

While I’d like to try to find a less contrived counterexample, in the meantime consider the following game involving three unconscious kidnapped “participants” A, B and C. I have an serum which, once injected, has some chance, say .9, of giving the recipient a euphoric sensation for some period of time and .1 chance of causing extreme pain for some period of time. Furthermore, I have connected the unconscious participants A, B, and C to a machine which, once activated, will select one of A, B or C at random and administer the injection to that person.

I may go on to justify the permissibility of playing this game to myself as follows: “Look, I have studied A, B, and C for a while now. I know for a fact that A and B have taken the serum voluntarily on multiple occasions. I admit that C is a different story. I happen to know that C is extremely risk-averse and is extremely sensitive to pain. Any person that has known C for any amount of time would tell you that C would never take the serum voluntarily. Still, we can fall back on 2* above. It is Ok to inject the serum into a random person drawn from a uniform distribution over three individuals, if most people drawn from that distribution (that is at least two of the three individuals) would consent to the injection.” I then proceed to activate the machine.

While this action seems morally repugnant to me, and the justification seems wrong, I can imagine there are people (presumably Caplan) who will bite this bullet.³

II-1). “It is never required to act out of regard for a being that does not (yet) exist.”

This reaction is surprisingly common, but I think falls apart pretty quickly with a little reflection. I’ve even heard people claim that no statements about the correct way to act with regard to a nonexistent individual could be meaningful. More specifically, the claim might be that the antinatalist, in making their moral claims, is trying to assign some predicate to non-existent entities. Perhaps they think the antinatalist is claiming something like “it is wrong to act on a thing in a way that would put it in a bad position.” They respond that at the time of the act, there is no thing, and thus the antinatalist is spouting nonsense.

We have already mentioned how we have taken care to phrase premise 1 of ANAT-PS precisely to avoid such a naive translation. The duty there is not to refrain from acting on a thing but from acting in a way that will cause a state of affairs where a thing exists in a certain situation. The logically inclined reader can take a crack at formalizing the premise⁴, but any competent speaker of English should be able to see that the statement is meaningful, just like any competent speaker of English should be able to see that the statement “In 10 years there will be many dolphins who are not yet born, and some of these dolphins will be over two meters long” is a meaningful statement (and obviously true) even though it speaks about a state of affairs in which the sum total of things that exist is different from what it is now.

Generally confusions this should remind us to sanity check our logical analyses:

Consider a society of, say, humans who live in a what we can call World X. This is a realm of constant agony. Individuals spend most of their day talking about how they wish they could die, but, perhaps due to the contrivances of some more powerful beings, they are denied death. Go on: Use your imagination to picture a really, really awful such situation. Now ask, is it morally permissible to create a new individual in such a world? If the answer is “No” and if the reason is out of regard for the wellbeing of the future individual, then it is at least sometimes required to act out of regard for a being that does not (yet) exist.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that we do live in World X. The example is just meant to provide a counterexample to the universal claim that “It is never required to act out of regard for a being that does not (yet) exist.” There are certainly some situations for which the statement “In this situation, we must act in a certain way out of concern for an (as yet nonexistent) person” that are both meaningful and true. If you think you have logically analyzed the latter statement in a way that makes it nonsensical or even merely impossible, you can be pretty confident that the problem is with your analysis.

II-2.) “I’m glad my parents created me!” / “I’m happy to be alive!” / “(My) Life is Beautiful.”

It’s not clear that this is so much of an argument as a data point with and an implicit assumption that we should be doing some sort of utilitarian calculation.

It would be uncharitable to assume that the objector believes that lives are on average not good and that childbirth is a random draw from such lives, and this is still somehow ok. Rather she probably means something more like

(Implicit 1) Human lives are on average individually good, and (for utilitarian reasons) this is sufficient justification for creating more human lives.

or perhaps

(Implicit 2). Whether or not human lives are on average individually good, some lives are good, and many people can have strong justification in believing that the lives that they create will be good. And (for utilitarian reasons) this is sufficient justification for those parents to create more human lives.

(“Life is beautiful” probably corresponds to Implicit 1. The other exclamations above could go either way.)

If you are like me you might be tempted to point out that many people are not glad that their parents created them while I’m sure that few if any of their parents predicted that their children come to feel this way. Honest defenders of (Implicit 1) or (Implicit 2) should allow that this is true even if they insist that it is still worth the risk for utilitarian reasons.

We really should be happy, though, for these people who say “I’m glad my parents created me! / I’m happy to be alive! / Life is beautiful” though. Seriously, isn’t it great that they are enjoying their lives so much? I do think that there are a non-trivial number of folks that have good lives (although I suspect the number might be lower than you think. See the responses to the premise 2 of NAT-UTIL below).

Still, the intuition behind the main premise of ANAT-PS is that the fact that you (and perhaps many others) have a good life is still not justification for you to make the existence decision on behalf of a perfect stranger. But again, if you are convinced by one of Implicit 1 or Implicit 2 above, you probably reject this premise.

