This video discusses only the asymmetry argument for anti-natalism. It is worth making clear -- and I should have made this more clear in the video -- that Benatar himself presents the asymmetry argument as only one part of the case for anti-natalism. The other important part are his arguments for the view that our quality of life is in general very poor. For pessimistic arguments along these lines, see my videos: Philosophical Pessimism: th-cam.com/video/pK91YWOLz_s/w-d-xo.html Schopenhauer's Pessimism: th-cam.com/video/5MuAJ9OR0Vk/w-d-xo.html
hi Kane, i wanted to ask you if you planning to make more videos about buddhist philosophy in the future? Because i really enjoyed the ones that you made.
@@rosszindulatuhonaljdaganat8090 I don't have any plans for that in the immediate future. It's something that I'd like to revisit, but it's rather outside my area of expertise so I get a bit worried about covering it adequately.
Understandable, but would you be able to point us to any sources to learn more about Buddhist/East Asian philosophy? Thank you so much for your videos as well!
@@AbdulMalik-uq8jr there is a website called buddhist elibrary where you can find a tons of downlodable text about buddhism and also there is a website called The Open Buddhist University which also have a tons of text, i hope i helped
I don't think the original asymetry argument is convincing, but i do think there is an asymetry that should be taken seriously. Many people have mentioned the conscent argument and Kants categorical imperative. As people who are unborn can't conscent, and are always used as a means to some end by the natalist. But these also have some problems, i think the issue is slightly more subtle. The real diffrence in approach seems to be between the utalitarians which use children as a means to an end, who get children for a 'greater good/goal/ or their egoistic desires' and those who think its immoral to do so, with the knowlage that the child might think their life to be unjustly created (judging by the amount of antinatalists its pretty likely, but even if it wasn't as likely, it might still not 0) SO the question becomes if its moral to create life knowing its a gamble? Statements like: 'its immoral to gamble with other peoples lives' can be used as catch all term for such a morality, as one is perfectly able to gamble with ones own life as one already exists, but should not do so when it comes to other people. The challange would be : what would the response from the natalist be when their antinatalist offspring accuses them of such a mindless gamble? "You could have gotten a son that loved life" seems to sidestep the issue. I see no response to this problem so far. All people have is 'too bad' , imagine baseing a morality on that. Then its just easier to ignore morality all together.
I agree, the problem for me is not that I'm convinced nonexistence is always preferable to coming into being but that I think it's clear there are many people for whom it would have been much better had they never been born, there's no way to know whether this will be the case for your prospective offspring, there's no way to get their consent beforehand to take that risk, and, once brought into existence, a whole host of factors like the instinctive fear of death, concern for how one's death would affect others etc. make it very difficult for that person to reverse the harm by choosing not to exist.
@@incoher i for one only think of utility as an individual goal, not in terms of group utility. If one purely thinks about utility as a utaliterian where utility is "a greater good/greater goal/furfillmemt of some desires in larger number" it seems pretty difficulty to judge suicide favourably (atleast as a general rule, because it might lead to unforseen consequances for some greater number of people). But If one thinks in terms of the utility it has for the individual, its pretty easy to see how suffering in life and choice of death could make suicide seem like a Great option.
Dont we always gamble with other peoples lives to some degree? For example, taking your car out for a drive. You take a risk knowing that you can seriously injure people, but you're aware of the necessary responsibilities to driving. There are also precautions in place to minimize the possibility of you injuring others. But even with perfect precautions and focus, accidents are bound to occur. This is why its important to discuss the ratio of probabilities because this is the reason why it's not seen as morally wrong to take this gamble and drive your car (in this context) if you are expectedly responsible. Parents take a gamble when they decide to have a child, but they're expected (as well as selflessly motivated) to take precautions to minimize the suffering of their child and provide a strong foundation for future joy and fullfillment. However, there is nonzero probability that something unexpected could happen, and the child you bring into the world suffers from a physical or mental disability. This nonzero probability could manifest in the driving example as someone accidentally tripping into your incoming vehicle, or a hidden potential problem in your vehicle/body suddenly actualizes. Whether or not the choice to have a child is mindless or wrong can be argued. If the parents are in a situation where they know that the future for their family/society/child is extremely bleak and they still decide have a child, then you can argue that they are being selfish and mindless. But what if the parents healthy and well off and live within a stable society that puts great effort into minimizing suffering? Well thats a bit more complicate. There is certainly a higher probability that the child will be content, but also a nonzero probability that they will not. How much greater does the former relative to the latter have to be to justify bringing the child into existence? Fully so? If thats the case then no, it will never be justified to bring a child into existence. Is that reasonable? Well, you can also argue that.....
@@semi-mojo Well you can argue anything, i agree. The point i was trying to make was an absolutist one, even if we gamble with life when we already live it, that isn't really that much of an counterargument for the point i was making, nor is it an excuse i would argue. As the whole point about the gambling is that its supposedly intrinsicly bad to take a gamble on someone elses behalf, therfor all other gambles that happen within life are of course a sub set of the inherently bad gamble that started it all, so its actually a much bleaker view on reality, then a counterargument. Someone could jus as easily say "yes, therefor life is even worse, because its a self-prepetuating gamble on other peoples behalf", rather then as your comment would suggest, which doesn't really follow. As an cheeky example, lets say i took a gamble with all your money without you knowing. On the rational that if everything turns right, you should be happy, as you would gain more. And im happy to do it for you as it doesn't effect me (your later disagreement wouldn't matter to me, anyways, because according to me, i did the best calculation that was possible from my perspective). So if i win you should be happy, and if i lose on your behalf, you can't do anything about it other then express you disagreement after the fact (which i don't care much for anyways, as the gamble was surely good, based on my morals, and my assesment of the risks) on second though, im not even going to ask you about doing this, in fact il do it now, and you can later express your morals and your assesment of the risks to me :^)
From a deontological standpoint, if we had a general moral duty not to inflict avoidable harm on others, then would that not justify anti-natalism on the near-certain presumption that a person who comes into existence will be harmed at least once at some point in their life? Even if the pleasure they experience would (or at least, could) "outweigh" it, that would make no difference with respect to my DUTY to avoid causing harm. I can avoid inflicting (or proximately causing) this harm by not bringing such a person into existence, therefore I should not create them, full stop. Additionally, negative duties not to harm are generally thought to outweigh positive duties to help. You're not required to go out of your way to make everyone around you happier than they are, but you shouldn't (on most deontological ethics) intentionally make anybody's life even a little bit more miserable if you don't have to. So even if the person I could bring into existence might have a great life on balance, I may not have any positive obligation to this hypothetical person to grant them that great life, yet have a negative obligation not to cause them any harm. "100000 years of bliss for a single finger prick" would be unjustified if I were a deontologist who believes I shouldn't cause (or bring about circumstances that will result in) a single finger prick. And since we're focusing on my duties as a moral agent who already exists, we avoid a lot of these abstract questions about what's good or bad for a nonexistent person; it's bad FOR ME to bring another person into existence because I personally would be violating my moral duties; the nonexistence of a potential person is merely a consequence of my behaving correctly, and I'm a deontologist who isn't motivated by consequences. This suggests that if a general duty to not harm exists, any act of creation is immoral; save, perhaps, sentient beings just popping into existence acausally or at least unconsciously, as we can't morally blame a non-agent or a creator that lacks moral agency. Deontologist anti-natalism therefore seems much stronger than Benatar's form, provided one can establish a general duty not to cause avoidable harms, which seems... pretty reasonable, to me.
I feel like this is still going to rest on something along the lines of Benatar's asymmetry argument, because surely the objection would be that by bringing into existence a person who has a good life overall, I'm not harming them. Yes, various harms will occur in their life, but those harms are outweighed by the benefits so their life in general is not a harm. Suppose we say that by performing an action that results in any harms whatsoever for a person, that action is a harm, no matter what benefits the action brings. In that case, I think most people would just deny that there is a moral duty not to inflict avoidable harms. It's perfectly acceptable - indeed, perhaps even obligatory - for the parent to take their child to the dentist, even though the child is terrified of the dentist. I would be inclined to say that taking the child to the dentist does not harm the child all-things-considered, since it promotes their well-being in the long run. If we insist that it does harm the child, then my view is that there is clearly no duty not to inflict avoidable harms.
@@KaneB A few thoughts. I'm not convinced it would require resting on something akin to the asymmetry argument, as I'm not convinced that matters of symmetry are motivating for certain deontological frameworks (none of which I necessarily endorse, to be clear; this is a thought experiment trying to parallel track Benatar's argument from a different position). "Yes, various harms will occur in their life, but those harms are outweighed by the benefits so their life in general is not a harm." But the issue from this hypothetical deontologist standpoint has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical person to be produced. It's with what THEIR moral duties are as an existent moral agent. THEY have some duty not to bring a person into existence if by doing so that person would come to some harm at some point. The calculus is basically "Is it wrong for me to knowingly bring about circumstances wherein a person would foreseeably -- indeed, almost certainly -- come to harm at any point but for my bringing those circumstances about? If yes, I should not do it." If this calculus is at least plausible as a general rule, then it seems to bring anyone who holds it down firmly on the side of not creating another person under any circumstances, not because of anything to do with that possible person's life, but because it's wrong for the would-be parent to knowingly cause any amount of suffering to their would-be child, and creating them would be exactly that sort of situation. I don't think a deontologist has to buy that bringing into existence a life that is net pleasurable/beneficial/good is "not harming them." Again, it seems plausible that if it's a rule that I shouldn't prick somebody's finger, then I shouldn't prick somebody's finger even if doing so would ensure them 100,000 years of bliss. The question is what I as a moral agent with certain duties must do; it doesn't matter if by doing something I have an obligation not to do that something beneficial would result, because under (many) deontological frameworks what is moral is fulfilling one's duties. However, you raise a fair point that perhaps this general rule, while possibly intuitive at first glance, may not actually work out so cleanly: "It's perfectly acceptable - indeed, perhaps even obligatory - for the parent to take their child to the dentist, even though the child is terrified of the dentist. I would be inclined to say that taking the child to the dentist does not harm the child all-things-considered, since it promotes their well-being in the long run. If we insist that it does harm the child, then my view is that there is clearly no duty not to inflict avoidable harms." That's a fair point, and I have thought about that, but there are a couple of possible ways around it: 1) Deontological frameworks can have conflicts of duties and moral obligations which have to be resolved in some fashion, as inaction would often be a worse violation of moral duties. Possibly, the calculus changes when dealing with an existing child with an existing dental problem, as now we have parental obligations that might override the general duty not to knowingly inflict avoidable harms, or a social duty to care for the welfare of those who are unable to care for themselves, neither of which exist between the purely-hypothetical parent and their purely-hypothetical uncreated child. Since we (probably?) owe no duties to nonexistent persons (maybe?), the dentist example becomes disanalogous to the anti-natalist argument (unless it doesn't, in which case we have even weirder problems), because the dentist argument relies on there being conflicting duties to actual persons. 2) One might instead modify the phrasing of the general duty to narrow the prohibition from all avoidable harms to avoidable harms based on certain intentions such that there remains a clear distinction between the dentist example and the having-a-child-at-all example. I think such a modification treads too close to the asymmetry argument though, to the point it might just be the same thing by different means, but I think it's at least possible to hash out a general duty that rationally obliges you to take your existing kid to the dentist but that also rationally obliges you to never deliberately create another kid, for reasons other than a balance of net benefits and harms. 3) The deontologist can bite the bullet and be like a Jain or something and just say that no, it's NOT acceptable to take a child to the dentist if doing so would traumatize them. The benefit of a deontological framework like this is that it allows for stubborn insistence on the rightness or wrongness of an action notwithstanding the consequences. If taking this kid to the dentist would prevent total nuclear war, it would still be ethical to refuse to do it and unethical to cave. We don't have to find the deontologist's stubbornness admirable or reasonable, but we can't call it inconsistent. In the ethical framework of a person who holds to this principle and lives by it, they are moral, no matter how badly things turn out as a result. Now that I think about it, some kind of consent principle may be the answer to both #2 and #3. Perhaps we have a duty not to intentionally and knowingly inflict direct or proximate harms on other individuals without their knowledge and consent. For instance, in the dentist example, it may be possible to convince the child that although she is terrified, it will be much scarier to stay in pain from her toothache, and thereby obtain her consent through persuasion. The disanalogy with creating new persons then becomes clear: A person who does not yet exist cannot consent to anything, so if the general principle is not to do something harmful unless you have knowing consent, then bringing a child into existence knowing they will experience at least a little bit of harm is impermissible because they cannot possibly consent to it. Now I do think it's possible to counter this with claims that e.g. there are people who are medically unconscious and unable to consent to invasive surgery that might save their lives (but they could consent ahead of time through a medical card, etc.); or that children lack the mental capacity to offer knowing consent even if persuaded (but we might still have the overriding parental duties for the deontologist to fall back on; and I'm not convinced a child can't consent to ANYTHING, so to such extent as a child is capable of understanding a potential harm and consenting to the risk of it, that should be fine). But I think we're getting closer to the idea that you could have a general deontological principle that doesn't rely on the asymmetry argument but still concludes in anti-natalism.
Happy to see this topic ! I've had already encountered it and had a big reservation about the fact that it only focus on the moral imperative relative to the offspring and not the parents, potential future friends or partner (and negatively to potential enemy I guess). As you stated, this fact alone make the absolut case for anti-natalism of Benatar's argument crumble and it becomes situational. An argument I have against Benatar's asymmetry argument itself is that il is made for the sake of the may-be existing offspring. An utilitarist may be arguing that it is the total good or bad that counts and so the argument should be made for the Universe. But with that, the two part of the balance are {Universe with offspring exists and the one without don't} and {Universe without offspring exists and the one with don't}, this would symetrize (if that word exists) the argument rendering it moot. You could hold this case for non-utilitarist also I think. (I don't have much background in philosophy so I don't now if this really make any sense) Anyways, like your videos very much, I'm very happy to hear some philo again :)
Yeah, I think if we frame things in terms of total good and bad in an impersonal sense, then the question just becomes whether there is more good in life than bad. We might well draw an anti-natalist conclusion from this: Benatar has argued that life is mostly bad, and I tend to share his pessimistic assessment here. But this is a separate point from the asymmetry argument.
I used to see life as mostly bad but as I've gotten myself together it's almost entirely good. Hard to be convinced by antinatalism when your just enjoying life.
Fantastic video Kane! I think you presented some really good objections. I actually wrote my masters thesis on this very subject, but I mainly looked into the other asymmetries, to see if they in fact are true, and if so, if Benatar's asymmetry is the best explanation for them. I don't think I can post a link here, but it is titled "Better Never to Have Been?: A Critique of David Benatar’s Axiological Asymmetry Argument for Antinatalism" and is on Diva portal. Please have a read if you're interested!
12:37 I think asymmetry in bringing people is merely because of how much we violate body autonomy? Forcing someone to be pregnant (due to child probaly will have happy life) is heavier than forcing someone to make abortion (due to genetical disase) it is obvious. Actually I don't agree most of the asymmetry argument but that part sticks with me most I guess
Great vid, I'm not sure I buy the asymmetry argument entirely, but l do want to clarify one point though. Benatar notes this regarding Harman's argument in Still better never to have been: "The mistake in this objection is that it misconstrues my basic asymmetry as a logical rather than axiological claim. We certainly can (logically) state that just as the absent pains in Scenario B are good, so the absent pleasures are bad. The problem, I have suggested, is that we should not claim this. Among the reasons for this is that we would then not be able to make all the value judgments we do in the four asymmetries that I say are explained by the basic asymmetry". Whichever valuation you accept should be justified through an appeal to the intuitions that support your position.
