Anti-natalism is a self-defeating ideology that exemplifies the continued collapse of intellectuals across time. The first half of this essay provides an explanation of how anti-natalism (AN) is self-defeating through behavioral genetics, and individual differences in receptivity to signals (psychological landscapes (Guilford & Dawkins 1991)). In summary: success in anti-natalist outreach efforts would be dysgenic from the perspective of anti-natalism by diminishing the traits that mitigate suffering. If that is insufficient to undermine faith in this worldview: in the second half, I’ll be getting into a presuppositional critique of the worldview, and those that rest on the same bases - in case anyone feels the AN program is salvageable. It fails on its own grounds, and those grounds aren’t even worthy of adoption in the first place. I’ll be assuming everyone who reads this has some familiarity with AN thinking, so I’ll just go ahead with showing why it’s wrong after explaining where I’m coming from. My perspective insofar as it’s relevant: Personally, what I find to be relevant here is the fact that I’m a hereditarian on the issue of differences in psychological and physical traits. By that, I mean: there’s an interaction between genes and the environment, and that biology doesn’t stop at the neck. I also take the position that the continuous characteristics of interventions applied to audiences corresponds better or worse to different ranges of continuous traits in terms of persuade-ability or dissuade-ability. Lastly, I accept the view that intelligence is a general reality that is resistant to change. I’m basically what sociobiology would’ve become. Not terribly interesting. The First Argument: Anti-Natalism Fails As a Social Program. In public speaking resources, you’ll find the idea that you should be concerned with the psychological landscape (PL) of your audience when crafting your messaging. In a Guilford and Dawkins paper from 1991, we see a relevant PL concept for the effectiveness of signaling to an audience: memorability . In order for the information contained in spoken and written signals to be remembered and internalized, audiences need to be attending to it. Generically, purposeful and sustained direction of attention is associated with intelligence, and in specific cases, it’s going to be associated with different traits. Reorganizing your thinking around new ideas, and executing programs that reject the instinctive, are also associated with intelligence. When it comes to interest in ideas, clearly, the intellect aspect of openness comes into play. When we’re concerned with interest in ideas that involve the welfare of others, agreeableness will probably also be relevant 1 Let’s think about those three traits: 1 This set of traits is to be generous. I’m aware of the study that exists on AN and dark triad traits, but people accept things for different reasons, and engage with them towards different ends. 1) Intelligence is obviously relevant to developing and maintaining a society where people don’t live in abject squalor. In order to accumulate infrastructure to smooth the sufferings out of life, some frequency of competent workers will need to persist since everything physical is prone to entropy. In order for that infrastructure to improve across time, and for other innovations to accumulate in the occupied space, people will need to exist in intellectual excess of the requirement to build and maintain the proceeds of innovations (higher average IQ). 2) Intellect is a personality trait, which means it’s a stable trait taken with you when deciding which situations to enter into, how you should make sense of those situations, and which "goods" (environment inputs) to consume(/orient towards). Do you want to go to a lecture? Do you go to it for the undergrad women (enticements), or for the ideas themselves? When sitting in front of the computer at 12:46 am, are you on ResearchGate hoarding freely available papers? If you want people attending and being intellectually engaged at lectures by day, and hoarding academic works at night, you’re going to want this trait sufficiently exaggerated in your society. This trait has obvious implications for the possibility of intellectual progress (i.e. innovation) in your society. 3) Agreeableness can be seen as having two components: compassion and politeness. These are straightforward, since psychologists are less sneaky than sociologists. Compassion is a concern for the wellbeing of others, and politeness is a willingness to comport oneself with custom 2 . A general society-wide concern for the well-being of others, willingness to comport to ritualized interactions, and aversion to exploitative behavior, would be expected to feed into intra-societal trust. A trusting society is more efficient than a less trusting one. A compassionate society is, ceteris paribus, less willing to let others languish in suffering. A compassionate society averse to exploiting others will be loftier in its conception of, and standards for, humane working conditions 3 To an AN, these traits would probably be seen as conducive to the program of stripping needless suffering from a world where we’re ‘better to have never been’ via treading entropy, innovation, social convention and reorganization. Tragically, for adherents, the association between interest in the philosophy and those traits is central to my first case against it. See: the philosophy of anti-natalism exists to depress reproductive outcomes. Due to this, adherents are personally, and through contact with others, working against the genetic bases of these traits. What is Heritability: Quoting from Wikipedia: heritability is “the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population” 