Both Implicit 1 and Implicit 2 will be addressed in section III where we take up the general utilitarian argument for pronatalism.

II-3) People who aren’t thankful for being created are mentally ill.

While people like me would emphatically deny this sentiment, I think it’s more productive to look at the implicit premises that lurk in the background in order to form a complete argument for pronatalism. Here are three alternatives from least charitable to most.

Implicit -1) Mentally ill people are not worthy of moral consideration.

The first one seems very strange given how we think about illness in general. We don’t generally dismiss, say an infant born with severe health problems as being unworthy of moral consideration due to her illness. Indeed if it were later found out that gross negligence, say on behalf of a doctor, caused said medical condition, the doctor would be held both morally responsible and legally liable.

Implicit -2 ) Mentally ill people can become mentally healthy, and so everyone wins.

It’s hard to see how the claim that all mentally ill people can become mentally healthy is seriously defensible given the number of people who spend their lives in and out of the medical system, trying a suite of medications, therapies, meditations, group meetings, strict discipline etc to mixed results. Are we to simply infer that these people just aren’t really trying? On what basis?

Regardless, even granting that with enough medications, therapies, meditations, group meetings, and strict discipline, we can fix anyone, isn’t it still a bit presumptive to bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in a situation in which where the only way to make their life manageable is a lifetime of medications, therapies, meditations, group meetings, and strict discipline?

Implicit-3 ) Some mentally ill people can become mentally healthy, and some cannot. Definitely not everybody wins. But (for utilitarian reasons) we are still justified in creating new human life.

This argument is addressed in section III where we take up the general utilitarian argument for pronatalism.

II-4) “If we don’t create new humans the species will go extinct.”

Maybe also throw in here “Suffering is just part of life.”

These claims are undoubtedly true, but again it will be helpful to look at implicit premises that lurk in the background in order to form a complete argument.

It’s important to distinguish two variants of this objection:

Implicit 1) Human lives are on average individually good, and (for utilitarian reasons) this is sufficient justification for perpetuating the human species.

or

Implicit 2) Regardless of whether individual human lives are on average individually good, preserving the human species as a whole is good.

Implicit 1 will be taken up in the section III where we take up the general utilitarian argument for pronatalism.. So we’ll just turn to Implicit 2 now.

The following is from Robin Hanson in conversation with Agnes Callard and William Eliot⁵

“[…] Think of then all the generations in sequence that go all the way through time. The ball gets handed generation to generation, and if you drop the ball, all the generations after you lose. You’re part of this collective effort where you shouldn’t fail anybody else, let the team down.

Sometimes somebody will be out drowning in the ocean. And [other people] will make a human chain of people with somebody on the shore holding on to something and one by one they’re all holding on to each other until they stretch out to the person in the ocean and grab their hand and pull them in. And if you join this human chain, you have a bit of a responsibility not to let go of the other people in that chain. Not only might you be in trouble the the whole rest of the people out toward the ocean they might get swept out.

And I would say you have a bit of a responsibility as a result of all the generations that came before you all of whom continued to exist and passed the ball on [ …] I would say you have a bit of a responsibility.”

This being a transcript of a conversation and not a published work, we probably shouldn’t demand that the analogy be to perfect. Still I’d like to know who the person “being saved” is supposed to represent. Also note that Hanson says “if you join this human chain, you have a responsibility…” Lest we take this to mean “if you choose to join this human chain…” note that Hanson goes on to emphasize later in the interview that our choosing has nothing to do with it:

Hanson: I would add to the example of history that not only are you the end of a long chain of people who continued your lineage, you’re the end of a long chain of people who eagerly wanted that to continue. They weren’t indifferent to this lineage.

Eliot: So it’s kind of like a historical debt?

Hanson: Yes they created you …in part….you own them. Part of what they want from you is that you continue.

Callard: I don’t understand why you owe them. You didn’t make a deal. There was no contract.

Hanson: You can owe things without a contract. You can be endowed with contracts.

Callard: Suppose that someone comes to your house and they renovate your house, and they make it look really nice. They sneak in when you’re not there and they renovate and they’re like “You owe me now. You owe me money for this renovation.”

Hanson: But we’re talking about your parents, not some random person that comes to your house.

Callard: Your parents are a random person that you never met before you come into existence.

Hanson: I think you can owe your parents, they are not just some stranger.

Callard: Of course they are!

[…]

It’s not so baffling that a member of our species may feel a drive to “fight for the home team (species)”, especially considering humanity’s other forms of tribalism or in-group / out-group preferentialism. But in this case the “home team" in question, the artifact that has been passed down, is just the end result of billions of years of violent evolution by natural selection. The process that created this “tribe” is a cold, heartless, violent process whose only goal is to propagate itself into the future. It’s certainly not clear to me why such an institution should have value outside of the value of its members. And regardless of what my forbearers (rightly or not) expected of me, it doesn’t seem right for me to throw a perfect stranger into this mix.

