Anti-natalism: Is it better to never have been?

Anti-natalism: Is it better to never have been?, also known as the infamous cammy kongregate essay was an essay written by member Cameron Myers in an attempt to convert people to his ways. It has been mocked often, and there have been many reading sessions of this essay.

“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”

An axiom that almost everybody holds to be not just true, but unquestionably true, is that it is better for sentient life to exist than for it not to exist. If people could press a button to ensure that no new experience-having creatures were to be brought into the world, it'd be untenable to even consider pressing the button. There are biological and societal reasons why one would be biased towards thinking that way, but whether or not it actually holds up as a philosophically justifiable proposition is another question entirely.

Life has no inherent value, else washing your hands would be genocide against bacteria. A bacterium is valueless in and of itself, the life of a dog has some value, and the life of a human has more value. The source of value- the mechanism which allows ethics to even be a relevant concept- is beings capable of experiencing qualitatively different things, and the intensity and complexity of the potential experiences determine the ethical significance of a life. If there exists no beings capable of having experiences better or worse than others, then ethics is moot and nothing is better or worse than anything else. I'm going to be using this as an axiom for the remainder of the post, so if you disagree with this, then this point must be addressed before getting to the rest of it.

There are two common arguments in favour of life that I have heard, though I'd be willing to address any others. The first is that overall, there is more good than bad in the world (and some would expand this to say that the amount of good relative to bad in the world will increase as technology progresses). If the good in the world surpasses the bad, then surely this is a valid reason to continue propagating existence.

The second common argument is that continuation of sentient life provides the possibility of anything. When I claim that nothingness is truly neutral (better than bad, worse than good), some people have countered me by saying that nothingness cannot be measured on the continuum of good and bad; it is something else entirely. The absence of the possibility for any meaningful events is worse than any reality with meaning, even if (at the present time), the good outweighs the bad

I think you'd be hard pressed to examine the state of the world as it is and conclude that the sum total of experience is more good than bad (however we're defining that).

Consider the best possible human experience, and the worst possible human experience. Imagine somebody who is happy, healthy, no serious life issues, has a loving family, a great social life, intellectual and artistic fulfilment, etc. This person is content; they're happy they were born, and this is a place in life that most people would aspire to.

Consider the worst possible human experience. Severely mentally ill people. Children dying of cholera in an African village. People born into a warzone. Victims of extreme abuse and trauma. If you had to spend a year experiencing the worst possible life in order to experience the best possible life, would you do it? I think the overwhelming majority of people would not. Some lives may be good, but some lives are REALLY bad. Even if you were to assert that the MEDIAN life is one worth living (which I don't agree with, but that's more difficult to argue against), then the MEAN life is undoubtedly worse than the median life, because the worst lives are so much more intensely bad than the best lives are good.

Even if somebody were to agree with me that the aggregate of the quality of sentient experience in the world as it is right now is on aggregate bad, AND you agree with my meta-ethical position, anti-natalism is not a foregone conclusion. It could be argued that we have reason to believe that the world will get sufficiently better due to technological improvements that even if the current sum total of experience is worse than non-existence, it is imperative to continue to propagate that which is currently tragic because it will pave the way for a future which will be sufficiently good to justify all that is wrong now. I have arguments against that:

Firstly, upon what basis can it be asserted that the world will get better? Technological improvements are making material conditions better for the time being, but even in developed countries, mental illness is an epidemic. For every way that the world could get better, it could also get far worse. Climate change could make life unlivable. WW3 could break out. There could be a pandemic that makes Covid-19 look infantile in comparison. AI could take over and have unimaginable consequences for humanity. It is indecent to continue bringing new (suffering) beings into the world with the promise that the future will be a more worthwhile experience than the present when there is every reason to believe that the future may be even worse than the present.

Secondly, there will always be intense suffering. Even people with great parents, no apparent external issues and material wealth can suffer from profound mental illness, or be the victim of extreme abuse, etc etc. Unless you truly believe that the future will be positively utopian, then there is no reason to believe that the sum total of all life will ever be one which is worth living, because there will always, in reality, be sufficiently terrible experiences to make birth an untenable proposition. Essentially, I wouldn't be an anti-natalist if I thought that the good in the world did or in the foreseeable future could surpass the bad, and I think that the human condition is such that the bad will inevitably outweigh the good, barring some kind of fanciful utopia.

Then there's the argument that something is always better than nothing. I don't think there is any basis to assert that. Imagine your life in the year 1800. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad... it was nothing. Remaining in that state would not be deprivation. It would not be a bad which can't be assessed on the same plane as a bad experience. It wouldn't be any kind of tragedy at all. It would be just as tragic as every single egg and sperm cell which did not become a human. The potential for life, but not a life lived. There is no being to experience the life that has not been lived. There is nobody to be aware of all the joys in life of which they have been deprived (though childbirth does mean there are beings who are acutely aware of all the bad they've been deprived of not having). It is truly neutral, and if you characterise the sum total of experience for sentient creatures to be a net negative, then true neutral in the form of the absence of anything valuable is better than reality.

People might say that they, and most of the people they know, are happy that they were born. For a few reasons, this isn't a valid case against anti-natalism:

Firstly, people are bad judges of the quality of their own experience. It would be painful for people to contend with the true nature of reality. It would not be tenable for some people to consider that they would be better off having never been born. It's a coping mechanism to refuse to consider this. It makes an individual's life less painful, so I wouldn't want to take it away from them, but I would want to take away that argument being used as an excuse to drag a new consciousness into existence (a consciousness which will find reality easy to content with if they also overestimate the positive effects of their birth, and underestimate the negative).

Secondly, I think of giving birth as like being a gamble. Imagine you gamble, and the consequences for winning are a lot of money (very good), and the consequences of losing are homelessness, bankruptcy, and permanent financial ruin (extraordinarily bad). It may have transpired that you won the gamble. Good for you, keep on going with this positive outcome. However, it doesn't mean it was justified to take the gamble in the first place. It certainly doesn't mean it's justified to take the gamble again, with the consequences being passed off to another person who cannot even consent to the gamble in the first place.

Thirdly, some people underestimate how much worse life will likely get towards the end of one's life. By bringing a new baby into existence, you're not just giving birth to a little bundle of cuteness and joy who will likely one day be a productive adult contributing to society. You're also giving birth to the 80 year old whose friends will die around them, will contract Alzheimer's (that accursed, wretched disease) or will watch their elderly spouse painfully die of cancer. Life gets much worse towards the end. This is an inevitable conclusion of all birth.

No life is worth starting, but some life is worth continuing. I'm not overtly pessimistic to the degree where I'd assert that everybody alive right now is better off dead. There absolutely exist some individuals who live lives which are on aggregate positive. By all means, continue to exist, but when you were born, there was a chance that you would be suffering to a degree which hugely outweighs the comparatively paltry happiness you're experiencing now. If life is good, keep living it, but do not thrust it on someone new, because they might suffer to an extreme degree.

A final thought which I think illustrates the point quite nicely: Is it ethical for people to try to have as many babies as possible? Is there a quantitatively different ethical value that you would assign to somebody's 9th and 10th children as compared to their 1st and 2nd. As such, would not having children 1 and 2 be any worse than not having children 9 and 10? If childbirth is a good thing, then giving birth to the people which do exist would be a comparatively lesser evil than humanity having not birthed the vast sums of people which could exist but do not. Curiously, people object to the former, but not the latter.I think that it is ethically wrong for ANYBODY to have children.