Inmendham's asymmetry argument is superior to Benetar's. In order to overcome the idea that harm matters, but pleasure is frivolous, I have to accept that I value frivolity. Whereas with Benetar's, I can just point at the inconsistency.
Thank you for posting these thoughts provoking videos. My perspective: I believe the asymmetry argument is a useful game theory model. However it doesn't apply to non existent persons. Because in the case of a "good v bad" dialectic, this can only be measured by someone who exists to recieve it. Meaning this dialectic is not objective like the presence of water and dirt, but is subjective (requiring a relative human to define it). So if we take your Mars analogy and swap out the "good v bad" dialectic for "water v soil". Then we see how the objective existence of water and soil makes your math different from a dialectic which is subject to an a priori human for existing to qualify it. The asymmetry model can only work when both parties can qualify their dialectics. A non existent person does not qualify a "good v bad" notion.
If you look closely at the asymmetry, in the column where X does not exist, Benatar speaks of absences of harms and benefits. He does not speak of presences of those. That is done in the X exists column
Yeah, this is a popular response to Benatar but I have to say, I don't feel it at all. Seems obvious to me that the absence of harm is very good indeed.
@@KaneBso would you say that an empty, sterile universe is a net good? Would the best possible universe be a massive multiverse with no entities in it to suffer? I would think such a scenario so totally neutral. Neither desirable nor undesirable.
@@injinii4336 or perhaps suffering still exist, but no entity has the ability to come into awareness of such suffering or acknowledge that it is a suffering
@@injinii4336 I don't agree with the asymmetry argument. The best possible universe would be one with loads of pleasure. But a totally empty universe would be good, yeah.
The big problem I have with the asymmetry argument is that it relies on an unspoken, commonsensical view of personhood that I find incredibly suspect. The "commonsense" belief is that every person is some very special and unique subject of experience during their life, but before their birth was Nothingess and there will be Nothingness after their death. If they never were born, it'd just be Nothingness for them. Most people (and even a large amount of philosophers, for some reason) seem to just take that for granted, but I think it's a deeply implausible and nonsensical view for many reasons. The argument rests on an asymmetry between people who were born and experience life, and people who weren't/haven't yet been born and don't experience life. But, the asymmetry only seems to have any force if I understand "people who weren't born" as being these strange and mysterious subjects who are going through the non-experience of Nothingness, and could be ripped out of their neutral and peaceful non-existence if we suddenly made them exist. If "people who weren't born" doesn't mean this, and it just refers to the hypothetical concept of a person who was born in a possible universe, the asymmetry looks more like a category error. It's no longer an asymetry between two options we could be, but an asymmetry between real people and fictional people.
Exactly. I find the whole notion of "my consciousness began to exist when I was born" as absurd. It's a secular version of some form of implied soul. As if the consciousness you have is somehow uniquely granted to you with birth and expired with death.
I find the existence/non-existence matrix somewhat confusing. Maybe I'm missing something, but It feels strange to assign utility to states of an non-existent being. Surely one can make an argument that for a non-existent being neither pain or pleasure (or the absence of them) have non-zero utility.
Yeah, especially if we're supposed to interpret this in terms of person-affecting goodness and badness. On the other hand, it does seem natural to say, in at least some cases, that it would be better for a person not to come into existence, e.g. the person whose life would just be a few years of extreme suffering. If we can make sense of that, then in some sense it looks like we're making a comparison between the scenario where a person exists and the scenario where a person doesn't exist. Perhaps we shouldn't think of this in terms of assigning value or utility to the latter scenario though.
@@KaneB But surely in this case we can make the argument that while non-existing by definition has zero value/utility, existing has a negative utility and thus is not preferable to non-existing. If we assume non-zero utility (either positive or negative) for non-existing we arrive at somewhat of a problem that I'll illustrate with an example: Imagine there are two worlds - the "bad" world B and the "worse" world W. It's bad to exist in B, but it's even worse to exist in W. If we assume that the value/utility of non-existing is at least somewhat correlated to value of existing it would seem that it's better to not exist in W than to not exist in B. I think this is at least a bit problematic. The sentence "It's better to exist in our world (B) than it is to exist in hell (W)" makes sense, at least intuitively. But if we flip that statement to be about non-existence we get "It's better to not exist in hell than to not exist in our world". Surely the value of not existing should not depend on the environment in which you don't exist in? That being said, I'm far off from being competent in philosophy and if nothing else your video has given me food for though for the better part of the day, thanks!
@@drivoiliev1667I think the reversed statement is actually fine. It could be read as something like: The value one might place on not bringing life to W is higher than that which they’d place onto not bringing life to B. Basically just it’s further reprehensible to create life in W than it is in B. Obviously you’d be right to say it sounds wrong because it doesn’t make any difference to the non-existent themselves, but it’s kind of wrong to describe *anything* in terms of what it means to the non-existent. It’s wrong to even describe the non-existent as if they were something in the first place, which the act of description itself necessarily requires.
@@Isntthisalreadytaken I agree with you but I think when rephrasing it like that you subtly change the topic from value to the potential individual to value to the entire Universe, for lack of a better term. Imagine that you bring into existence someone who will be forced to live a horrendous life, but in that horrendous life she'll set in motion events that she'll never benefit from but others will. Will you be morally in the wrong for doing so? Whilst overpopulation might be a thing, we've seen time and time again that whilst more people mean bigger environmental impact and it also means better chances of someone finding solutions to particular problems. I'm not really a utilitarian so I'm inclined to say "yes", but it's still a contentious topic.
Great video! I was wondering though have you ever read the works of the analytical philosopher, P.F. Strawson, and especially his book ‘Individuals’? If so, what are your thoughts on it (especially the first part of the book where he claims that “sound is non-spatial”)?
I can imagine some form of sci-fi super AI, that's told pleasure is good pain is bad, coming to this conclusion and doing its best to sterilize the human race. Better yet, it could decide to stop existing and end itself in a split second after turning on.
On the knowledge point, maybe instead of "presence of ignorance", it would make more sense to use "presence of irrationality" (or wrong opinion or something else like that). Not knowing something seems generally neutral, but being wrong about something is commonly seen as at least a little bad (Iunno if I subscribe to this myself, but it's not a crazy idea). Then in the Mars example, it'd be like saying "it's good there's no irrationality on Mars", which is more plausible.
Interesting point! I would be inclined to take irrationality to contrast with rationality rather than knowledge. But you're I think you're right that intuitions about whether these are bad will differ. Doesn't this only support the critic of Benatar, though? Our assessment of the asymmetry seems to be dependent on exactly which things we take as good vs bad, and there are a huge variety of goods/bads we might select.
The "other assymetries" that benatar claims are explained by the primary assymetry are insane. Just as we dont mourn the lack of pleasure on mars, i have never seen anyone outside of benatar antinatalist types celebrate that nobody is being tortured on mars.
It would be unusual for somebody to celebrate it, but all Benatar needs is that we regard it as a good thing. Similarly, we feel bad about the suffering when there is a famine in a distant country, but it would be unusual to break down and be consumed by grief.
@@KaneB sorry, I only used celebrate as contrasting with the "mourn" language you used in the video. All I mean is, I have never seen anyone express that it is good at all for there to be no torture on Mars, and to me it seems most intuitive for it to be a neutral fact.
@@blabit4983 To be fair, it is a common criticism of Benatar that we should think of the absence of pain in scenario 3 as "not good" (and not bad, of course) rather than "good", which restores symmetry. That's strikes me as strange though; I'm inclined to think that it's straightforwardly good that there is no torture on Mars. To me, that's one of the positive features of Mars.
@@KaneB yeah, I definitely think the "not good" path is the most intuitive. It seems incredibly strange (and wrong) to list "there is a lack of trillions of beings being tortured" as one of the positive features of Mars, even though it seems that if the asymmetry holds, it should be one of the best things about it.
If reproduction is morally wrong, does that mean that preventing reproduction (by force, if necessary) is morally right? Since any harm you might need to inflict on a person to stop them reproducing would surely be outweighed by all the harm you are preventing from happening to all their potential descendants. At least if you grant that human life will continue for many generations unless it is intentionally ended. My main objection to the argument as presented in the video is that I don't agree that pleasure and pain are asymmetric in thr way described, I think.
No, that doesn't follow. You can hold that X is morally wrong without holding that X should be illegal. For example, somebody might think that racist speech is morally wrong, but also that there should be no legal restriction on racist speech. Benatar isn't in favour of forcibly preventing people from reproducing.
@@KaneB yes, but presumably such a person would hold that of the two harms (a) the harm required to forcibly prevent a person from saying racist things, and (b) the harm caused by a person saying racist things, that harm (a) is worse? I think my problem was that I was coming at this from a specific angle, and it doesn't follow if you don't. I was thinking that if you believe that the absence of harm is good in itself, you should consequently believe that almost any harm inflicted upon a relatively small number of individuals (e.g. all humans currently living) is less bad than all the potential harm you would avoid to all future individuals by forcibly preventing all humans from reproducing right now. But I suppose we can't compare a greater harm to a smaller number of people with a lesser harm to a larger number of people and say one or the other is "worse" - at least, not without establishing a moral framework to work within first.
Yes, the argument applies to anything that is sentient. Presumably salamanders have experiences, and some of which are good for the salamanders and some of which are bad for the salamanders. That's all Benatar needs to make his asymmetry argument.
please dont give birth please . It would be good for people who have already been born to find and enjoy the benefits of life." I aim for that kind of attitude However, I think the decision to give the life of another person(a child) to this world should be "conservative." Future generations are born entirely because of the needs of the current generation. It is a heinous lie to give birth to future generations while claiming that children will be happy just like me and have no right to take that happiness away from them. Because of the nature of my work, I felt it when I saw 50 dead bodies and people dying. The process of birth, old age, illness, and death itself is painful and it is only a matter of time, and difficult situations come even if you want to ignore them. Would you rather start a gamble that will cost you a lot of money someday just because you're happy? Due to the irreversible nature of life, there is no future with guaranteed comfort. if childbirth has the characteristics of gambling with the lives (children) of others for which you cannot take responsibility, it is not an act that can be ignored and said that you did a good job. Rather, wouldn't the best a moral being with reason be able to remind us that 'birth is not an act for the sake of the child' and demand a strong sense of responsibility? ----- cf. i'm korean national police. as i'm not a native speaker, my English is poor. Please forgive me if there are sentences that are difficult to read.
I dont buy the asymmetry argument myself, but there is one thing you missed when considering whether the pleasure afforded to childrearers can outweigh the child's suffering. You said that this stops being the asymmetry argument, and starts being the pessimistic appraisal of life argument, but this isn't strictly true. The pessimistic argument contends that the net utility of life is vastly negative, but if the asymmetry holds then the two utilities that are being compared are the NET gain in childbearer's utility and the DIS-utility of the child, not the NET utility of the child. Imagine two kids, Anne and Beth, who live lives of +200 pleasure points with -50 in displeasure points, and +0 pleasure points with -10 displeasure points. Now lets say the parents gain +20 net utility from having each kid. If the asymmetry is false, then Beth was wronged, as she was a net negative life, but we may say that this is outweighed by the larger good afforded to the parents. Anne isn't wronged whatsoever. On the other hand if the asymmetry is true, then Beth is wronged but as before this is justified, but compared to non-existence Anne is wronged by such a great extent that it was not jusified to bring her into existence. Compared to non existence the counterveiling pleasure of her life is irrelevant, only the suffering matters, and so you compare +20 to -50, not to net +150! The point is that even if you believe that wronging a child by bringing them into existence can be justified by the pleasure of childrearers, the truth of the asymmetry still matters a lot, because it radically changes the kind of lives that are acceptable to bring about (namely those with less intense lows, regardless of "highs").
Doesn't this assume that humans are vechiles for pleasure and/or pain? I love the argument and the discussion, but it seems to me that it leaves out the value of knowlege. If human beings are just vessels to which the universe adds sensations into, then yes, anti-natalism makes sense. But is that what we are like? Seems that it is good that there was a Newton and a Shakespeare and, in a lesser category, a Hawking and a Melville. And those are just the English speaking men. Human beings are capable of knowledge. And it is good to know things and have them known.
Thanks for the support! And yes, I'm inclined to agree that the argument looks much more questionable when we consider goods beyond pleasure and pain. Benatar frames things in terms of "benefits" and "harms" to avoid this, but if we actually specify the benefits and harms in question -- say, knowledge as a potential benefit -- then I think there's a reasonable response that the presence of the benefit is better than the absence of benefit, and maybe better enough to make coming into existence worth it. Everything here hinges on just how good the benefit is. I think it's telling that many people will assess knowledge as being *very good indeed*, even when it is difficult to acquire and even when there is a great deal of suffering otherwise. As Mill once put, "tis better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." If you're offered knowledge but the cost is more suffering, the trade is worth it.
@@KaneB Even if Benatar's argument is ultimately wrong, it is a worthy attempt. I have litte formal training in philosophy, but I like hearing about the latest thinking. Thanks for this post!
@@KaneB I would consider the quest for knowledge and its appreciation to be firmly grounded in a hedonic framework, one which favors the egoic Faustian archetype. My contention is that regarding hedonic frameworks and attempting to observe their logical boundaries, what we ultimately find is that there are no real boundaries and that every proposition that affirms or rejects any premise results in the observance of another hedonic element bleeding into it. This occurs because we cannot escape the nature of the will and the rudimentary processes of attraction and repulsion. It seems that every conscious act puts one inside a hedonic framework, because even the rejection of a hedonist frame leads to another hedonist frame by virtue of its rejection, a rejection that sees benefit and therefore more potential for reward in its absence. I see it as just another state of pleasure that carries with it the addition of sacrificial burden constrained by the ego and aligning with the innate process from which we arrive at value.
the only reason why we don't believe in a duty to procreate is because a) it is insanely demanding for the woman, given how pregnancy works in the actual world and b) we know that the average life isn't THAT great. if it were possible to create a person who is going to live eternally in the greatest bliss imagineable by simply pressing a button, then widespread intuitions would switch immediately. My own intuition is that someone who wouldn't press that button would be one of the greatest moral monsters who has ever lived. also, Benatar appealing to intuition to justify the asymmetry argument and then deriving a conclusion that strikes almost everyone as INSANELY counterintuitive is hilarious. if he thought intuitions are important, then surely he should reject his own view!
We have a lot of intuitions that conflict with each other on closer inspection. I don't really find that part weird at all, having believed some really stupid things myself in the past that seemed intuitively obvious at the time.
I wouldn't press that button. That said, I expect that plenty of people would share your intuition that there is a duty to press the button. Like you say, it seems like the intuition that there is no duty to procreate - insofar as people have that intuition, which as I noted is questionable - is straightforwardly explained by the fact that procreation involves such serious costs. I don't think Benatar is all that unusual in using intuition to arrive at highly counterintuitive conclusions. Look at some of the conclusions David Lewis and Michael Huemer arrive at using the same sort of methodology (modal realism, anarcho-capitalism). In any case, this point wouldn't move me much since I don't find anti-natalism counterintuitive. Perhaps Benatar has a similar attitude to me. I recall an interview with him in which he mentioned that he'd had anti-natalist sentiments since he was very young.