This is not to say that I don’t feel the pull, say, to advance certain scientific disciplines. I personally would love to be able to travel forward in time to see, e.g. what cosmological discoveries we will make in the next hundred years. This pull might also explain why I feel I hears the natalist sentiment coming particularly hard from public intellectuals with some pet project (technology, science, politics, art) that has come to define them. I can concede that the universe is a fascinating place and scientific progress is exciting. But it also seems clear to me that it is not my place to create a stranger solely so that she can pick up the torch on my pet project.

I started to write and then deleted a section on the body of very loosely structured reactions that, roughly, accuse antinatalism as being “slave morality” or which proclaim that “To suffer is virtuous!” They wouldn’t be completely out of place in this section about continuing the species for it’s own sake.

I find such appeals to virtue particularly interesting as a defense of pronatalism: The proponent has apparently shunned both utilitarian approaches to as well as probably most rights / duties based frameworks in favor of simply pursuing what they personally deem to be a “virtuous life”. Surely this should be a very individualistic endeavor? And yet, being a pronatalist, this person feels they must involve, indeed impose upon, some perfect stranger in said endeavor. This seems as strange to me as a person who boasts about refusing to “work for the man” while spending each day asking passers-by for spare change. What account of virtue is this that requires imposing on strangers?

II-5) I want to pass on my genes. / I want to experience parenthood / I want someone to take care of me when I’m old.

These three are grouped together because, unlike all other reactions in this section, they admit outright to acting primarily out of self-interest. For this reason the antinatalist may respond in two ways: 1) The moral case: arguing that regardless of whether the act accomplishes its intended end, self-interested acts are often wrong if they violate other considerations, or 2) The empirical case: pointing out that the self-interested act might not accomplish the goal that the agent desires.

For for the person who wants to pass on their genes, the moral case might be to suggest that, regardless of what you want for a legacy, that does not entitle you to bring it about that a perfect stranger, who may have no interest in your genetic legacy or anybody else’s for that matter, finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly, when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, etc.

The empirical case depends exactly on the reasoning the person has for wanting to pass on their genes. In the case that the person has some notion of figurative immortality in mind, the antinatalist might remind the pronatalist how their genes will be diluted with each subsequent generation.⁶

For the person who craves the experience of parenthood, the moral case against might be to point out that parenthood is quite unlike hiking Mount Everest or going skydiving: That it’s unreasonable to expect a perfect stranger to be put in a situation in which they might suffer significantly, all so you can have some momentous life experience.

The empirical case corresponding to wanting to experience parenthood may be that the parent could have all or most of these experiences by adopting a child instead of creating a new human.

The moral case for the senior care is like that of the parenthood case, but with the additional observation that their plan really is just an obviously self-perpetuating pyramid scheme, that it is unfortunate that they were put in the position where they have to look for a caretaker, but in other aspects of life we do not generally take A imposing on B as and excuse for B to impose on C.

The empirical case is harder, at least for people living in some cultures. While it might be tempting for members of affluent societies to take the money that would go into raising a child and invest it in a “comfortable old age / nursing home fund”, this is doubtless not an option for people in many cultures. One might again suggest adoption as an option, but this may also be difficult in some cultures. And while I would imagine that adopted children are even more willing to help take care of their parents in old age, I don’t have any data to back this up..

In general, I think the empirical approach (or some combination of the two) probably has more promise. Unfortunately I suspect the moral approach alone might not to do so well against the type of individual that takes “I want <totally self-interested thing>” to be a perfectly reasonable, end-of-story justification for their actions.

II-6.) “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

This admonition seems to pop up frequently in exchanges where one party voices disapproval of another party’s treatment of a third. Perhaps a person is expressing disapproval at a stranger’s decision to corporally punish their child and the parent is asking that they kindly butt out. Or perhaps a pro-life advocate is protesting (or even trying to legislate) against the right of others to have an abortion, and the latter is responds that if it’s not their body, it’s not their concern.

Of course, nobody is really claiming that I can do anything I want with my own body (I cannot throw my fist into a strangers face) and whether or not you think that corporate child punishment is permissible, presumably you can imagine some sort of violence of a parent toward a child for which it would be appropriate, or even obligatory, for an observing third party to intervene. In general everyone will agree that there are situations where a their party C has the right or even the duty to protest or even intervene in the treatment of a stranger A on another stranger B. Whether or not you think that corporate child punishment is permissible, presumably you can imagine some sort of violence of a parent toward a child for which it would be permissible, or even admirable, for an observing third party to intervene.

At the end of the day, what lies behind the request to “mind your own business” is almost always a disagreement on the surrounding mitigating circumstances. What the defender of corporal child punishment may really want to suggest if they had time is that there is no net harm in the long run to the child, and that the third party is not nearly so justified in their belief that there is a net harm to outweigh various social costs that come along with a stranger butting in to the goings-on other families. In the case of the pro-choice advocate, there is typically also some latent belief that the fetus B is not yet a person or not yet sentient, and combined with the intrinsically physically intimate nature or a pregnancy, and the emotional cost that comes along with an abortion regardless, this is really not a case where third parties should be concerning themselves in A’s behavior.

