this post was NOT generated by AI
This post is based on Richard Carrier’s essay, “Antinatalism Is Contrafactual & Incoherent.” Specifically the section titled “Incoherence.”
Antinatalism holds that being alive causes suffering, such that not being alive is better. This entails killing everyone, and yourself. To try and avoid this consequence, as antinatalists do, with an equivocation fallacy, like “suicide and murdering billions causes suffering; therefore we ought not commit suicide or exterminate people,” only proves the point. They are contradicting themselves. If becoming dead is suffering, then how can being dead be better than being alive? The only reason one can ever coherently be against mass suicide is to admit that staying alive is better than being dead. But that renounces the entire premise that antinatalism is built on. What we are left with is incoherent nonsense.
What Carrier is missing is a couple things. First, there is an alternative to killing everyone and suicide and that is never having been born to begin with. There is no contradiction when ANs say that murder is morally wrong. You are, by definition, violating the consent of those being murdered – murder causes suffering. Furthermore, Carrier is conflating “becoming dead” with not existing in the first place.
Secondly, this argument can be distilled by the AN concepts of “a life worth starting” and “a life worth continuing.” A life worth continuing is one that has already begun. A life that is self-conscious and has accrued interests; projects, relationships, meaning, etc. Forcibly taking those interests away via murder or coercive tactics is undeniably wrong. But that life also contains suffering, large amounts of it, that, no doubt, remains tolerable in the face of said interests.
On the other hand, no life is a life worth starting. Nonexistent life has not accrued the interests mentioned above. As a baseline, there is simply nothing there in terms of incentives to come into existence or be forcibly brought into existence. There aren’t even conscious interests. There is also zero suffering. Notwithstanding hypothetical ideas like Generic Subjective Continuity (GSC), suffering is completely absent before birth/conception.
If being dead actually was better than being alive, we should all seek death, and indeed give everyone death. It’s the only humane thing to do. Right? Antinatalism is really just a whitewashed Cthulhu cult. And there is no way to get around this consequence. Because it absolutely requires defending the premise “being alive causes enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Yet this cannot be defended if you then import a new premise with a conflicting utility function, that “being alive does not cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Hence saying “making people dead causes more suffering than letting them live” simply is a refutation of the antinatalist’s own premise. Because “being alive does not cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better” is literally the denial of “being alive causes enough suffering such that not being alive is better.” Death is the absence of all pain. So the only reason death can ever be bad is that it ends something good. Which requires admitting life is not only good, but so good as to warrant outlawing death. So the antinatalist has set themselves a doomed project. They want a certain outcome (to have their cake and eat it too: being against all having of kids and being against genocide and suicide), but there is simply no logically coherent way to get that outcome. Yes, they will haul out much hand waving and harrumphing in attempts to deny this and stick to their self-contradiction. But what we never get in those desperate flailings is facts or logic.
Again, Carrier makes reference to “being dead” which muddies the waters between “not having been born,” “not being alive,” and, “dying/death after being alive.” He then proceeds to compare two contradictory premises attributing them both to a confused AN:
- being alive causes enough suffering such that not being alive is better.
- being alive does not cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better.
Carrier is sneaking in two different meanings of “not being alive is better.” He makes repeated claims that ANs want to give everyone death. What AN claims is that once in existence, you should be free to continue your life as you see fit. However, your life will be filled with actual suffering alongside ongoing potential suffering. Had you never been born, you would never have experienced life and its contents, and you would not have experienced suffering since there is no one there/in existence to experience it.
With the two contradictory premises, it would be best to change the baseline of them to best suit the AN framework. Instead of “being alive,” it could look something like this:
- not being alive (not being born) causes no suffering such that not being alive is better.
- being alive (having been born) does not (usually) cause enough suffering such that not being alive is better
What Carrier doesn’t seem to understand is that the goods of life are persuasive enough to keep you in existence despite the bads. ANs also believe that there are scenarios where pain is so intolerable that suicide/euthanasia is the best course of action.
With reference to Carrier’s utility functions, they’re abstractions despite utilizing numbers. The value of good and bad in life cannot be calculated with mathematics.
Of course, one could bite the bullet, hail Cthulhu, and admit antinatalism does entail killing everyone and yourself, and start giving marching orders. That it has that outcome does not make it false. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we should hail Cthulhu and destroy the world. But that antinatalists recoil in horror at that conclusion calls into question the truth of their entire premise. In their very revulsion to this they reveal that even they don’t really believe that being dead is better than being alive. So you have to question what they are really on about. Their motives are clearly not rational. Which leaves something else.
In this summation of his thinking about AN’s rationality, he repeats a claim that AN is about killing everyone and yourself. This is patently false. Consent is a pivotal concept in AN and it strongly claims that no one’s consent should be violated. But AN is also internally coherent about murder and suicide. The philosophy is about pre-natal harm prevention, not post-natal death.