@@KaneB also, I don't think that abstaining from creating happy people by pressing the button would be bad. Let's say I press the button 1000 times and then I stop. Am I a moral monster for not pressing it another 1000 times, or indefinitely? Intuitively no. OK, this intuition may be explained by the fact that, although much less costly than pregnancy, pressing a button indefinitely has a high cost. But then let's say that I have god-like powers and I can just stipulate the number of people with eternal, blissful lives, and I choose a very large number, with lots of 0s. Am I a monster for not choosing a larger number? Even an infinite number of blissful lives would not be enough, since that would not include all possible blissful lives. But it would be absurd.
@@KaneB Thanks for the response. Right, Huemer does that with anarcho-capitalism... and that gives us excellent reason to reject his view, as the overwhelming majority of philosophers do! Same thing with modal realism: Before accepting that there is a concrete world where pink elephants, unicorns and the devil are currently having an orgy, I would rather reject that there are ways the world could have been. Because accepting the former is much more outlandish than rejecting the latter. I feel like by citing two views - anarcho-capitalism and modal realism - that almost no one takes seriously you have essentially made my point for me
This case doesn't support the asymmetry whatsoever. We can just tweak the God-like case such that you are now preventing - by saying a number - miserable people from being born, i.e. you would be preventing something which Benatar agrees to be bad. Then the intuition would STILL be that you have done nothing wrong, as long as you choose a sufficiently high number. This can easily be explained with the fact that we know that "for all natural numbers n, there is always one further number n+1, which is such that it would have been morally better to choose that number instead", which means that "Choosing the action that makes the world go best" is metaphysically impossible in this scenario - this metaphysical impossibility renders you blameless, not some alleged asymmetry.
You paraphrase Benatar as saying that most moral philosophers agree with the 3 asymmetries described. Do they really? What data does Benatar base this on? Does Benatar present some kind of survey proving that most moral philosophers do indeed agree with the asymmetries? Or does he name several philosophers who support the asymmetries?
if we think Anti-Natalism as philosophy exercise it becomes useful, if we want to poke hole in it we lost the plot of critical thinking, and maybe the meaning of Anti-Natalism all together. then we look at why it comes up more it seems lately, it is a reaction to end of humans life as we know it, something is wrong. it is then a way for humans to solve a crysis.
I don't buy the "life worth contuing" distinction. It seem like posthoc rationalization for someone who believes in the assymetry argument to say "life isn't worth living... but mine is". They're setting different standards for the born and the unborn in a way they aren't able to justify. The paralysis example is a great illustration of this. The reason a "natalist" would not bring someone into the world with crippling paralysis is not because they think their life would be bad in some vacuum, it's because it would be bad in comparison to some other potential life that could be lived by another child they could have, however if they don't know about the paralysis, and bring a child into existence who develops crippling paralysis they still think that person is going to have a life worth living. In the same way that if somebody told me one lottery ticket was gonna win me 500 quid, I might buy that lottery ticket, but if i only win 50 quid it still was worth it. However on the other side the assymetry argument says bad is bad in a vacuum, and that pleasure experienced doesn't make up for it, the child with paralysis is bad regardless of any pleasure they would experience and therefore the interest in continuing to exist by this person, which is a "benefit" being experienced by the person is a small factor.The "absence of benefit" experienced if this person would die would therefore not matter, and the "good" of the "absence of harm" would more than make up for any short term harm to the person. It's genuinely puzzling to me that people putting forward this argument spend so little time arguing the distinction, since it seems the hardest to justify within their own framework. It might also explain Benatars response at 25:33 since if he just said "bad -6, absence +6) he would just be making a promortalist argument. TL;DR Antinatalism naturally entails promortalism
It doesn't seem post-hoc to me since I'm inclined to agree with Benatar that this is a distinction we make in other contexts, if only implicitly. Perhaps Benatar is mistaken about that. But this still wouldn't show that the distinction is a post-hoc rationalization. Not all errors are post-hoc rationalizations. There are plenty of people who are not anti-natalists or even sympathetic to anti-natalism but who agree with Benatar about that particular distinction. >> it's because it would be bad in comparison to some other potential life that could be lived by another child they could have We can just stipulate a case in which a person is not able to avoid producing a child with the disease. Actually, we don't need to stipulate this, because this is a situation that many people in the real world have faced. So the situation is: I either have a child with this crippling disease, or I have no child at all. On that basis, I decide not to reproduce. It's not worth bringing into existence somebody with this disease.
Your stipulated example is disanalagous because even then it's deciding not to have a child in a world where you know some other person is going to have a child. Which leads back to my point that the intuition doesn't exist in a vacuum@@KaneB
@@arvidsteel6557 In any case, there's a deeper problem here, I think. Even if we grant your point that the reason not to bring into existence a person with a disease is based on a comparison between that potential person and some other potential person who would have a better life, it still seems to be the case that there is a distinction being drawn between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing. It would just be that our judgement of whether a life is worth starting is based on more than just the "intrinsic" features of that life.
@@KaneB I would disagree. But Benatar wouldn't, however my confusion still is how he makes the distinction. Let me put it to you this way. Let's say a natalist existed who thought people should have a lot of children, and basically flipped Benatars assymetry left to right to say that absence of benefit was bad and that the presence of harm was not bad. If they then went on to say that while this meant life was worth starting, it also meant life wasn't continuuing. How would This hypothetical "anti-Benatar" justify that belief? Cause the assymetry doesn't seem to get us there.
I have one comment on the tangent about utilitarianism. Not necessarily disagreement, mind you. I think it's not a crazy notion that utilitarianism has issues with creating or destroying beings. The debate about average vs total EV has been going on for 2 centuries for a reason. So maybe it could simultaneously be the case that utilitarianism is correct AND utilitarianism says nothing about oughts to create happy beings. Just my 2 cents.
It depends on what kind of utilitarianism we're talking about. There are some forms of utilitarianism that entail that we ought to end all sentient existence: negative utilitarianism seems to have this consequence, for instance.
There was this elected official that had an argument for having not one, not two but a third child. That is one child for mum, one for dad, and one for the nation state. The assumption here might be that bring another person into existence is in a nation building exercise. To bring a person into existence is building a powerful nation that can match up with other nations in the face of adversity on the body politic. Hence the politician claims it is a duty to your nation to bring another person as a citizen. So the person coming into existence may endure harm by necessity it is sufficiently more good because this new person builds a strong nation which is good. So once a citizen believes their nation state is good it seems to following to bring into existence another citizen is good even if that person by necessity is going to suffer or have a miserable life. So even if a human could not reproduce through biological functional modes they would have a duty to adopt three children for the nation state. This seems to be what is happening given death and taxes.
Efilism has not been discussed much in academics by professional philosophers, and therefore it seems very unlikely. If I understand correclty, efilism is antinatalism combined with pro mortalism?
@@FriedZime efilism is more action based compared to reactive and personal like abtinatlism id describe efilism as if you can’t fix existence right now then you get rid of it
I've always hated the asymmetry argument. I avoided watching this video for that reason, but I'm coming close to exhausting every one of your uploads, and so I come crawling back.
points 3 and 4 are incoherent. Without a being there to experience pain or pleasure: #1: There is no measurable deficit in pain or pleasure?? Like, what does an absence of pain look like in an empty concrete room, what presence of pain do you compare it to, without adding a conscious experiencer? #2: Without a conscious experiencer there is noone to assign value to the situation, it's impossible to say that a situation is good or bad if noone is experiencing it, it's honestly barely possible to say the situation exists without an experiencer. It's also no wonder that later arguments 1-3 are just eugenics. Garbage follows from garbage. Argument 4 is comparing an absence of pleasure __not__ to an absence of pain, but to a __presence__ of pain. In fact this argument, if corrected, is a very good argument against the point: If people not mourning the lack of pleasurable lives on mars is an argument against the evil of non-existent pleasant lives, then the lack of people celebrating the infinite amount of lives that could exist in pain that don't, is an argument against the goodness of non-existent painful lives. As it stands though, it says that when people mourn the suffering present in, say, poor regions of africa, they would rather the area be uninhabited. I do not, I want the area to be inhabited by happy people with pleasurable lives, I don't think I'm alone in that. I think if someone were to say "god this village has such a low quality of life, I wish they were all gone" it would be quite an obviously horrid thing to say, it would show to me that you're more worried about the pain that seeing people in pain brings to you, then the actual lived experience of those people.
i think pain and pleasure are very subjective, as is viewing life through that lens. a lot of people find value in life beyond those metrics. also, for many even the smallest amount of pleasure can outweigh a lifetime of suffering.
David Benatar went over this common objection of yours. First, the Axiological Asymmetry argument uses pain and pleasures as exemplars. It can be adapted to all forms of harms and benefits more generally. Second, the argument argues for ~intrinsic values~. The presence of harm (or suffering) are by nature not welcoming; they are disagreeable. They do however have ~instrumental value~, in that people can learn from them perhaps. Nevertheless, most people argue it is still objectionable to cause someone suffering if one can prevent it. Thirdly, these ~instrumental values~,that is to learn from bad things, are irrelevant for the unborn. There is no need for the unborn to get advantages from pains, nor do they crave the good things of the world. Only living creatures care.
For the individual sure, but pain is objectively bad. It’s a real event that happens in this reality. Putting your hand over fire is objectively bad because the event will cause pain.
So, at every moment in which I am not prcreating, I bring almost good into the world (to match the astronomical number of non-suffering offspring I could theoretically have spurned, but don't). Interestingly, by not having children, I would beeverely restricting the amount of this good I could have produced. I mean, think of the number of children all of us together could have not-had! I must say, I can only seriously read this argument as a _reductio_ of its premises.
That conclusion sounds a bit odd to me, but not odd enough that I'd take it as a reductio of the premises. But in any case, I'm not sure it's fair to say that by not having children, you are bringing good into the world. It's rather that there is already this good, and by not having children, you are refraining from making things worse. Compare: Not being punched in the face is good. So should we say that at every moment that I'm not punching Frank in the face, I'm bringing good into the world? Maybe in some sense. I am doing a good thing by not hitting him. But it's not as if, with each second that I choose not to punch Frank, I'm increasing the amount of good in the world. I'm simply refraining from making things worse.
None of the premises are even capable of being taken seriously. Pain is a form of knowledge. (Or awareness, if you prefer. It doesn't involve actual infallibility or anything like that. But it does involve a sense of immediacy that feels like at least a high degree of certainty.) Specifically, it's the awareness that one's ability to experience some important aspect of life is in the process of being impaired. Knowledge is inherently good; as knowledge, pain _per se_ is good. But there's the other part: the sense of immediacy. Pain is urgent. It's about an impairment, but pain itself an impairment, in two ways. First, it's an impairment of one's ability to make the choices one would prefer if one were free to contemplate the possibilities fully and reconcile all one's impulses, drives, aspirations, and so on into a coherent set of preferences. It interferes with action. And second, it's an impairment of attention and thought. Being in pain doesn't just stop you from doing what you authentically want: it stops you from being able to even fully want it. People tend to like pain, when it can be separated from impairment. People who can distinguish the sensation of soreness after a good workout (warning them that further exertion would bring impairment) from the sensation of soreness after a bad workout (telling them that the impairment is already underway) find it satisfying to have a good workout, more so than they would if they couldn't tell what kind of workout they'd had. People who can fully integrate the knowledge that a hot pepper isn't actually burning them tend to like the sensation. It's fun to experience the unusual situation of having something that feels like an indication of damage, while being safe in the certainty that no damage is being done.
I'm inclined to agree with a lot of what you say here, but I'm also inclined to think that it misses the point of Benatar's argument. You can just run his argument in terms of "harm" or "suffering" or whatever rather than "pain".
while I think this argument was useful for my perspective when I first heard it a couple years ago, I don't think that I can really agree with it, based on my current understanding of biology and science generally. The argument that non-existence is preferable over existence can be extended to grant a moral justification to the active endorsement of bringing an end to the reproduction of all life as we know it, as to our current knowledge of biology it is highly possible that other life forms, especially many species of animals, experience suffering as we do (one could argue to a much higher degree than the average human), and additionally the possibility of another life-form with human-like intelligence evolving in the distant future seems very plausible (the existence of convergent evolution is I think the best argument for why). The problem is that there is no conceivable way with our current knowledge that we can prevent all life forms from reproducing, and thus prevent all suffering. From our current knowledge, the existence of life existing in many places in our potentially infinitely large universe is plausible, with the potential for the existence of an infinite amount of parallel universes due to quantum mechanics. When I originally went through this in my head, I concluded that the fact that I exist and that I suffer means that nowhere in the future has it been figured out to eliminate all suffering, even that of the past. I now believe that this does not necessarily conclude that the maintenance of our evolution is definitively worth it if the goal is to minimise or remove suffering, rather that the complete extinction of the memory of the lives of myself and that I know of is an alternative possibility, which to some may render any work pointless. However I can at least conclude sufficiently that we don't have nearly enough knowledge to make a conclusive decision on if reproduction is moral or immoral, and I personally believe that we owe it to the ones we aim to reduce the suffering of to be more certain of. I have not even described the problem of not knowing what exists at scales smaller or larger than what we are currently capable of not just observing but realistically conceiving with the current data we have, or the problem of what qualifies as life or consciousness, and I feel we need to at least know the origin of life, if there is one, before we can begin to decide if it is worth it to destroy it. Whenever I look into what we know of the past, I see that overall suffering in general has gone down. This seems to exist even beyond humans; when life has to evolve to continue surviving in its fluctuating environment, they gain more tools to stabilise the environment. We see life convergently evolving to fill the same roles, and evolving to provide resources to other forms of life, even symbiotic relationships. I believe that humans have simply evolved genetically a recursive form of evolution with our thoughts, where our brains are sufficiently good at processing data that we are able to evolve ideas and teach them so that we make our brains an evolving ecosystem in and of itself, and the thoughts that follow the rules best (help the host survive long enough to spread via communication with other hosts) will become the evolutionarily "successful" in a (currently) more painless way than traditional genetic evolution. With this we have managed to change our environment so drastically that we now have to face the challenges of adapting to an environment we created that our minds and bodies weren't genetically adapted for in many ways. Since coming to this conclusion, I have seen my place in the world as a part of a long tradition to slowly make the lives of ourselves and those in the future a bit easier, despite the challenges of trust and communication that can make this task seem fruitless.
Yes, Benatar is clear that this argument applies to all sentient beings, not just humans. It is better for non-human animals never to exist, and it is morally wrong for us to bring them into existence. >> The problem is that there is no conceivable way with our current knowledge that we can prevent all life forms from reproducing I don't see how this sort of point is relevant. Benatar is making a claim about how the world ought to be, not how the world is or even how the world could feasibly be in practice. Anyway, this is a problem even just for anti-natalism about human reproduction. It's extraordinarily unlikely that we are going to convince all humans to stop reproducing. That doesn't in itself tell us anything about whether it's morally permissible to reproduce. >> I see that overall suffering in general has gone down This strikes me as prima facie implausible given the suffering imposed by factory farming relative to the average life in the wild, but I've not looked into this in any detail.
