I agree that antinatalism shouldn’t be the term for the idea that sentience sucks and should be done away with, but I think antinatalism isn’t the optimal solution anyway (wrt consequences). (I don’t expect this to be controversial; if all sentient life on this planet were to go extinct through a lack of procreation, there would be a not insignificant probability of it existing after we are gone (through evolution of non-sentient life here into sentient life, or through sentient life already existing elsewhere).)

But what is this right to live and die that you speak of? Is it similar to the right to have kids?

Obviously, I know what you mean by it, but it isn’t that clear-cut. The right to have kids conflicts with the right to live and die as you choose, and the right to live and die as you choose conflicts with other people’s rights to the money that you owe them, et cetera. You can encode morality in terms of a bunch of rights and duties, but then you have to decide which rules to break and which to follow.

You can do this by favoring the “more important” rules over the “less important” rules, but how do you decide which is more “important”?

I cannot see any other useful way of measuring the importance of a rule (in the context of a certain decision) than by the consequences that breaking it would have. In sloppy words, you can justify killing a serial killer because all else being equal there would be fewer kills in total. (Note that the justification is NOT that the serial killer has “given up his rights” because he broke a rule or something like that, because it is impossible to live without breaking any of the rules that people usually agree on.)

Furthermore, I cannot see any other useful way of measuring the magnitude of the consequences than in terms of suffering and/or pleasure experienced. Note that in these discussions, “suffering” usually means “experiences which the experiencer considers undesirable”, and similarly for “happiness”. So there is no inherent vagueness or irreconcilable subjectivity there.

Well, that is one way in which the consent/rights/deontologist view is problematic. Another is that it is based on the notion of a self. Yet another is that it has nothing to say on the atrocities that nature commits: we can’t live and die as we choose because nature might build a couple of healthy, natural tumors in your body and since nature is not a “morally culpable” entity, there is no way to condemn this in such a moral framework. At best you could go look for someone to sue for negligence.

(In the context of the thought experiment, the second button would leave people alive and vulnerable to reality, which in all likelihood would get worse as most of them died and society would no longer be able to provide for them. The consequences would be disastrous, but your moral framework has no way to recognize and take into account this harm, as none of its rules would be broken (except the “minor offense” of pushing the button).)

What is “right” and “wrong” as determined by this intricate web of self/intent/consent/right/culpability/fairness/intuition/respect/privacy is a gray area. That I agree with. However, what is “good” and “bad” in terms of consequences is perfectly black and white, at least in a metaphorical sense. The goodness of an action is an objective property of that action: it is the goodness of reality after that action. We may not always be able to measure/predict this goodness perfectly accurately, but that does not make it any less objective (by which I mean independent of what we think).

What is this “goodness”? This is the only morally loaded question we’re left with. That’s a huge cleanup when compared to the rule-based mess where every rule was potentially controversial. Once we settle this, it’s all clear-cut from there. If you decide that paperclips are good, then it follows that you should always act in such a way as to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. At any one moment in time, which of the possible actions available to you would maximize this is an indisputable fact of reality.

If we could get people to give up their irrational beliefs (god, natural rights, karma, gaia, et cetera), I am pretty damn sure we could finally agree that it is only suffering and pleasure that matter. We would be united under the common goal of maximizing some combination of those two. In this light, pushing the first button is far superior to pushing the second button. Note that while the antinatalist asymmetry heavily involves the concept of self, it is true on a lower level as well: causing a brain to be created causes more suffering than pleasure because the desire for pleasure and the frustration of said desire manifests as suffering.

An example of where this goes wrong is in the case of rape. To many, rape is clearly a violation of the consent of the rapee by the rapist. On the other hand, in some countries, the rapee is held accountable instead. (This is popular wisdom; I do not know if it is accurate, but it illustrates the point.) So, is it wrong to rape, or is it wrong to get raped? Or is morality relative?

What apparently goes unnoticed is that both sides agree that rape is bad, as in, undesirable. There is no insurmountable subjectivity or relativity when it comes to judging the consequences (you know, those things that you actually care about). It only gets complicated when you want to do all that crazy accountability stuff.

