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wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

As someone who understands, if not necessarily espouses, anti-natalist ideology, I can give a bit of elucidation from my perspective of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I am happy to debate. It would be nice to be proven wrong here.

It comes down, in my opinion and understanding, to the following argument:

an entity is inherently unable to consent to its own creation. [A postulate]
suffering has a net-negative effect on the (perceived or actual) value of existence [precept of utilitarianism]
suffering knowingly enacted against any entity which cannot give informed consent is eqquivalent to the suffering of an entity which is actively not consenting [by which argument paedophilia is a crime]
The potential suffering inherent in life is foreseeable, as is the potential of a human life to harm the lives of others. [The basis of the concept of negligence]
An entity that is not created does not harm or cause others to suffer, nor does it experience harm or suffering [postulate]

From propositions 1 through 4:

You are personally, morally responsible for the life which you create, both its actions and its experiences, as all of its experiences and actions are exclusively contingent on the act of its creation. It is from this moral duty that parental responsibility derives.
there is a foreseeable possibility that the entity being created could endure enough suffering (or be the cause of same) to make the value of their life net-negative

From propositions 5 and 6, and the various observations one might make of the world (from climate change, to the renewed rise of fascism and the far-right, and a myriad of other “natural shocks which flesh is heir to”), they suggest:

On cost-benefit analysis, the expected value of a new life which I might create is net-negative.

From which:

it would be irresponsible (read: negligent) to procreate.

That is the basis. If you can prove each of those propositions, then from a utilitarian perspective, I think anti-natalism follows. I am personally convinced up to proposition 6, and I am personally waiting until I no longer feel that 8 has a chance of being valid before I have children. There are plenty of ways you can argue against the propositions, but as they stand, there is no indication of a moral duty to end already-extant life or to engage in mass-sterilisation of animals. There are certainly people who try to come at it from a nihilistic perspective, and it’s MUCH easier to argue pretty much anything from nihilism than from utilitarianism, but I, being primarily utilitarian, hold with the above.

I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman. I’m a public school teacher, and I love being around kids. The wonder with which they view the cosmos is forever inspiring to me, but many of my students have experienced truly awful things. I believe my moral duty involves doing everything I can to minimize the suffering of entities that exist. I think that, once a child has been created, you now have a moral duty to make that child’s life as free from suffering and as fulfilling and rich as possible (without imposing suffering on others, of course)

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lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Wow, a very impressive, nuanced, and detailed explination about the ideology. A much better argument for anything than I can conjur up myself.

I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman.

Alright, I am that person. Then again now that I see you have written about some people arguing for anti-natalisim from a nihilistic perspective vs a utilitarian one. I usually see more of the nihilistic arguments, which to me I just outright ignore for having too much of a negativity bias, especially these days.

TLDR: you are better than me

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- wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  That’s fair, and I can’t speak for others, but at the very least, it’s a generalisation which I believe is unwarranted. I can simultaneously believe that it is morally questionable to choose to have a child, but also that a child, once born, places upon all members of society a moral duty of care in its upbringing, not only for harm reduction, but to work toward the betterment of society writ-large, so that we can potentially make the future act of procreation less morally concerning.
  
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ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals, and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.

If society collapses, it will be even more suffering and more harm to more people and if populations collapse, so will society. I am deeply involved in logistics and nobody really gets how much suffering a population collapse could be for billions of people.

All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.

You are fantastically, amazingly lucky you exist in this form and in this time and space, because odds are much better that you would have been a short-lived small animal, to live desperately and die horribly. That seems to be the far more likely state for the conscious experience. You (not you specifically, but singular sense of self broadly) will likely go through quintillions of reformations where you just are crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe. We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.

Anti-natalism has a noble idea behind it, but like so many “ism’s” it’s extremely human-biased in it’s foundational beliefs and I don’t assume to know enough to make it a “thing” in my life or endorse it because it feels dumb. Not in a “you’re dumb for believing it” way, but “we’re all dumb, this doesn’t help with that” kind of way.

I’m not saying we should breed like rabbits (but we do need to work to keep population levels from causing a mass starvation and migration crisis) but I’m also not saying the opposite. This is a neutral issue to me because the cosmic perspective makes it silly. Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.

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- wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals
  
  And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that’s something we need to fight with all our might as a species.
  