4 . A way to view this for our purposes could be the following: insofar as something is 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability 3 Writing this to an assumed atheist audience, I decided to go with the license to choose what’s right given personal judgement 2 Say, against the countervailing pressures of egoism. heritable, we could be said to be “seeing” the genes in the phenotypes of our population. A heritability of 0 means we’re wholly incapable of seeing them, and a heritability of 1 means we’re seeing them clearly. Intermediate values mean we’re seeing them with some degree of obfuscation. Insofar as we’re getting a look at the genes in the population, meaningful selection would be taking place for or against said trait when it’s implicated in differences in success. A quick explanation of this idea: If you were to execute the top 2% of criminals over and over in a society where the variety in criminality is strictly “environmentally determined”, you’d see no change at all in the frequency of alleles that’d otherwise contribute to variance in criminality (i.e. no selection pressure). In terms of genetic consequences, it’d be as if people were executed at random. In a society where variety in criminality is strictly “genetically determined”, you’d be dumping the highest concentrations of the relevant gene variants by executing the top 2%. We’re concerned with concentrations here, because genes have tiny additive effects on these continuous traits (Chabris et al. 2015). The change in allele frequency per execution, or expected consequences per change in reproductive success (RS) is dependent upon the concentration in the person we’re influencing. Supposing a heritability of .5 for intellect and agreeableness, and a heritability of .8 for intelligence, you can see how this is of meaningful concern. Persuading people towards sterile ethotypes 5 insofar as they have traits compatible with a technologically advanced 5 Behavioral kinds society would support the experience of suffering in the world, while leaving those whose traits advance suffering free to smash up the place. The audiences of anti-natalist YouTubers, bloggers, authors and speakers aren’t full of people intellectually incapable of controlling their own reproduction, nor are they those disinterested in the welfare of others - out there at night with a gun 6 . Depressing the frequency of those with traits compatible with offsetting the entropy in the world, and that imposed by the malevolence of others, just expands the wreckage of the world towards total unmitigated ruin. There's no mitigation without enough hands at work - the ship sinks without enough water being bailed. Dependent people and violent criminals will always be with us, and that’s why responsible, moral, discerning people need to replenish the earth. It’s actually worse than this level of analysis lets on. Mate choice and friendship are assortative. Our traits are more like the traits of those we’re attracted to than those of random people. If we cut down the “willingness to reproduce” of specific smart, intellectually engaged and compassionate people, it would be expected that those remaining with those traits who are left wanting kids will have additional search costs imposed upon them. Furthermore, it’s reasonable to assume that some would also refuse to leave their partner despite their differing preferences, which would preclude reproducing. 6 This is a reference to an old Bob Backlund pro wrestling segment. I don't expect anyone to get it. At a level removed from outreach efforts, this will continue to depress RS. Women have to reproduce within a specific timeframe, as everyone knows, and men who postpone reproducing will see themselves contributing further to mutation load in future generations due to declines in sperm quality with ageing (Sharma et al. 2015). Reproductive outcomes will fall off by a consequence of this, and those that do take place will lead to a lower “fidelity” reocurrence of those relevant traits. Additionally, as Walter Block has pointed out on the analogous issue of wedding rings (Block 2010): there’s no physical sign of commitment to this ideology. This means we’d see some frequency of people unknowingly entering into relationships with someone who has opposing preferences which will waste their time. Time wasted from this social information problem just means more of those already established problems. In sum: anti-natalism, due to its trait targeted consequences for RS, works against the stated aims of those who have adopted the philosophy. It takes those conducive to the development of an advanced society, teaches them they’re bound to experience net suffering in life, and coaches them to trash the genes that they’re a vehicle for at the expense of those living and yet to be born. Part One Conclusion: Because anti-natalism is expected to diminish the reproductive success of adherents, those persuaded by arguments, their partners, and those romantically displaced by said persuasion, I consider anti-natalism to be another failed attempt at a worldview that subordinates everything to biology. Diminishing suffering is the goal. Diminishing suffering relies upon heritable traits. Anti-natalism strips the genetic bases of those traits. Therefore, the anti-natalist program is self-defeating. Insofar as it spreads, it undermines the future possibility of reducing suffering, and sours the prospects for those inevitably yet to be born. Even if it weren’t self-defeating, and it could be salvaged, the paradigm would still have clear issues, and those are the subject of the next section. Part Two: The Presuppositional Critique Anti-natalism, like all efforts