Is it wrong for a hurricane to destroy a city? It depends on the hurricane’s culpability (its parents may be responsible instead if it was not raised according to some arbitrary standards), its intent, some karma-inspired notion of fairness, whether the city consented to or “was asking for” the destruction, whether asserting wrongness is consistent with deeply held intuitions, and then still on who you ask.

Is the destruction of a city by a hurricane bad? Yes.

Imagine Alice, a girl just like you and me, being given the choice to live one of three different futures:

• a future in which she buys the winning lottery ticket
• a future in which she buys a losing lottery ticket
• a future in which she never participates in the lottery

Which should she choose?

Why, the one she thinks will lead to the best outcome, of course!

Obviously, which outcome is “best” depends on what she finds “good”. There are those who expect that winning the lottery will make them unhappy, and there are those for whom it seems to be the greatest good. This difference is not as irreconcilable as is commonly thought, but, in the interest of tackling controversial things one at a time, let’s assume that only Alice’s interests matter.

Alice just wants money. So she dislikes the future in which she buys a losing lottery ticket. She likes the future in which she never participates in the lottery, but not as much as she likes the future in which she buys the winning lottery ticket. For Alice, the options are ranked from worst to best like so:

1. the future in which she buys a losing lottery ticket
2. the future in which she never participates in the lottery
3. the future in which she buys the winning lottery ticket

Hold on… What is this that I see? Did your browser just assign numbers to these futures?

Indeed it did! How convenient! Now we can compare them by their numbers instead of by their wordy descriptions. Alice likes 3 better than 2, and 2 still better than 1. Each of these futures has effectively been reduced to a number. This shows that a future (which is not relevantly different from a life) can be reduced to a number.

Don’t roll your eyes and leave just yet. I will now address any objections I see myself and any objections which you bother to inform me of. If you feel your particular objection is not addressed, please post it in the comments. Feel free to start off your comment by saying this is “wrong on so many levels”; just be sure you point out at least one concrete problem.

There is more to life than money!

There is. This is just an example. In fact, it is an example in which it was assumed that only money matters.

But this kind of objection is valid. When you reduce things to numbers, you lose information. This is sort of the point. You need to make explicit what it is that you like, and base your reduction on that.

If Alice disliked the threat of being robbed, she would have to reduce differently. The future in which she wins the lottery might then no longer be the best option. She will have to trade off money and threat of robbery, and how she does this will depend on how important she finds both. (This importance can be reduced to a number.)

Actually, since a robbery would probably cost Alice money, this would already have to be taken into account in the original example in which she only cares about money. But that would be unnecessarily complicated for the purpose of the example.

There is more to life than good and bad!

Yes, there is. But if you want to measure how the goodnesses and badnesses of different options stack up to one another, then they are all you need to take into account. The reduction abstracts away the irrelevant stuff.

What if Alice’s conception of good and bad changes over time?

This is a solved problem of mathematics: you just integrate with respect to time.

What if two futures reduce to the same number?

Then they are equally desirable and therefore, just like the numbers, effectively equivalent.

As an example, Alice might have had a fourth option of a future in which she participates in multiple lotteries and breaks even in the end. If money is all she cares about, then this future and the one in which she does not participate at all are equally good.

Shouldn’t the future in which she loses money reduce to a negative number?

It doesn’t matter. Alice has to choose from the three options given. She can’t not choose.

In real life, you don’t always know all options beforehand, and you don’t want to have to do the ranking all over again when a new option reveals itself. You want to reduce each option to a useful number independent of what the other options are. Then when a new option becomes apparent, you can just reduce it to a number and compare that number to the numbers you already have.

These numbers aren’t useful beyond this pathetic example.

Correct. Most Alices care about much more than money alone, and most Alices don’t get to choose their futures. Additionally, most Alices’ desires change over time.

Let’s say you are shopping for a car. You want it to have a high mileage, low maintenance costs, and lots of cargo space. The first thing to realize is that these properties are already reductions to numbers.