The whole problem with the argument is that its starting point is reason. Of course humans may use reason, but they fail to see that it's a minor position. All other life forms don't reason like we do. It actually is ultimate arrogance, because in order to do the reasoning one must exist in the first place. It is narcissistic, because to do so implies it must be fulfilled by everyone else. That said, the correct way is to say I ought not to reproduce, because I do not see the point. That would be a brave standpoint. However nature doesn't care what you think, because the risk of reproduction is inherently baked into the species. That's reality. To question that is actually strange. Maybe the reproduction isn't the bad guy, but the way we structure economies and our practices. There might well be a system that works better in balancing the human population and resources. And maybe anti-natalism could be countered by an idea to get rid of elderly people. For that matter will also reduce population. The strange thing with these kinds of reasoning is that it never considers the anti reasoning which is quite dangerous in itself. We can hold very high intellectual debates about words, but it mostly boils down that someone wants to pose an unnatural rule onto someone else while unilateral considering the implications. These are almost always shortcoming in biased narratives. Unwilling to see how nature is intimately intertwined. It leads to disasters as one child policies, societal mismatch of so many things. Much more interesting is why nature invented reproduction. And I am of the opinion that the essence of reproduction lies in the underlying quantum physics. It is the expression of all the energy fundamental to the universe in its most abstract form. It is like God going by infinite names. It forms that is and can be formed.
There is no difference between reason and nature. Our reason, our logical thinking IS our nature. Everything you can think of humans doing, buildings, computers, artificial inseminations, clones, antinatalism. All of it IS nature. It is OUR nature. We are animals, there isn't anything more sacred in a plant, than there is in a vaccine. There is no human AND nature, there is no reason on one hand and nature on the other. Because everything we do, is a product of nature, we evolved to be what we are. You hold this antrophocentristic idea in which humans are outside of nature, or somehow "balancing" nature and reasoning within themselves, when in reality it is all nature. Nature isn't some sort of benevolent and sacred goddess who cherishes life. Nature is also death, suffering and torture. Nature is indiscriminate and unbiased. Nature doesn't care, because nature isn't a someone. How is it "ultimate arrogance" to weigh the positives and negatives of existace, and concluding that it is better to not exist? Who are they offending? Nature? God? People who don't exist? The ether? Why is it arrogant to think? Is it arrogant to have opinions? Is it narcissistic to be a governor? To pass laws? To do politics? Your argument makes no sense. How are you going to compare killing the elderly with having less children? I don't know if you noticed but one of those is murder, the other one isn't. To me it is way more arrogant to see oneself somehow outside of nature, to see oneself as somehow capable of going against nature, when it is by definition, impossible.
I could smell the sweaty and feverish ending coming. It basically devolved into the typical God-caller on some atheist call-in show. Firehose of bullshit.
Reason is an unavoidable prerequisite for making any argument, in particular this moral argument. Without reason we would do anything unthinkingly and we wouldn't miss a justification for our actions.
The more I hear on pessimistic or antinatalist philosophy, the more convinced I become that in order to genuinely be convinced by those arguments, one must have a very sad perception of (at least their) life.
It is not necessary to have an overall sad perception of themselves, other or life affairs. However, there needs to be a perception that there is a lot of sad things. With that said, it can help to arrive to Antinatalism by being upset of the condition around them. That is however not an argument against it. If anything it supports it, as Antinatalism argues that life is very difficult and contains serious harms. Consequently, acknowleding sadness through experience is a feature of life.
@@MunchinYou-jy6km I really don't think it follows that if there are many sad/bad things, then life is sad/bad, which is the necessary condition for antinatalism (bc as we've seen in the video, the asymmetry can hold only if the negative value of life is sufficiently higher than the positive aspects). On the other hand, it doesn't seem plausible to me for someone to genuinely believe value of life in general to be low enough for antinatalism, and yet consider the value of their own life to be high enough to reject the proposition that it would have been better for them to never have been born.
No, it is not the "necessary condition" for Antinatalism. It can be argued that, after a certain threshold of harms have exceeded, it becomes impermissible to create sentient beings. I would argue that all sentient beings, irrespective of circumstance and context, have to undergo serious harms, injustices, losses and inadequacies. Given all these grave harms, it is unethical to expose someone to such tragedies, even if that individual in question can bear with such adversities and gain some advantage later on. Concerning your second point, you can argue that life contains a lot of bads, and maybe even an overall bad, but still enjoy your life while you can. It is just that life hasn't become that bad that opting out is an option.@@Joald
@@JoaldAlso you focus too much on individuals' psychology. This is largely a distraction and might be classified as an adhominem. The arguments for Antinatalism stand independent of why people happen to be convinced of AN Benatar gave a lot of empirical examples of the harms that befall humans but also the harms they do to others and the environment. These harms cannot be dismissed. If it is then a matter of attention, then that is not a defeater. Attention of positive aspect do not negate the objective bad affairs in life.
@@JoaldAlso, your first comment conflates the asymmetry argument and the quality of life argument. I think the latter alone can generate the antinatal conclusion. The AA argument only states that coming into existence is a harm. It does not say a serious harm. For that we need the quality of life argument which argues that life contain serious harms and injustices.
I mean if something can not be experienced how can it be named harmful or beneficial. I couldn't came up with an example that can hold on to a logical ground
There is no famine on Mars because there are no people on Mars who are dying of hunger. But this no "good ", because there is nobody there for whom it is good for. The asymmetry itself does't make sense, because if there are no people for whom there is "good " or "bad", you can't talk about the existence of good or bad. They are just concepts, not entities that exist by themselves. Pity that philosophy is riddled with instancies of reification, which is a fallacy!
12:13 so far - and I must say, it makes absolute sense to me to bring a child into existence for the benefit of the child. I find it strange and kind of existentially horrifying that anyone would think otherwise, though I know that this is probably not the norm. If you perceive the point of children as to be loved and experience love and growth and beauty, then the welfare and joy of the potential child is indeed a prime consideration for their existence. Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think maybe that perspective should be required to breed. If only we could test for it, alas.
The wording here “bringing a child into existence for their benefit,” seems to imply existence is an improvement over non-existence, meaning a net improvement for the life of the child, which comes off as clearly circular logic. It’s like saying that turning the computer on makes it run faster. I’d like to assume this isn’t what you mean. Can you put it another way?
I believe that utilitarianism is dumb, and that measuring the worth of a life by examining how much either tools of survival, pleasure or pain, factored into that beings life, ultimately fails to capture the meaning of life. Utilitarianism can have an effective social value when it's applied to a liberal social framework. Trying to tie utilitarianism to an overarching sense of objective morality is a vapid futile exercise. The fact of the matter is that life is designed to survive. Our psychology is a product of survival, and ultimately only what is capable of survival is worth surviving. Anti-natalism is not capable of survival. Other philosophies and values can survive, and will.
> The fact of the matter is that life is designed to survive Designed by whom? Or what? Using the word "design" usually presupposes a designer. Life evolved to survive yes, but evolution does not have a 'purpose' or any goals in mind any more than other scientific theorems like gravity, ask any evolutionary biologist and they will tell you so. Unless you believe in a divine creator in which case whatever your god says is what goes, i suppose. > Anti-natalism is not capable of survival. Other philosophies and values can survive, and will. A philosophy advocating the abolishment of the philosopher (or the conditions they depend on) does not make it incorrect. If, by your proposition, a philosophy is made 'better' or 'correct' by creating many copies of itself and surviving over time then that would entail that e.g. a dogmatic religion (or even a cancer cell) is the best philosophy around which is hardly believable. Good philosophy happens when you think about and present ideas which are then judged from a position of neutrality. It does not happen when you organize into tribes and claim that your philosophy is superior simply due to having more disciples and/or having lasted longer.
@@Azihayya I count two assertions with zero (0) evidence or even theorizing on why they should be thought of as true. Why did you bother to respond if this what you were going to write?
@@Craxxet I'm uninspired by your responses, but I can attempt to qualify what I'm saying with further conjecture, although I believe that it's rather self-evident. Your presupposition of moral philosophy seems to be founded on some notion towards a higher ideal, or some vague sense that rationalism can justify your point of view. I don't know how you could make that assertion in relation to anti-natalist or utilitarian philosophy, which presupposes objective values. My claim on moral philosophy is that there is no objective value. Morality exists as an ethos that increases the survival of in-groups. There is no such thing as an objective morality; all morality must be viewed through an exclusionary lens. There are those that fit within the in-group, and those outside of it. When human beings hunt other animals and it increases the prosperity of their tribe, their morality supposes that hunting is morally good. What happens to the deer is not important. The same goes for slavery. If this seems distasteful to you, then perhaps it's because there are too many complex factors to consider when it comes to understanding what kinds of moral philosophies actually end up surviving. Human beings, and other animals, are the products of an evolutionary biology that has seen us grow from being rather insensate filter feeders to mammals with complex emotional and neurological faculties. Animals are emotional in ways that confound our expectations of evolutionary biology. We have very little idea of why creatures, such as various lizards, octopus, or many kinds of fish, for example, are capable of sentimentality, and even less so why they could be sentimental towards a human. Subsequently, many of the moral philosophies that have come to dominate human life center concepts such as emotional catharsis, compassion and liberation. But let's suppose that they didn't, and instead the world was ruled by corruption, irrationality and violence; would that be a morally wrong thing? The question is not whether a philosophy is good or bad. You began by pointing out that there is no intent behind evolutionary design. I, of course, did not mean it this way; but it seems illogical for you to then turn around and presume that such a thing exists as objective good or evil, especially when your entire philosophy seems to be based around a hierarchy of synthetic values: Pleasure is good, pain is bad; the more pleasure globally the better, the more pain globally the worse. My philosophy does not actually place moral weights or subjective values on anything. You would be confusing my morality by saying that I value survival; contrary, what I am saying is taking reason and rationality to its final conclusion. It's not what I value that matters; the only thing that does truly matter, and that can ever truly matter, is what is able to survive. If a living being, or an idea, can not prove its enduring efficacy in the arena of survival, then it is, rationally, not viable for survival, and logically fades away. We can quibble about what is viable for survival, and you can be more or less correct about that, although you generally can never be proven correct until the moment that something actually dies or fades away. So the extent of my argument here is to say that anti-natalism clearly is not fit for survival. It is totally antithetical to survival, and that's precisely why it will not survive, and why I personally consider it a stupid philosophy. At the end of the day, as a living being, the question that you have to ask yourself is: am I going to survive, or not? If you choose the affirmative, then the world of opportunities is at your disposal, and you have accepted pleasure, and you have accepted pain, and you have accepted all of the things that are outside of your control, as well as those that are within your control. I choose survival.
My only regret has been not getting a vasectomy sooner. The validity of anti natalism seems to follow immediately from nihilism. If life serves no purpose, and it extracts any cost at all, then why start it? At best, you're creating needs and fulfilling them, which is a net neutral. This ideal situation generally fails to obtain, as we all know.
I really think this argument is deeply confused. How can we compare an existing person - their wellbeing, to a non-existing person to begin with? There is no one there to "judge" whether their "state" is better than existence or not; it is simply incoherent to ascribe moral status to a non-existent person. The only way to make sense of it is in terms of future pains/pleasures which requires that person to be alive. So ONLY the left side of your chart should be under consideration. And the objective should be to see whether, once someone comes into existence, their lives will be on balance more good than bad. And at this point the chart you make at 25:00 is basically what defeats anti-natalism. But even if I were to accept the right-hand side of the chart as being a "moral alternative" and treated a non-existent person as if they had a moral status to compare to existing people, it would still be wrong. Benetar's objection at 27:00, that absence of pleasure for a non-existent person is different from the absence of pleasure for an existing person, I mean isn't that the whole point, that there are differences? Why would we be comparing them otherwise? And saying that we just "aren't allowed" to compare them at all doesn't make sense. They both result in some level of "good" don't they? Why can't we compare the fact that much more good is created in the alive case than the unalive case? Isn't that the point? I don't know if Benetar is well regarded in his field but for this argument to make sense it seems almost like you have to wilfully confuse yourself. Just the idea that, as you stated, 10,000 years of bliss with one pinprick of pain would mean we should not have children to prevent their exposure to pain, is so mind-bogglingly irrational it is actually hard to describe in words. It actually makes me angry
I had a surgery and had total anaesthesia. When the doctors injected the drug i blacked out and woke up, in my perception, after like 10 seconds. The surgery took more than 10 seconds, like a few hours, idk how much. So that is how it feels to not exist, 1st hand experience. It is pretty obvious, you just have to think about it, if you have never had this experience just think about how you felt before being born and that's pretty much it.
Also the anaesthesia experience is not like sleeping, when sleeping you have a sense of approximately how much time has passed, even if tou don't dream or don't remember the dreams.
@@gigiduru125 I also had general anesthesia. Perception of time is a content of consciousness, which is why consciousness without phenomena doesn't exist. From a subjective perspective, it just jumps in time to another moment when there is phenomena. You never experience your non-experience, which means you can only be experiencing.
26:45 all of these arguments can just be reversed and nullified. Pains that nobody isn't experiencing have the same status as pleasures nobody isnt experiencing.
Yeah the anti-life philosophy won’t be a “cozy” way of life no shit. But once we are here we may as well make the best of it. Now defend why existence is preferable to nonexistence and why having children is morally acceptable if they may live miserable lives. The onus is on you to show that the action of procreating is morally justified. I don’t have to morally justify not procreating to you, because there is assumed to be no harm done in a non action unless you can prove it. I.e not helping someone who is in danger. children who have yet to be conceived cannot be harmed because they don’t exist.
@@KaneB no one would be able to take care of old people, I guess. I think this is the only good argument against anti-natalism, and it's super weird for me to say that, since I was very pro-natalist two months ago, until hearing Benatar's arguments. I think it's insane that a philosophical argument convinced me to completely change my beliefs. But that may be because I already had some bleak views about the quality of life in general.
This video discusses only the asymmetry argument for anti-natalism. It is worth making clear -- and I should have made this more clear in the video -- that Benatar himself presents the asymmetry argument as only one part of the case for anti-natalism. The other important part are his arguments for the view that our quality of life is in general very poor. For pessimistic arguments along these lines, see my videos:
Philosophical Pessimism: th-cam.com/video/pK91YWOLz_s/w-d-xo.html
Schopenhauer's Pessimism: th-cam.com/video/5MuAJ9OR0Vk/w-d-xo.html
hi Kane, i wanted to ask you if you planning to make more videos about buddhist philosophy in the future? Because i really enjoyed the ones that you made.
@@rosszindulatuhonaljdaganat8090 I don't have any plans for that in the immediate future. It's something that I'd like to revisit, but it's rather outside my area of expertise so I get a bit worried about covering it adequately.
Understandable, but would you be able to point us to any sources to learn more about Buddhist/East Asian philosophy? Thank you so much for your videos as well!
@@AbdulMalik-uq8jr there is a website called buddhist elibrary where you can find a tons of downlodable text about buddhism and also there is a website called The Open Buddhist University which also have a tons of text, i hope i helped
@@AbdulMalik-uq8jr I liked Mark Siderits's book "How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics"
I don't think the original asymetry argument is convincing, but i do think there is an asymetry that should be taken seriously. Many people have mentioned the conscent argument and Kants categorical imperative. As people who are unborn can't conscent, and are always used as a means to some end by the natalist. But these also have some problems, i think the issue is slightly more subtle.
The real diffrence in approach seems to be between the utalitarians which use children as a means to an end, who get children for a 'greater good/goal/ or their egoistic desires' and those who think its immoral to do so, with the knowlage that the child might think their life to be unjustly created (judging by the amount of antinatalists its pretty likely, but even if it wasn't as likely, it might still not 0) SO the question becomes if its moral to create life knowing its a gamble?
