Why I'm Not an Antinatalist

Don't throw the baby out with the... uh... baby.

I recently read a piece from G.S Wilker about limiting our suffering footprint. Generally, I agree with the sentiment. There are a few simple things we can do to make enormous gains in limiting the harm we cause to others - most obviously, abstaining from animal products.

We all know I’m a bleeding heart vegan though, so that’s not much news. The more interesting part of Wilker’s post suggests we should abstain from having children. This is where I disagree with him, despite the fact that babies are loud sticky carpet-goblins (except my niece, she’s literally perfect in every way).

Note: Wilker’s post inspired this one, but I’m more critiquing Antinatalism in general than his views specifically.

Benatar’s Asymmetry

By far the most famous Antinatalist is David Benatar, who wrote the book Better Never to Have Been. He thinks there is a crucial asymmetry between the moral properties of pain and pleasure.

1. Presence of pain is bad

2. Presence of pleasure is good.

3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.

4. The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

1 and 2 are not really controversial, the interesting parts are 3 and 4. The easiest way to illustrate this asymmetry is with a table I ripped off of Wikipedia.

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They even coloured the cells in. Thanks Wikipedia.

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You’ll notice that, assuming these premises are true, then no one existing is the only way to guarantee a valuable universe. As absent pleasure doesn’t decrease value, but absent suffering increases it, the only way is up!

Benatar justifies these premises with a few examples of the asymmetry, which I’ll quickly summarise.

The Asymmetry of Procreational Duties

We have a moral obligation to not make unhappy people, but don’t have an obligation to make happy people. This is best explained by the asymmetry. The obligation not to make unhappy people is because suffering is bad, and the absence of their suffering is good (even though they aren’t around to experience it). However, while pleasure would be good for the person were they here, it’s not bad that they aren’t here to experience pleasure.

To illustrate, imagine you lived in hell - would it be wrong to have a baby and subject them to a lifetime of eternal torment of torture, pain, and being told to stand up so someone can find their phone in the sofa cushions (I assume that's what happens in hell)? Seems like the answer is yes. In that scenario you should abstain from having a kid. Not only that, but it seems good that the non-existent child isn’t there. By contrast, imagine you lived in heaven. Would it be bad not to have a kid? Benatar wants to say no - and so an asymmetry arises

Prospective Beneficence Asymmetry

Another asymmetry is how we talk about the interests of prospective children. We sometimes consider the badness of our circumstances before we make the jump. It makes sense to say things like “I live in a warzone, I shouldn’t subject a kid to that”. However, it’s odd for us to consider the good things a child can experience as a reason in favour of creating them. We don’t say “I have a PS5, I should have a kid so they can experience this!”. (This one seems pretty much the same as the previous one, but I’m adding it anyway to be comprehensive)

The Retrospective Asymmetry

Were we to have a kid, and they suffer immensely, we may live to regret having had them for their own sake. However, were we not to have a kid, we probably wouldn’t regret not having them for their own sake. We may regret not having kids because we’re old and no one’s helping us up the stairs - but we don’t regret it because we feel we wronged the non-existent person.

The Asymmetry of Distant Suffering and Absent Happy People

We regret that people far away have to suffer in bad circumstances. However, we don’t regret that people in good circumstances don’t exist in higher numbers. I may be sad that there are people living in crippling poverty, but it’s not like I’m sad that there aren’t more people in Beverly Hills doing whatever it is rich people do when they’re being rich (Pilates? I feel like a lot of it is pilates).

Against the Asymmetry

I don’t think the examples Benatar gives are insane, but I think the intuition they try to isolate isn’t that strong. Would it be good for a person not to be born in hell? Maybe? I don’t feel that strongly about it, and were someone to say someone not existing in hell is neither good nor bad, then that would also seem sensible. So, I find myself sympathetic to a Moorean approach. While his examples aren’t obviously false, the sorts of things they entail are, and that’s a reason to reject them.

