Instead of or in addition to advancing arguments why not
- Open a really neat bar or restaurant,
- Hang out in a really neat bar or restaurant, looking to hook up with someone,
- Create some yummy porn and give it away for free,
- Program a really neat video game.
What do these items have in common? Well, they’re all adult activities, they’re all fun for someone, and they’re all harder to do for people with children. They raise the opportunity cost of having children, because having children takes away from fun times out or even just playing video games (ask any parent if you really must). The more adult fun in the world, the less people will want to have children. From a philanthropic antinatalist perspective, this is win-win. Existing people have fun (or at least, the sufferings of their existences are palliated) and future people are never brought into existence and thus never have to suffer at all.
I am shamelessly stealing an idea here from the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, who uses a similar concept to explain the Fermi paradox. Why don’t we see alien civilizations out there? Maybe because once they got sophisticated enough they managed to amuse themselves into extinction.
Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.
Although Miller also notes the existence of a version of the Shaker problem.
My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.
And that does look like a real problem to me.
3 Responses to “Some things you could do to promote antinatalism”
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I think simply raising awareness of the existence of antinatalists is likely to be more effective than advancing arguments (though if only one person is prevented from breeding by the arguments, that’s still quite an impact, considering the potential for future generations). Various naturalistic fallacy-related biases ensure that people’s respect is significantly influenced by how prevalent/established a group is perceived to be. Take, for instance, Christian sects with a long tradition (e.g., Catholicism) vs. relatively new ones like Mormonism or JWs. The beliefs of the former are often much more outlandish than those of the latter, but Catholicism is generally taken seriously even by non-Catholics, whereas the newer religions are considered crazy cults.
It used to be that simply expressing antinatalist views got one labeled as a troll on the intertubes. I think it has been much more difficult for people to do that since Peter Singer’s article in The Stone and the amount of commenters who expressed philanthropic antinatalist sentiments. After being exposed to it, people are forced to (however slightly) engage with the arguments instead of simply declaring no one would actually hold such views and moving on. Of course, making yummy porn probably wouldn’t hurt the cause, either.
This seems like a good point, and I might extend it further. Not only is it good to raise awareness of the existence of antinatalists, it might also be good for people to “come out” (to some extent, at least) as antinatalists. It’s much harder to dismiss or stigmatize as a grotesque troll someone who has an actual face and a life. Although I also realize that there’s likely to be a fair amount of hostility toward and anguish about someone who does, so I certainly wouldn’t hold it against anyone who didn’t.
The most cost-effective way is probably to pay people directly to be sterilized, as done by Project Prevention.