and, a response directed at the wrong party. If you want to end suffering, end mind's constructions, and attachments thereto. Why end a species? — ENOAH
See, that reads to me like a breath of new air in the conversation. Sort of procreates some breathing space.
Reminds me that we are talking about making a rule that must guide my actions. It’s not just an analytic exercise with suffering and ethical rules as its parts. The argument for antinatalism is also about my response, like where you said it was a response directed at the wrong people.
After we’re done with the logical analysis, antinatalism is a call to action. It says if we work hard enough together, maybe in a few generations, we will finally all do the ethical thing and choose to be antinatalists, then, the human species will be gone, and with it, gone is all suffering, and those last people can say “we, now the most ethical generation, the ones who have inflicted the least suffering on others, we bid to those who discovered antinatalism our humble gratitude for showing us the ethic, and bid everyone else, including ourselves, I guess, good riddance.”
While I think we mean different things when you say “end mind’s constructions and attachments thereto”, I would use those same words to point to the fact that all ethics is in our heads. Ethics is about what we physically do when we interact with other people in the world, but the ethical parts of those actions exist only in my head, in our heads. We must construct all of this, and together for it to be ethics. I would also instead use some of your words to say, “while we are always attaching and detaching from constructions, to be ethical is to take care of what you attach to and detach from.”
But we need both the analytic approach, and this raw, more contextual (aware of aware-ing) view to find an ethical norm.
My attempt at the analytic syllogism:
Life is suffering.
No one should intentionally cause suffering.
Procreating is intentional infliction of suffering…
Therefore, antinatalism.
Negatively put, we should not inflict suffering, so we should not procreate. Or more positively put, it is right not to procreate, or else you would intentionally cause suffering.
We’ve constructed out of suffering this new ethic. (It had to be new because people had to be here first to construct it, it is newer than us at least.)
Now of course antimatalism is more that. And granting the premises, it’s a sound argument. That may be enough for many intuitions.
But what can we know and say about this syllogism?
P1: Life is suffering.
Maybe. Maybe because of life, we have something to compare suffering with in order to identify that life includes suffering. Without something good in life to compare to, how would we recognize suffering. We had to have a happy finger first before we could say that on prick was suffering. But then, does that mean the good and happy finger is a cause of the suffering too?
But maybe life is living. And living is many things, with the many things we live with. One of them is suffering. One of them is ecstasy. One of them is sleeping. One of them is a pin-prick, or reading. Life is reading, right now.
Also, this premise is where we assume a sub premise “suffering is only bad.” Suffering is bad, but it is not only bad. Some suffering is called work. Some called really hard work. Some called loving. Some called longing. Some longing is suffering deeply. Some longing is not.
I think many are willing to say there is enough suffering assured in life that it’s not worth breaking it down into how much or how little there is that it would start to change the calculus of the syllogism. Many would argue life pivots from suffering too much to suffering enough, and therefore “Life is suffering” is a valid premise, period, end of discussion.
So we’ll move on, under protest.
P2: No one should intentionally cause suffering.
Sounds like a nice sentiment from the start. But it depends on your view of what suffering is from P1 if you would make this an absolute. If all suffering is bad, then yeah, absolutely no one should inflict it on anyone else. But many of us have had suffering inflicted upon us without our consent, at great cost, causing deep suffering, only to later count the experience as a a good one. That’s the constant life of a child. Some suffering can lead to tremendous things that would not have been what they are without the suffering. So if not all suffering is bad, what is wrong with causing it in another?
So this premise only works if all suffering is bad. So my protest from P1 is rearing its head.
That means to me I should try to tailor P2 to keep the argument flowing.
How about new P2: “No one should intentionally harm or injure another for the sole purpose of causing them to suffer.”
Sounds stronger, and accounts for the good of inflicting valuable suffering, but this will be a problem when it comes time to choose whether to procreate. Now with new premise 2 we have to have a baby already born who we can physically “harm and injure” before we might unethically do so for “the sole purpose of causing them to suffer.”
I just disagree that intentionally causing suffering, the heart of this ethical rule, is necessarily something that should never be done, it’s not clearly a universal. It’s not self-evident.
It needs work, as does my argument against it, but let’s press on.
P3: Procreating is intentional infliction of suffering.
This conflates begetting, or giving new life, with infliction on a subject. When we inflict, we inflict upon. There must be an object that we inflict something specific like suffering upon. But that object is missing in the syllogism. Take the antinatalist negative approach and flip it, and you see the hole, the missing object when one tries to inflict something onto the unborn, the non-existent.
If we do not procreate we will not inflict suffering upon……..who? (I get it, the answer is: on the possible child that would have been had you gotten pregnant.). But really, who benefits when I do not have a kid so I can not inflict suffering? Can I say I benefited 10 babies because I was going to have at least 10 kids, but now since I’m an antinatalist, I benefited 10 people? That seems really odd. But if making up some number of never-existing people as beneficiaries of my good antinatalist deeds is odd at all, so is saying I benefitted one person. There is no one person who benefits if you conflate the Infliction of suffering with procreation and respond by not procreating. I’m just procreating. There is no one there to enjoy my mon-procreation with, as there is no one to say “thanks for not inflicting suffering on me” because I didn’t create any such life.
Secondly, there is a bias in the word “inflict”. We don’t inflict levity and happiness. We inflict pain and suffering. To procreate need not be an “infliction” of anything at all. Maybe it is another place to reword the premise better.
But thirdly, premise three is kind of premise 1 reworded. To say procreation is inflicting suffering is like saying life is suffering. Life, the tug and pull of being and becoming, or just the becoming of being, or just the “ing” of suffering. If life is suffering procreating is building new suffering or inflicting suffering.
This just goes back to the arguments against premise 1, that life can’t only be suffering for suffering to be distinguishable as a feature of life at all - life is more than suffering, and more than enough good to enable appropriate attachment to other features of life besides suffering. And suffering isn’t so bad that you must never cause it in another.
But, Conclusion: Antinatalism.
Logically flows from the premises as they are meant by the antinatalist. Suffering is truly excruciating and life is suffering, so since procreating makes new lives of suffering, we should not procreate. Certinly uses logic.
But only compelling if you think suffering is so bad, that suffering is the definer of becoming a human being, that we can’t see any good in suffering, that we can’t see other things besides suffering more valuable to us, that we can’t use our suffering to construct other things, and that if we inflict suffering it is never for good, it is always an unethical act. I just disagree with all of those observations. Together they mean an end to procreation is wildly inappropriate a response. It’s an emotional response to suffering, not something clear enough to construct an ethical norm.
It’s a slap in the face of the Dionysian. Mother Nature inflicted humanity on the universe, why would we judge her so harshly and end her creation, for the sake of each other not having each other?
I don’t see wisdom in turning against life itself because of suffering.
We should turn against the suffering, not the life that begets it or not even the ones who inflict it.
The law should be, because life involves suffering, we should give relief and kinship, so that others can know life with less suffering, but others can know life.
My arguments don’t seem compelling enough yet either. But that just means I need to keep searching for the words, suffering through the birth of better words, constructing something to attach to that accounts for more than the last attachment.