Jun 052011
This particular diavlog ran some time ago over at Bloggingheads.tv, but it’s probably still worth some attention. Among other things, it involves an antinatalist — indeed a voluntary human extinctionist — being interviewed by someone sympathetic to transhumanism. That’s an unusual pairing.
Though for what it’s worth, there seem to be significant differences between the position that Nina Paley is taking here and what I take to that of philanthropic antinatalism. Paley objects to the effects (horrific, no doubt) that humankind has on other species. But it strikes me that if we worry about suffering, animal suffering should also an object of our concern: if we expand the circle of our concern outward from just humanity it would seem that even for non-human animals (sentient ones, anyway) it is also better for them never to have been. Or as Schopenhauer once put it:
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
3 Responses to “An apropos diavlog”
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I couldn’t agree more. Why do we care about species? Most reasons are self-serving; if we care about individual organisms’ own good, we must, I agree, apply the same logic.
See my slightly flippant Judge Nature.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the ecological arguments, but on the other hand, it seems rather dumb to evaluate the human species as the equal or superior to every other species put together. How do you even make such an evaluation? It seems loaded from the onset.
Also, I know this is very sexist, very dumb and totally irrelevant of me to say this, but has anyone else noticed how beautiful Nina Paley looks in this video?
The people of the V.H.E.Mt. are the useful idiots of antinatalism.