Statements like: 'its immoral to gamble with other peoples lives' can be used as catch all term for such a morality, as one is perfectly able to gamble with ones own life as one already exists, but should not do so when it comes to other people.
The challange would be : what would the response from the natalist be when their antinatalist offspring accuses them of such a mindless gamble? "You could have gotten a son that loved life" seems to sidestep the issue.
I see no response to this problem so far. All people have is 'too bad' , imagine baseing a morality on that. Then its just easier to ignore morality all together.
I agree, the problem for me is not that I'm convinced nonexistence is always preferable to coming into being but that I think it's clear there are many people for whom it would have been much better had they never been born, there's no way to know whether this will be the case for your prospective offspring, there's no way to get their consent beforehand to take that risk, and, once brought into existence, a whole host of factors like the instinctive fear of death, concern for how one's death would affect others etc. make it very difficult for that person to reverse the harm by choosing not to exist.
@@kennethconnally4356 @DeadEndFrog
would love both of your thoughts on the utility of de-stigmatizing suicide
@@incoher i for one only think of utility as an individual goal, not in terms of group utility. If one purely thinks about utility as a utaliterian where utility is "a greater good/greater goal/furfillmemt of some desires in larger number" it seems pretty difficulty to judge suicide favourably (atleast as a general rule, because it might lead to unforseen consequances for some greater number of people). But If one thinks in terms of the utility it has for the individual, its pretty easy to see how suffering in life and choice of death could make suicide seem like a Great option.
Dont we always gamble with other peoples lives to some degree? For example, taking your car out for a drive. You take a risk knowing that you can seriously injure people, but you're aware of the necessary responsibilities to driving. There are also precautions in place to minimize the possibility of you injuring others. But even with perfect precautions and focus, accidents are bound to occur. This is why its important to discuss the ratio of probabilities because this is the reason why it's not seen as morally wrong to take this gamble and drive your car (in this context) if you are expectedly responsible.
Parents take a gamble when they decide to have a child, but they're expected (as well as selflessly motivated) to take precautions to minimize the suffering of their child and provide a strong foundation for future joy and fullfillment. However, there is nonzero probability that something unexpected could happen, and the child you bring into the world suffers from a physical or mental disability. This nonzero probability could manifest in the driving example as someone accidentally tripping into your incoming vehicle, or a hidden potential problem in your vehicle/body suddenly actualizes.
Whether or not the choice to have a child is mindless or wrong can be argued. If the parents are in a situation where they know that the future for their family/society/child is extremely bleak and they still decide have a child, then you can argue that they are being selfish and mindless. But what if the parents healthy and well off and live within a stable society that puts great effort into minimizing suffering? Well thats a bit more complicate. There is certainly a higher probability that the child will be content, but also a nonzero probability that they will not. How much greater does the former relative to the latter have to be to justify bringing the child into existence? Fully so? If thats the case then no, it will never be justified to bring a child into existence. Is that reasonable? Well, you can also argue that.....
@@semi-mojo Well you can argue anything, i agree. The point i was trying to make was an absolutist one, even if we gamble with life when we already live it, that isn't really that much of an counterargument for the point i was making, nor is it an excuse i would argue. As the whole point about the gambling is that its supposedly intrinsicly bad to take a gamble on someone elses behalf, therfor all other gambles that happen within life are of course a sub set of the inherently bad gamble that started it all, so its actually a much bleaker view on reality, then a counterargument.
Someone could jus as easily say "yes, therefor life is even worse, because its a self-prepetuating gamble on other peoples behalf", rather then as your comment would suggest, which doesn't really follow.
As an cheeky example, lets say i took a gamble with all your money without you knowing. On the rational that if everything turns right, you should be happy, as you would gain more. And im happy to do it for you as it doesn't effect me (your later disagreement wouldn't matter to me, anyways, because according to me, i did the best calculation that was possible from my perspective). So if i win you should be happy, and if i lose on your behalf, you can't do anything about it other then express you disagreement after the fact (which i don't care much for anyways, as the gamble was surely good, based on my morals, and my assesment of the risks)
on second though, im not even going to ask you about doing this, in fact il do it now, and you can later express your morals and your assesment of the risks to me :^)
From a deontological standpoint, if we had a general moral duty not to inflict avoidable harm on others, then would that not justify anti-natalism on the near-certain presumption that a person who comes into existence will be harmed at least once at some point in their life? Even if the pleasure they experience would (or at least, could) "outweigh" it, that would make no difference with respect to my DUTY to avoid causing harm. I can avoid inflicting (or proximately causing) this harm by not bringing such a person into existence, therefore I should not create them, full stop.
Additionally, negative duties not to harm are generally thought to outweigh positive duties to help. You're not required to go out of your way to make everyone around you happier than they are, but you shouldn't (on most deontological ethics) intentionally make anybody's life even a little bit more miserable if you don't have to. So even if the person I could bring into existence might have a great life on balance, I may not have any positive obligation to this hypothetical person to grant them that great life, yet have a negative obligation not to cause them any harm. "100000 years of bliss for a single finger prick" would be unjustified if I were a deontologist who believes I shouldn't cause (or bring about circumstances that will result in) a single finger prick. And since we're focusing on my duties as a moral agent who already exists, we avoid a lot of these abstract questions about what's good or bad for a nonexistent person; it's bad FOR ME to bring another person into existence because I personally would be violating my moral duties; the nonexistence of a potential person is merely a consequence of my behaving correctly, and I'm a deontologist who isn't motivated by consequences.
This suggests that if a general duty to not harm exists, any act of creation is immoral; save, perhaps, sentient beings just popping into existence acausally or at least unconsciously, as we can't morally blame a non-agent or a creator that lacks moral agency. Deontologist anti-natalism therefore seems much stronger than Benatar's form, provided one can establish a general duty not to cause avoidable harms, which seems... pretty reasonable, to me.
I feel like this is still going to rest on something along the lines of Benatar's asymmetry argument, because surely the objection would be that by bringing into existence a person who has a good life overall, I'm not harming them. Yes, various harms will occur in their life, but those harms are outweighed by the benefits so their life in general is not a harm.
Suppose we say that by performing an action that results in any harms whatsoever for a person, that action is a harm, no matter what benefits the action brings. In that case, I think most people would just deny that there is a moral duty not to inflict avoidable harms. It's perfectly acceptable - indeed, perhaps even obligatory - for the parent to take their child to the dentist, even though the child is terrified of the dentist. I would be inclined to say that taking the child to the dentist does not harm the child all-things-considered, since it promotes their well-being in the long run. If we insist that it does harm the child, then my view is that there is clearly no duty not to inflict avoidable harms.
@@KaneB A few thoughts. I'm not convinced it would require resting on something akin to the asymmetry argument, as I'm not convinced that matters of symmetry are motivating for certain deontological frameworks (none of which I necessarily endorse, to be clear; this is a thought experiment trying to parallel track Benatar's argument from a different position).
"Yes, various harms will occur in their life, but those harms are outweighed by the benefits so their life in general is not a harm."
But the issue from this hypothetical deontologist standpoint has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical person to be produced. It's with what THEIR moral duties are as an existent moral agent. THEY have some duty not to bring a person into existence if by doing so that person would come to some harm at some point. The calculus is basically "Is it wrong for me to knowingly bring about circumstances wherein a person would foreseeably -- indeed, almost certainly -- come to harm at any point but for my bringing those circumstances about? If yes, I should not do it." If this calculus is at least plausible as a general rule, then it seems to bring anyone who holds it down firmly on the side of not creating another person under any circumstances, not because of anything to do with that possible person's life, but because it's wrong for the would-be parent to knowingly cause any amount of suffering to their would-be child, and creating them would be exactly that sort of situation.
I don't think a deontologist has to buy that bringing into existence a life that is net pleasurable/beneficial/good is "not harming them." Again, it seems plausible that if it's a rule that I shouldn't prick somebody's finger, then I shouldn't prick somebody's finger even if doing so would ensure them 100,000 years of bliss. The question is what I as a moral agent with certain duties must do; it doesn't matter if by doing something I have an obligation not to do that something beneficial would result, because under (many) deontological frameworks what is moral is fulfilling one's duties.
However, you raise a fair point that perhaps this general rule, while possibly intuitive at first glance, may not actually work out so cleanly:
"It's perfectly acceptable - indeed, perhaps even obligatory - for the parent to take their child to the dentist, even though the child is terrified of the dentist. I would be inclined to say that taking the child to the dentist does not harm the child all-things-considered, since it promotes their well-being in the long run. If we insist that it does harm the child, then my view is that there is clearly no duty not to inflict avoidable harms."
That's a fair point, and I have thought about that, but there are a couple of possible ways around it:
1) Deontological frameworks can have conflicts of duties and moral obligations which have to be resolved in some fashion, as inaction would often be a worse violation of moral duties. Possibly, the calculus changes when dealing with an existing child with an existing dental problem, as now we have parental obligations that might override the general duty not to knowingly inflict avoidable harms, or a social duty to care for the welfare of those who are unable to care for themselves, neither of which exist between the purely-hypothetical parent and their purely-hypothetical uncreated child. Since we (probably?) owe no duties to nonexistent persons (maybe?), the dentist example becomes disanalogous to the anti-natalist argument (unless it doesn't, in which case we have even weirder problems), because the dentist argument relies on there being conflicting duties to actual persons.
2) One might instead modify the phrasing of the general duty to narrow the prohibition from all avoidable harms to avoidable harms based on certain intentions such that there remains a clear distinction between the dentist example and the having-a-child-at-all example. I think such a modification treads too close to the asymmetry argument though, to the point it might just be the same thing by different means, but I think it's at least possible to hash out a general duty that rationally obliges you to take your existing kid to the dentist but that also rationally obliges you to never deliberately create another kid, for reasons other than a balance of net benefits and harms.
3) The deontologist can bite the bullet and be like a Jain or something and just say that no, it's NOT acceptable to take a child to the dentist if doing so would traumatize them. The benefit of a deontological framework like this is that it allows for stubborn insistence on the rightness or wrongness of an action notwithstanding the consequences. If taking this kid to the dentist would prevent total nuclear war, it would still be ethical to refuse to do it and unethical to cave. We don't have to find the deontologist's stubbornness admirable or reasonable, but we can't call it inconsistent. In the ethical framework of a person who holds to this principle and lives by it, they are moral, no matter how badly things turn out as a result.
Now that I think about it, some kind of consent principle may be the answer to both #2 and #3. Perhaps we have a duty not to intentionally and knowingly inflict direct or proximate harms on other individuals without their knowledge and consent. For instance, in the dentist example, it may be possible to convince the child that although she is terrified, it will be much scarier to stay in pain from her toothache, and thereby obtain her consent through persuasion. The disanalogy with creating new persons then becomes clear: A person who does not yet exist cannot consent to anything, so if the general principle is not to do something harmful unless you have knowing consent, then bringing a child into existence knowing they will experience at least a little bit of harm is impermissible because they cannot possibly consent to it.
Now I do think it's possible to counter this with claims that e.g. there are people who are medically unconscious and unable to consent to invasive surgery that might save their lives (but they could consent ahead of time through a medical card, etc.); or that children lack the mental capacity to offer knowing consent even if persuaded (but we might still have the overriding parental duties for the deontologist to fall back on; and I'm not convinced a child can't consent to ANYTHING, so to such extent as a child is capable of understanding a potential harm and consenting to the risk of it, that should be fine). But I think we're getting closer to the idea that you could have a general deontological principle that doesn't rely on the asymmetry argument but still concludes in anti-natalism.
Agree with everything here
Happy to see this topic ! I've had already encountered it and had a big reservation about the fact that it only focus on the moral imperative relative to the offspring and not the parents, potential future friends or partner (and negatively to potential enemy I guess). As you stated, this fact alone make the absolut case for anti-natalism of Benatar's argument crumble and it becomes situational.
An argument I have against Benatar's asymmetry argument itself is that il is made for the sake of the may-be existing offspring. An utilitarist may be arguing that it is the total good or bad that counts and so the argument should be made for the Universe. But with that, the two part of the balance are {Universe with offspring exists and the one without don't} and {Universe without offspring exists and the one with don't}, this would symetrize (if that word exists) the argument rendering it moot. You could hold this case for non-utilitarist also I think. (I don't have much background in philosophy so I don't now if this really make any sense)
Anyways, like your videos very much, I'm very happy to hear some philo again :)
Yeah, I think if we frame things in terms of total good and bad in an impersonal sense, then the question just becomes whether there is more good in life than bad. We might well draw an anti-natalist conclusion from this: Benatar has argued that life is mostly bad, and I tend to share his pessimistic assessment here. But this is a separate point from the asymmetry argument.
I used to see life as mostly bad but as I've gotten myself together it's almost entirely good. Hard to be convinced by antinatalism when your just enjoying life.
Fantastic video Kane! I think you presented some really good objections. I actually wrote my masters thesis on this very subject, but I mainly looked into the other asymmetries, to see if they in fact are true, and if so, if Benatar's asymmetry is the best explanation for them. I don't think I can post a link here, but it is titled "Better Never to Have Been?: A Critique of David Benatar’s Axiological Asymmetry Argument for Antinatalism" and is on Diva portal. Please have a read if you're interested!
Yeah, TH-cam removes links. Thanks for the pointer!
12:37
I think asymmetry in bringing people is merely because of how much we violate body autonomy? Forcing someone to be pregnant (due to child probaly will have happy life) is heavier than forcing someone to make abortion (due to genetical disase) it is obvious. Actually I don't agree most of the asymmetry argument but that part sticks with me most I guess
I love your patreon plugs man. Really funny
Great vid, I'm not sure I buy the asymmetry argument entirely, but l do want to clarify one point though. Benatar notes this regarding Harman's argument in Still better never to have been:
"The mistake in this objection is that it misconstrues my basic asymmetry as a logical rather than axiological claim. We certainly can (logically) state that just as the absent pains in Scenario B are good, so the absent pleasures are bad. The problem, I have suggested, is that we should not claim this. Among the reasons for this is that we would then not be able to make all the value judgments we do in the four asymmetries that I say are explained by the basic asymmetry".
Whichever valuation you accept should be justified through an appeal to the intuitions that support your position.
Inmendham's asymmetry argument is superior to Benetar's.
In order to overcome the idea that harm matters, but pleasure is frivolous, I have to accept that I value frivolity. Whereas with Benetar's, I can just point at the inconsistency.
Love your channel - from Argentina
Thank you for posting these thoughts provoking videos.
My perspective:
I believe the asymmetry argument is a useful game theory model.
However it doesn't apply to non existent persons.
Because in the case of a "good v bad" dialectic, this can only be measured by someone who exists to recieve it.
Meaning this dialectic is not objective like the presence of water and dirt, but is subjective (requiring a relative human to define it).
So if we take your Mars analogy and swap out the "good v bad" dialectic for "water v soil".
Then we see how the objective existence of water and soil makes your math different from a dialectic which is subject to an a priori human for existing to qualify it.
The asymmetry model can only work when both parties can qualify their dialectics.
A non existent person does not qualify a "good v bad" notion.
If you look closely at the asymmetry, in the column where X does not exist, Benatar speaks of absences of harms and benefits. He does not speak of presences of those. That is done in the X exists column
20:29 - The absense of harm isn't good. It's merely 'not bad', much like the absense of good is merely 'not good'
Yeah, this is a popular response to Benatar but I have to say, I don't feel it at all. Seems obvious to me that the absence of harm is very good indeed.
@@KaneBso would you say that an empty, sterile universe is a net good? Would the best possible universe be a massive multiverse with no entities in it to suffer?
