Episode 46 - Anti-Natalism

Transcript

David: 0:00

Before we jump into today's episode, we would like to give a content warning. In what follows, we discuss suicide. Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman,

Ellie: 0:15

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:19

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:21

who are also professors,

David: 0:22

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:25

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Hello, everyone. We are so excited to share with you the contents of today's episode. But before we do that, we have a very rare ask.

David: 0:46

Very rare. We are at almost 100 reviews-

Ellie: 0:51

on Apple.

David: 0:52

Yes. On apple. And we would love it if you would take a minute of your lovely time to write a review for us. A fair review, but preferably an amazing review.

Ellie: 1:03

Yeah. I know five stars, please. We know that some of you don't listen to us on Apple. Spotify has recently introduced reviews. So if you listen to us on Spotify, please review us there. But if you don't have time for a review, you can also just give us a simple rating. Here's your moment. We're building it into the episode. Pull out your phone. Go to the app of choice. Go ahead, click on our show. You're probably already there, cause you're listening to it. Scroll down to the bottom and under ratings or reviews, please just hit this five star button.

David: 1:34

Doo doo doo doo.

Ellie: 1:42

Oh, well you really went off the rails there, David. Okay. That's probably enough time cause now people are like, I am tuning out. Thank you all. We appreciate you so much. We really want to keep Overthink going for as long as we possibly can. And yeah, reviews are really important for folks eyeing the show for the first time. And so we are really appreciate your support. Hey, and if by the time you're listening to this episode, we have already well exceeded a hundred reviews, please, please, please still do this. It means a lot to us.

David: 2:10

Yeah, because if by now you're still listening, chances are you kind of love us.

Ellie: 2:17

Okay. Okay. We're launching in today's episode, anti-natalism.

David: 2:24

Ellie, in 2019, there was a major controversy involving an Indian man by the name of Raphael Samuel, who very publicly made the claim that he intended to sue his parents for having committed the great injustice of, dun dun da, having brought him into the world. Now the case got a lot of attention because he says he loves his parents and has a perfectly good, healthy relationship with them. But he believes that they violated his rights in some way, by not getting his consent before having done the deed that brought him into the world.

Ellie: 3:10

But how can you violate the rights of a non being, right? Like he only has rights in as much as he is a living human being. And so the very condition for the possibility of his saying that they violated him is that he's already born.

David: 3:25

So I suspect this is why the lawsuit probably never actually went anywhere because I try to follow the story after 2019. And I just couldn't find any information beyond that original moment where he announced to the world that he didn't want to exist and that he was suing his parents. So I suspect that this might be why it didn't get any legal traction.

Ellie: 3:48

It's funny because in these cases where somebody says it would've been better if I didn't exist at all, I just kind of like. It often feels to me like they are imagining being a little unborn baby soul up in the universe somewhere and trying to decide, should I come down from my sweet womb of a heavenly resting place and be in the world or not? It's almost as if they're imagining themselves as potentially existent beings.

David: 4:17

Before existence.

Ellie: 4:18

And potentially non-existent beings. Yeah. But to be a being needs to be existing, it's almost like the Disney movie Soul where there's all of these like unborn souls that live up in the sky somewhere. It's just like such a fantasy.

David: 4:30

I don't disagree with you. But if I were to put on my hat representing this guy's philosophy, I suspect he would argue that his existence, just by virtue of the amount of suffering that he has endured, is already bad enough that it justifies the claim that he would have been better off not existing.

Ellie: 4:50

With his wonderful loving parents and the beautiful family life.

David: 4:53

I do. I love that. He's like, I love you guys, but I'll see you in court. But, you know, the funny thing is that we might want to think about this guy as a lone voice in the wilderness, you know, a random guy with a random worldview or trying to sue his parents for having given birth to him. But it's seems as if his case reflects a growing view among certain corners of the population. And the reason that I say that is because one of the films that was nominated for the Oscars in 2018 is a movie called Capernaum by the Lebanese director, Nadine Labaki. And the movie tells a story of a young boy, a Syrian refugee child who is living in Lebanon, who has a very difficult life. And towards the end of the movie, this is not a spoiler, uh, moment, but the movie hinges on the fact that this kid, due to circumstance, eventually sues his parents in a Lebanese court making literally the same argument that Raphael Samuel tried to make in an Indian court room, which is that his existence should not have happened and that his parents somehow violated his rights by having procreated. And so the kid not only sues his parents for having given birth to him, but also argues that they should be prevented from having any other kids in the future.

Ellie: 6:26

Widespread attention to the problems of procreating are definitely having a moment. And in philosophy, this position that being born means to be harmed is what's known as anti-natalism, which we'll be talking about a lot throughout the episode. One of the reasons that anti-natalism has become so popular, I think too is because of climate, right? A lot of people are really concerned about climate change. Uh, in fact, there was a study showing that one in four childless adults in the United States cited climate change as a factor in why they don't currently have children, although I did recently see a meme that people might be rethinking this now that Rihanna is pregnant.

David: 7:05

Oh, my God.

Ellie: 7:07

Rihanna's pregnancy is the death knell of anti-natalism. But then, I mean, you can, you can either be on the Rihanna side or you can be on the Miley Cyrus side because Miley Cyrus said in an interview that until I feel like my kid would live on an Earth with fish in the water, I'm not bringing in another person to deal with. So Miley Cyrus is on the anti-natalist side of things due to climate change.

