A case for animal antinatalism.

[Implications]

The existence of Life on Earth is the only problem faced by life on Earth, discuss.

I used to be a tree-hugging hippy, at least by my current values, life is beautiful, biology is fascinating. But then I realised that the higher order of complexity; the "balance", between good or bad, the great interconnection on all life on Earth, has no value. 

I argue that animal antinatalism; reducing the amount of animal birth to prevent poor welfare, is legitimate biology.

Conservation is considered to be legitimate biology despite being a philosophy; it is an attempt at finding a biologically accurate version of morality to apply to wild animals, and I argue that it is wrong.

I argue that what is best for living things can be acquired by humans; what we need to do, is make sure the needs of conscious beings are met as effectively as possible, I argue this is scientifically possible. Granted,  humans are distractable; it might be happening to me; my solution must be effective , make sense, and not merely make futile sense. If I harm others instead of help, I will be obligated to stop.

What is the case, though, is that life runs on backwards logic.
Nonconsciousness is the default from which, ideally, we need to justify conscious beings, instead, we're forced to justify being alive.

Bad experience does not actually protect you from bad things, as "bad things" are a hallucination of conscious minds and are not necessarily existent.

It appears to be the case then, that antinatalism does not actually need to be proven at all, but is just as self-evident as atheism; we need to deliberately say yes to life in order to justify it's continued production, and we do not have the proof to justify it. 

Positive experience is not effective proof. There are intensely bad implications in the argument that positive is just as valid in value as negative, appeals to equality of opinions or appeals to "democracy" (including the opinions of animals). These imply that it is ok to abuse somebody as long as enough people join in.  The argument that animals would disagree is  frankly bizarre, if I lacked the correct reasoning skills I would not reason that harming others is wrong, if I lacked science I would not be able to help.

This may not be intuitive, however. We have challenges to face. If we are to reduce the population of animals; Where do we start? Does this view have harmful implications for the rights of conscious things? How do we navigate  the risks associated with population shifts? How bad is species extinction? 

I am currently willing to accept the "unpleasent" implications of antinatalism implies; nonexistence (being dead) is preferable to existence, that  the right to life is a kind of fiction; we're forced to be alive, only have a right to life because we have obligations to other agents, and have a right to die when we choose. What are the further implications of this?

We need to answer these questions, and what I seem to see, is that people refuse to rationally engage in debate, writing off antinatalism as edgy nonsense,  not good-faith debate.

I have been careful to not make any edgy pleas except for possibly this one; billions of conscious beings are suffering and dying as we speak, do we really have no choice but for this to continue as normal?

Biologists do not take antinatalism seriously and are conservationists instead, if there is good rationale behind this I'd like to hear it. What it appears to me, is that scientists become distracted with complex dynamical systems, which misleads them from the experience of the actual beings involved.

 

 

Edited April 1, 2021 by Implications

[Ericchiriboga]

I mean, conservation isn't just some theoretical philosophy adopted by biologists. Yes, it often goes hand-in-hand with what a lot of people view as the ethical way to do things, but it has clearly tangible benefits for the environment and mankind. It's a forward-looking policy, concerned with doing as little damage to ecosystems as possible. Preventing trophic cascades, slowing down anthropogenic climactic change, preventing collapses of populations that serve as our food sources, stopping invasive species that will overrun environments, stopping the destruction of ecosystems that can theoretically yield new scientific advances (think medicines derived from aquatic compounds), etc. It's not just an issue of ethics, but one of pragmatism, too. It's also "easy" in that it's a policy largely concerned with keeping the status quo so there's minimal opportunity to accidentally completely ruin the environment.

 

I've never heard of "antinatalism" before, but even if you think that's the most ethical thing to do, implementing it requires such high levels of human interference that I feel it would almost inevitably end terribly. I'm a vegetarian, so I have no lack of empathy for animals, but not only is it impossible to calculate all the variables needed to implement it and keeps ecosystems functioning, it's not within the realm of possibility, with the tools we have.

[altaylar2000]

For me there is only one ethical problem: the problem of the existence of a predator.
The predator must be destroyed in its animal or human manifestation: a wolf, a parasite, a swindler. The source of evil on earth is the predator. Eating meat is immoral. The destruction of someone else's life is immoral.
The problem with modern society is that these are cowards who do not try to stop the villain.

There is no balance between good and evil. For example, the destruction of wolves will not lead to overpopulation of herbivores, because the food resource is limited, and fertility will decline. This is just myth designed for survive of evil

The position of the pacifist is vicious as well as the ideology of Jains, Buddhists and Christians, passivity is serve to villain

Good moral is moral of aryans: just kill villian

Even if there is some kind of balance philosophically, then in reality it will not exist anyway. Once in Old Europe, cannibals and slave owners lived, they caught people and broke their legs so that they would not run away, they ate them and forced them to work for wear, there they find traces of trepanned skulls on living people, оnce upon a time people were brutally killed to extract adrenochrome. and so on. And what is this "philosophy" worth if you saw how your child is savagely killed?

[Implications]

> isn't just some theoretical philosophy adopted by biologists

>tangible benefits

My argument is that what is morally,ethical, whatyacallit, true, must have tangible benefits, not be mere philosophy.

It seems to me we could start with fast-breeding and common animals, particularly when not native.

Making things worse must be considered, but we can be conservationists purely becuase we do have information about how ecosystemns work. I believe the notion that ecosystems are so mysterious is a part of this "beautiful glorious whole" narrative. It's silly to imply any problem is just too complicated and therefore procrastinate serious investigation. If something is purely useful to humans then this is bigoted to animals.