to discover how we should act by examining and contemplating the world, fails to provide a reason as to why the perspective should rise in significance to a position above the level of a subjective assessment and personal preference. Worse, with AN, the worldview doesn’t offer, or even care, that it has no means to execute, or justify certain features of its self-contradictory thought. Subjective Utility and Preferences To date, nobody has developed a utilimeter 7 . This is important for a few reasons in anti-natalism. The first and most obvious one is the calculation that the subjective experience of positive states is outweighed by the subjective experience of negative states, which makes life unworthy of living. The second is the idea addressed in the following subsection: that suicide would inflict too much of a cost onto others around you to justify it. Outside of a personal subjective valuation of the positive and negative experiences of life, there isn’t a means to rank order the sum of an entire life’s positive and negative experiences (at which point would you even gather those data?). For any given experience, the tradeoffs and resultant payoffs for one actor might be considered as 7 A “utilimeter” is a hypothetical tool that would offer the ability to measure how many “utils” (well-being units) someone receives in response to a given choice outcome. having been worth it, whereas for others, the opposite might be true. This relationship could even be judged differently if considered at different points. This is true of the real experienced outcomes, and expected outcomes(/affective forecasting). This is true of individual choices, and also true of bracketed choices 8 (life itself). This is very basic thinking around utility and wellbeing that would be found in an undergrad economics or psychology course. What’s worthy of note here is that: AN apologists don’t make attempts to argue for selecting for traits that would feed into trait-linked subjective experiences that would make this gamble more favorable. Why not consider if selecting against neuroticism, and selecting in favor of extraversion 9 would contribute to rectifying the bad odds? If life is pointless and meaningless, aside from the arbitrarily carved out meaning suffering has, why not enact a selective breeding program or intervene into pregnancies with CRISPR? Equal investment in feelies could deliver greater subjective experiences, but it goes forgotten. If you accept that babies will be born as an inevitability, and you want to mitigate the experience of harm to fix the gamble, there’s no reason to be disinterested in this question. It might actually be a more viable program, but for some reason, anti-natalists don’t support this. There’s a magical “brute prescription” that just 9 The Feelies were basically VR pornography toys in Brave New World. 8 “Choice bracketing” is a device that brings a number of choices together into being seen as one choice. For example: smoking cigarettes comes with an immediate benefit early on with a negligible negative, but the program of cigarette smoking across many instances has a different set of consequences to subjectively assess. announces itself from the “brute fact” of experience skewing towards suffering, which they can’t even calculate. Why not breed the Utility Monster from Robert Nozick’s thought experiment 10 ? If we bred people towards the Utility Monster’s traits, they’d change the quality of subjective experience and increase the likelihood of people having deemed their lives worthy of having been lived - the key gamble of anti-natalism. Why not selectively tell people to breed based on the specific (incalculable) odds their kids would face? Why not breed people based on their additive effect on the odds? For some reason it has to be all or nothing, and the incalculable has to be said to be known. On to the Issue of Suicide Causing Excess Harm Over the Alternative, or the Anti-Natalist Utility Calculation Problem 11 In Conan the Barbarian ( Milius 1982) it is famously said that the greatest joy in life is “ To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. The death of someone can be a huge relief or cause for celebration to others. If you listen to anti-natalists, they’ll tell you that suicide would put undue suffering onto those around them and this makes it unjustifiable. They never consider the positives that would be felt by others (ad hoc exclusion of half the equation), or the impossibility of calculating the positives experienced against the negatives experiences 11 A joke based on the Socialist Economic Calculation Problem from Ludwig Von Mises. 10 Robert Nozick’s utility monster is a hypothetical actor who always gains huge amounts of utils in excess of what anyone else would receive for receiving the same payoff/consumption by the audience population. Again, if there’s no utilimeter, there’s no possibility of weighing subjective utility against disutility across actors with diverse preferences. The Anti-Natalist Calculation Problem is worse than the Socialist Economic Calculation Problem laid out by Mises. In a socialist economy, industry can be centrally coordinated despite being less efficient than in a system where price related information would direct efforts. We know someone will need: a house, food, water and other necessities so we can throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, then revise as issues emerge. With anti-natalism, missing prices aren’t the relevant concern, but the (related) impossible proceeds of a utilimeter are. Without a tool to predict the outcomes, or measure the resulting actions, you’d have to eyeball the right thing to do. It’s just that Anti-natalists aren’t building