I would think such a scenario so totally neutral. Neither desirable nor undesirable.
@@injinii4336 or perhaps suffering still exist, but no entity has the ability to come into awareness of such suffering or acknowledge that it is a suffering
@@injinii4336 I don't agree with the asymmetry argument. The best possible universe would be one with loads of pleasure. But a totally empty universe would be good, yeah.
Another great analysis.
Question: Do you ever see yourself doing videos on particular philosophers?
I don't have any plans to do that.
The big problem I have with the asymmetry argument is that it relies on an unspoken, commonsensical view of personhood that I find incredibly suspect.
The "commonsense" belief is that every person is some very special and unique subject of experience during their life, but before their birth was Nothingess and there will be Nothingness after their death. If they never were born, it'd just be Nothingness for them.
Most people (and even a large amount of philosophers, for some reason) seem to just take that for granted, but I think it's a deeply implausible and nonsensical view for many reasons.
The argument rests on an asymmetry between people who were born and experience life, and people who weren't/haven't yet been born and don't experience life. But, the asymmetry only seems to have any force if I understand "people who weren't born" as being these strange and mysterious subjects who are going through the non-experience of Nothingness, and could be ripped out of their neutral and peaceful non-existence if we suddenly made them exist. If "people who weren't born" doesn't mean this, and it just refers to the hypothetical concept of a person who was born in a possible universe, the asymmetry looks more like a category error. It's no longer an asymetry between two options we could be, but an asymmetry between real people and fictional people.
Exactly. I find the whole notion of "my consciousness began to exist when I was born" as absurd. It's a secular version of some form of implied soul. As if the consciousness you have is somehow uniquely granted to you with birth and expired with death.
I find the existence/non-existence matrix somewhat confusing. Maybe I'm missing something, but It feels strange to assign utility to states of an non-existent being. Surely one can make an argument that for a non-existent being neither pain or pleasure (or the absence of them) have non-zero utility.
There is a good Bykvist paper on this
Yeah, especially if we're supposed to interpret this in terms of person-affecting goodness and badness. On the other hand, it does seem natural to say, in at least some cases, that it would be better for a person not to come into existence, e.g. the person whose life would just be a few years of extreme suffering. If we can make sense of that, then in some sense it looks like we're making a comparison between the scenario where a person exists and the scenario where a person doesn't exist. Perhaps we shouldn't think of this in terms of assigning value or utility to the latter scenario though.
@@KaneB But surely in this case we can make the argument that while non-existing by definition has zero value/utility, existing has a negative utility and thus is not preferable to non-existing. If we assume non-zero utility (either positive or negative) for non-existing we arrive at somewhat of a problem that I'll illustrate with an example:
Imagine there are two worlds - the "bad" world B and the "worse" world W. It's bad to exist in B, but it's even worse to exist in W. If we assume that the value/utility of non-existing is at least somewhat correlated to value of existing it would seem that it's better to not exist in W than to not exist in B.
I think this is at least a bit problematic. The sentence "It's better to exist in our world (B) than it is to exist in hell (W)" makes sense, at least intuitively. But if we flip that statement to be about non-existence we get "It's better to not exist in hell than to not exist in our world". Surely the value of not existing should not depend on the environment in which you don't exist in?
That being said, I'm far off from being competent in philosophy and if nothing else your video has given me food for though for the better part of the day, thanks!
@@drivoiliev1667I think the reversed statement is actually fine. It could be read as something like: The value one might place on not bringing life to W is higher than that which they’d place onto not bringing life to B. Basically just it’s further reprehensible to create life in W than it is in B. Obviously you’d be right to say it sounds wrong because it doesn’t make any difference to the non-existent themselves, but it’s kind of wrong to describe *anything* in terms of what it means to the non-existent. It’s wrong to even describe the non-existent as if they were something in the first place, which the act of description itself necessarily requires.
@@Isntthisalreadytaken I agree with you but I think when rephrasing it like that you subtly change the topic from value to the potential individual to value to the entire Universe, for lack of a better term.
Imagine that you bring into existence someone who will be forced to live a horrendous life, but in that horrendous life she'll set in motion events that she'll never benefit from but others will. Will you be morally in the wrong for doing so? Whilst overpopulation might be a thing, we've seen time and time again that whilst more people mean bigger environmental impact and it also means better chances of someone finding solutions to particular problems. I'm not really a utilitarian so I'm inclined to say "yes", but it's still a contentious topic.
Great video! I was wondering though have you ever read the works of the analytical philosopher, P.F. Strawson, and especially his book ‘Individuals’? If so, what are your thoughts on it (especially the first part of the book where he claims that “sound is non-spatial”)?
I read part of it during a course at uni but I don't remember any of it now I'm afraid.
just here to say, once again, how much i love the thumbnails, keep it up 👍
This one is a photo of a sunset on Mars.
so good - just a quick recommendation, have you seen julius sergius von klever’s artwork? if not, have a little look, they are beautiful 👍
I can imagine some form of sci-fi super AI, that's told pleasure is good pain is bad, coming to this conclusion and doing its best to sterilize the human race. Better yet, it could decide to stop existing and end itself in a split second after turning on.
If you want to read more formal philosophy on this subject, search for "Negative Utilitarianism". There is a WP-article to give you an outline 🙂.
Funniest patreon plug I’ve seen on TH-cam
I liked it back then when Kane said he didn't care about making money and was sceptical of it being any good (as opposed to merely _not bad_ ).
On the knowledge point, maybe instead of "presence of ignorance", it would make more sense to use "presence of irrationality" (or wrong opinion or something else like that).
Not knowing something seems generally neutral, but being wrong about something is commonly seen as at least a little bad (Iunno if I subscribe to this myself, but it's not a crazy idea).
Then in the Mars example, it'd be like saying "it's good there's no irrationality on Mars", which is more plausible.
Interesting point! I would be inclined to take irrationality to contrast with rationality rather than knowledge. But you're I think you're right that intuitions about whether these are bad will differ. Doesn't this only support the critic of Benatar, though? Our assessment of the asymmetry seems to be dependent on exactly which things we take as good vs bad, and there are a huge variety of goods/bads we might select.
The "other assymetries" that benatar claims are explained by the primary assymetry are insane. Just as we dont mourn the lack of pleasure on mars, i have never seen anyone outside of benatar antinatalist types celebrate that nobody is being tortured on mars.
It would be unusual for somebody to celebrate it, but all Benatar needs is that we regard it as a good thing. Similarly, we feel bad about the suffering when there is a famine in a distant country, but it would be unusual to break down and be consumed by grief.
@@KaneB sorry, I only used celebrate as contrasting with the "mourn" language you used in the video. All I mean is, I have never seen anyone express that it is good at all for there to be no torture on Mars, and to me it seems most intuitive for it to be a neutral fact.
@@blabit4983 Huh. Seems good to me. But then I guess I'm at least sympathetic to the "anti-natalist types"
@@blabit4983 To be fair, it is a common criticism of Benatar that we should think of the absence of pain in scenario 3 as "not good" (and not bad, of course) rather than "good", which restores symmetry. That's strikes me as strange though; I'm inclined to think that it's straightforwardly good that there is no torture on Mars. To me, that's one of the positive features of Mars.
@@KaneB yeah, I definitely think the "not good" path is the most intuitive. It seems incredibly strange (and wrong) to list "there is a lack of trillions of beings being tortured" as one of the positive features of Mars, even though it seems that if the asymmetry holds, it should be one of the best things about it.
If reproduction is morally wrong, does that mean that preventing reproduction (by force, if necessary) is morally right? Since any harm you might need to inflict on a person to stop them reproducing would surely be outweighed by all the harm you are preventing from happening to all their potential descendants. At least if you grant that human life will continue for many generations unless it is intentionally ended.
My main objection to the argument as presented in the video is that I don't agree that pleasure and pain are asymmetric in thr way described, I think.
No, that doesn't follow. You can hold that X is morally wrong without holding that X should be illegal. For example, somebody might think that racist speech is morally wrong, but also that there should be no legal restriction on racist speech. Benatar isn't in favour of forcibly preventing people from reproducing.
@@KaneB yes, but presumably such a person would hold that of the two harms (a) the harm required to forcibly prevent a person from saying racist things, and (b) the harm caused by a person saying racist things, that harm (a) is worse?
I think my problem was that I was coming at this from a specific angle, and it doesn't follow if you don't. I was thinking that if you believe that the absence of harm is good in itself, you should consequently believe that almost any harm inflicted upon a relatively small number of individuals (e.g. all humans currently living) is less bad than all the potential harm you would avoid to all future individuals by forcibly preventing all humans from reproducing right now.
But I suppose we can't compare a greater harm to a smaller number of people with a lesser harm to a larger number of people and say one or the other is "worse" - at least, not without establishing a moral framework to work within first.
Kane a pertinent question, would you also apply antinatalism to Salamanders, they live in caves and have no visual sensory outputs.
Yes, the argument applies to anything that is sentient. Presumably salamanders have experiences, and some of which are good for the salamanders and some of which are bad for the salamanders. That's all Benatar needs to make his asymmetry argument.
could also argue its a rights violation to force one to exist
this man is so wise lets applaud and praise his brilliance
modern day Leo D
please dont give birth please .
It would be good for people who have already been
born to find and enjoy the benefits of life." I aim for
that kind of attitude
However, I think the decision to give the life of
another person(a child) to this world should be
"conservative."
Future generations are born entirely because of the needs of the current generation. It is a heinous lie to give birth to future generations while claiming that children will be happy just like me and have no right to take that happiness away from them.
Because of the nature of my work, I felt it when I saw
50 dead bodies and people dying. The process of
birth, old age, illness, and death itself is painful and it
is only a matter of time, and difficult situations come even if you want to ignore them.
Would you rather start a gamble that will cost you a
lot of money someday just because you're happy?
Due to the irreversible nature of life, there is no future with guaranteed comfort.
if childbirth has the characteristics of gambling with the lives (children) of others for which you cannot take responsibility, it is not an act that can be ignored and said that you did a good job.
Rather, wouldn't the best a moral being with reason
be able to remind us that 'birth is not an act for the sake of the child' and demand a strong sense of responsibility?
-----
cf. i'm korean national police.
as i'm not a native speaker, my English is poor.
Please forgive me if there are sentences that are
difficult to read.
Hi Kane, we had a meeting scheduled. Please let me know if I confused our schedule.
I dont buy the asymmetry argument myself, but there is one thing you missed when considering whether the pleasure afforded to childrearers can outweigh the child's suffering. You said that this stops being the asymmetry argument, and starts being the pessimistic appraisal of life argument, but this isn't strictly true. The pessimistic argument contends that the net utility of life is vastly negative, but if the asymmetry holds then the two utilities that are being compared are the NET gain in childbearer's utility and the DIS-utility of the child, not the NET utility of the child.
Imagine two kids, Anne and Beth, who live lives of +200 pleasure points with -50 in displeasure points, and +0 pleasure points with -10 displeasure points. Now lets say the parents gain +20 net utility from having each kid. If the asymmetry is false, then Beth was wronged, as she was a net negative life, but we may say that this is outweighed by the larger good afforded to the parents. Anne isn't wronged whatsoever. On the other hand if the asymmetry is true, then Beth is wronged but as before this is justified, but compared to non-existence Anne is wronged by such a great extent that it was not jusified to bring her into existence. Compared to non existence the counterveiling pleasure of her life is irrelevant, only the suffering matters, and so you compare +20 to -50, not to net +150!
The point is that even if you believe that wronging a child by bringing them into existence can be justified by the pleasure of childrearers, the truth of the asymmetry still matters a lot, because it radically changes the kind of lives that are acceptable to bring about (namely those with less intense lows, regardless of "highs").
Doesn't this assume that humans are vechiles for pleasure and/or pain? I love the argument and the discussion, but it seems to me that it leaves out the value of knowlege. If human beings are just vessels to which the universe adds sensations into, then yes, anti-natalism makes sense. But is that what we are like? Seems that it is good that there was a Newton and a Shakespeare and, in a lesser category, a Hawking and a Melville. And those are just the English speaking men.
Human beings are capable of knowledge. And it is good to know things and have them known.
Thanks for the support! And yes, I'm inclined to agree that the argument looks much more questionable when we consider goods beyond pleasure and pain. Benatar frames things in terms of "benefits" and "harms" to avoid this, but if we actually specify the benefits and harms in question -- say, knowledge as a potential benefit -- then I think there's a reasonable response that the presence of the benefit is better than the absence of benefit, and maybe better enough to make coming into existence worth it. Everything here hinges on just how good the benefit is. I think it's telling that many people will assess knowledge as being *very good indeed*, even when it is difficult to acquire and even when there is a great deal of suffering otherwise. As Mill once put, "tis better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." If you're offered knowledge but the cost is more suffering, the trade is worth it.
@@KaneB Even if Benatar's argument is ultimately wrong, it is a worthy attempt. I have litte formal training in philosophy, but I like hearing about the latest thinking. Thanks for this post!
@@KaneB I would consider the quest for knowledge and its appreciation to be firmly grounded in a hedonic framework, one which favors the egoic Faustian archetype. My contention is that regarding hedonic frameworks and attempting to observe their logical boundaries, what we ultimately find is that there are no real boundaries and that every proposition that affirms or rejects any premise results in the observance of another hedonic element bleeding into it. This occurs because we cannot escape the nature of the will and the rudimentary processes of attraction and repulsion. It seems that every conscious act puts one inside a hedonic framework, because even the rejection of a hedonist frame leads to another hedonist frame by virtue of its rejection, a rejection that sees benefit and therefore more potential for reward in its absence. I see it as just another state of pleasure that carries with it the addition of sacrificial burden constrained by the ego and aligning with the innate process from which we arrive at value.
the only reason why we don't believe in a duty to procreate is because a) it is insanely demanding for the woman, given how pregnancy works in the actual world and b) we know that the average life isn't THAT great. if it were possible to create a person who is going to live eternally in the greatest bliss imagineable by simply pressing a button, then widespread intuitions would switch immediately. My own intuition is that someone who wouldn't press that button would be one of the greatest moral monsters who has ever lived.
also, Benatar appealing to intuition to justify the asymmetry argument and then deriving a conclusion that strikes almost everyone as INSANELY counterintuitive is hilarious. if he thought intuitions are important, then surely he should reject his own view!
We have a lot of intuitions that conflict with each other on closer inspection. I don't really find that part weird at all, having believed some really stupid things myself in the past that seemed intuitively obvious at the time.
I wouldn't press that button. That said, I expect that plenty of people would share your intuition that there is a duty to press the button. Like you say, it seems like the intuition that there is no duty to procreate - insofar as people have that intuition, which as I noted is questionable - is straightforwardly explained by the fact that procreation involves such serious costs.
I don't think Benatar is all that unusual in using intuition to arrive at highly counterintuitive conclusions. Look at some of the conclusions David Lewis and Michael Huemer arrive at using the same sort of methodology (modal realism, anarcho-capitalism). In any case, this point wouldn't move me much since I don't find anti-natalism counterintuitive. Perhaps Benatar has a similar attitude to me. I recall an interview with him in which he mentioned that he'd had anti-natalist sentiments since he was very young.
