Comment on Slay Girl
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 months agoI was going to comment that this comment is going to draw in antinatalist weirdos but I am beaten to the punch.
Hey, the world is beautiful, do what the other user suggested and go out and experience it.
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Anti-natalism is such a wild and depressing position to have. It’s not just not wanting kids personally, or even just not wanting to be around kids, but that giving birth is immoral and horrendous.
I don’t really plan to have kids myself, but I have a nephew and he is so amazing and my sister is doing an amazing job raising him.
I’ve heard (well, read) from one anti-natalist that thinking children are wonderful to be around is akin to cult language. As if anti-natalists don’t sound like they are in a cult themself.
Thank you for coming to my TedTalk
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Militant Anti-natalists are just as cringe as those Pro-natalistswho pressure you to have children
Just leave people alone for their personal decisions ffs
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve always thought if they actually believed what they said they would be against all animal life as well. If existing is such misery and we need to like, end experiencing the universe broadly or whatever their main idea is, then definitionally we would also need to end all animal life, they have existed far long and suffered far worse than any humans over any stretch of time.
But for some reason they get real shifty when you start trying to dismantle their ideology.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
As someone who understands, if not necessarily espouses, anti-natalist ideology, I can give a bit of elucidation from my perspective of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I am happy to debate. It would be nice to be proven wrong here.
It comes down, in my opinion and understanding, to the following argument:
an entity is inherently unable to consent to its own creation. [A postulate]
suffering has a net-negative effect on the (perceived or actual) value of existence [precept of utilitarianism]
suffering knowingly enacted against any entity which cannot give informed consent is eqquivalent to the suffering of an entity which is actively not consenting [by which argument paedophilia is a crime]
The potential suffering inherent in life is foreseeable, as is the potential of a human life to harm the lives of others. [The basis of the concept of negligence]
An entity that is not created does not harm or cause others to suffer, nor does it experience harm or suffering [postulate]
From propositions 1 through 4:
You are personally, morally responsible for the life which you create, both its actions and its experiences, as all of its experiences and actions are exclusively contingent on the act of its creation. It is from this moral duty that parental responsibility derives.
there is a foreseeable possibility that the entity being created could endure enough suffering (or be the cause of same) to make the value of their life net-negative
From propositions 5 and 6, and the various observations one might make of the world (from climate change, to the renewed rise of fascism and the far-right, and a myriad of other “natural shocks which flesh is heir to”), they suggest:
From which:
That is the basis. If you can prove each of those propositions, then from a utilitarian perspective, I think anti-natalism follows. I am personally convinced up to proposition 6, and I am personally waiting until I no longer feel that 8 has a chance of being valid before I have children. There are plenty of ways you can argue against the propositions, but as they stand, there is no indication of a moral duty to end already-extant life or to engage in mass-sterilisation of animals. There are certainly people who try to come at it from a nihilistic perspective, and it’s MUCH easier to argue pretty much anything from nihilism than from utilitarianism, but I, being primarily utilitarian, hold with the above.
I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman. I’m a public school teacher, and I love being around kids. The wonder with which they view the cosmos is forever inspiring to me, but many of my students have experienced truly awful things. I believe my moral duty involves doing everything I can to minimize the suffering of entities that exist. I think that, once a child has been created, you now have a moral duty to make that child’s life as free from suffering and as fulfilling and rich as possible (without imposing suffering on others, of course)
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Wow, a very impressive, nuanced, and detailed explination about the ideology. A much better argument for anything than I can conjur up myself.
Alright, I am that person. Then again now that I see you have written about some people arguing for anti-natalisim from a nihilistic perspective vs a utilitarian one. I usually see more of the nihilistic arguments, which to me I just outright ignore for having too much of a negativity bias, especially these days.
TLDR: you are better than me
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals, and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
If society collapses, it will be even more suffering and more harm to more people and if populations collapse, so will society. I am deeply involved in logistics and nobody really gets how much suffering a population collapse could be for billions of people.
All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
You are fantastically, amazingly lucky you exist in this form and in this time and space, because odds are much better that you would have been a short-lived small animal, to live desperately and die horribly. That seems to be the far more likely state for the conscious experience. You (not you specifically, but singular sense of self broadly) will likely go through quintillions of reformations where you just are crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe. We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.
Anti-natalism has a noble idea behind it, but like so many “ism’s” it’s extremely human-biased in it’s foundational beliefs and I don’t assume to know enough to make it a “thing” in my life or endorse it because it feels dumb. Not in a “you’re dumb for believing it” way, but “we’re all dumb, this doesn’t help with that” kind of way.
I’m not saying we should breed like rabbits (but we do need to work to keep population levels from causing a mass starvation and migration crisis) but I’m also not saying the opposite. This is a neutral issue to me because the cosmic perspective makes it silly. Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.