David: 7:30

I love that the polls for our political imagination are always celebrities. So it seems like when it comes to the ethics of procreation, we have to choose between our Miley Cyrus commitments and our Rihanna commitments. I mean, I, I think I prefer Rihanna but in this particular case I might side with- but in this particular case, I might actually go in the other direction, but you're right that Rihanna's pregnancy has changed discourse around procreation and around pregnancy.

Ellie: 8:02

Yeah. On the one hand you have rampant economic insecurity, climate destruction, imminent political turmoil in many places of the world, if not already existing political turmoil. Then on the other side you have, oh, Rihanna is having a baby. Let's be like Rihanna and bring more children into the world.

David: 8:24

Today we are talking about anti-natalism.

Ellie: 8:28

Is birth a harm because life involves so much more pain than pleasure?

David: 8:32

Is it better never to have been born at all?

Ellie: 8:36

And do humans have a duty not to bring children into the world, considering the ravages of climate change and overpopulation? David, where are you on the Raphael Samuel scale? Do you feel like you were harmed by being born?

David: 8:53

I don't know that I was harmed by being born but I feel like maybe other people were harmed by my being born, the first among them being my mother, definitely.

Ellie: 9:08

You- poor, poor Lydia. Um, and also I can speak personally to being harmed by your existence.

David: 9:14

I do what I can.

Ellie: 9:15

I am very, very glad you were born. Let's think about why somebody might think that you were harmed in being born.

David: 9:22

Lets.

Ellie: 9:23

Regardless of whether or not you harmed your mother. So the basic articulation of an anti-natalist position would be as follows. Being alive means feeling pain. There is no way to avoid pain by coming into existence. And pain is a harm that we would otherwise not experience, right. If I didn't exist, I wouldn't experience anything at all. And pain would be one of those things that I didn't experience. Wouldn't it be better not to experience pain than to experience pain? If you agree with that, you will agree that existence is a harm and it's not just a harm, but it's actually a very serious harm.

David: 10:02

That is a good description of the at times convoluted logic of anti-natalist arguments. But I want to know, Ellie, whether you buy that argument that you just presented. Do you feel as if birth is not just a harm, but a serious harm?

Ellie: 10:21

No, I don't feel that way. I've been describing the view of philosopher, David Benatar, who is the most famous proponent of anti-natalism. Anti-natalism simply put is the theory that it would be better never to have been born.

David: 10:35

At all, period.

Ellie: 10:37

Yeah. That's the title of his book.

David: 10:39

Yes. So Benatar's position can be counter-intuitive. And in the past, when I've taught his material to my students, they have really strong reactions against it, right? They're like, no, that doesn't sound right to me. That doesn't square off with my view of existence and the value of existence. But then as you start digging into the details of his claims, one of his core arguments, which then many of my students assent to, is that in general, there is more badness than goodness in living. So life is generally like more crappy than enjoyable.

Ellie: 11:19

So he's drawing a very counter-intuitive conclusion, but showing you that it's based on intuitive premises.

David: 11:27

One of the ways that he does that is by talking about the pain-pleasure calculus of existence and, in short, his argument is that on the grand scale of things, pain outweighs pleasure in each of our lives. And he gives two different arguments for this. One is that it just lasts longer, right? Most of us will experience really amazing moments of pleasure and ecstasy. But they never last as long as moments of pain, despair, deep suffering. So if you just add up the amount of time that you are down rather than up, there is a clear imbalance between the two. And beyond just temporality, there's also the question of the intensity of the experiences in question, right? Even when I am at the highest of highs, that's never quite as intense as my lowest low. So when I am in the throng of grief or pain or depression, the negativity of that experience is more negative than the positivity of my most positive experiences, if that makes.

Ellie: 12:37

Yeah, the way that I was taught this as an intro to psych student in undergrad was that five positive things even out to one negative thing. And so you could get like five really positive YouTube comments, but then one negative one will cancel them all out. And so you would need six to everyone in order for there to be like a slightly positive balance. And I also think we can find a number of arguments to this effect throughout the history of philosophy. There are certain precursors to Benatar's arguments in the 19th century philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who's sort of an anti-natalist before anti-natalism is a term. And Schopenhauer says that misfortune is the general rule of our lives, because well-being is negative and pain is positive. And what he means by that is, you know, in terms of negative and positive, we're not talking about bad and good. We're talking about the absence of something and the presence of something else.

David: 13:32

Whether you notice it or not, is that right?

Ellie: 13:34

Yes. So think about when your shoes fit perfectly. When your shoes fit perfectly, you're not noticing them throughout the day, right? The whole point of a shoe fitting perfectly is that the shoe can get out of your range of conscious awareness. But when you have a slight pinch in your shoe, maybe it's a little too tight, suddenly all you can think about is how your foot hurts. And so Schopenhauer says that this is actually how we experienced life in general. When we are in a state of wellbeing, we don't notice that, we don't appreciate it, but we do notice when something is slightly amiss. Pain has a presence in our life, whereas wellbeing is simply an absence of pain.

David: 14:16

Yeah. It has a normative power that wellbeing doesn't. And this is an argument that the French historian of medicine Georges Canguilhem makes in connection to health. And more generally he says, look, when we're healthy, we are not aware of being healthy, but the moment that disease or pain or illness enters into our lives, it crowds our mental and experiential space. And we can think about nothing but that, and he has this really nice definition where he says health is the silence of the organs. It's an absence.

