…to sex worker, pornographer, and activist Furry Girl, not just for having a tubal ligation at the age of 22, but for writing about the experience for the world.
Not that I’m really a fan of the genre, but a bumper sticker for philanthropic antinatalists:
Protect children — don’t have any.
I invite your own in comments, as long as you’re willing to offer them as part of the creative commons, just like mine.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Dax Cowart is the subject of a famous case in medical ethics, one probably well known to many readers of this blog already. Hideously burned in a propane gas explosion in 1973 he wished to refuse treatment and die. He was treated anyway against his will — for ten years — an experience which Cowart has compared to be repeatedly skinned alive: see the Wikipedia article on Cowart here and an interview with him here. He is mentioned in David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (p. 63) as an example of some who has suffered so much that he maintains that, even though he has a decent quality of life now, that quality of life does not justify the suffering he underwent, and that he should have been allowed to die.
Cowart has been the subject of two documentaries, which I believe to have had the titles Please Let Me Die and Dax’s Case. I have so far been unable to find copies of either of them — does any reader know if they are available? If so, please comment. Thanks.
“What do you mean, posthuman stuff?” A vague term, I admit, but understand it to mean all that rapture-of-the-nerds speculative technology that people who describe themselves as transhumanists and Singulatarians get all excited at the prospect of: life extension technology and Friendly AI and hedonic engineering and mind-uploading and virtual reality paradises and so forth.
My general sense is that antinatalists, even those with philanthropic motivation, regard the posthuman stuff with some disdain (consider this example) or Thomas Ligotti’s dismissive commentary on transhumanism. And it seems to me that to some extent this disdain is well motivated. If existence is intrinsically problematic, then you’re not likely to be impressed by the prospect of much longer existence with much fancier technology. There’s at least some reason to think that problems that transhumanists think are solvable actually might not be. And as with so many other things, transhumanism competes with antinatalism for energy and attention: antinatalists might with some justice see transhumanism as a false path, a timewaster, and a distraction.
But let’s pause and think for a moment about best possible human futures on antinatalist terms. It admittedly looks like the program of abolishing human reproduction has a long way to go at the moment. But we can’t infer from that that it will never go anywhere. The program of abolishing chattel slavery probably looked pretty hopeless in, say, the mid-eighteenth century but it has pretty much triumphed today. So it’s not crazy to at least think about what happens when human beings finally swear off having children.
If they ever do, there will be a last generation. What should become of them? Well, their lives will matter, just as our matter. And some of the posthuman stuff might be good for them.
For example, how long should people in the last generation live? Not for the rest of their natural lives, that seems sure. Perhaps they should commit suicide and spare their own future selves from coming into existence. But it is also possible that their optimum lifetimes might be much longer than natural. If that’s the case, then we might actually care about things like life extensions technologies.
Likewise, various human enhancements or fun technologies should matter. The lives of the last generation will contain suffering just as ours do. Indeed, arguably their suffering will be worse than ours, ceteris paribus, because in their generation, unlike in ours, there will be a lot of melancholy. Many people actually want children and enjoy them (at least, so it seems) and the absence of them will be a lack in their lives, even if they understand and accept that it is a necessary lack. And we should care about palliating that suffering.
And I’ll bet that a virtual reality paradise to plug into would palliate a whole lot…
I know the wrong answer to this question, at least. It is “until your natural death.” The facts of human senescence and death are accidents about us set by evolution, and evolution is not our friend. The notion that there’s something good about letting nature take its course in our lives seems to be implicitly religious — it is a form of submission to the will of God. Very foolish, since nothing can answer to the concept of God. Or perhaps its some sort of ethico-mystical notion deriving from some vague sense that “nature is good.” Equally foolish. Nature is not good.
Inevitable natural senescence and death make life even worse that it would otherwise be. Here are just a few reasons why:
If not natural life, then what? There are two possible answers that strike me as reasonable and principled.
Only as long as it takes you to end your life. This is an argument that I covered before: if people have temporal parts, then it’s in your hands whether there are future selves descended from you. Those selves will suffer and will have frustrated desires. You should prevent this.
Now perhaps this position is unsound. Maybe people don’t have temporal parts, or maybe David Benatar’s propostion that there is an asymmetry between good and bad things in people’s lives is mistaken. Or perhaps, because the argument only leads to a pro tanto reason for suicide, the reasons for ending one’s life are outweighed by other reasons. In any of these cases, we might want to consider an alternative possibility.
