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Antinatalism

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FeatherFall

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This is something I've only recently encountered. As I understand it, antinatalism is the position that it is never ethical to have children.

Every antinatalist I've heard seems to regard the cost-benefit analysis of pleasure and harm as a "category error." This doesn't jive with my understanding of category errors, but suffice it to say that antinatalists object to the idea that any amount of pleasure can justify the simplest harm visited upon a sentient creature. Their solution is to seek the extinction of the human race (and if possible, all sentient life) through abstinance or contraception.

Antinatalists also have a tendency to speak about value as if it means something absent the context of a living organism (even though they seem to be atheists). I spoke with an antinatalist recently who backed off such talk after a 20min conversation about the biocentric nature of value. One antinatalist I listened to conceded - without prompting - that life-affirming moralities must be egoistic, but he regarded such moralities as evil anyway (specifically because they are life-affirming). I've got other thoughts about this if anyone is interested, but it seems to be best to keep the first post short.

Has anyone encountered antinatalism before? I'd appreciate someone with technical knowledge to try to help me understand how antinatalists use the phrase, "category error."

Edited by FeatherFall
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I've never heard someone describe themselves as antinatalist, but part the argument is familiar from various forms of nihilism.

As far as "category error" goes, I don't know how they would mean it except, like you said, that they believe the smallest amount of

harm invalidates the greatest amount of good. Discussions I've had have led down the path of defining causality, and they generally

believe that to take part in any chain of events which ends in disaster is to cause the disaster.

Example: You get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and then you hit a pedestrian who dives in front of your car on the way

to work. Taking the time to have the cup of coffee caused you to be on a collision course with that pedestrian, so it was an evil act,

but you had no way of knowing beforehand. Therefore any attempt to be moral is futile and we should all euthanize ourselves.

The best I've been able to do to contest this has been to take the act of making coffee and ask them which part of it increases

the likelihood of accidental manslaughter. They either do or do not perceive the basic metaphysical nature of an action, and they

either do or do not understand that morality doesn't apply when there is no choice involved. Some people have just had tough lives

in which they seem to get more bad luck than good and the good they try to do doesn't pan out. It's hard to persuade someone

against their own experience, but maybe you can point out that throughout history, particularly in the past few hundred years

(good opportunity to plug capitalism), it has become easier for people to live long and be happy. Random suffering from disease and

natural disasters is deceasing precipitously in developed countries, and justice is enforced upon a larger percentage of criminals.

This suggests a net force for good rather than evil over time.

If their issue is more like the religious notion that straying from perfection at any time makes one unworthy of life there are different

approaches, but in my experience nihilist types are more concerned with chaos, resulting from a failure to identify the difference between

human action and natural accidents.

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I'm unfamiliar with this label, but I know of one case I've come across before of a group that regards having children as always immoral and aims to have people just quit breeding. The call themselves the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I'm pretty sure I recall them being environmentalists rather than nihilists though.

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This is something I've only recently encountered. As I understand it, antinatalism is the position that it is never ethical to have children. Every antinatalist I've heard seems to regard the cost-benefit analysis of pleasure and harm as a "category error." This doesn't jive with my understanding of category errors, but suffice it to say that antinatalists object to the idea that any amount of pleasure can justify the simplest harm visited upon a sentient creature. Their solution is to seek the extinction of the human race (and if possible, all sentient life) through abstinance or contraception. Antinatalists also have a tendency to speak about value as if it means something absent the context of a living organism (even though they seem to be atheists). I spoke with an antinatalist recently who backed off such talk after a 20min conversation about the biocentric nature of value. One antinatalist I listened to conceded - without prompting - that life-affirming moralities must be egoistic, but he regarded such moralities as evil anyway (specifically because they are life-affirming). I've got other thoughts about this if anyone is interested, but it seems to be best to keep the first post short. Has anyone encountered antinatalism before? I'd appreciate someone with technical knowledge to try to help me understand how antinatalists use the phrase, "category error."

I'm only familiar with it in passing but from what you wrote, Antinatalism sounds like an emo psychology that never grew up predicated on a pack of stolen concepts. "All life is pain, man..." The idea that no amount of pleasure is worth enduring any amount of pain is preposterous on its face. Any human presented with the option of, say, receiving a paper cut followed by a payment of a billion bucks would easily disagree on their relative values and importance.

I would need more context, but I would assume that the category error is that without religion there is no ultimate base for values. No ultimate meaning for existence. Values, of course presuppose a valuer and without the ultimate valuer(god) it can not be said that something "should" exist in any cosmic sense. Seems like some member of the nihilist camp and subject to similar problems.

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I though this might be a package deal also. They say there is no justification for creating life. But justification is a normative process, and therefore requires life to make any sense at all.

While the human extinction thing is a shared goal of some environmentalists, the reasons appear to be different. Antinatalists seem to think sentience is a curse, not so for the environmentalists.

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