Ellie: 14:51

Oh, the silence of the organs as a way of describing health. That's so good.

David: 14:56

Yeah, my organs right now are screaming by the way. So I haven't met very much-

Ellie: 15:00

Too many squats.

David: 15:02

Maybe that's right. For our listeners, I confessed to Ellie that I did way too many squats and I'm very uncomfortable at the moment. Dude did 600 squats yesterday, which is something I can not even imagine. The organs are not quiet at the moment. Yes, they are yelling and squealing.

Ellie: 15:19

Potentially, they will be quieter in the longterm because of your exercise, who knows? Um, but yeah, I mean, Schopenhauer really draws from this point about the negative nature of pleasure and the positive nature of pain, that because existence is mostly made up of frustration and pain, our best moments in life are when we come as close as possible to non-existence. So he says people tend to be happiest when they're on the brink of falling asleep and the least happy when they wake up. Cause when you're about to fall asleep, you're about to be non-existent. And then when you wake up, it's like, oh shit, a day of existence.

David: 15:56

Oh, wow. I kind of love that even though I'm not sure that I agree.

Ellie: 16:00

Yeah. I definitely don't agree.

David: 16:02

I want to believe that I've been happier than when I just, like, pass out at night. I have to say that there is an aspect of anti-natalist philosophy that speaks to me. The problem for me is that anti-natalists, whether they are old school, like Schopenhauer or more contemporary figures like Benatar, they don't just say that existence is bad, which again I might agree with. They go one step further and they say that non-existence is better than existence. And I think this gets us into a lot of metaphysical puzzles that are really difficult to entangle. For example, how can we say that I would be better off not being when, if I am not, then there is no I that would be better off, right? This is what you said about this lawsuit that was going to happen in India. How could this guy's consent have been taken before he was born into the world, and that's where I start hitting the brakes on anti-natalism.

Ellie: 17:10

Yeah. And Benatar does say that it's not that the people who never existed, if we can even use that phrase, which we probably can't, are better off than the people who are existing, but he's saying among those people who exist, existence is bad for them. And once we say this, we can say that never coming into existence is better. A lot of this trades on what Benatar calls the asymmetry argument and his view is basically as follows. So I, Ellie Anderson, currently exist. I'm alive coming at you over your airwaves. And because I exist, I have both the presence of pain and the presence of pleasure. The presence of pain is bad, right. I woke up this morning with a nervous stomach ache because I have a lot on my plate this week. The presence of pleasure though, is good. I had some delicious coffee this morning, made myself some nice Chia pudding for breakfast. Fun. Wonderful. Good. So both pain exists in my life and pleasure exists in my life. Presence of pain bad, presence of pleasure good. But let's say that there's a non-existent, and like I said, it's really hard to describe this because we can't talk about a non-existent being.

David: 18:25

You're about to say, imagine that there's a non-existent Ellie in this non-existent realm.

Ellie: 18:31

Let's say non- let's say non Ellie. Okay. So non Ellie has an absence of pain, right? Non Ellie doesn't exist. So they don't experience any pain. Not experiencing pain is good, but not Ellie also doesn't experience pleasure. You might think this is bad, right? The presence of pleasure was good. So why wouldn't the absence of pleasure be bad? But Benatar says no, that's where you're wrong. The absence of pleasure is actually neither good nor bad. It's simply not bad. Because if nothing exists to feel pleasure, then it's not as if that non-existent thing is being deprived by not feeling pleasure. So here's the asymmetry. Ellie experiences pain, which is bad and pleasure, which is good, but non Ellie experiences an absence of pain, which is good, and an absence of pleasure, which is not bad.

David: 19:28

Okay. So this is what I meant when I said that this gets complicated and metaphysically, um, somewhat circuitous, but I think one way to visualize this, because it's different than the argument that we talked about with Schopenhauer. So the first argument about the pain pleasure calculus is that within existence, so if we just focus in the existing realm, there's just more pain than pleasure. Therefore existence is in general bad. That's the first argument. Now, when we get to the asymmetry argument, it's actually a comparison between existence and non-existence.

Ellie: 20:06

Yeah. So it's not the asymmetry between pain and pleasure.

David: 20:09

And so it seems like what you're saying, Ellie, that Benatar is saying, is that the main difference between existence and non-existence is that Ellie will experience negativity in her life, a minus, but non Ellie will never experience any kind of negativity because there is no negative value to non-existence. Either-

Ellie: 20:32

Exactly.

David: 20:33

you're not suffering because you don't exist, which is good. Or at worst, you are just not having pleasure, which is neutral.

Ellie: 20:39

Exactly. But what I find really weird about this is that why wouldn't Benatar just say that the absence of pain that characterizes non Ellie is neither good nor bad, but it's just not good, right? Like if the whole point is that the absence of pleasure is neither good nor bad for a non-existent entity, then why not say that the absence of pain is neither good nor bad either, right.

David: 21:04

Well, I think this goes to his interpretation of pain as inherently problematic. We can not imagine a case in which pain isn't bad and therefore its absence is good because its absence is experienced again as the silence of the organs, which is a kind of goodness of normal wellbeing. But this is precisely where I kind of jumped off the bandwagon with Benatar.

Ellie: 21:31

First you put the brakes on anti-natalism. Now you're jumping off the bandwagon altogether.