Your mileage may vary, but the advertised mileage is still a fairly reliable indicator of how much the car will cost to drive. Advertised mileages may invariably be higher than actual mileages, but this does not matter much if all of the cars are off by roughly the same amount. (Although you should take this into account if you also have the option not to buy a car.)

The cargo space is reduced to a measure of volume. The space may not be one contiguous space as you’d like, but rather a bunch of inaccessible nooks and crannies that you’ll never be able to fit your drumkit into. A better number to go by might be a weighted sum of the volume and some measure of fragmentation.

The low maintenance cost is an expected cost. It is the sum, over everything that could go wrong, of the probability of this going wrong times the cost of this going wrong. Let’s say you’re looking at a particular car which you are planning to drive for the next five years. You are 90% certain that you will have to change the oil ten times, which will cost you $300 in total. You are 10% certain that the exhaust will fall out from under the car during this period, which your uncle will weld back together again for you for $50. You are 30% certain that that crack in the windshield will spread to the point where it needs replacing, which will cost you $500. If this were all that you expected to go wrong, the expected maintenance cost for the next five years would be 0.1*50 + 0.3*500 + 0.9*300 = $425.

You are not actually directly interested in these three properties. They are measured in different units and represent incompatible quantities. You are interested in what they are worth to you. Mileage may be worth 1 goodness unit per mile per gallon, whereas maintenance costs may score -2 goodness units per dollar per year. This is not always simply linear: an increase in cargo space may be worth less to you if you already have lots of cargo space.

Eventually, you will be able to sum the car’s worth on each of these properties, thus reducing it to a useful number.

That does not sound very practical.

You don’t have to be so precise and explicit about it. Your head already works roughly in this way, except that it is influenced by biases and irrelevancies (such as the color of the car). If you learn to correct for this, you will probably do better than you are doing now.

That said, being more explicit about what you are interested in can help prevent you from making bad decisions. If one of the cars you’re looking at reduces to a low score even though you really like the car, something is wrong. Whatever it is that makes you prefer the car, you apparently did not properly account for it. You need to examine what it is.

If it turns out that you find mileage more important than you thought, or that you also want power windows (the worst thing since sliced bread), go ahead and reevaluate the options.

If it turns out that you prefer the car because it smells better, you might want to disregard your gut feel and go with the cold, hard numbers instead. Baking an apple pie inside of a car is a well-known car salesman’s trick.

Now that the broken value system of religion has been overthrown, we can rebuild the notion of objective value in a rational way.

The necessity of an objective value system

This is necessary because even nihilists are not nihilists. In daily life, all of us avoid pain and seek pleasure every step of the way. You know, as if these were somehow valuable. We value laws against things like rape and murder because they probably help us avoid that which we value negatively. Rapists and murderers are no significant exceptions to this; in the worst case they might disagree on this or that law.

Given that we necessarily act based on some implicit value equation in daily life, is there any reason this value equation should be different from the more explicit, philosophically justified one we intellectually accept? Is it defensible to flesh out a coherent worldview and accompanying value equation, and then throw it all to the wind when it actually comes down to making decisions, basing them on some separate value equation you actually use instead?

For example, I have a drinking habit which makes it hard for me to do that which my philosophical value equation tells me I should do. My daily-life equation evidently says it is good to go get drunk, or I would not feel a desire to do so. But I should work toward influencing my daily-life equation so that eventually it matches my philosophical equation.

In other words, we should let our everyday lives be guided by rationality, not by the whims of our biology. Nature has revealed its true colors beyond doubt: it does not work in sentient life’s interests. I think that to defend a difference between your philosophical value equation and the equation you “actually use” is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.

So, an objective value system is necessary, and the best one we can come up with should be honored.

An objective value system

Nihilism appears to be right in that there is nothing of objective value. But this is mere wordplay. Since value is subjective, there would be no value at all if it weren’t for sentient life (the subjects). We can construct a notion of objective value based on their subjective values.

By definition, negative sensations are subjectively valued negatively, and positive sensations are subjectively valued positively.

“Earwax tastes good” is subjectively true or false, but “I think earwax tastes good” is objectively true or false. If I think earwax tastes good, me tasting earwax is objectively good. (Obviously, this should be seen as an isolated case.)