You should have healthy life as long as you want, and end your own life when you’ve had enough. This is science fiction, of course, but respectable science fiction: some version of suicide is the principle (almost only) reason why sentients routinely die in stories like Greg Egan‘s Diaspora or Cory Doctorow‘s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I don’t think that such a state of affairs is technically unfeasible, though it might be a while before it does become possible.
This last state of affairs could make people’s lives much better, even if they weren’t otherwise improved. Not only would they not be subject to the kinds of misery detailed in natural life under 1-4 above, but they wouldn’t have to experience regret at things left undone, assuming they really want to do them.
Suppose one were to accept the full implications of Benatar’s asymmetry argument: that it would be wrong to bring into existence any being that suffers in any, even a hypothetical person (“One Pinprick”) whose life of fulfillment and bliss consists only of one brief but discriminable instance of pain. (Some folks — including me in some moods — think that the implication that it would be wrong to bring One Pinprick into existence is a reductio of Benatar’s asymmetry. Though if it is such, it is as a practical matter a rather feeble one since no human being has ever had a life as good as One Pinprick and no human being ever will have such a life.)
Does Benatar’s asymmetry entail that it is wrong to bring any sentient into existence? Allow me to offer a tentative argument that it does not. Please and pain (or enjoyment and misery, or flourishing and suffering) seem pretty wired into the kind of things that we are. But there’s no necessity that the universe contain beings such as we are. We’re an accident: one slight bend sinister in the natural history of Earth and there’d have been no us at all. And I see no reason to think that pleasure and pain (or whatever) are part of the necessary furniture of the universe at all. The existence of each is also an accident.
Stealing an idea from David Pearce let us imagine a being — call her Unbreakable — who has an even better existence than One Pinprick. Unbreakable isn’t human, although she looks human and has human-ish goals. Unbreakable is capable of feeling things and has a utility function based on what she feels, but she doesn’t feel pain. Instead what she has is a pleasure gradient. When things go well (in terms her own goals) she feels ecstasy. When things go badly, say when she’s damaged in some way or her pursuit of her goals is frustrated, her enjoyment declines to something much more mild. Correctly tuned up, she works as hard to avoid damage and frustration as human beings do, but her hedonic experiences in doing so are vastly different.
Would it be wrong to bring Unbreakable into existence? (In our mad science lab, perhaps?) I very much doubt it.
There are a number of reasonable (I think) against the relevance of Unbreakable. At present I am not persuaded by any of them, but would be interested in hearing them (or any others) fleshed out.
I am curious to see what other people think.
People who count as middle class and above in advanced industrial societies enjoy a level of material prosperity and comfort far exceeding human historical norms and should have really good lives, right? Well…
Let’s face an unpleasant fact to begin with. For most people work ranges between pretty unpleasant to very unpleasant. For some of the most privileged people in the professional middle class, it is shockingly unpleasant. People often say they like their jobs, and there are senses in which this is true. They like having incomes and the social status (or which more anon) attached to their jobs, and they might like some aspects of their work, like being able to interact with people on a day-to-day basis. But I’m pretty sure they don’t like what goes on from minute to minute in a workplace, much of which is an unpalatable combination of tedium and fear, rather like being an infantry grunt only much more slowly fatal. If you think people really like their jobs, ask yourself how many of them would keep doing them were it not for pay. And yet they spend shockingly large amounts of time on them. Even if directly only 40 hours a week they spend large amounts of time commuting to and from them, lying exhausted in front of the TV after them, spending time getting credentials to obtain them, and so forth. Kind of a nasty existence, if you look at with an appraising eye. Why?
We certainly can’t appeal to brute physical necessity. We’re way beyond that. I remember quite well that during the last part of my life in which I enjoyed extended happiness I had an income more than an order of magnitude less (yes, I did control for inflation!) than what I have now, and I don’t recall any sense of significant physical discomfort or deprivation back then. Many older readers of this blog might recall something similar in their own lives.
Given my huge rise in productive possibilities, shouldn’t I be working an order of magnitude fewer hours? After all, George Jetson worked only nine hours a week. Why isn’t the future as good as it used to be?
I’m pretty sure the answer has to do with status. It’s a complicated concept, but I hope not too hard to grasp. It clearly has a first order component of being admirable somehow: smart, beautiful, capable, talented, rich, etc. It also has a second-order component of affiliation. Be friends, allies, associates, or even just hangers-on to those high in status and your own status goes up. The dreaded converse also applies.