David: 21:36

Oh my gosh. Have you met me? I am basically a wagon of confusing, mixed metaphors, but if we go back to Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer makes this claim that pain is just terrible and that's why existence is not worth it. And I actually side a little bit more with one of Schopenhauer's critics in the 19th century, who is Nietzsche, who says, well, that presupposes that you then draw that additional conclusion that if existence is bad, that therefore it would be better not to exist. And Nietzsche says no, even if there is a lot of negative stuff in existence, you can still whip up something positive out of it, even if pain never actually goes away. So I just think that Benatar gives too much weight to this differentiation between pain bad, absence of pain good. To me, that's just simplistic.

Ellie: 22:37

Yeah, I agree, in part, because I think when we're talking about what is good or bad, we have to have a human calculus already in mind, and we have to have somebody in mind for whom something is either good or bad. So this is where I worry that we're kind of positing accidentally some unborn non Ellie soul up in the universe somewhere because I just don't think it really makes sense to talk about pain or pleasure outside of existence at all, right. We already have to have an existing being for whom something is good or bad in order to talk about what's good, bad, better, or worse. And the philosopher Elizabeth Harman claims that Benatar's asymmetry argument has a problem of conflating impersonal goodness, just like this abstract notion of goodness and justice with goodness for a person, right. And that's what I'm really interested in. I think goodness, when we're talking in terms of morality, has to be goodness for a person ultimately.

David: 23:36

Well, and I, I like this distinction between goodness in the abstract versus goodness for a particular individual, because when we think about pain, I think we also have to think about the fact that the valuation of pain is not universal and invariant, even in existence, right? So if we think about cultural variation and more importantly, historical variation, we can imagine a lot of scenarios in which, for an individual, pain that might be bad in the abstract is actually good, right. So people can reinterpret the value of pain in ways that I don't think Benatar does justice to. And here we can think about any example of a historical or cultural practice that hinges on the value of pain. So think about, I don't know, your BDSM practices, where there is value to experiences of pain. Think about auto flagellation practices in religious communities where you attain a kind of good through pain, which for Benatar, would just not make any sense. So my point here is that pain might be bad when you talk about it in universal, invariant, disembodied, decontextualized terms, but when you localize it in particular forms of life, it can actually cross over onto the positive side of that calculus.

Ellie: 24:59

Yeah, not to mention that there are also different ways of thinking about the value of life that go beyond pleasure and pain as the two polarizing values, which I want to talk about a little bit more later. I also think just in general, I really do agree with the idea that Benatar's asymmetry argument doesn't work because the absence of pain should be considered as neither good nor bad in the same way that the absence of pleasure is considered neither good nor bad. I think it's weird that he's like the absence of pain is good for this non-existent non being. And I'd had this sort of feeling about anti-natalism for quite some time, but there was always something about it I couldn't put my finger on. And then there's a guy named Thaddeus Metz who has articulated precisely this objection to Benatar, and in reading that argument, I was like, oh yes, this makes sense. What Benatar is getting wrong is that he is assuming that the absence of pain is a good thing for the non-existent being, whereas really it's just kind of like neutral or not bad.

David: 25:54

You just want to say that in the non-existent realm, there is no good or bad. Everything is just neutral because nothing exists. That's your view?

Ellie: 26:01

Not existing realm doesn't exist, not even a realm.

David: 26:04

I agree with you that valuing the non-existent from the perspective of the existent is a kind of leap that is philosophically problematic.

Ellie: 26:32

David, you talked about a moment where you jump off the anti-natalist bandwagon altogether. And, and you mentioned that thou is in part because of Nietzsche's rejection of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, very pessimistic philosopher, Nietzsche, has a reputation for being a pessimist sometimes, but actually is not a pessimist. Why do you agree with Nietzsche that even if life involves suffering, it doesn't follow that life has worthless?

David: 27:00

Because I buy Nietzsche's argument in his book, The Birth of Tragedy, that even if there is a lot of suffering in existence, all the way to the point of reaching the conclusion that existence is meaningless, that doesn't quite mean that our existence in this world un-ideal as it may be, can not be somehow justified through human actions. So in this book, Nietzsche says, look, we have forgotten just how meaningless life is. And he cites the mythical figure, Silenus, who famously said to the ancient Greeks that the best thing that a human can do is to never have been born. And then that the second best thing that a human can do is basically kill themselves. And Nietzsche says, I think Silenus is right that existence is an abyss in which you can find no foundation. There is no bedrock that will secure meaning and value for the life that you have. Nonetheless, and this is why he writes extensively about ancient Greek tragedy and music, we can justify existence through music, through art, and even through mythology. He says existence can only be justified, uh, aesthetically i.e., through art.

Ellie: 28:20

Yeah. And one way that we can think about art is the transformation of the pain and suffering of human existence into something that is beautiful. I don't know if we might call it pleasurable. Certainly some would, I'd be probably fine with that, but we'd have to be thinking about pleasure in a way that's not just about like the physical pleasure of not having my shoe pinch, something that is sublimated to use a term from Freud. Something that really helps us achieve higher order goals of human existence.

David: 28:45

And Nietzsche doesn't use the term pleasurable. He uses three other terms. He says that through art, we can sublimate existence into either the comic, so we can make fun of existence. The beautiful, so you look at something in art that just stirs up certain emotions or the sublime, which is a combination of something that is fascinating and awful at the same time. So it's not that existence suddenly becomes pleasurable. It's just that it can be comic, beautiful and sublime, arguably all at the same time.