 

 

 

 

Edited April 1, 2021 by Implications

[altaylar2000]

3 minutes ago, Implications said:

isn't just some theoretical philosophy adopted by biologists

>tangible benefits

My argument is that what is morally,ethical, whatyacallit, true, must have tangible benefits, not be mere philosophy.

It seems to me we could start with fast-breeding and common animals, particularly when not native.

Making things worse must be considered, but we can be conservationists purely becuase we do have information about how ecosystemns work. I believe the notion that ecosystems are so mysterious is a part of this "beautiful glorious whole" narrative. It's silly to imply any problem is just too complicated and therefore procrastinate serious investigation. If conservation is purely useful to humans then this is bigoted to animals.

Benefit is not needed, truth is needed. Everyone has their own benefit, the villain has it too

[Ericchiriboga]

 

18 minutes ago, Implications said:

> isn't just some theoretical philosophy adopted by biologists

>tangible benefits

My argument is that what is morally,ethical, whatyacallit, true, must have tangible benefits, not be mere philosophy.

It seems to me we could start with fast-breeding and common animals, particularly when not native.

Making things worse must be considered, but we can be conservationists purely becuase we do have information about how ecosystemns work. I believe the notion that ecosystems are so mysterious is a part of this "beautiful glorious whole" narrative. It's silly to imply any problem is just too complicated and therefore procrastinate serious investigation. If something is purely useful to humans then this is bigoted to animals.

 

 

 

 

When species are not native, we do try to take action like that. And I think you don't appreciate the complexity or scale of interactions. When you have thousands and thousands of variables all interconnected in a giant web, arbitrarily going through and changing some from their normal state will cause massive ripples throughout the system, potentially causing unforeseen harm to humans and nonhumans alike. 

Species have existed in Darwinian struggle since abiogenesis. Now it's our moral prerogative to change the entirety of how the ecosystem works? Regardless of the ethics of it (on which I completely disagree with you), if you don't see that it's impractical, implausible, and probably harmful, then I don't see much more productive discussion resulting from this.

[Implications]

I can see pitfalls of changing ecosystems yes. If you think I got my ethical reasons screwed, i'm curious about that too.

I want to discuss something I have been confused about that hopefuly may clear up some issue.

The thing  with the antinatalist vs natalist debate, seems to be; that antinatalists hold the assymetric view of birth, and natalists hold the incomparability of non-existence.

 

The assymetric view of birth states that is very bad to create suffering individuals, and happy individuals are a weak justification for taking the risk.

The incomparability view, states that it cannot be better to exist or not exist and nonexistent individuals don't have rights, as no person is affected, so antinatalism can't be true.

The incomparable view has some implications for things that we may more intuitively think of as correct, like selecting against chronic pain, and improving the welfare of people in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 2, 2021 by Implications

[MSC]

On 4/1/2021 at 4:59 PM, Implications said:

My argument is that what is morally,ethical, whatyacallit, true, must have tangible benefits, not be mere philosophy.

If nothing is alive, there are no tangible benefits or anything left to perceive anything as good or bad. 

As for your claim that value is non-existent, this is moral anti-realism. By this stance, even antinatalist values are non-existent. If we follow your logic to the letter, then we need to ask why we would care either way if life exists or not. For something to be absent value, it cannot be good or bad. Either would be a value. 

I've done a lot of research into antinatalism over the years and been in countless debates about it. Probably some of the most heated I've ever had to be honest. So I have quite a number of questions to throw at you.

Firstly: is it possible to end all life everywhere and thereby elimate all negative and positive happenings a life form can experience? 

If you think yes, then how do you do so without becoming a Dr Who villain? Do you have a reality bomb handy there Davros? And can you guarantee that life won't start again after you and everything else are gone? 

Why would life have to justify it's existence to anyone or anything, when it does in fact already exist? Life just is. There is little to no choice in the matter. Speaking of choice, I'll tackle deontological and utilitarian versions of antinatalism here: To the deontological consent argument, yes I did not consent to be alive, but I also do not consent to being dead. While I have no choice in the former, I can take my life at anytime I please. Thereby consenting to latter and giving myself choice over the former. If you ask an animal if it wants to be alive, you'll get no answer you are able to make sense of. 

For the utilitarian argument against suffering; if I offered to rig a button attached to a device in your brain that could put you in a state of euphoria whenever you want, would you take it? If yes, why not advocate for that instead of taking on the herculean task of convincing all life everywhere, not to procreate? Or taking antinatalism to the extreme, the killing of all life everywhere? Since antinatalism tends to be a slippery slope that can quickly devolve into justification for murder, based on a value system held by a minority of people who may or may not lack objectivity based on the suffering of their own lives, we need to be really careful in assuming it's justification is self evident.  It's not self evident. Neither is atheism. I'm agnostic because I prefer not to appeal to ignorance in favour of there being a God or not. I have a tangible deity. Meaning, I have something which I worship and live for. There is nothing supernatural about it. Just life. Particularly unborn life. My kids and descendants will judge me, so I live for them. 

In conclusion, it seems to me that your argument for antinatalism revolves around arguing against value theory, which antinatalism has to assume in order to justify itself in the first place. So it's a bit of a contradiction. "By my value system, values don't exist." At least, that is how it reads to me. If I'm wrong, feel free to clarify your position. 

Edited January 20, 2022 by MSC
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