Free Disposal

See non-identity problem.

If you’re an adherent of a person-affecting moral theory, then it is hard to see how benefits to non-existent people could be of moral concern, especially as the policy in question would likely make it come about that a different set of people would come to exist than would have otherwise.

Actually, this may well be the easiest utility inference in the world.

This leads to strange conclusions. Suppose you and your wife decide you don’t want to have children. But you could really use some help around the house. So the two of you decide to have a baby and raise him as your slave. By your logic, as long as you treat him well enough that he doesn’t commit suicide, this is perfectly legitimate.

And speaking of not having children, it’s arguably worse than murder. If you kill a middle-aged person, you’re only depriving him of half of his life. But you’re depriving every baby you don’t have of all of his life.

The utility of not having been born isn’t zero–it’s undefined because there’s no one to look forward to being born or to lament not having the chance. That’s why these kinds of comparisons break down.

We know that people almost universally prefer existing to not existing because there are so many cheap and easy ways to stop existing.

Bryan, this doesn’t seem like the right comparison. People can choose to continue to live and still wish that they had never been born. Many do. Mankiw is on target: judging the merit of large-family subsidies involves “signing” the net utility of the people whom the subsidy will cause to be born, i.e., determining whether it will be positive or negative.

This puts me in mind of the joke that involves two elderly Jews. One says, “Life is so painful, joy is so short, pain is so long, that we would be better off dead than alive!” The second fellow says, “You are right.” The first adds, “Even better than to be dead would never to be born!” To which the second responds, “But who has such luck? Not one in ten thousand!”

Bryan,

While I appreciate the plug, I should mention that my series on antinatalism is informed by arguments articulated in David Benetar’s treatise, Better Never to Have Been. If you are curious about the ethical case against procreation (and against your existential intuition), I strongly encourage you to take a look at Benatar’s work.

Of course, that should have read David BenAtar. Spelled like the 80s pop diva.

For those who have experienced clinical depression, I suspect the notion of rationalist etiology will ring false. There is probably something to depressive realism inasmuch as the afflicted have a more accurate sense of their situational prospects, but the defining characteristic of deep despair is a kind of tumultuous, ridiculous and extra-rational self-absorption. The happy pills bring clarity and peace of mind, preconditions for rational thought.

If antinatalism is soundly reasoned, as I believe it is, there is nothing inherently demoralizing in the implications. Ultimately, it’s a philanthropic position – one that cherishes vitality with an aim toward minimizing harm. That’s simple stuff.

Personally, I think there is something at least arguably pathological about the mindset that permits people to wantonly create new life without careful regard for the all-too-preventable suffering this entails. Life is valuable for the living, but it is not a gift. Those who never come into existence will never suffer, and are deprived of nothing. Why role the dice?

This is not a loop. This is not tail-chasing. This is nothing more than a precautionary conclusion. A modest hedge. I sleep well.

Of course if one fears the possibility of some form of Hell then committing suicide is not equivalent to not having been born. Even if one assigns a low probability to being damned eternally, the expected value-maximizing move might be to stay alive. [Remember: To be or not to be? That was a classic cost-benefit analysis of what might come after.]

Empirical question: As faith has declined, have suicide rates increased in the West in the last 2 centuries? If so, this would be consistent with the thesis since lives were harsher in times past, so suicide rates should actually fall today if fear of the afterlife were a constant.

If antinatalism is soundly reasoned, as I believe it is, there is nothing inherently demoralizing in the implications. Ultimately, it’s a philanthropic position – one that cherishes vitality with an aim toward minimizing harm. That’s simple stuff.

It’s clearly anti-life and obviously pathological from an evolutionary perspective. And it’s based on some assumptions not shared by most people.

Look at the world. Thousands or millions of different philosophical beliefs, based on different foundational assumptions. To assume that your anti-natalism is “rational” and Bryan’s pro-natalism is “irrational” — this is the original sin in discovering truth. To someone who honestly wants to overcome bias and see reality, the fact that human beings are rationalizing animals should strike terror in their heart. Instead I find that most “rationalists” simply ignore all the evidence that reason is virtually always used to justify decisions made for emotional reasons. Because that evidence would threaten their so-called “rational” belief systems. However the fact that so many self-proclaimed rationalists all disagree about so many ideas (like natalism) should be a big honking clue. . .

I think all self-identified rationalists would do well to put some effort into a meditation practice, or use some psilocybin mushrooms in a positive setting, or perhaps a challenge like hiking the Appalachian Trail end to end.

Anything to break them out of their mental “closed loops” and open them up to other possibilities. . .

Matthew C, it seems to me you are committing the naturalistic fallacy when you judge a meme by its ability to self-replicate. Do we consider AIDS to be wonderful because it has propagated itself, or admire the remarkable ability of cancer cells to keep going when other cells would die?

You seem imagine your choice is between a complete absence of emotion or abandoning rationality. Unless you actually attain rationality though, how can you know if you are judging it correctly? And don’t you think there is room for improvements on the margin?