factories or roads, they’re deciding whether or not they should perform irreversible actions in response to their reckoning around local knowledge issues (Hayek 1945). You can’t decide that the expected outcome of a suicide is acceptable, go ahead with it, then un-suicide once you get the wrong outcome. The planner can revise his building plans to include more grey cube homes, but the anti-natalist can’t revise his acquaintanceships in the service of yielding a more favorable blend of outcomes. There can be no justification for the choices made by the accepted standards, and worse: the nature of the choices leads to a less workable system (practically via possibility of successive moves) than socialism. The Overly Narrow Concern Given the Premises “Reproducing” being wrong because it “creates a need that need not exist” is arbitrarily narrow. If it’s wrong for need that need not exist to be permitted to enter into being, then that’s going to come with prohibitions against additional behaviors that are mysteriously absent from AN. Choosing to live past the time any need is addressed leads to the gradual emergence of a need that needn’t exist. This isn’t an active willing towards the creation of needs, but it is still the emergence of need that could be readily prevented - knowingly afforded. Life could be ended at any point in time, and its existence is pointless in anti-natalism. If life is pointless, why permit life-related needs to re-materialize because an amount of time has elapsed? Why even address the needs in the first place? Now, here’s the transition point from needs to wants. If creating needs that need not exist is wrong, then what about wants? In the service of mitigating harms while people drop off from attrition in Anti-Natalstan, there’d have to be some techne with its associated inputs. Anti-natalists would have to develop and maintain means to modify the balance between positive and negative affect. In the process of participating in the chosen techne, they would experience the well known reality: wherever you go... there you are. They’d experience the hedonic treadmill. A more elaborate system would exist that the people would be adapted to, and this would involve specific demands that didn’t need to be met prior 12 or else there’d be a perceived decline to a lower state. This is prohibited in anti-natalism. You’re creating a new possibility of harm. Now, it would be dishonest of me to say that this is a necessary need, but it does raise two questions: why not live a spartan existence under AN? Are they even permitted to address suffering through artifacts? Insofar as a way of living involves cultivating your ecology in the service of mitigating harms, you’re elevating the standard of living. Without this cultivation, there’s no possibility of becoming accustomed to that standard of living. Without becoming accustomed to it, or arriving at knowledge of it, there’d be no possibility of harm from having been removed from it. That this is also all voluntary means that it needn’t be. In addressing our problems through technology, we’re necessarily creating potential for a set of perceived harms that needn’t be . That means it’s prohibited in anti-natalism. This could even be expanded further to something much more basic. People forget things, and suffer negative consequences for doing so. Without having learned, there is no potential to suffer from having forgotten as forgetting has learning as a necessary antecedent. But, again, an anti-natalist would just answer “we’re (mysteriously) only concerned with depopulation, so blah...” 12 In continuity with the previous thoughts: using drugs can create a physiological dependence which had no need to exist, and would then be wrong in AN ethics. This is a contradiction in their beliefs that they refuse to state. You can’t create the possibility of harm to address the possibility of harm. Feelies means the possibility of losing feelies. This essay could’ve just been this thought, and that would’ve been sufficient. But, let’s create additional critiques that need not exist. The issue remains: why not prescribe a spartan lifestyle to imbue the world with the meaning that everyone saw prior to our current Mouse Utopia? If the world is meaningless, and pointless, why even accept the idea that a developed society is desirable? We could minimize cultivation, be locked into treading entropy, and have our minds captivated by need. People deemed it worthwhile to live in those times, and it doesn’t come with the development of so many extravagant tools that tickle your fancy that needn’t exist. That seems to be a route to address the “was it worth it”/”will it be worth it” gamble. The reproductive gamble typically made perfect sense to the pagan who had to chase a pig through the woods. Even Objectivism is an improvement over Antinatalism If there’s no realistic possibility of discontinuing life, and no possibility of calculating the net balance of positive and negative affect across different people, why not just go ahead with an egoist ethic? You can rank order alternatives based on your own preferences, and you could strictly concern yourself with enacting that project. You can leave others to enact the same goal of doing so in a decentralized manner. That could address the bad odds of the gamble. Whenever any two actors have potential to interact they could decide whether or not to do so based on the expectation that it would be personally beneficial. How does the suffering of another impose a burden onto you in AN? Why not be an Objectivist and follow Rand or Peikoff? They’re concerned with human flourishing, reject lying, and reject the initiation of force. That sounds compatible with rectifying the gamble