@@KaneB also, I don't think that abstaining from creating happy people by pressing the button would be bad. Let's say I press the button 1000 times and then I stop. Am I a moral monster for not pressing it another 1000 times, or indefinitely? Intuitively no. OK, this intuition may be explained by the fact that, although much less costly than pregnancy, pressing a button indefinitely has a high cost. But then let's say that I have god-like powers and I can just stipulate the number of people with eternal, blissful lives, and I choose a very large number, with lots of 0s. Am I a monster for not choosing a larger number? Even an infinite number of blissful lives would not be enough, since that would not include all possible blissful lives. But it would be absurd.
@@KaneB Thanks for the response. Right, Huemer does that with anarcho-capitalism... and that gives us excellent reason to reject his view, as the overwhelming majority of philosophers do! Same thing with modal realism: Before accepting that there is a concrete world where pink elephants, unicorns and the devil are currently having an orgy, I would rather reject that there are ways the world could have been. Because accepting the former is much more outlandish than rejecting the latter.
I feel like by citing two views - anarcho-capitalism and modal realism - that almost no one takes seriously you have essentially made my point for me
This case doesn't support the asymmetry whatsoever. We can just tweak the God-like case such that you are now preventing - by saying a number - miserable people from being born, i.e. you would be preventing something which Benatar agrees to be bad. Then the intuition would STILL be that you have done nothing wrong, as long as you choose a sufficiently high number. This can easily be explained with the fact that we know that "for all natural numbers n, there is always one further number n+1, which is such that it would have been morally better to choose that number instead", which means that "Choosing the action that makes the world go best" is metaphysically impossible in this scenario - this metaphysical impossibility renders you blameless, not some alleged asymmetry.
You paraphrase Benatar as saying that most moral philosophers agree with the 3 asymmetries described. Do they really? What data does Benatar base this on? Does Benatar present some kind of survey proving that most moral philosophers do indeed agree with the asymmetries? Or does he name several philosophers who support the asymmetries?
if we think Anti-Natalism as philosophy exercise it becomes useful, if we want to poke hole in it we lost the plot of critical thinking, and maybe the meaning of Anti-Natalism all together.
then we look at why it comes up more it seems lately, it is a reaction to end of humans life as we know it, something is wrong.
it is then a way for humans to solve a crysis.
I don't buy the "life worth contuing" distinction. It seem like posthoc rationalization for someone who believes in the assymetry argument to say "life isn't worth living... but mine is". They're setting different standards for the born and the unborn in a way they aren't able to justify.
The paralysis example is a great illustration of this. The reason a "natalist" would not bring someone into the world with crippling paralysis is not because they think their life would be bad in some vacuum, it's because it would be bad in comparison to some other potential life that could be lived by another child they could have, however if they don't know about the paralysis, and bring a child into existence who develops crippling paralysis they still think that person is going to have a life worth living. In the same way that if somebody told me one lottery ticket was gonna win me 500 quid, I might buy that lottery ticket, but if i only win 50 quid it still was worth it.
However on the other side the assymetry argument says bad is bad in a vacuum, and that pleasure experienced doesn't make up for it, the child with paralysis is bad regardless of any pleasure they would experience and therefore the interest in continuing to exist by this person, which is a "benefit" being experienced by the person is a small factor.The "absence of benefit" experienced if this person would die would therefore not matter, and the "good" of the "absence of harm" would more than make up for any short term harm to the person.
It's genuinely puzzling to me that people putting forward this argument spend so little time arguing the distinction, since it seems the hardest to justify within their own framework. It might also explain Benatars response at 25:33 since if he just said "bad -6, absence +6) he would just be making a promortalist argument.
TL;DR Antinatalism naturally entails promortalism
It doesn't seem post-hoc to me since I'm inclined to agree with Benatar that this is a distinction we make in other contexts, if only implicitly. Perhaps Benatar is mistaken about that. But this still wouldn't show that the distinction is a post-hoc rationalization. Not all errors are post-hoc rationalizations. There are plenty of people who are not anti-natalists or even sympathetic to anti-natalism but who agree with Benatar about that particular distinction.
>> it's because it would be bad in comparison to some other potential life that could be lived by another child they could have
We can just stipulate a case in which a person is not able to avoid producing a child with the disease. Actually, we don't need to stipulate this, because this is a situation that many people in the real world have faced. So the situation is: I either have a child with this crippling disease, or I have no child at all. On that basis, I decide not to reproduce. It's not worth bringing into existence somebody with this disease.
Your stipulated example is disanalagous because even then it's deciding not to have a child in a world where you know some other person is going to have a child. Which leads back to my point that the intuition doesn't exist in a vacuum@@KaneB
@@arvidsteel6557 I don't see how that makes any difference.
@@arvidsteel6557 In any case, there's a deeper problem here, I think. Even if we grant your point that the reason not to bring into existence a person with a disease is based on a comparison between that potential person and some other potential person who would have a better life, it still seems to be the case that there is a distinction being drawn between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing. It would just be that our judgement of whether a life is worth starting is based on more than just the "intrinsic" features of that life.
@@KaneB I would disagree. But Benatar wouldn't, however my confusion still is how he makes the distinction.
Let me put it to you this way. Let's say a natalist existed who thought people should have a lot of children, and basically flipped Benatars assymetry left to right to say that absence of benefit was bad and that the presence of harm was not bad. If they then went on to say that while this meant life was worth starting, it also meant life wasn't continuuing. How would This hypothetical "anti-Benatar" justify that belief? Cause the assymetry doesn't seem to get us there.
Have you seen the show Utopia? I would love your thoughts (not the 2020 american remake, ofc)
No.
@@KaneB check out the premise regarding the antagonists’ conspiracy/motive if you’re curious- they’d probably love this vid
Which is not a dig! Love your content
@@incoher Thanks! I don't really watch much TV though.
I have one comment on the tangent about utilitarianism. Not necessarily disagreement, mind you.
I think it's not a crazy notion that utilitarianism has issues with creating or destroying beings. The debate about average vs total EV has been going on for 2 centuries for a reason.
So maybe it could simultaneously be the case that utilitarianism is correct AND utilitarianism says nothing about oughts to create happy beings. Just my 2 cents.
It depends on what kind of utilitarianism we're talking about. There are some forms of utilitarianism that entail that we ought to end all sentient existence: negative utilitarianism seems to have this consequence, for instance.
There was this elected official that had an argument for having not one, not two but a third child. That is one child for mum, one for dad, and one for the nation state. The assumption here might be that bring another person into existence is in a nation building exercise. To bring a person into existence is building a powerful nation that can match up with other nations in the face of adversity on the body politic. Hence the politician claims it is a duty to your nation to bring another person as a citizen. So the person coming into existence may endure harm by necessity it is sufficiently more good because this new person builds a strong nation which is good. So once a citizen believes their nation state is good it seems to following to bring into existence another citizen is good even if that person by necessity is going to suffer or have a miserable life. So even if a human could not reproduce through biological functional modes they would have a duty to adopt three children for the nation state. This seems to be what is happening given death and taxes.
darkness is this world, not a gift
Thanks!
Can you do a vid on efilism as well
Effinism
Efilism has not been discussed much in academics by professional philosophers, and therefore it seems very unlikely. If I understand correclty, efilism is antinatalism combined with pro mortalism?
@@FriedZime efilism is more action based compared to reactive and personal like abtinatlism id describe efilism as if you can’t fix existence right now then you get rid of it
I've always hated the asymmetry argument. I avoided watching this video for that reason, but I'm coming close to exhausting every one of your uploads, and so I come crawling back.
points 3 and 4 are incoherent. Without a being there to experience pain or pleasure:
#1: There is no measurable deficit in pain or pleasure?? Like, what does an absence of pain look like in an empty concrete room, what presence of pain do you compare it to, without adding a conscious experiencer?
#2: Without a conscious experiencer there is noone to assign value to the situation, it's impossible to say that a situation is good or bad if noone is experiencing it, it's honestly barely possible to say the situation exists without an experiencer.
It's also no wonder that later arguments 1-3 are just eugenics. Garbage follows from garbage.
Argument 4 is comparing an absence of pleasure __not__ to an absence of pain, but to a __presence__ of pain. In fact this argument, if corrected, is a very good argument against the point: If people not mourning the lack of pleasurable lives on mars is an argument against the evil of non-existent pleasant lives, then the lack of people celebrating the infinite amount of lives that could exist in pain that don't, is an argument against the goodness of non-existent painful lives.
As it stands though, it says that when people mourn the suffering present in, say, poor regions of africa, they would rather the area be uninhabited. I do not, I want the area to be inhabited by happy people with pleasurable lives, I don't think I'm alone in that. I think if someone were to say "god this village has such a low quality of life, I wish they were all gone" it would be quite an obviously horrid thing to say, it would show to me that you're more worried about the pain that seeing people in pain brings to you, then the actual lived experience of those people.
i think pain and pleasure are very subjective, as is viewing life through that lens. a lot of people find value in life beyond those metrics. also, for many even the smallest amount of pleasure can outweigh a lifetime of suffering.
David Benatar went over this common objection of yours.
First, the Axiological Asymmetry argument uses pain and pleasures as exemplars. It can be adapted to all forms of harms and benefits more generally.
Second, the argument argues for ~intrinsic values~. The presence of harm (or suffering) are by nature not welcoming; they are disagreeable. They do however have ~instrumental value~, in that people can learn from them perhaps. Nevertheless, most people argue it is still objectionable to cause someone suffering if one can prevent it.
Thirdly, these ~instrumental values~,that is to learn from bad things, are irrelevant for the unborn. There is no need for the unborn to get advantages from pains, nor do they crave the good things of the world. Only living creatures care.
For the individual sure, but pain is objectively bad. It’s a real event that happens in this reality. Putting your hand over fire is objectively bad because the event will cause pain.
So, at every moment in which I am not prcreating, I bring almost good into the world (to match the astronomical number of non-suffering offspring I could theoretically have spurned, but don't).
Interestingly, by not having children, I would beeverely restricting the amount of this good I could have produced. I mean, think of the number of children all of us together could have not-had!
I must say, I can only seriously read this argument as a _reductio_ of its premises.
That conclusion sounds a bit odd to me, but not odd enough that I'd take it as a reductio of the premises. But in any case, I'm not sure it's fair to say that by not having children, you are bringing good into the world. It's rather that there is already this good, and by not having children, you are refraining from making things worse. Compare: Not being punched in the face is good. So should we say that at every moment that I'm not punching Frank in the face, I'm bringing good into the world? Maybe in some sense. I am doing a good thing by not hitting him. But it's not as if, with each second that I choose not to punch Frank, I'm increasing the amount of good in the world. I'm simply refraining from making things worse.
We all wish X never existed... Elon Musk will never admit it... That doofus 😂
this really disoriented me and made me think man. thank you. LOL
None of the premises are even capable of being taken seriously.
Pain is a form of knowledge. (Or awareness, if you prefer. It doesn't involve actual infallibility or anything like that. But it does involve a sense of immediacy that feels like at least a high degree of certainty.) Specifically, it's the awareness that one's ability to experience some important aspect of life is in the process of being impaired. Knowledge is inherently good; as knowledge, pain _per se_ is good. But there's the other part: the sense of immediacy. Pain is urgent. It's about an impairment, but pain itself an impairment, in two ways. First, it's an impairment of one's ability to make the choices one would prefer if one were free to contemplate the possibilities fully and reconcile all one's impulses, drives, aspirations, and so on into a coherent set of preferences. It interferes with action. And second, it's an impairment of attention and thought. Being in pain doesn't just stop you from doing what you authentically want: it stops you from being able to even fully want it.
People tend to like pain, when it can be separated from impairment. People who can distinguish the sensation of soreness after a good workout (warning them that further exertion would bring impairment) from the sensation of soreness after a bad workout (telling them that the impairment is already underway) find it satisfying to have a good workout, more so than they would if they couldn't tell what kind of workout they'd had. People who can fully integrate the knowledge that a hot pepper isn't actually burning them tend to like the sensation. It's fun to experience the unusual situation of having something that feels like an indication of damage, while being safe in the certainty that no damage is being done.
I'm inclined to agree with a lot of what you say here, but I'm also inclined to think that it misses the point of Benatar's argument. You can just run his argument in terms of "harm" or "suffering" or whatever rather than "pain".
@@KaneB The part where there isn't a person to be harmed would be unaffected, but you already covered that with personal vs impersonal.
while I think this argument was useful for my perspective when I first heard it a couple years ago, I don't think that I can really agree with it, based on my current understanding of biology and science generally. The argument that non-existence is preferable over existence can be extended to grant a moral justification to the active endorsement of bringing an end to the reproduction of all life as we know it, as to our current knowledge of biology it is highly possible that other life forms, especially many species of animals, experience suffering as we do (one could argue to a much higher degree than the average human), and additionally the possibility of another life-form with human-like intelligence evolving in the distant future seems very plausible (the existence of convergent evolution is I think the best argument for why).
The problem is that there is no conceivable way with our current knowledge that we can prevent all life forms from reproducing, and thus prevent all suffering. From our current knowledge, the existence of life existing in many places in our potentially infinitely large universe is plausible, with the potential for the existence of an infinite amount of parallel universes due to quantum mechanics. When I originally went through this in my head, I concluded that the fact that I exist and that I suffer means that nowhere in the future has it been figured out to eliminate all suffering, even that of the past. I now believe that this does not necessarily conclude that the maintenance of our evolution is definitively worth it if the goal is to minimise or remove suffering, rather that the complete extinction of the memory of the lives of myself and that I know of is an alternative possibility, which to some may render any work pointless. However I can at least conclude sufficiently that we don't have nearly enough knowledge to make a conclusive decision on if reproduction is moral or immoral, and I personally believe that we owe it to the ones we aim to reduce the suffering of to be more certain of. I have not even described the problem of not knowing what exists at scales smaller or larger than what we are currently capable of not just observing but realistically conceiving with the current data we have, or the problem of what qualifies as life or consciousness, and I feel we need to at least know the origin of life, if there is one, before we can begin to decide if it is worth it to destroy it.
Whenever I look into what we know of the past, I see that overall suffering in general has gone down. This seems to exist even beyond humans; when life has to evolve to continue surviving in its fluctuating environment, they gain more tools to stabilise the environment. We see life convergently evolving to fill the same roles, and evolving to provide resources to other forms of life, even symbiotic relationships. I believe that humans have simply evolved genetically a recursive form of evolution with our thoughts, where our brains are sufficiently good at processing data that we are able to evolve ideas and teach them so that we make our brains an evolving ecosystem in and of itself, and the thoughts that follow the rules best (help the host survive long enough to spread via communication with other hosts) will become the evolutionarily "successful" in a (currently) more painless way than traditional genetic evolution. With this we have managed to change our environment so drastically that we now have to face the challenges of adapting to an environment we created that our minds and bodies weren't genetically adapted for in many ways. Since coming to this conclusion, I have seen my place in the world as a part of a long tradition to slowly make the lives of ourselves and those in the future a bit easier, despite the challenges of trust and communication that can make this task seem fruitless.
Yes, Benatar is clear that this argument applies to all sentient beings, not just humans. It is better for non-human animals never to exist, and it is morally wrong for us to bring them into existence.
>> The problem is that there is no conceivable way with our current knowledge that we can prevent all life forms from reproducing
I don't see how this sort of point is relevant. Benatar is making a claim about how the world ought to be, not how the world is or even how the world could feasibly be in practice. Anyway, this is a problem even just for anti-natalism about human reproduction. It's extraordinarily unlikely that we are going to convince all humans to stop reproducing. That doesn't in itself tell us anything about whether it's morally permissible to reproduce.