Nevertheless, in every different case there will be disagreement on whether the surrounding circumstances really are mitigating. And in some circumstances C might rightly respond that in fact A is not sufficiently minding his own business! The dispute arose not because A was minding his own business but rather acting on B. The kind of treatment of B might be sufficiently bad that C should maintain that “No…no this really isn’t ok what you’re doing.”

Similarly we should not be surprised when the defender of antinatalism is likely to see the wrongness of bringing it about that a perfect stranger will suffer, when they otherwise would not have suffered (etc.) as sufficient to warrant protest.

II-7.) “Why don’t you kill yourself?”

[Content Warning: Discussion of suicide]

Almost every antinatalist who has raised the topic or seen it discussed in a public forum has encountered this question.

Taken literally the question is a not a bad one, although it can come across not as a question in search of a reason, so much as a “Fuck you.” People generally don’t like to have it suggested that what they have done (or what their parents have done) is morally suspect, and this is amplified when the behavior in question is something so sacred. The result is that it is not uncommon to hear people express distain in a way that suggests they wish violence upon the person that proposed that the thing was morally problematic.

If you are thinking of asking this question and wondering how to word it, I would suggest you consider whether you would ask “Why don’t you kill yourself?” to a close friend or family member. If one day your own child comes to you and tells you he thinks he is an antinatalist, will your reaction be “Well, why don’t you kill yourself?”

Nonetheless, we can give some good faith replies to the literal question:

For now we’ll skip over data containing the number of people who do kill themselves every day. Presumably the question is asking something more akin to “How is it that you, the antinatalist talking to me, has not yet killed yourself?” Once again we distinguish two implicit premises

Assumption-1) Antinatalist must want to die / think that their death would be good.

But as we have pointed out, antinatalism is consistent with the view that some lives are good (or at least good right now), where this might mean

a) Good for the individual in question

b) Good for others (friends and family would be greatly hurt by the individual exiting, or other opportunities to do good would be missed)

Consider someone who is kidnapped and taken to a far away country. Even if they manage to escape their captors, can we find them totally unreasonable if they find parts of the foreign country to be beautiful and decide to stay a little longer before returning home? I think we can say that this might make sense, even while maintaining that it is wrong to put a perfect stranger in this position. This escaped captive may also want to help other prisoners, or find a way to protest against the country’s practice of kidnapping.

So an antinatalist may find that their life is good (or good for now), but even in the case where she does find her life to be quite bad, there may be many other factors which make it rational for her to stick around. She might have friends or family that would be hurt very badly by her suicide, or she might want to engage in charity or activism.

Let’s examine a different possible implicit premise here, usually held in conjunction with the one above.

Assumption-2) Suicide is easy.

There often seems to be a kind of machismo accompanying the question “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” that suggests “Heck! I personally love life as every good person does, but by golly if I needed to I’d be great at killing myself!”

To take a particular example, Bryan Caplan says

“Almost everyone’s behavior confirms that they’re glad to be alive.  After all, no mobile adult needs to be miserable for long.  Tall buildings and other routes to painless suicide are all around us; in economic jargon, life is a good with virtually “free disposal.”  Yet suicide is incredibly rare nonetheless."⁷

Ah yes, the existence of tall buildings. It really is simple after all isn’t it?

If someone ever asks you “Why don’t you kill yourself” please ask them if they have ever tried. They well might have, but more likely they have never really thought hard about what would be involved. Given that you’re not on some sort of moderated forum which will ban you for such talk, and given that you personally are resilient to such kinds of conversation, have them walk you through what method they would use, how they would arrange for their body to be found (who would find it), how they would put their affairs in order, and what they think it would feel like the second they had to do the deed. How long do they think it will take to die and what would that time be like?

Also what is their plan if they accidentally survive?

A shitty feeling - dying alone - isn’t it?

I personally find that when I get to the edge of a tall building my knees turn to jello, I get sick to my stomach, and all I can think about is backing away. It has precisely nothing to to with an evaluation of whether not I appreciate my life and precisely everything to do with the sheer awfulness of heights, falling, the fear of pain, the idea of the final “splat”, and small but positive possibility of spending the rest of my life kept alive while I consume all nutrients through a straw. I would think anyone with half a brain could see the difference here, but perhaps not. Maybe Caplan and the machismo pronatalists will just chalk up my visceral reaction here to yet more evidence for my moral failings.

But let’s consider a world where suicide is easy and not socially stigmatized.

Even the most permissive such society is presumably not providing youths the option.

This point I never see raised. Even in an ideal case where adults are given an safe, reliable, legally permissible exit, the plan is still to force everyone to live through childhood.