  You said that anti-natalists dislike when their beliefs are challenged, but the first thing you do is concede that point and start talking about your personal perspective on the history of anti-natalism. I’m trying to present as close as you can get to a logically-valid anti-natalist argument, but it seems like your personal experience with people you perceive to be anti-natalists has tainted your ability to engage with that perspective. Claiming that an idea attracts crazy people is just an anecdotal ad hominem, not an actual issue with the idea. If you want to talk about why you perceive it to attract crazy, antisocial child-haters, then first establish that that is the case and suggest what it is about the idea which makes such an attraction dangerous. Fascism isn’t bad because the worst people rally around it. The worst people rally around it because of the things which make it bad, such as the ease with which those in power in a fascist state can exploit the weak for personal gain.
  
  It appears, to me (though it is ambiguous, so let me know if I’m off-base), that you believe that the biggest danger of anti-natalism is in the potential of population decline. If a significant portion of the population agreed with an anti-natalist argument, such that they actually did believe it was morally irresponsible to have a child, I contend that the problem which must be solved is not their exposure to anti-natalism, but the things which caused it to be a convincing argument, namely the fact that the future of a child born into this world is a deeply risky bet, due to the reasons I’ve listed and more. I don’t think that people taking a rational cost-benefit analysis of a situation is a problem. The problem would be the situation.
  
  In fact, it seems like (again an implication, so correct me if I’m wrong) you are concerned that an anti-natalist would try to forcibly prevent people from having children, but such an action would increase the suffering of those alive, and the actor would be morally culpable for such an act. As such, if you are, instead, suggesting that anti-natalists believe in forced sterilisation or otherwise, then I think that it might not be the anti-natalists projecting their own problems onto the world.
  
  All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
  
  As an earth and space science teacher, why yes, I DO know some things about the cosmos. For instance, I know that the “big bounce” theory (everything repeating) is only one of many potential interpretations for the future of our universe, and is by no means the most popular among astrophysicists, since it appears inconsistent with a universe in apparently-accelerating expansion. Far more likely is heat death or the big rip, which would make all effort to come before existentially meaningless, unless some method of information transfer outside of our universe or beyond our current understanding were to be achieved. It’s a good thing that none of us will be around to experience those eventualities. If you’d like to chat about existential nihilism, absurdism, or other concerns, I’m happy to do so, but I don’t perceive them to be particularly germane to the argument at hand, unless you’re trying to use a nihilistic argument to tear apart a fairly common position among nihilists. Utilitarianism itself is, ultimately, a response to the lack of meaning in the cosmos, and is an attempt to ascribe meaning by our own, subjective definition, so of course it’s human-biased, but it can be applied evenly, even to animals, which seems to be a primary concern for you.
  
  and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
  
  That is… Exactly my point. Are you sure you are disagreeing with me? We need to be actively taking better care of the world, so that no one need feel afraid of bringing a life into this world, only for it to experience unspeakable suffering.
  
  Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.
  
  Such a thing is fundamentally unknowable, but our definition of suffering is fairly consistent, and of course It’s all about personal moral culpability, because that’s the whole idea of morality. If you’re going to take so many nihilistic and moral relativist stances, I don’t see why you’re so concerned with population collapse or animal welfare.
  
  We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.
  
  While it is fair to attack the postulates of an argument, this is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. Sure, I assume that not creating a life does no harm, but to say “ooh, free will might be an illusion” doesn’t actually negate my point, because, at worst, this means that it doesn’t matter whether you’re anti-natalist.
  
  [a] crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe.
  
  My argument does not apply to animals in a state of nature, as those animals are not reasonably expected to have responsibility. Humans are the active cause of the current mass-extinction event, and we have the wherewithal to potentially stop it. That is, from my perspective, a moral imperative. Humans are the cause of a great deal of suffering, both human and animal, and one of my precepts claims that suffering can have a net-negative effect on the value of life. Another precept enjoins us to act, as the failure to act constitutes negligence. Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes. Do I think that I have a moral responsibility to stop people from fucking? No I do not. Do I think I have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place for the inevitable products of the aforementioned fucking? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY
  
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  - ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes.
    
    Okay then you’re not really anti-natalist, you’re just mad at people who are irresponsible, which is relatable.
    
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    wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I very clearly stated “as someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology”. I am suggesting that I, personally, think that my original 7th premise is becoming closer and closer to logical validity. I believe, as something close to an anti-natalist, that everyone needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they can accept the culpability of deciding to bring an unconsenting entity into the horrific world in which we currently live. So, just because I don’t believe in forcibly converting everyone to the cause, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it, just like not every Christian is an evangelical. Anyone who believes that there is a moral imperative to forcibly stop others from having children is clearly fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons why anti-natalist principles are so attractive (much like how evangelicals display a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian theology)
    
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