The vast majority of those who reproduce are third-worlders from the Global South with impoverishment genes, not wealthy and intelligent college-educated people like yourself. 90% of those who are born make no impact on the world and a good chunk of the global south that comprises 85% of our global population lives on less than $2 a day in overcrowded dilapidated slums with flies swarming around their face as they collect cups of rainwater to wash themselves.
This is a good argument for state-mandated eugenics and controlled breeding.
But you agree that being born with unfavorable genes is a guaranteed way to ruin someone's life as clearly evident by the numerous long-term scientific studies out there on the web that find a correlation between someone's physical attractiveness, intelligence, and height, all of which are almost entirely genetic and immutable, and their statistical relationship with societal defined parameters of success like amount of wealth, the number of romantic partners you have, and your life term expectancy.
These advantages embedded within the footprint of your DNA allow you to exploit and harm others in a world with finite resources and competition for survival. Life is a zero-sum game and if someone manages to win, there is a loser paying the price on the other side of the world in the natural currency of pain i.e gaining employment at a limited job vacancy over another desperate applicant, killing and eating other sentient animals for sustenance, poisoning airs, rivers, lakes and oceans with our pollution and filth so we can build more cities while encroaching and depriving the natural habitats of other animals, etc.
If life is a zero-sum game and It is a matter of cold chance that you are the descendant of an inferior diseased peasant bloodline full of farmers and street beggars, or an enlightened aristocratic wealthy family with scientists and great thinkers, why is existence preferable to non-existence?
But life isn't intrinsically zero-sum nor a competition. There are plenty of intra and inter-species examples of mutually beneficial coexistence (positive sum). There's even a symbiosis between crocodiles and a kind of bird that feeds on the chunks of meat between its teeth and cleans out the croc's mouth.
For something to be alive does not mean that another thing
must die, or for something to eat and sustain itself another
must suffer and starve. If there was some cosmic law of life in the universe that demanded this kind of balance, then you could maybe make the fairness argument. If you want to narrow it down and say that human life only is zero-sum, then you need a stronger case.
I am sure you have already heard of the asymmetry argument which states that are no disadvantages relative to non-existence on the basis that pleasure is intrinsically good and pain is intrinsically bad.
If you do not exist, the absence of harm is positive, but the absence of benefit is neither positive nor negative. Whereas if you do exist, the presence of harm is negative, and the presence of benefit is positive. We are measuring the meaningfulness of conscious experience in terms of pain or gratification.
Believe it or not, I didn't hear about the asymmetry argument or know about Benatar's work before this thread. But I did immediately intuit the asymmetry towards suffering and did acknowledge that in some capacity almost immediately, so thanks to
@Lobo for the link.
Correct but the unborn are not in limbo banging on the doors of existence begging to be born either. Pain is more often intense than pleasure and you're gambling with someone's life when you have children. Will they become the next victim of rape, murder, cancer and all sorts of nasty diseases? Nobody is performing risk assessment when they make the decision to have children, and it's usually an out of spur decision that is done out of impulse or lust, not where logic supersedes the natural drives and one questions whether that person is impermissibly harming someone by bringing them into existence. And more often that not procreation is the consequence of sex rather than the result of decision to bring someone into existence. No criteria being followed nor any license required to bear offspring because in most people's eyes it would be infringing upon their autonomy and telling them that they don't have the right to reproduce.
It's true that almost nobody does a risk-assessment and rationally decides to bring humans into the world with half of their DNA in them. If you did that (risk-assessment), however, there will clearly be cases where it's favorable to do so, which nullifies the blanket argument that "always bringing children into the world is bad."
Moreover, telling someone who finds existence intolerable to kill themselves sounds contrived because they don't have the luxury of having a painless method of self-terminating themselves as it's either unaffordable or inaccessible i.e drugs or firearms, so there's a good chance that they hurt and maim themselves in the process and end up in even more pain than what was found in their previous state.
This discussion is a narrow tangent, but separate altogether. We're not arguing for euthanasia or the right to die or anything of that sort.
While this is true, what do you tell to those that have persistent depressive disorders? Happiness does exist to some extent, but it's usually brief and fleeting, and accompanied by pain and suffering shortly after.
For instance, a suicidal individual with an aggressive form of throat cancer would derive happiness from taking a sip of their favorite beverage, but it does not suggest that their existence was a net-positive and that particular person should have been born. We can objectively assess whether a person's life is good or bad depending on the extent it is characterized by positive or negative mental states, and in this scenario it is the latter.
People with disorders are not the average though. Their baselines are going to be very different than the mean human experience of existence. The mean baseline is typically neutral, interspersed with sensations of hunger, horniness, random thoughts about people and/or things - sometimes ideas, and impulses towards activities to occupy the mind and relieve the state of invariance and constancy that is void of thought (the maintenance of such a state of mind is something meditation actively encourages, for example).
Even if you managed to become a powerful fascist dictator and eviscerated the 7.9 billion hairless apes roaming this planet, the remaining 100,000 scattered across the globe would reproduce and restore to those levels within a few centuries. We are a resilient cockroach-like species and it's ingrained within us to spawn offspring even in the most horrific draconian-like conditions.
Yes, that is a likely outcome.
I was an antinatalist at one point but I've grown out of the philosophy now and it seems juvenile in retrospect I know that my opinion ultimately doesn't matter because I have no skin in the game and people are always going to be slaves to their biology and DNA. In all fairness, the philosophy is neither practical nor in touch with reality, but it is a travesty that more victims are going to be spawned in this rigged game and there's nothing you or I can do about it.
It is indeed juvenile and out of touch, but the argument does have value. Its merits lie in encouraging reasoning towards moral actions of something we take for granted (assume to be true) and that is the assumption that it's great to be alive and exist. It nudges people to think and act more responsibly towards something that is probably one of the most important decisions in their existence: the decision to bring another conscious, thinking, feeling, acting, soul into the world.