Some of the most suffering that a human will experience in their life comes in childhood (only second place to the period at the end of life I’d assume, but it’s not crucial to the argument). A very young child has practically zero autonomy, has very poor understanding about why things are happening to them. For years they have restricted means of communicating their physical or mental state in any intelligible way. And have few resources to reliably do anything about it anyway.

If we are to take the a child’s giggle as evidence toward to goodness of their lives, then we must also take their crying as evidence toward its badness. A similar thing can be said about toddlers and teenagers. The many “firsts” that so many parents praise about the teenage years seem to often leave out some pretty negative ones. Let’s just take a minute to reflect on the fact that almost anyone can force a child into this situation.

It’s heartbreaking to hear of a young child or teenage who actually does take their life, not least because the suffering that must have led them to that point was probably pretty bad. The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t think this young person is on the top of the mind of the pronatalist asking “Why don’t you kill yourself?”

III) An Argument for Pronatalism: Utilitarianism

The spirit of the first argument against antinatalism will be the following:

“Look, life can be pretty bad some times, and it’s honestly unfair. It’s even true that some people never have a chance to have good lives. But there’s still some sense in which one person’s good experience can cancel out another person’s bad experience so that the net result is good. Furthermore, acting in whatever way that promotes the most good on net is our best moral compass (not rules about specific types of duties like the main premise of ANAT-PS). Since the practice of creating humans results in more good on net than not creating humans, we should continue to create humans.”

We have already reduced (some interpretations) of many of the above informal arguments to this basic argument. Let’s formalize it somewhat.

Define Total Utilitarianism (TU) to be the claim that the morally best action among some set of alternatives is the one which has the highest total expected value (creates the most welfare / happiness / utility, etc) across all impacted morally relevant individuals.

Embedded in this definition is the assumption that we can always compare the goodness / badness of things. That is, statements of the form “Ashley’s eating the ice cream cone was less good than Bob’s hitting his thumb with a hammer was bad.” have meaning and truth value.

Note that TU is incompatible with premise 1 of ANAT-PS since TU implies that it is not only permissible but required to bring it about that a perfect stranger (or anyone else for that matter) finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly (etc.) so long as the total expected benefit to all individuals involved is greater than that which would result in not doing so. This might either be because the stranger themselves will likely experience an amount of goodness that outweighs that suffering, or simply because acting on the stranger will bring about experience of goodness in others that outweighs the badness inflicted on the stranger.

Thus this first argument for pronatalism goes as follows

(NAT-UTIL)

1) Total Utilitarianism (TU) is true.

2) The expected value of creating a new human life (to that new individual themselves and to all others impacted) is often greater than that of not creating a new life.

C) Therefore, often the best action is to create a new human life.

The argument is clearly valid. Furthermore the first premise is accepted by a large number of philosophers and public intellectuals.⁸ And I would bet money that the majority of “folks on the street” would agree with premise 2. Nevertheless I suspect that not just one but both of these premises are false and will consider them in turn.

The literature surrounding utilitarianism is vast, and I don’t expect to deal TU any sort of devastating blow here. But it will still be helpful to point out some of the core objections in order to point to its implications.

The so called “Utility Monster”⁹ has been proposed as an unpalatable consequence of

Total Utilitarianism that many people, including myself, count as a reductio ad absurdum. This thought experiment can take many forms. I can’t summarize it better than Wikipedia:

“A hypothetical being, which Nozick calls the utility monster, receives much more utility from each unit of a resource that it consumes than anyone else does. For instance, eating a cookie might bring only one unit of pleasure to an ordinary person but could bring 100 units of pleasure to a utility monster. If the utility monster can get so much pleasure from each unit of resources, it follows from utilitarianism that the distribution of resources should acknowledge this. If the utility monster existed, it would justify the mistreatment and perhaps annihilation of everyone else, according to the mandates of utilitarianism, because, for the utility monster, the pleasure it receives outweighs the suffering it may cause.”

Parfit has argued¹⁰ that the Utility Monster is simply conceptually impossible. That is, it’s not possible that one being could experience so much happiness as to outweigh the suffering of so many. But it is perhaps more conceivable when the suffering is shifted onto one individual. For instance, imagine a sadist that is able to torture individuals in such a way that gives him an extreme amount of pleasure. So extreme in fact, that the value received by the sadist outweighs the disvalue delivered to the victim. That is, while the victim may be suffering when the sadist conducts the torture, the sadist gets much more pleasure than the victim suffers. This may be either because the suffering of the victims is mild and the pleasure delivered to the sadist is moderate, or because the suffering is great but the pleasure to the sadist is astronomical. Now TU seems to imply that in such a situation the sadist is justified in doing what they do, and the victim is morally compelled to submit themselves to the sadist. And since there is only one sadist and one victim here, this example seems less likely to be vulnerable to Parfit’s cries of “Inconceivable!”

We make the hypothetical even less inconceivable by further increasing the ratio of sadists to sufferers. Imagine a city of sadists that picks a random citizen to torture each year for the pleasure of the citizens. This might be televised in order that the greatest number of people could benefit from the victim’s suffering. A similar idea is explored in Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,¹¹ which describes a otherwise utopian society whose existence and function turns out to depend on one child being kept in perpetual suffering.