Thus, a subject’s experience of negative sensations should be objectively valued negatively, and a subject’s experience of positive sensations should be objectively valued positively.

Implications

Evidently, objective value exists: I have described it to you.

To reject it, you must either show that there is no need for an objective value system, or that the proposed system is worse than some alternative (given the need for an objective value system).

To accept it, you must recognize that you do not live solely for yourself. (This does not mean you have to go out of your way to step over every bug you would otherwise crush. This is where value equations come in.)

Notes

I have handwaved my way across some things here, such as what exactly a value equation might look like, and how complicated decisions can be made in a practical way on the basis of the value system described. These are not really the point of this post, but I intend to write about them in the future.

The system described is, as far as I know, just utilitarianism, and the usual criticisms apply. The point of this post is to show that we are obliged to establish, improve and discard in favor of superior alternatives an objective value system in the same way we do this for scientific theories, and that we should honor the value system established in this way.

Anyone interested in such a promisingly sane future should visit No Bad Memes, the author of which intends to set up a small community based on this and similar ideas (in order to avoid having to wait for popular opinion to change for the better).

Ik zei dat een baby doodmartelen gerechtvaardigd is ALS dat het totale leed vermindert. Dit is waar ongeacht het verschil in leed.

De waarschijnlijkheid dat zielen bestaan voor dat ze geboren worden of nadat ze doodgaan is zo goed als nul. Kleiner dan de waarschijnlijkheid dat het beter is voor mensen om doodgemarteld te worden. En dat is klein. Het is belachelijk om daar zoveel gewicht aan te hangen.

Wat mensen zelf van hun leven vinden doet er niet toe. Het is dan al te laat. Sowieso zijn die mensen partijdig, zie hier hoe ik dat waarschijnlijk beter zou kunnen weten dan die mensen zelf.

Nogmaals, er is geen toekomst en die wordt aan niemand opgelegd, tenzij je erop staat om irrelevante betekenissen te gebruiken voor die woorden. Als jij het echt waarschijnlijk vindt dat de oneindige voorraad ongeboren zielen in een wachtkamer staat te dringen om een lichaam te bemachtigen, nee, dan kan ik daar niks tegenin brengen, behalve dat het idioot is.

Het beeindigen van bewust leven is WEL een oplossing voor het kut-zijn van het leven. Wegrennen van een probleem is normaal gesproken vaak een slecht idee omdat het vervelende gevolgen kan hebben en er betere oplossingen zijn. Niet hier. Als je de stekker eruit trekt, trek je ook de stekker uit de slechte-gevolgenmachine. Niet wegrennen maar oplossen is in de meeste gevallen goed levensadvies, maar, nogmaals, dat geldt _in_ het leven, niet noodzakelijk _buiten_ het leven of m.b.t de grens daartussen.

Hetzelfde met dat “acceptabele” leven. Het wordt als wijs gezien om genoegen te nemen met minder, omdat dat IN HET LEVEN vaak het beste is. Maar je moet dat niet meteen als axiomatisch nemen en zeggen dat genoegen nemen met minder ALTIJD het beste is.

Daarnaast is wat goed en fout is NIET subjectief, althans niet op een relevante manier. Jij hebt er vast iets op tegen als ik je maandag tijdens de toets HCI levend vil (nou ja, het is wel HCI dus je zult op dat moment je leven toch al hekelen). Ik veroorzaak dan onnodig lijden en dat is fout.

Rest mij nog te zeggen dat het leven in alle technische bedrijfstakken rationeel wordt benaderd, met goede resultaten.

Somehow, in the light of my life experience, (because it’s the only experience I can experience), I have to try to understand, or, put myself in a mental place where I wish I were never born. Beyond that I must wish I never had children or grandchildren. I must, if I am to make any serious attempt to see the world through “Antinatalist” eyes, somehow, see life as not worth living. The curious part of all this is the fact that, for myself and I would say the overwhelming majority of other humans is… I can’t.