One worry about the view that absent suffering is good, is that it would make some obviously bad universes good. Let’s say that there’s a hell universe with 10 people in it. The number of possible people that are absent in that universe is what, infinity? Infinity minus 10? At the very least it’s enormous. So, either we have to say that their absent suffering is good enough to outweigh the 10 people suffering, which would make the small hell good (which is nuts!), or we have to say the good of the absent suffering doesn’t outweigh the 10 people suffering in hell - but then that means the good of each potential individual’s absent suffering is tiny! The first of those conclusions seems obviously false, and the second reduces the good of each individual’s absent suffering to such a tiny amount that it might as well be zero.

Another reason to doubt the absence of suffering is good is that it’s just a bit weird to think the absence of something can have a moral property. Imagine we have a universe that’s the size of your bedroom with nothing in it. According Benatar, this is a good universe. Now imagine you have two room sized universes with nothing in them, presumably, that would be twice as good as having one. What happens when we connect them though? Is it still twice as good? If the answer is yes, then that means a empty universe the size of a double room is twice as good as an empty universe the size of a single room - and that’s kind of weird! It’s like he thinks an empty expanding universe is getting better and better over time. That just seems odd to me.

What’s unintuitive about believing an expanding dead universe is improving, is that at some point you would have to choose a certain amount of expansion over populating it with one happy person who experiences no suffering at all. That strikes me as false. It’s better to have a perfectly content person in a room sized universe than an enormous gaping void - no matter how big it is.

Now, you could just deny the original thought that two dead room sized universes are twice as good as one, but that would mean that the absence of suffering is just one constant value. When does it obtain? Only when there is literally no one? How big is that value? I have no idea, but I can’t imagine that it’s so good that the value of trillions of sentient beings wouldn’t dwarf it. It’s probably a rounding error on the universal utility calculation.

I also want to say it does seem good to bring happy people into existence. It seems clear to me that it’s more valuable to have a universe with trillions of blissful people than a universe with 10 lucky few - so I don’t find his examples that compelling. If I lived in heaven, I probably would be saying we should have as many kids as possible (assuming it doesn’t have other worse consequences, like making my life bad, jeopardizing my ability to be a good father, etc.).

Our intuitions in these cases are also probably being clouded somewhat. Take the Beverly Hills Example. I think the reason we feel like it wouldn’t be good if their population doubled is because it would probably be chaotic for Beverly Hills and make their lives worse in the real world. This is why we don’t always consider runaway population booms good. We also might be a bit envious that other people have perfect lives. Even though my rational brain thinks someone having a yacht is a good thing (All else being equal. It might still be indicative of other bad things), there’s still a part of me that looks at pictures of people on them and thinks “Fuck you, I deserve that yacht! I got my class’s Pupil of the Week award twice in 2004!”.

So, generally I feel like Benatar’s Asymmetry Argument doesn’t have an enormous amount of intuitive force to begin with, and entails weird conclusions that are more obviously false. I think it’s more plausible to say the absence of pleasure and pain are symmetrical - and both are simply neither good nor bad.

The State of The World

Another reason to be an Antinatalist comes from just looking outside; there’s war, hunger, disease, and Futurama keeps getting cancelled. What kind of fresh hell is this? The thought goes that by bringing someone into this world, you make them vulnerable to all the bad things that can happen, and so are wrong to do so.

It’s true. Life is hard, however we have some strong evidence that it’s worth it. For example, only about 1.3% of us kill ourselves. Now, maybe there are some people who don’t go through with it, but still wished they were never born - but how many of us are those people? It doesn’t seem like it’s that many, and if the Antinatalist wants to say a big portion of people wish they weren’t born, they’d have to provide some evidence.