One may try to avoid these ugly implications of TU replacing it with some weakened form that places additional constraints on how each individual may be affected alone. Perhaps we insist that no individual can suffer too much on net? That is, first we restrict ourselves to a set of actions where each individual walks away with total welfare greater than come constant C. Then we pick our action by maximizing total utility over this restricted set.

How should we pick this constant C? Presumably one wants to pick a high enough value to rule out creating the Omelas child. But high values will certainly rule out creating human life altogether, since it is inevitable that at least a small percentage of humans brought into existence will suffer immensely.

At any rate such an ad hock theory lacks the alluring simplicity that drives so many to utilitarianism the theory in the first place.

Some folks will bite this bullet and say we must allow for the inevitable Omelas child. I find this impossible to stomach, but there are a sizable group of utilitarians who take great pride in biting bullets.

I also suspect the second premise of (NAT-UTIL) is false and will will say a few words about this. This part is included with quite a bit of trepidation, since I fear that an attack on the second premise may distract from the main thrust of the paper and thus be more trouble than it is worth. I want to repeat that I’m really not interested in convincing you that you have a net negative life, rather I would encourage that we not regard the goodness of our lives as justification for imposing life on perfect stranger. For this reason I’m almost tempted to grant the pronatalist premise 2 above, since doing so would not change my overall attitude toward acting upon perfect strangers.

A few philosophers have tried to claim that no lives are good on net. One flavor of this is the so called Negative Utilitarianism, a flavor of utilitarianism that emphasizes the minimization of suffering (conceived of as qualitatively different from happiness) as opposed to the maximization of happiness. Taken in it’s strongest form, this theory suggests that one life is better than another never by being more positive but by being less negative.

Related but distinct would be a view that that happiness / positive well-being simply is the absence of suffering / negative well-being.

I personally find this latter identification hard to accept solely on the mundane empirical grounds that I have had a few truly positive experiences the goodness of which I cannot see how to reduce to "absence of suffering”. Furthermore I see no a priori reason why suffering should take precedence in evaluating the goodness of states of affairs in the way that Negative Utilitarianism says it should. In general, while I do think my life has been net negative, it seems a little presumptuous to say that, as a matter of fact, all lives have been and will be. Some people have had some seriously charmed lives or have remarkably unusual psychologies.¹²

Having said this, I do believe most of the people who would say that they have a good life are wrong.

First of all, I reject the idea that beliefs like “My life has been overall net good up until now.” are like those of “I am currently in pain” or “I am seeing the color red” in that believing that they are true justifies us in being certain (or at least near certain) that they are true. This is because being justified in believing “my life has been net good” requires evaluating how we are doing throughout the day for an extended period of time and honestly judging whether the experience we are having are net positive. I think that very few of us do this regularly.

Second, while I think it is incorrect to identify happiness with the absence of pain, I do think that most of what we consider to be good about our day is indeed simply an absence of badness: A good night’s rest, a quiet moment in the morning with a cup of tea, “pleasant weather” on a walk to work or “no traffic” for our commute. These may allow us to “clear our heads”. In the best case feeling physical and mental “well” may result in a “smooth” work day. Perhaps we didn’t even spend much time feeling the need to “distract” ourselves or “kill time” with our phone.

We should all be lucky to have such a day on average, but this is all mostly just the absence of suffering. Certainly we do have moments of seemingly positive experience. A delicious meal, an exciting book, an engaging conversation with a friend or family member. A yearly vacation to the beach. Another yearly vacation to spend time with family for the holidays (for those of you for whom this is a pleasant experience). Generally though these things are relatively sparse on the timeline of our lives. Meanwhile if you are like most people, you spend the vast majority of your day doing things you wish you didn’t have to do in order to not die of hunger or exposure. And this is the situation for middle class folks in the first world.

Thirdly, while we may continue to reject the stronger claim that happiness just is the absence of suffering, there certainly does seem to be a kind of strong asymmetry between suffering and positive well-being. I heard someone ask once if anyone would agree to accept an hour of the most intense happiness they could image given that it had to be paid for by an hour of the most intense suffering they could imagine. Everybody seemed to agree that nobody would agree to this exchange. The sufferings of our life have an intensity to which our paltry happy moments are unable to measure up.

Fourth, note that we have significant incentive to delude ourselves about the idea that the lives we see around us are generally good. While I am hesitant to wade into an uninformed just-so stories citing evolutionary psychology, the most cursory glance at evolutionary machinery should leave little surprise that we treat procreation as a major important goal in our lives. It would be quite inconvenient if we also all walked around with the idea that we were generally creating these humans into a situation that was on net negative.