Ellie: 29:18

Yeah. And I think what you're saying, David points to one of the problems for me with the rules of pleasure and pain in our everyday lives, because I buy the idea that there are higher order goals to human existence that either are higher order pleasures or even go past pleasure altogether. And this is one of the points that philosopher Elizabeth Harman makes in response to Benatar. She says that Benatar fails to distinguish between the higher order pleasures of life and the minor pains that we experience.

David: 29:50

So can you give me an example of what for Harman would be a high order pleasure that cancels out a lot of tiny little pain?

Ellie: 30:00

Because of my profession, one of the things that immediately comes to mind for me is the writing process. Let's say writing a book. Writing a book involves all kinds of everyday minor pains. Uh, writing is challenging. It is a tough thing to do. It requires grappling with very everyday banal demons, but ultimately the finished product of having written a book, I think, makes those pains worth it for a lot of people. And even if we're thinking beyond minor pains to really, really serious pains and serious suffering in human existence, Harman uses the example of somebody who has received a cancer diagnosis at a young age. And she says, according to Benatar, the fact that people often die from painful illnesses and often die young is one of the problems with existence. He uses that as part of his anti-natalist argument. And Harman just sees no reason to conclude that somebody who receives a cancer diagnosis at a young age, let's say it's a terminal cancer diagnosis, should not have been born, right. She says having loving relationships, doing work that we find rewarding, those can contribute to a life that is well worth living because it contains good experiences.

David: 31:15

Yeah. I am persuaded by what you were saying, because I do think that if we equalize pain and pleasure into simply two categories, with the same weight across the board, we lose a lot of nuance about what it is that we value about our own existence. And, you know, I guess as somebody who has written a book that, that- that's a good description of my experience. It was awful at times. And then you get this high at the very end of the process that justifies that retroactively and makes you think, Hmm, maybe I would do that again. Which is precisely what you said all along you would never do. But even beyond that, I think whenever you get to the point of making arguments about who should and should not have been born, you are entering into very dangerous territory. And this is also a problem that I have with Benatar's anti-natalist position is that sometimes it does reek of ableism, to a large extent because of social norms and expectations that we have around the value of people with disabilities, especially from an able-bodied perspective. I think we run a real risk of saying the life of this person should not have happened because I am projecting myself into their shoes and assuming that I would not have wanted to exist, if that had been the hand that I had been dealt.

Ellie: 32:46

Well, it's interesting that you say that because Benatar really wants to guard against this worry. He actually thinks that his version of anti-natalism is less abelist than a lot of arguments about the value of human life. But he points out that we often think it's wrong to procreate if the person who would be created would have a life that was worse than a typical human life, but for Benatar, it's not clear why the typical human life would be the cutoff point for a life that's worth living and a life that different or less, or according to a lot of people would, would mean that it's not worth living. So he's like, I'm just going to say no human life. No human life is better than non-existence here.

David: 33:30

One way to articulate my worry. It's not so much about the anti-natalist position as articulated by Benatar but as about the potential uptake of that position by others in a social setting where we're already primed to equate disability with more pain, more suffering.

Ellie: 33:48

Definitely. And I think also a lot of anti-natalists equate the idea that life is suffering with the idea that life is not worth living. And I wonder actually, how much of it traces back to Schopenhauer who was deeply inspired by Buddhist philosophy, but didn't always follow out Buddhist philosophies to their conclusions. So the idea that life is suffering is a key tenant in Buddhist philosophy. According to Buddhist traditions, humans are caught up in a wheel of suffering, a Wheel of Samsara. And our goal is to break out of that wheel of suffering. But Buddhist philosophy does not reach anti-natalist conclusions. The way to get out of the wheel of suffering is not by not being born at all. In fact, Buddhists see birth as a good, because it's only by being born that we are able to reach the point of enlightenment, to reach the point of getting out of the wheel of suffering. And human birth in particular is seen as a good in Buddhist metaphysics because it is humans who have reached the point at which we may become enlightened. We can become aware of the four noble truths. One of which is that life is suffering. And another of which is that there is a way out of this suffering. So Schopenhauer is inspired by the Buddhist philosophy that life is suffering, but comes to very different conclusion.

David: 35:04

Well, I would say that that's an interesting reason to reject anti-natalism from the perspective of people being born, because it shows why existing might be good for them, right? Because it enables you to reach enlightenment. It enables you to reach these higher order pressures that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. But there's another aspect of anti-natalist philosophy which hinges less on whether existence is good for the people who are either going to exist or not, but on procreation and whether bringing more new beings into existence is good for those who are already there. So aren't living sentient beings and not just human beings ultimately harmed by more people coming into the world. So for example, the more people that there are, of course, the worse climate destruction becomes, the more that the natural world is devastated. Think about deforestation. Think about the oppression of animals. Think about pollution. So this would be the, I think, that Miley Cyrus version of the argument, is that right?

Ellie: 36:09

Yes, definitely. Yeah. This idea that you should not under the current conditions of the world, bring in another person.

David: 36:18

It's much more context dependent than the first argument, which is just about the absolute value of existence versus non-existing.

Ellie: 36:26

Yeah, and this is actually the second major type of anti-natalism and it's called the misanthropic version of anti-natalism. What we've been talking about up to this point is the other form, which is the benevolent or philanthropic form of anti-natalism, the idea that if you're considering the perspective of the person who may or may not be born, it's better for them not to be born, right? You want to do them a good by not bringing them into existence. The misanthropic argument is about doing a good to non-humans by not bringing in more humans into the world, right?