Generally, if you make a decision on someone else’s behalf and it has 95% chance that they were happy you did it, even if they suffered because of it - then it’s fine to do that for them. In fact, you probably should do that for them. If flicking someone’s ear would procure them £100 (a deal most people would be willing to take, I’d wager), you should go around flicking everyone’s ears. It’s really weird to say “I’m glad you did X to me, but you shouldn’t have done X to me”

Also, despite what the news tells you, the world is getting better. Most of us alive today are happy to have been born, and our kids will probably live lives that are even better than ours. They might not have to deal with things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, or hell - even work! Genuinely, I would be surprised if my baby niece ever needs to get a job. Talking about working in the office will probably be my generation’s version “I had to walk 10 miles to school, and it was uphill both ways!”.

Maybe there are situations where it’s wrong to have a kid. For example, if I lived in a warzone, I’d probably abstain until I was in a better situation - but that’s not enough to believe that having kids is pro tanto wrong, which is what the Antinatalist wants to say.

The Counterfactual

Another thing to consider is what would happen were you not to have a kid. We’re assuming it would be an identical Earth without that person, but is that true? Since 1970, about 69% of wildlife has died out. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s our fault. Call me crazy. Worryingly for the Antinatalist, if an increasing human population decreases the wildlife population, that means having a kid probably reduces the total number of sentient beings in the world. On top of that, the sentient beings that would’ve existed almost definitely would’ve lived awful lives that ended in being eaten alive or starving to death. Basically, abstaining from children brings a lot of sentient beings into the world to suffer, which is the exact opposite of what the Antinatalist is trying to achieve.

Now, you could point to the fact that the potential animals would be of less value than a potential human, and that’s true. A mouse matters less than a person. However, I’m not convinced that they matter so much less than us that the huge number of them being born wouldn’t outweigh a single person. Unless you’re a speciesist, but that’s a silly thing to be.

If we were to walk hand in hand into oblivion, the world would not become a dead planet. It would have way more living things, and their lives would mostly be terrible. I think a strong case can be made for us to prioritise building the human population. This is because we’re the only ones capable (at least as far as we’ve seen) to save sentient life from suffering in the wild. Who knows what we’d be capable of after centuries of more progress? Intelligent beings and their technology could end suffering, but us walking into extinction guarantees it.

A Note On Meat Eating

One important caveat. It is probably wrong to have kids if you are going to raise them to eat meat. This is because on average we eat thousands of animals over our lives, and almost all of them live in what are essentially torture chambers. Even if you try to raise them to eat ‘humane’ meat there are reasons to think you’ll still cause factory farming. This is because of things like humane washing, the recidivism rate of conscientious omnivores, and the implied condoning of meat eating to the people around you.

If you raise a kid vegan, there is a risk. What if they turn around and say “Fuck you dad, I’m eating meat!”. This could happen, but I’d wager that if a kid is raised to see all animals the same way the rest of us were raised to see cats and dogs, they would likely find the whole thing off putting. Especially if you make a point to teach them what actually happens in animal agriculture. Maybe there’s a selection effect going on, but I know quite a few people who have never eaten meat in their life, but I know no one who was raised vegan/vegetarian and went back on it. Additionally, having a vegan kid increases the numbers of vegans in the world which in turn normalises it. 3 people have gone vegan as a result of me being one, and one person went vegetarian for a while. A vegan kid would probably have a similar effect.

This entire thing could be made moot in a few short years anyway. We’re probably not that far away from eating synthetic animal products, at which point the concern about factory farming and ex-vegan kids goes away. In fact, you may find that were you to have a kid now, by the time they’re old enough to turn around and say “Fuck you Dad”, we’re all eating robot steaks.

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So, the case for Antinatalism doesn’t move me much. Mostly because the Asymmetry argument entails strange and unintuitive conclusions. However, I also think I’m just a more optimistic person in general than your average Antinatalist. The world has many awful things, but it’s also mostly populated by humans who are glad they were born, which is a good reason to think the good parts outweigh the bad (at least for us). As long as you’re not propping up hell by making another factory farmed meat consumer, the net effect on the world when having a kid is probably positive! Also, if you’ll allow me to sound like I’m in a movie briefly, Humanity is Earth’s only hope for Salvation. A dramatic thing to say, sure, but I also think a true one.