But even more honest conversations with a friend or loved one about the grind of work, the stress of bills, or even a pessimistic outlook on the state of the world, seems to shift on a dime into cheeriness when someone mentions that they are expecting a child.¹³

So far I’ve chosen focus on more mundane lives and not the smaller but not insignificant group of “super sufferers”. People living with chronic pain or other physical conditions that make existence agony, folks with hellish mental illness, or those living in the daily grind of addiction. My mostly skipping them here is partially because the online discussion of antinatalism tends to focus quite a bit on these gory details. But we shouldn’t forget that they are an important part of the calculation. Like the Omelas child, these are the folks that we’ve collectively decided that we are willing to sacrifice.

The CDC gives the following numbers for the United States for 2022:¹⁴

Over 49,000 people died by suicide in 2022.

That’s 1 death every 11 minutes.

But what grabs my attention is that this is

1.6 million attempted suicide.

3.8 million made a plan for suicide.

13.2 million adults seriously thought about suicide.

If we take census data¹⁵ for population (335,754,720) at the end of 2022 as our denominator, this is almost 4% of the population that had serious thought and over 1% that made a plan.¹⁶

My goal is not to be inflammatory. It must be hell to lose a loved one to suicide. But I really wish we could spend last time flabbergasted at the “mentally ill victim of suicide”, and turn more of an eye toward the suspect practice of bringing it about that a perfect stranger found themselves in a situation in which they would suffer significantly, when they otherwise would not have suffered at all, and where the only prospect of escape was the very risky, terrifying, and painful option of suicide.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

To conclude, returning to NAT-UTIL in general, I’ll say that I’d count it as a small victory if the pronatalist community were to admit that it really was Total Utilitarianism that was doing the work of justifying their position. While I think that TU is a really unsettling position, I don’t deny that it is accepted by many bright people who have thought in depth about normative ethics for their livelihood. My objections to TU above are by no means new and are just the very tip of a large literature about the plausibility of TU. But I maintain that it really is a bleak worldview at the end of the day. And I think it would be a step in the right direction if pronatalists were to at least acknowledge who their bedfellows are.

IV) An Argument for Pronatalism: Futility of Antinatalism

Here’s another argument for pronatalism.

(NAT-FUTILE)

1) For any moral principle to be correct, it must be at least plausible that society at large should be able to adopt said principle.

2) It is not plausible for society at large to adopt antinatalism (A).

Conclusion) (A) is incorrect.

How would we predict the people to respond on average to premise 1 here? After all, what is right or wrong is not a matter of how who agrees with you is it? If the whole world decided that it was best practice to start committing random acts of violence (not out of self-defense, but just for funsies) would that make it right for you to join in? “Speak the truth! Even if your voice shakes!” goes the bumper sticker. I saw another one today which said “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”¹⁷ But what if the revolutionary act is proposing something really deeply difficult to implement or even intrinsically self-defeating? Is there a point at which we should just throw up our hands and say, “This can’t be what ethics is For!”

I will admit that premise (2) usually seems to me to be unfortunately quite likely. It is hard to see how antinatalism will ever be more socially accepted than, say, the belief that it is best to avoid eating meat or to avoid factory farms, and the fraction of vegetarians¹⁸ does not seem to be increasing significantly, despite the efforts of passionate activist groups.

But more to the point is the fact that after antinatalists protest, argue, plead, shout, they die, with nothing like the parent-child relationship that is so suited for disseminating other ethical, religious, or political ideologies.

While the internet is a boon in modern times to distributing ideas to folks who otherwise would not have had access to them, realistically the internet is no match for social and cultural indoctrination.

Let’s picture the smoothest, most hilariously naive picture of a possible ideological shift the world could take towards an antinatalist ethic.

Ignore for a second the tremendous economic difficulties resulting from a shrinking population. Perhaps technology advances so far that it really becomes feasible for everyone to have their current needs met without the labor of a stream of workers continually being created to feed the workforce.

Imagine a world where, not just in“socially conscious” circles, not just in fringe spaces, not only in progressive circles in crunchy, American coastal cities, but among broader mainstream community organizations and the more open-minded faith-based groups, it becomes more and more obvious that it really is not permissible to bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly, when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, and where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful option of suicide. More and more folks begin to adopt children instead of creating new humans, perhaps even adopting them from other countries who are slower adopters.

There is tremendous social upheaval of course. There would be tremendous pushback, mostly from conservative groups, and the result is most likely that the western world is left in the hands of an increasing number of pronatalist public figures. But since we’re taking our most hilariously rosy picture, let’s indulge in a world where antinatalists take the broader cultural and intellectual high ground. Even the descendants of Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan come around to admitting that, no really, it really is not ok to bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly, when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, and where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful option of suicide.

What happens is that countries in which this sympathy is strongest begin to wither away. Or be encroached upon by the those with stronger militaries who suppress this kind of idea. The dwindling antinatalist population leave behind beacons on the internet spreading the “good word” of antinatalism, but eventually the planet is left to be parceled out amongst fundamentalist religious groups and a handful of authoritarian nations.