of AN. But for some reason, again, it doesn’t come up. Almost like there’s an unspoken agenda they're dupes for. Since Objectivism has come up, that raises another issue for the project of an ethical system... Determined to Choose: That problem is: Objectivism doesn’t presuppose determinism. Anti-natalism does. This is hilariously, something that Objectivism has going for it that they don’t. They both want to have ethical systems, but the anti-natalist is precluded from any possibility of discussing ethics because he precludes any possibility of an alternative action. If there’s no possibility of an alternative, there’s no possibility of ethics, since that implies alternative courses of action are possible. In the deterministic naturalism of anti-natalism, you fall into a view where you’re endorsing how some chemicals are chemicaling, and disavowing how some chemicals are doing so 13 Conclusion: I think that’s enough flitting around. Time for a simple review: 13 To steal a thought from Greg L Bahnsen Part one: Anti-natalism as a social program isn’t going to discontinue life (AN’s ideal outcome), and serves to strip traits from society that mitigate suffering and serve to improve the “gamble” that being born entails (realistic stated project of AN). It does this by depressing the reproductive success of those amenable to the messaging, because of their specific psychological landscapes, that are associated with heritable traits. As a social program, again, it’s self-defeating. You might see that, and say “ok, we’re wrong in how we’re going about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad system to believe in”. Well, as I explained in part two, it actually can’t be fixed since the errors exist at a more basic level than praxis: the presuppositions. Those points are summarized here: Part two: (1) Anti-natalism is a variety of determinism, which means there’s no possibility of choosing an alternative action in the worldview. In order for ethics to be possible, there needs to be a possibility of an alternative. Anti-natalism, then, has no basis to make any of the ethical claims that it makes. (2) Like everyone else, they don’t have an utilimeter. Without an utilimeter, the interpersonal comparison of utility is impossible. Despite that, they claim to be able to tell that suicide as such is not justifiable given the expected (incalculable) net consequences. (2.5) Consequences that they, in an ad hoc fashion, only half-consider, since they never talk about the possibility of positive well-being resulting from someone dying 14 (3) Agreeing to live another day is to agree to let your bodily processes yield needs that have no need to exist. ANs prohibit unnecessary need creation in their case for reproduction to be avoided, but not in living another day (contradiction). (4) If creating the possibility of felt harms where they need not exist is said to be wrong, then, how can it be acceptable to 14 Something that’s rectifiable, but probably won’t be since this ideology seems artificial. generate a world where people are lifted up to a higher standard of living, because they couldn’t otherwise experience the harms of being deprived of that enriched state? It can’t be acceptable. (5) Lastly, there’s not even reason to believe in this system to the exclusion of any other system. Looking at the world, you might as well see predator-prey relationships, and subordinate yourself to the system of predation against the prey of the world... or even vice versa as some who’ve signed their lives away to cannibals have. Had adherents of AN been constituted differently, they could easily have just arbitrarily adopted another incoherent system. Unfortunately, constituted as they are, they've failed into being dysgenic demoralization engines - sad! Concluding comments: Now, someone might respond to this by saying “that’s not my anti-natalism”, or they might take issue with how seriously I’ve taken individual arguments, and I accept that completely as a possibility. However, I’m not concerned with that possibility’s consequences. The reason for that is: individual arguments in this essay, in and of themselves, by my assessment should be enough to demonstrate the issues with the system to any honest reader. No possibility of an ethical system being baked into your ethic's presuppositions sinks your ship. I could’ve just written that, and it would’ve been enough, but as anyone who has ever changed his mind knows: people get stuck to ideas, and need multiple reasons to wiggle out from them in many cases. They see the proceeds of arguments in their daily lives, and it works to remove them from the system. I tried to develop a basis for that suite of spontaneous thoughts throughout the course of this, and hopefully it worked. References: Block, W., & Rockwell, L. H., Jr. (2010). The Case for Discrimination (1st ed.). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Chabris, C. F., Lee, J. J., Cesarini, D., Benjamin, D. J., & Laibson, D. I. (2015). The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(4), 304–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415580430 Guilford, T., & Dawkins, M. S. (1991). Receiver psychology and the evolution of animal signals. Animal Behaviour , 42 (1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-3472(05)80600-1 Hayek, F. A. (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review, 35(4). Milius, J. (1982). Conan the Barbarian. Universal Pictures. Sharma, R., Agarwal, A., Rohra, V. K., Assidi, M., Abu-Elmagd, M., & Turki, R. F. (2015). Effects of increased paternal age on sperm quality, reproductive outcome and associated epigenetic risks to offspring. Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12958-015-0028-x