Matthew C, it seems to me you are committing the naturalistic fallacy when you judge a meme by its ability to self-replicate. Do we consider AIDS to be wonderful because it has propagated itself, or admire the remarkable ability of cancer cells to keep going when other cells would die?

Self-replication is not a sufficient condition for a meme to be worthwhile. But it is usually a necessary one.

You seem imagine your choice is between a complete absence of emotion or abandoning rationality. Unless you actually attain rationality though, how can you know if you are judging it correctly? And don’t you think there is room for improvements on the margin?

TGGP, belief that we are in the (small, select) group which is “attaining rationality” versus all the others who disagree with us is the essential characteristic of self-delusion. It is the original sin that produces unbounded error in its wake.

The best we can do is hold our thought processes in deep skepticism, and realize the radical contingency and tentativeness of our conclusions. Failure to do so leads to personal cognitive cul-de-sacs from which there is no exit. Because our “rational” thought processes are inextricably intertwined with emotional underpinnings that guide and direct them, mostly based on the evolutionary psychology of being social creatures.

Jonathan Haight writes about this quite effectively in this Edge essay, and in this academic paper. A few choice quotes:

Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can’t understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. . .

The basic idea is that we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.

Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor disagreement with your spouse. It’s like you’re preparing for a court appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other.

Anyone who claims to be about “overcoming bias” or a to be a “rationalist” or “moral philosopher” who is not intimately familiar with this cognitive gravitational black hole that completely dominates the trajectories of our “rational” thought processes, is walking blindfolded, stumbling across the landscape of reality on a cloudy, moonless night.

Matthew c,

It seems to me that if ethics is about survival – at whatever level – then the game is rigged in your favor.

My empirical proposition is that procreation entails avoidable suffering and death. Antinatalism addresses this by proposing that people refrain from creating new life. If my empirical premise is accurate, and if refraining from bringing new life into existence reduces suffering and death, and if preventing suffering and death is a desirable thing, then we are left with a situation in which a good outcome (less suffering and death) is in conflict with survival. But if survival is posited as a constitutional feature of ethics proper, then my antinatalist preference for reducing harm is rendered axiomatically untenable from the start. After all, antinatalism embraces attritional extinction as a just means of minimizing harm.

It seems to me that either your preference for survival is less than descriptive (and personally, I think it borders on nature-faking), or my preference for antinatalism is extra-ethical. However it’s framed, I am certain that I want nothing to do with an ethical order that presupposes the value of survival on such terms.

I don’t know if someone has already pointed this out, but there are also serious costs to others of choosing to die after you already exist that aren’t there if you could ‘choose’ to never exist at all. I suffer from a long-term and serious chronic illness that has made life very, very difficult at times; often then I thought it would be better to have never existed.

Nonetheless, I don’t think I ever contemplated suicide for any substantial period (as in, longer than six hours in a hospital ER), and this is without any philosophical or theological opposition to the idea of suicide; I strongly believe in a right to euthanasia and the acceptability of taking your own life if things are truly miserable. But because my utility calculation included effects on others, I never got close to that point despite the pain.

Even though I knew my parents would in some sense understand – since they had even explicitly stated that they would help me find a painless way to die if my disease ever became that intolerable – it was also clear the effect on them would be horrible. Not only would they be emotionally & psychologically devastated, they would be deprived of all the future positive interactions and joy* (we have a really good relationship, so let’s note the utility of this would be high, unlike turbulent relationships where the joy would be offset by fights). To a somewhat lesser degree, I would be inflicting the same on my friends. None of these would be caused by, say, either the original egg or sperm being defective and never fertilizing.

Obviously it’s your own life and you have no obligation to live it for others benefit, but for anybody who cares about their friends & family the costs of dying (ceasing to exist) and never having existed are drastically different.

* = Some would argue that these same lost opportunities apply to having never existed at all. But whether or not economic theory predicts it, there is clearly a huge difference in human psychology between how we deal with opportunities we never thought of and opportunities we know ‘could have been’ but aren’t.

The interpretation of these arguments depends solely on just how technical you wish to be. I personally agree with the interpretation that, with so many easy, cheap, accessible ways to commit suicide, we can see that most people prefer life. However, who can really know they prefer life for a a fact? Anyone who has been born has nothing to compare life with. Anyone who has never had life clearly cannot be asked about it.

I found one point in the comments particularly interesting: “…we don’t know anything about whether people prefer having existed to never having existed, because there’s no way – cheap, easy, or otherwise – to stop having ever existed.”

This comment raises the point that there is a difference between never having existed and ending the existence that we have. This brings factors such as devastated family members and loose ends that would be left after committing suicide. Someone may wish they did not have a life or had never been born, but elect not to commit suicide based on what might happen to those they love or things they are responsible for. For instance, what would happen to the preteen children of a single mother who commits suicide?