Philosophy, no matter how convincingly communicated, is no match for indoctrination, “divine command”, and the natural selection of ideology for a tendency to spread itself. And so even under the rosiest assumptions we land in a dystopia.

I do hope that future generations will continue to take up this problem and search for novel solutions. It may be that my pessimism in this thought experiment is as naive and shortsighted as member of the Roman Empire claiming that Rome cannot fall. Just like we didn’t see the internet coming, there may be other developments that we cannot account for now. In the meantime, I’ll continue to be one more voice of protest.

Because it seems to me still that one should maintain that premise 1 of (NAT-FUTILE) is false, and the hellish World X from the thought experiment much earlier seems to help us see this fact. In the hellish World X it is both just as undeniable that the correct thing to do is not to bring a new individual as it is undeniable that there will always be a society that do it anyway. Again, this is not to claim that we are living in World X, but it does show that premise 1 of (NAT-FUTILE) premise 1 does not hold necessarily, as a matter of conceptual necessity, or as some sort of consequence of the meaning of morality.

I suspect that most observant defenders of the argument from Futility will come around on this fact, but will immediately fall back to the argument from Utility. The bleak scenario described above, where we land in a world of fundamentalist religion and authoritarian government really is unsettling. Still, and once again, I’d count it as a victory if the pronatalist would publicly recognize it really is fear that is doing the heavy lifting in their moral framework. It would be a major progress if pronatalists could admit that, while it may otherwise seem so blatantly obvious that one should not bring it about that a perfect stranger finds themselves in a situation in which they will suffer significantly, when otherwise they would not have suffered at all, and where the only prospect of escape is the very risky, terrifying, and painful option of suicide, nevertheless we carry on with it in order to avoid an even more horrifying fate.

Apart from simply bringing us closed to the truth, this admission would encourage an improvement in our attitude towards children, the mentally ill, societal discontents, and any individual who is absolutely indignant to have been forced into a meat suit.

Adoption would be the only really societally acceptable option given that there are any children at all needing adoption.

Psychiatry could start with the standpoint of “Well it’s no surprise you have issues: After all you were essentially kidnapped.. Now let’s see how we can remedy the harm that was done to you.”

We could dispense with all stigma surrounding suicide and make it more widely available. As if one should ever be surprised that a captive might take an opportunity to escape. As if we have the right to tell them that they cannot.

And we can finally see children for being the sacrifices that they are.

1. Shiffrin, Seana Valentine (June 1999). "Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm". Legal Theory. 5 (2): 117–148.

2. A Cursory Rejection of Anti-Natalism

3. We will define Total Utilitarianism below. Note that while 2* can be said to be some sort of consequentialist principal, it is not really a consequence of Total Utilitarianism since we haven’t even considered the magnitudes of the potential reactions of A, B and C.

4. This will involve some sort of quantified modal logic in which the domain of qualification changes when various actions are taken.

5. Is Life Worth Living? (Robin Hanson & Agnes Callard, with William Eliot), Minds Almost Meeting (podcast) Season 4 Episode 2.

6. I had originally planned to link the Wikipedia article for Meiosis here, but the reality is I’m grossly unqualified to speak on genetics. (And I feel I’ve also heard things like that modern science can now detect genetic indicators in modern humans that tell us which of several different ancient demographics they came from. Really fascinating stuff.) If this is truly the crux of the argument for someone, perhaps we could revisit it, but until then I’m going to let it go.

7. A Cursory Rejection of Anti-Natalism

8. According to the philosophers survey approximately 30% of professional philosophers surveyed are consequentialists, and to the best of my understanding, this means that most of this group are Total Utilitarians (there doesn’t seem to be the kind of subdivision in utilitarianism like there is in deontology or virtue ethics). Outside of professional philosophy, communities like the rationalists and effective altruists, albeit small, are up to their ears in Total Utilitarians.

9. Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books. p. 41.

10. Parfit, Derek (2004). "Overpopulation and the Quality of Life". In Tännsjö, Torbjörn; Ryberg, Jesper (eds.). The Repugnant Conclusion: Essays on Population Ethics. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy. Vol. 15. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. pp. 7–22.

11. Le Guin, Ursula (2017). “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Harper

12. Jo Cameron

13. Seriously though, once you start seeing this phenomenon, it’s hard to stop seeing it. Someone will be making a joke about how awful life is or how terrible humanity is, when ten minutes ago they were telling you that they are expecting their second child.

14. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

15. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-national-total.html

16. Indeed, the table that the CDC cites, gives not absolute numbers but percentages, and there the percentage had serious thoughts is 5.2 and the percentage that made a plan is given as 1.5. Presumably they are using a different estimate for total population than that given in the census table above. If anyone has more information on this, let me know; I’ll update this stat.

17. This is often attributed to Orwell, but quoteinvestigator.com seems to think that he never said it.

18. According to this poll of Americans from 1999 to 2023, it appears that the fraction of vegetarians in the US has actually dropped steadily from 6% in 1999 to 4% in 2023.