David: 36:59

Yeah. So one is like, humans are good. Let's not harm them by giving them life. The other one is humans are crappy, so don't bring them into the world because they'll ruin it for everybody else. Well, and if you buy this misanthropic argument, then you might be tempted to agree with one of the most controversial conclusions that Benatar reaches, which is that we have a moral obligation not to procreate, not to bring new members of the species into existence who will cause irreparable harm and damage to the world. Humans cause suffering, therefore, we should not bring new ones into the world. And this leads us to the ethics of procreation. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other listeners on Facebook and Instagram. Even though David Benatar is by far the most famous spokesperson for anti-natalism, the term was first used by the French philosopher Theophile de Giraud, who has written a couple of books on the subject, including one that is amazingly titled The Art of Guillotining the Procreators: Anti-Natalist Manifesto.

Ellie: 38:32

Um, that's the most French thing I've ever heard of.

David: 38:36

The book is written like a manifesto with lots of calls to action and lots of exclamation points. And in it, he says that there are basically no good reasons to have children and people should stop procreating. Well, yes.

Ellie: 38:51

Well, if there are no good reasons for having children, then why do people have them since obviously they do?

David: 38:56

Well, he interprets the will to have children as a combination of narcissism, infantilism and jealousy. So, in short, he says that we want to replicate ourselves ad infinitum because we are afraid of death. And procreation through children, biological procreation, is the one way in which we get to achieve immortality in our world. And more over, we also want the social perks of having children. Um, and he doesn't mean like taxes or other kinds of material benefits. He's talking about symbolic perks. The fact that people who have children get treated differently on account of having contributed to the future of the family, the future of the nation and the extension of the species.

Ellie: 39:47

That one I can definitely buy, because I have noticed this strange tendency among people who have children to be super sanctimonious. Um, and they just have like the whole weight of society behind them. And so they get to say really, really annoying and rude things to the childless folks like myself, like, oh, must be nice to have time to do your work. I'm like, yeah, it is nice to have time to do my work. You chose to have a child, so you don't have time to do work, but like, what if I were to say to them must be nice to have a husband and child, like, that would be, that would just seem desperate, but they get to seem like they're like on the high, on the know on some moral high ground. Oh, like, must be nice this long suffering martyrdom.

David: 40:33

So I think Theophile de Giraud just hates children. Uh, but this is one of his arguments. He says that parents are allowed by society to vaunt their superiority for others. And let me read you this quote, and this is characteristic of his writing style. Let me just say that. God knows that parents love to take any opportunity to strut around with their unbearable, intrusive spawns, every public place available. Parks, museums, theaters, hospital, cemeteries, unemployment offices, by pushing in front of them with a puffed chest those characatures of a sarcophagus that are their strollers or- it's not over- or even by dangling under the noses of innocent bystanders, their shopping basket from which an ugly squealing head emerges, much to the delight of the makers, who benefit at little cost from their little siren who captures our attention and stimulates our repressed instinct for murder.

Ellie: 41:43

Wow. Okay. I just want to go on the record and say, I love children. I think this is hilarious, but I'm not like, wow, there's a lot going on here. I'm curious, actually about Theophile de Giraud's psychoanalytic baggage that he's bringing to the table here, but I did, you know, I did have an experience recently where a friend who has a child, who chose to have a child, has a very secure economic condition, accused another one of our friends of childless privilege.

David: 42:13

God.

Ellie: 42:14

And said, check your childless privilege. And I just think, how can you possibly say that?

David: 42:23

Yeah. You know, the rhetoric.

Ellie: 42:26

Who's the privileged one by society here for starters, but then there's a lot of other things to say, this is not a privilege. And you can't tell somebody to check their childless privilege or in the same way you can tell them to check their white privilege.

David: 42:36

Yeah. It's like, oh, you're the person that doesn't go to the park privilege. You know, it's like a choice that you've made. What are you talking about? But let me say that even though de Giraud's rhetoric can be bombastic and sometimes even a little bit off-putting, he does reach this conclusion that we should refrain from having children, because there are no good reasons for procreation, because all reasons that people give for having children ultimately reflect this fear of death, this desire to replicate the self and a desire to accumulate, uh, material and symbolic benefits in society. But he recognizes that asking people not to have children period. It's largely impractical. So he spent a lot of time talking about how we can live anti-natally in a natalist culture. So given that people are likely to have children, what are things that we as a society can do to move the needle from natalism to anti-natalism. One thing is recognized that if we selfishly bring a child into this world, at the very least, we incur a moral obligation to absolutely ensure, to the extent that this is possible, that that being's life is the best possible life, not just a good life, but the best possible life. And he coined a new term, which is agatho-genics, which comes from the Greek word agathos, meaning good. And geni, meaning birth. And he says, agatho-genics is different from another term that has a similar etymology, which is eugenics, which has a very different meaning for him. So he's like, I'm not talking about eugenics. Eugenics is about deciding who is and who is not good enough to be born, right? Who's worthy of being, but agatho-genics is about ensuring that whoever is born, independently of who they are, has the best possible life that we can give. And that means that we have to really raise the bar on procreation and parenting, and we need to pass laws that protect children from non-ideal situations. So he has a lot of practical recommendations. He says, if you're going to be a parent, you need to go through formal education. Maybe you need a couple of years of college to study child development, childcare, child nutrition. So just like you need to pass a test for a driver's license, he says you should pass some formal requirement before you're allowed to have children. He also says that people who are prospective parents should have to go to psychoanalysis because one of the problems, and I don't disagree with this point-

Ellie: 45:30

I thought he couldn't get any more French.