It’s just awful of us (and I am afraid I can’t exempt myself) to care about status, but we do. A lot. Even people on the very brink of subsistence will make sacrifices in their material well-being and those of their nearest and dearest to maintain status. Sister Y links to an account of how even people suffering severe malnutrition will still spend parts of the meager budgets on things like alcohol and tobacco of the purposes of maintaining status and social affiliation. Perhaps even more astonishingly, Katja Grace points to an example of how in rural Bolivia, people refuse to use a cheap method of disinfecting water, even when it means more of their children will die of diarrhea, because doing so means signaling comparative poverty to their neighbors.
But even in a rich society like ours, status matters. Pretty much all the time.
| High Status | Low Status |
|---|---|
| “I’m sure we can help you with that, ma’am.” | “Your call is very important to us. Please remain on the line and it will be answered in the order received.” |
| “I’d love to have coffee with you some time! What works for you?” | “Gee, I’m really busy for the whole next month.” |
| “May I see your license and registration please, sir?” | “Out of the car, hands on the hood, legs apart. NOW! |
You know the drill. You can add your own examples. To be low in status, or to lose status, is to bleed from a thousand tiny cuts.
What has this to do with work? As the Bolivia example above shows, people put a lot of effort into signalling their status to others. If you want people to treat you as higher in status, and if you want people to affiliate with you on the basis of your status, you’d better be able to show people that you have a higher status. These signals are often pretty costly. Consider an example that a lot of ordinary middle-class people in my neighborhood face: live in a forty year-old split-level or a new McMansion. The McMansions are costlier and thus a more reliable signal to the world of your ability to pay for something more costly, and thereby indirectly a signal of your ability to earn more, and thus a signal of some desirable attribute on your part — you’re smart or hard-working or good at office politics or have a fancy degree from a fancy school or something.
Now if you happen to live in one of the older split-levels (which are perfectly comfortable houses, by the way), you could try to convince people that you just prefer living more modestly. But doing so invites invidious inferences. Maybe you just can’t afford enough to buy the McMansion. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to get a higher-paying job. Maybe you’re just unsociable and just weird. So if you don’t want to bleed from those thousand little cuts, you end up trying to buy the McMansion. Better put in those hours at the office! Hope you enjoy them…
And so people engage in their consumer status arms races against each other while slaving away. A good book to read in some ways on this is Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Human Behavior. His diagnosis, at least at the level of individual human psychology, is good.
His proposed policy solution won’t come even close to working. The race for status — and the corresponding misery it generates — is one which very few if any can escape.
A new law in Tennessee makes it a crime to “transmit or display” images which will “cause emotional distress” unless one has a “legitimate purpose” in doing so.
Guess I’m in trouble then…
I am quite gratified at the flow of comments so far here at Diabasis — I’ve received many excellent ones already.
In hopes of improving the commenting experience for readers, I have put in a pair of minor changes, which I hope will improve functionality, especially for readers who wish to discuss posts with each other.
First, I have tweaked the settings to allow nested comments.
Second, in an attempt to follow up on a suggestion from one of my excellent commenters, I have installed a plug-in to allow commenters to receive notification of follow-up comments. I haven’t been able to test this very extensively yet, but you should notice a checkbox at the bottom of each post’s comments that will allow you to subscribe to e-mail notifications whenever someone leaves subsequent comments on post.
These changes are experimental and I hope they work. As always, I would appreciate feedback.
There’s an old saw that states (in annoyingly sexist language, but put that aside here) that the child is father to the man. On at least one plausible metaphysical view about the nature of persons, I am the parent to all my future selves. If there is a sound argument for philanthropic antinatalism and if it is also the case that people have temporal parts, then is a pro tanto reason for committing suicide right now.
Consider: David Benatar’s argument that coming into existence is always a harm is driven by an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. It always bad for pain to be present and good for pain to be absent, but while it is always good for pleasure to be present, the absence of pleasure only if it there is someone for whom that absence would be a deprivation. All lives contain some pain, so coming into existence is always a harm.
I am writing on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning, if events take their natural course, I will have a future self that will suffer a little. He will have to get up to early, stuff himself onto a commuter train, and do a day’s work at a stressy, tedious job. Some things might go well for him, but these are not an advantage over never having had to suffer in the first place. Better never to get to Monday, perhaps. Further along in life, future desires will emerge in future selves. Many of these desires will be thwarted, leading to frustration. Better never to have those desires arise.
Thus we would seem to always have a pro tanto reason to commit suicide. Either that, or we have a reductio either of Benatar’s argument or the view that people have temporal parts.