You do not need to do any of this. You simply need to realize that those who are never born have no need for the good things in life. There is no cost to pulling life’s plug. On the other hand, there is a cost to not pulling the plug.

Culture manufactures the stupidity we desperately need and crave to function in this world. It is, for lack of a better way of putting it “a skill” that sentient beings had to develop. It is the “invention” of a creature in need of something to absorb the chaos and overwhelming mystery of the universe it finds itself imprisoned within.

Indeed, sentient life has needs, and when these needs are frustrated, it suffers. Creating a sentient being entails creating these needs, which can never be a good thing.

We should by NO means be shocked that a very small percentage of the human population find themselves bereft of that skill.

Whatever. I am not bereft of this skill, nor is Jim Crawford, nor are most people who frequent his blog. I defy you to point out one “antinatalist” who is bereft of this.

It would be shocking, I submit, were this not the case. What kind of a universe would it be after all if it did not, in fact, contain everything?

If you define “everything” to mean “everything contained by the universe”, it would be a strange universe indeed. What is the point of this sophistry?

The ability that comes with sentience to see and predict the future seems, in Antinatalists, to be wholly untempered with the prerequisite cognitive skill to construct, psychologically, an invented reality that both cushions the horror of an inevitable and painful extinction and demands, for the overwhelmingly majority of sentient beings, that life go on. In short, they are victims of imagination failure.

Either that, or they have not allowed this invented reality to cloud their evaluation of life. I for one actively try to see the actual reality, despite being distracted by the invented reality that my subconscious keeps creating. Maybe you should stop telling yourself stories to glorify insanity and try the same instead.

The question I think that should interest us is not why Antinatalists exist, but, why they are not in the majority? Life is painful and brutal and short and each and every thing we come to love must die, or end in rot or destruction. The question… “Why bother if pain and loss are the inevitable outcome?”… must, it seems to me, be answered with the obvious… “No point really.”

*narrows eyes*

Proceed.

That is what I find so curious. In all but a very small minority of sentient beings the question isn’t answered that way at all. Far from it! Instead, since the first sentient being walked the earth the opposite has been the case. Life, with all the horror of death and pain has been not only preserved and continued, but championed above all else. Why should this be?

Because those who did not have a cushion to derail their judgment, went extinct. Yes, it really is as simple as that. Nature selected in favor of (some level of) detachment from reality.

The answer, I would suggest, is obvious. Imagination trumps pain.

It does not. Buddhist monks dedicate their lives to overcoming suffering. Yet you claim that this sought-after state of mind is built into all sentient organisms, save for the few of us who see life for what it is. If I ever do end up skinning you alive, I’ll ask you again whether imagination trumps pain. I think you will find that the goggles do nothing.

Could it be that the answer, the goal or the purpose, if evolution can be said to have a goal or purpose, was NOT sentience, but its necessary twin? Could the universe have been after wonder and conjecture and imagination using sentience, with all it’s inherent pain and horror, as a mere vehicle, a means to an end? Is that why we cherish art? Is that why we have music?

Even if this were somehow the intent of the universe, what makes you think we should go along with it?

Is that why those who see the price to be paid by life in matter as too high are and must be continually removed from the gene pool?

Probably not. There is no evidence that the universe is after anything. Sentience emerged indeliberately. If pessimists are and must be continually removed from the gene pool, that is just another unfortunate indeliberate side-effect.

Nothing of positive value would be lost if this game were to end. Yet you want this at best worthless game to continue, despite the apparent fact that it is worse than worthless because some if not all players are known to suffer under it.

The claim in this post’s title is ridiculous on its face. It makes no sense to say that someone who is happy is really not. Who would know better than they themselves? And if they were unhappy but didn’t realize it, how would it matter?

But the question of whether you are happy with your life is very different from the question of whether your pleasure has outweighed your pain. In the context of antinatalism, “Does life suck?” means “Does the pain in your life outweigh your pleasure?”.

Let me first note that pleasure exists: it seems to come only in the form of relief from pain, but the pleasurable feelings are real. Also, how valuable the pain and pleasure in your life have been is subjective. (But do not make the mistake of assigning higher weight to pleasure than pain just because you like pleasure more than you do pain.)