David: 45:32

I know, but he says one of the problems is that parents, without realizing it, replicate a lot of their childhood trauma through their own children because their parenting style ends up being ultimately an unconscious critique of the parenting style of their parents, right? Like I won't do what my daddy did or I won't do what my mother did. And so there is a lot that the child endures on account of the baggage that the parents have not worked through about their own childhood. And that my favorite point that he brings up is that actually nobody should be having children before 30. He says, already Plato recognized this in The Laws, in the dialogue, The Laws about marriage Play-Doh says people should not get married before 30 because they're not mature. And he says-

Ellie: 46:22

What? Wait really? Like people were, what was the life expectancy at that point in the age of fertility? That's shocking to me.

David: 46:29

Well, I think people live into their fifties, definitely. And I mean, but this is also Plato's recommendation, right? They also say that you shouldn't become a philosopher until like 40, so you and I are not there yet. And de Giraud says that sounds right to me. If you're a 20 something year old, you probably shouldn't be having kids. Okay.

Ellie: 46:50

Yeah, I'm really resisting the urge to like pull an ad hominem attack on de Giraud right now, because he just sounds so fricking toxic.

David: 47:01

No, that's unfair.

Ellie: 47:04

I know, I know. It's not fair. That's why I'm trying to find some more philosophical reasons to reject what he's saying. So I was really interested when you said that for him, we need to pass laws that protect children from non-ideal situations because where my mind went was oh, great, de Giraud is suggesting social protections and a wider social safety net for parents, so that there's not as much of a responsibility on the nuclear family system, on one or two parents, right. Um, because for me, a huge part of the problem with parenting in our society is just how much pressure it puts on the individual parents. But then once you actually described all of the things that de Giraud thinks the laws should pertain to, they're all about individual parents. The parents need to go through formal education. The parents need to undergo psychoanalysis. The parents need to be 30 years of age or more. And for one, I think, that's really really a bad solution because it's ultimately keeping the nuclear family structure of the privatization of parenting in place. But now just saying that we should also persecute parents if they don't live up to this. And I also think that there's very much a gender asymmetry that is behind this because people who give birth are often more fertile before they're the age of 30 and you know, who are we talking about? Like when we say not before 30 and make it seem like that's just a universal claim, but it actually pertains more to one side of the population than another. And that's not to say that men's fertility also isn't an issue or, you know, people who have semen are not always men. People who have semen, that's like a very weird way of putting it, but still I think hopefully you get what I'm saying, which is just that this is a claim that has been leveled against anti-natalism from feminists. Is that a lot of times anti-natalists arguments and up really putting a lot more pressure on people who have ovaries and wombs, who for the most part are women.

David: 49:02

So I think the argument about 30 definitely is susceptible to this argument. The claim about formal education and undergoing psychoanalysis. He's clear that he means this for parents independently of their sex or gender identity.

Ellie: 49:14

But it's still presumably within a nuclear family structure where he's imagining a two parent system, maybe he's recognizing the prevalence of single parenthood, especially single motherhood. But if he's not like I'm not getting the vibe. I want, I want like communal parenting situations myself, and a really strong social safety net by the state.

David: 49:32

Yes. But here we have to think about the context in which he's writing, right? He's writing in a French context where there are those social networks to a much larger extent than they are in the US so he takes it for granted that there should be state funded childcare facilities, pretty significant maternity and paternity leave for new parents who are bringing a child into the world. What he is saying is that those safety nets that we currently have are not enough because they don't recognize the psychological, and in fact, existential, significance of bringing our child into the world. So he's not under cutting them as much as adding on top of them, but to my knowledge, he doesn't require that that be a nuclear family. It's just that that's the form that it culturally takes and has taken for some time recently.

Ellie: 50:24

Yeah. But psychoanalysis itself as a practice is rooted in nuclear family systems, but also think take the nutrition point. He says that parents should have education in children's nutrition. I actually think that that's a pretty cool idea, but why not also say cities need to have accessible and healthy, affordable food, you know, so that we don't have food deserts because what are two years of nutrition education going to do for parents who live in a food desert?

David: 50:49

Yeah, of course. And I guess my point here is that he is not in favor of austerity measures about parenting or privatizing it again because he's coming out of that largely socialist French context, but maybe he should devote more time to specifying the ways in which we could break down the nuclear family.

Ellie: 51:07

I want to jump back to the gender point for a moment though, because I was having a conversation recently with friend of the podcast, Jessica Locke, who said that part of the problem with anti-natalist arguments for her is that the end up looking a lot like the conservative argument about policing women's bodies through anti-abortion laws. So the conservative position would be that women have a duty to give birth. The anti-natalist position would be, people have a duty not to give birth, but then there's a hidden premise in that claim, which is that who are the people who give birth? By and large it's women. And so the anti-natalist position ends up looking like women have a duty not to give birth, which is the obverse of the conservative position that women do have a duty to give birth.

David: 51:57

Okay. So two different thoughts come to mind here for me, the first one is that de Giraud talks about this argument in his book on Guillotining the Procreators. And he says that in fact, the women, no. And he says that in fact, his brand of anti-natalism grows out of feminist critiques of reproduction in the 20th century and the central feminist premise that women have zero duties to have children. Of course, then it takes a turn towards a negative duty, but-

Ellie: 52:33

Yeah, cause it's one thing to say you don't, you don't have a duty to have children. It's another thing to say. You have a duty not to have children.