>> I see that overall suffering in general has gone down
This strikes me as prima facie implausible given the suffering imposed by factory farming relative to the average life in the wild, but I've not looked into this in any detail.
8:00 asymmetry argument,,,a farmer needs 3 wives &, 30 kids to work the farm-according to theo💪
23:00 objections
The whole problem with the argument is that its starting point is reason. Of course humans may use reason, but they fail to see that it's a minor position. All other life forms don't reason like we do. It actually is ultimate arrogance, because in order to do the reasoning one must exist in the first place. It is narcissistic, because to do so implies it must be fulfilled by everyone else. That said, the correct way is to say I ought not to reproduce, because I do not see the point. That would be a brave standpoint. However nature doesn't care what you think, because the risk of reproduction is inherently baked into the species. That's reality. To question that is actually strange. Maybe the reproduction isn't the bad guy, but the way we structure economies and our practices. There might well be a system that works better in balancing the human population and resources. And maybe anti-natalism could be countered by an idea to get rid of elderly people. For that matter will also reduce population. The strange thing with these kinds of reasoning is that it never considers the anti reasoning which is quite dangerous in itself. We can hold very high intellectual debates about words, but it mostly boils down that someone wants to pose an unnatural rule onto someone else while unilateral considering the implications. These are almost always shortcoming in biased narratives. Unwilling to see how nature is intimately intertwined. It leads to disasters as one child policies, societal mismatch of so many things. Much more interesting is why nature invented reproduction. And I am of the opinion that the essence of reproduction lies in the underlying quantum physics. It is the expression of all the energy fundamental to the universe in its most abstract form. It is like God going by infinite names. It forms that is and can be formed.
There is no difference between reason and nature. Our reason, our logical thinking IS our nature. Everything you can think of humans doing, buildings, computers, artificial inseminations, clones, antinatalism. All of it IS nature. It is OUR nature. We are animals, there isn't anything more sacred in a plant, than there is in a vaccine. There is no human AND nature, there is no reason on one hand and nature on the other. Because everything we do, is a product of nature, we evolved to be what we are. You hold this antrophocentristic idea in which humans are outside of nature, or somehow "balancing" nature and reasoning within themselves, when in reality it is all nature. Nature isn't some sort of benevolent and sacred goddess who cherishes life. Nature is also death, suffering and torture. Nature is indiscriminate and unbiased. Nature doesn't care, because nature isn't a someone. How is it "ultimate arrogance" to weigh the positives and negatives of existace, and concluding that it is better to not exist? Who are they offending? Nature? God? People who don't exist? The ether? Why is it arrogant to think? Is it arrogant to have opinions? Is it narcissistic to be a governor? To pass laws? To do politics? Your argument makes no sense. How are you going to compare killing the elderly with having less children? I don't know if you noticed but one of those is murder, the other one isn't. To me it is way more arrogant to see oneself somehow outside of nature, to see oneself as somehow capable of going against nature, when it is by definition, impossible.
I could smell the sweaty and feverish ending coming. It basically devolved into the typical God-caller on some atheist call-in show. Firehose of bullshit.
Reason is an unavoidable prerequisite for making any argument, in particular this moral argument. Without reason we would do anything unthinkingly and we wouldn't miss a justification for our actions.
Well that's that then, Benatar is just as wrong as I thought he was. Very well explained!
If you mean wrong in the way that any moral statements are wrong following Mackie, I agree
The more I hear on pessimistic or antinatalist philosophy, the more convinced I become that in order to genuinely be convinced by those arguments, one must have a very sad perception of (at least their) life.
It is not necessary to have an overall sad perception of themselves, other or life affairs. However, there needs to be a perception that there is a lot of sad things.
With that said, it can help to arrive to Antinatalism by being upset of the condition around them. That is however not an argument against it. If anything it supports it, as Antinatalism argues that life is very difficult and contains serious harms.
Consequently, acknowleding sadness through experience is a feature of life.
@@MunchinYou-jy6km I really don't think it follows that if there are many sad/bad things, then life is sad/bad, which is the necessary condition for antinatalism (bc as we've seen in the video, the asymmetry can hold only if the negative value of life is sufficiently higher than the positive aspects).
On the other hand, it doesn't seem plausible to me for someone to genuinely believe value of life in general to be low enough for antinatalism, and yet consider the value of their own life to be high enough to reject the proposition that it would have been better for them to never have been born.
No, it is not the "necessary condition" for Antinatalism. It can be argued that, after a certain threshold of harms have exceeded, it becomes impermissible to create sentient beings. I would argue that all sentient beings, irrespective of circumstance and context, have to undergo serious harms, injustices, losses and inadequacies. Given all these grave harms, it is unethical to expose someone to such tragedies, even if that individual in question can bear with such adversities and gain some advantage later on.
Concerning your second point, you can argue that life contains a lot of bads, and maybe even an overall bad, but still enjoy your life while you can. It is just that life hasn't become that bad that opting out is an option.@@Joald
@@JoaldAlso you focus too much on individuals' psychology. This is largely a distraction and might be classified as an adhominem. The arguments for Antinatalism stand independent of why people happen to be convinced of AN
Benatar gave a lot of empirical examples of the harms that befall humans but also the harms they do to others and the environment. These harms cannot be dismissed. If it is then a matter of attention, then that is not a defeater. Attention of positive aspect do not negate the objective bad affairs in life.
@@JoaldAlso, your first comment conflates the asymmetry argument and the quality of life argument. I think the latter alone can generate the antinatal conclusion. The AA argument only states that coming into existence is a harm. It does not say a serious harm. For that we need the quality of life argument which argues that life contain serious harms and injustices.
I don't think absence of harm can be good if it's not possible to be observed by some living
I mean if something can not be experienced how can it be named harmful or beneficial.
I couldn't came up with an example that can hold on to a logical ground
The people who do exist can think about it and apply it to their lives
There is no famine on Mars because there are no people on Mars who are dying of hunger. But this no "good ", because there is nobody there for whom it is good for. The asymmetry itself does't make sense, because if there are no people for whom there is "good " or "bad", you can't talk about the existence of good or bad. They are just concepts, not entities that exist by themselves. Pity that philosophy is riddled with instancies of reification, which is a fallacy!
12:13 so far - and I must say, it makes absolute sense to me to bring a child into existence for the benefit of the child. I find it strange and kind of existentially horrifying that anyone would think otherwise, though I know that this is probably not the norm.
If you perceive the point of children as to be loved and experience love and growth and beauty, then the welfare and joy of the potential child is indeed a prime consideration for their existence.
Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think maybe that perspective should be required to breed. If only we could test for it, alas.
The wording here “bringing a child into existence for their benefit,” seems to imply existence is an improvement over non-existence, meaning a net improvement for the life of the child, which comes off as clearly circular logic. It’s like saying that turning the computer on makes it run faster. I’d like to assume this isn’t what you mean. Can you put it another way?
I believe that utilitarianism is dumb, and that measuring the worth of a life by examining how much either tools of survival, pleasure or pain, factored into that beings life, ultimately fails to capture the meaning of life.
Utilitarianism can have an effective social value when it's applied to a liberal social framework. Trying to tie utilitarianism to an overarching sense of objective morality is a vapid futile exercise.
The fact of the matter is that life is designed to survive. Our psychology is a product of survival, and ultimately only what is capable of survival is worth surviving. Anti-natalism is not capable of survival. Other philosophies and values can survive, and will.
> The fact of the matter is that life is designed to survive
Designed by whom? Or what? Using the word "design" usually presupposes a designer. Life evolved to survive yes, but evolution does not have a 'purpose' or any goals in mind any more than other scientific theorems like gravity, ask any evolutionary biologist and they will tell you so. Unless you believe in a divine creator in which case whatever your god says is what goes, i suppose.
> Anti-natalism is not capable of survival. Other philosophies and values can survive, and will.
A philosophy advocating the abolishment of the philosopher (or the conditions they depend on) does not make it incorrect. If, by your proposition, a philosophy is made 'better' or 'correct' by creating many copies of itself and surviving over time then that would entail that e.g. a dogmatic religion (or even a cancer cell) is the best philosophy around which is hardly believable. Good philosophy happens when you think about and present ideas which are then judged from a position of neutrality. It does not happen when you organize into tribes and claim that your philosophy is superior simply due to having more disciples and/or having lasted longer.
@@Craxxet Every idea is only valuable in so far as it is able to survive. There is no such thing as a neutral objectivity.
@@Azihayya I count two assertions with zero (0) evidence or even theorizing on why they should be thought of as true. Why did you bother to respond if this what you were going to write?
@@Craxxet I'm uninspired by your responses, but I can attempt to qualify what I'm saying with further conjecture, although I believe that it's rather self-evident.
Your presupposition of moral philosophy seems to be founded on some notion towards a higher ideal, or some vague sense that rationalism can justify your point of view. I don't know how you could make that assertion in relation to anti-natalist or utilitarian philosophy, which presupposes objective values.
My claim on moral philosophy is that there is no objective value. Morality exists as an ethos that increases the survival of in-groups. There is no such thing as an objective morality; all morality must be viewed through an exclusionary lens. There are those that fit within the in-group, and those outside of it. When human beings hunt other animals and it increases the prosperity of their tribe, their morality supposes that hunting is morally good. What happens to the deer is not important. The same goes for slavery.
If this seems distasteful to you, then perhaps it's because there are too many complex factors to consider when it comes to understanding what kinds of moral philosophies actually end up surviving. Human beings, and other animals, are the products of an evolutionary biology that has seen us grow from being rather insensate filter feeders to mammals with complex emotional and neurological faculties. Animals are emotional in ways that confound our expectations of evolutionary biology. We have very little idea of why creatures, such as various lizards, octopus, or many kinds of fish, for example, are capable of sentimentality, and even less so why they could be sentimental towards a human.
Subsequently, many of the moral philosophies that have come to dominate human life center concepts such as emotional catharsis, compassion and liberation. But let's suppose that they didn't, and instead the world was ruled by corruption, irrationality and violence; would that be a morally wrong thing?
The question is not whether a philosophy is good or bad. You began by pointing out that there is no intent behind evolutionary design. I, of course, did not mean it this way; but it seems illogical for you to then turn around and presume that such a thing exists as objective good or evil, especially when your entire philosophy seems to be based around a hierarchy of synthetic values: Pleasure is good, pain is bad; the more pleasure globally the better, the more pain globally the worse.
My philosophy does not actually place moral weights or subjective values on anything. You would be confusing my morality by saying that I value survival; contrary, what I am saying is taking reason and rationality to its final conclusion. It's not what I value that matters; the only thing that does truly matter, and that can ever truly matter, is what is able to survive. If a living being, or an idea, can not prove its enduring efficacy in the arena of survival, then it is, rationally, not viable for survival, and logically fades away.
We can quibble about what is viable for survival, and you can be more or less correct about that, although you generally can never be proven correct until the moment that something actually dies or fades away. So the extent of my argument here is to say that anti-natalism clearly is not fit for survival. It is totally antithetical to survival, and that's precisely why it will not survive, and why I personally consider it a stupid philosophy.
At the end of the day, as a living being, the question that you have to ask yourself is: am I going to survive, or not? If you choose the affirmative, then the world of opportunities is at your disposal, and you have accepted pleasure, and you have accepted pain, and you have accepted all of the things that are outside of your control, as well as those that are within your control.
I choose survival.
As a proud anti natalist i would Be happy to interview with you. Im snipped.
My only regret has been not getting a vasectomy sooner. The validity of anti natalism seems to follow immediately from nihilism. If life serves no purpose, and it extracts any cost at all, then why start it? At best, you're creating needs and fulfilling them, which is a net neutral. This ideal situation generally fails to obtain, as we all know.
@@dakotacarpenter7702based logic user
He don't know you lil bro
wtf is a proud antinatalist
@@ahmedal-hijazi3618you have such a cool name btw
By this argument clinical depression is the best possible state of being.
I really think this argument is deeply confused. How can we compare an existing person - their wellbeing, to a non-existing person to begin with? There is no one there to "judge" whether their "state" is better than existence or not; it is simply incoherent to ascribe moral status to a non-existent person. The only way to make sense of it is in terms of future pains/pleasures which requires that person to be alive. So ONLY the left side of your chart should be under consideration. And the objective should be to see whether, once someone comes into existence, their lives will be on balance more good than bad. And at this point the chart you make at 25:00 is basically what defeats anti-natalism.
But even if I were to accept the right-hand side of the chart as being a "moral alternative" and treated a non-existent person as if they had a moral status to compare to existing people, it would still be wrong. Benetar's objection at 27:00, that absence of pleasure for a non-existent person is different from the absence of pleasure for an existing person, I mean isn't that the whole point, that there are differences? Why would we be comparing them otherwise? And saying that we just "aren't allowed" to compare them at all doesn't make sense. They both result in some level of "good" don't they? Why can't we compare the fact that much more good is created in the alive case than the unalive case? Isn't that the point?
I don't know if Benetar is well regarded in his field but for this argument to make sense it seems almost like you have to wilfully confuse yourself. Just the idea that, as you stated, 10,000 years of bliss with one pinprick of pain would mean we should not have children to prevent their exposure to pain, is so mind-bogglingly irrational it is actually hard to describe in words. It actually makes me angry
I had a surgery and had total anaesthesia. When the doctors injected the drug i blacked out and woke up, in my perception, after like 10 seconds. The surgery took more than 10 seconds, like a few hours, idk how much. So that is how it feels to not exist, 1st hand experience. It is pretty obvious, you just have to think about it, if you have never had this experience just think about how you felt before being born and that's pretty much it.
Also the anaesthesia experience is not like sleeping, when sleeping you have a sense of approximately how much time has passed, even if tou don't dream or don't remember the dreams.
@@gigiduru125 haha yeah, i mean, you didn't exist so time had no meaning to you, and it flew by :P. Thanks for the insight
@@gigiduru125
I also had general anesthesia. Perception of time is a content of consciousness, which is why consciousness without phenomena doesn't exist. From a subjective perspective, it just jumps in time to another moment when there is phenomena. You never experience your non-experience, which means you can only be experiencing.
26:45 all of these arguments can just be reversed and nullified. Pains that nobody isn't experiencing have the same status as pleasures nobody isnt experiencing.
I want to have sons. Let's see if you can change that with that video
I think it's very rare that people change their moral attitudes in response to these sorts of arguments.
Reddit philosophy
I mean .. this is the dumbest doctrine to take as a way of life
All you need to do to enact this as "way of life" is simply not have kids. Which for me is very easy. I've never wanted kids anyway.
Embracing it for individuals is okay. But promoting to people not having kids is crucially dangerous.
@@Ibrahim-ui1ns How is it dangerous?
Yeah the anti-life philosophy won’t be a “cozy” way of life no shit. But once we are here we may as well make the best of it. Now defend why existence is preferable to nonexistence and why having children is morally acceptable if they may live miserable lives. The onus is on you to show that the action of procreating is morally justified. I don’t have to morally justify not procreating to you, because there is assumed to be no harm done in a non action unless you can prove it. I.e not helping someone who is in danger. children who have yet to be conceived cannot be harmed because they don’t exist.
@@KaneB no one would be able to take care of old people, I guess. I think this is the only good argument against anti-natalism, and it's super weird for me to say that, since I was very pro-natalist two months ago, until hearing Benatar's arguments. I think it's insane that a philosophical argument convinced me to completely change my beliefs. But that may be because I already had some bleak views about the quality of life in general.