When answering the question, you should take into account all pain and all pleasure you have experienced, are experiencing and probably will experience. Right now, you are probably sitting comfortably at your computer. Because of that, you may downplay the pain you have endured up until this point.

Even while taking this into account you may underestimate what you have been through. Many people advise themselves that whatever pain they are currently in, it will only be temporary. This is good advice and mostly true, but the same holds for pleasure and absence of pain. It’s not that comfort is the default state of existence that you return to after some short insignificant dips into misfortune. I would argue that it is exactly the other way around, but the point here is that you should be aware of these biases. Do not discount current or past painful periods as “just a passing phase”, they are no different from your comfortable or pleasurable periods in this regard.

For example, someone who has successfully battled cancer is likely to overrate their life. They do not account for the shock upon diagnosis, the chemotherapy, the fear of not getting through, … It’s not that for them the “pleasure” of overcoming outweighs all that, either. They simply sweep it under the rug.

For those who think this is an unwarranted assertion, consider this: if the pleasure of overcoming cancer outweighed the pain of struggling with it, would it be a good thing to endow everyone with cancer, provided that they will all be cured eventually? Is it really a net benefit to have endured cancer? What if the cancer keeps coming back? Is that even better than overcoming it just once?

No. This is clearly an example of discounting past pain. Many people, including myself, fall prey to this all the time (remember them good ol’ times?).

The discounting of future pain is more difficult to exemplify because I admittedly am not very good at predicting the future. Just like pretty much everyone else. Hah! Gotcha!

Now, next time you have a headache, are stuck in traffic, feel miserable mentally and/or physically, fill out your tax forms, lose someone you love, pull your hair out over some colleague, break your leg, secretly hate your life, or are out of toilet paper when you most need it, think of this. It all counts.

Hopefully, you can now more accurately evaluate your life.

In response to this, I have two (unoriginal) thought experiments.

• Imagine you were given the choice to either die painlessly right now, or be tortured to death as slowly and painfully as possible. In effect, you get to choose either nonexistence or a horrible existence. Does comparing existence and nonexistence still make no sense? Would you argue that there is no reason to consider one option over the other?
• Imagine a man and a woman, both carriers of Tay-Sachs disease, who want to have a child together. The disease makes it likely[1] that a child created by them will suffer increasingly horribly and finally die at the age of four. Would it be better if their hypothetical child never existed, or does comparing existence and nonexistence still not make any sense (i.e., would it be perfectly fine if these people had such a child)?

Clearly, I see no reason why comparing existence to nonexistence is nonsensical.

Birth can be a harm because the person born is around after the fact. What matters is that the “victim” will experience the consequences (in this case until their death).

Consequently, I do not think death is necessarily a harm to the person dying; there is no one to experience the consequences after the fact. What harms is the anticipation and the suffering leading up to death.

As The Plague Doctor notes in the comments: this is why omnicide is justified, as long as it’s (1) simultaneous (2) instantaneous and (3) without prior warning.

[1] A probability of 0.25, according to Wikipedia, but the number does not really matter.

Footnotes:
[1] I have heard that with decades of commitment, one can learn to (appear to) be indifferent to these sensations, though.
[2] A sadistic individual might value others’ suffering positively, but I see no reason to cater to them.

It bothers me greatly that the latter view is much more socially accepted than the former view. It seems that people hate people, and people like to hate people.

Usually when I say that life sucks, people shout “NEVER!” and then proceed to treat me as if I tortured their firstborn to the death. Were I instead to say that taxes suck, or that slow drivers suck, or that politicians, hunger, disease, religion, or the medical establishment sucks, or that multinationals, governments, governing bodies or mean people suck, then people would agree without much opposition.

They might give some counterexamples like a couple of politicians that don’t suck, or explain why taxes are necessary, but they won’t be violently opposed to any of these notions.

Not so with the idea that existence causes suffering, even though all of these examples are practically inevitable consequences of existence.

It really seems to me that people insist on blaming people for everything. Ironically, it fills me with a passionate hatred of humankind. This is truly one of the only things that can do so.