David: 52:38

Yeah. But that's where I think we need to be careful about the term that we use for that negative duty, because it's not people have a duty not to give birth, because then that does gender it in a particular way that argument and that's contained already in the title, is that people have a duty not to procreate. And it's not just typically women who procreate. More importantly, this would also include a duty not to bring people into the world, for example, through artificial means that don't involve a traditional pregnancy or birth. So-

Ellie: 53:12

So David, as a gay man, you're on the hook too.

David: 53:14

Definitely, definitely.

Ellie: 53:16

No, no sperm donor or sorry. Um, what's the opposite of a sperm donor?

David: 53:20

Egg donor? Sperm receiver?

Ellie: 53:22

No, no egg donor for you.

David: 53:24

Um, just said sperm receiver. That is not kind of opposite. But no. So the category here is procreation rather than parturition. And I think we need to be careful there because it does make the gender politics a little bit more different.

Ellie: 53:43

Wait, what is parturition?

David: 53:44

Parturition, like the act of giving birth. The physical act.

Ellie: 53:48

Literally never heard that in my life. My mom was a doula. She helped women give birth and I have not even heard that.

David: 53:55

Yeah. So doulas are parturition experts.

Ellie: 53:59

Okay. Well, and I do think that is interesting, David, because I will say when we're thinking about abortion arguments, I am not of the mind that the whole story is my body, my choice. I think it's very, very important for people who can give birth, most of whom are women, but not all of whom are women, to be able to have choices about their own bodies. I also think that like it's important for us to have a view of childbearing that does not put all the onus just on the person who is either able to give birth or not give birth. So I do think that that's interesting to sort of widen it out to the procreation part rather than just giving birth.

David: 54:34

Because the problem isn't the physical act, the biological reality of birth, it's actually the act of engendering a new being. And in fact, de Giraud refers to-

Ellie: 54:44

Totally.

David: 54:44

Human beings in general, as us, the forcefully engendered.

Ellie: 54:49

I think when de Giraud talks about the importance of parenting and giving a child, not just a good life, but the best possible life. There are implicit gender assumptions there too, because who are the people by and large who are giving children good lives. It tends to be women.

David: 55:03

Yeah. And I think there is an anti-natalist argument as to why that's wrong, because that imbalanced the gender distribution of parenting.

Ellie: 55:10

He thinks that we should. Yeah. Yeah. But he thinks that we should, if we are going to bring children in the world, give them the best possible life.

David: 55:16

I think one possible reading is that when men don't step up to the plate, that's a problem because then it creates un-ideal situation for the child. But again, this is the difference between the argument and its social uptake. Now, I agree with you that thinking about the cultural context is important. And one of the arguments that de Giraud makes that really caught my eye is his argument that we don't just need to pass laws to make the lives of whichever children are going to be born better and more ideal, whether that's at the individual level or with the help of the government. He says we actually need a cultural revolution around the very meaning of fertility. And in short, we need to re evaluate what we think about barrenness, about childless privilege, what you call childless privilege. I know, I know, but de Giraud says in no uncertain terms, we need to learn to cheer for, and maybe even glorify, people who choose not to have children. If you want to add value to existence, you ought to sublimate, to use a term that you already used from Freud, you ought to sublimate your sexual energy into a kind of symbolic birthing or symbolic procreation rather than literal procreation. So instead of having literal babies, why don't you generate something that adds meaning to the world that is not a living being. Like write a book. Create art. Engage in activism. Build up that sense of community that, Ellie, you say is missing from our approach to parenting. Give birth to something that is not going to suffer.

Ellie: 57:07

I love that. I was just at a wedding this past weekend. And sometimes people assume that I'm not into weddings because as a feminist philosopher, I often critique norms of heterosexual, romantic love and marriage, but I actually love weddings and I think they're great. And I'm going to a baby shower next weekend. And so I'm in between a wedding and a baby shower. I was telling my partner last night, I was like, you know what? I just wish we had more things like this. I'm not about getting rid of weddings and baby showers, I'm about also having a party for getting a new job or also having a party for another kind of relationship. Let's celebrate a friendship with an exchange of vows.

David: 57:43

An article shower.

Ellie: 57:44

Celebrate a birth. We gotta celebrate a birth of a new book. Yes, an article shower.

David: 57:50

I expect all my friends to give me gifts. Um, and actually de Giraud says that this new movement that seeks to reimagine the value of fertility versus barrenness already has a heroine or an idol. And that's Athena, who is the Greek goddess of war, who was born to Zeus, but who herself refused to bear any children. Nonetheless, Athena that created a lot of cultural value and significance for the Greeks and in his really awful prose at times, he says, quote, initiates us to the idea that true fertility is that of the soul and not that of the crotch.

Ellie: 58:36

Athena herself wasn't even born through a crotch. She was born straight out to Zeus's head. Yes, yes. Yeah. I actually played Athena in a high school play. I thought I was so cool. I got to wear this all gold outfit. So I just want to personally thank my parents for giving birth to me so I could play the role of Athena.

David: 58:53

One of the higher order pleasures that justify being in the world.

Ellie: 58:59

Well and in that case, I guess our hand is forced and we need to become team Miley rather than team Rihanna. Haha.

David: 59:14

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:22

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David: 59:28

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Ellie: 59:39

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