Better Never to Have Been

For my money, the clearest evidence that humans apply rationality only post-hoc, as (epiphenomenal, if not simply feigned) justification for actions sufficiently caused by their emotions, is the fact that we keep making more humans.² If we were truly rational actors, we would stop reproducing, because on purely rational grounds there is no justification for making new humans.

Benatar captured this logic succinctly: “Better never to have been.” Underlying this conclusion is the (what to me seems) self-evident moral asymmetry of procreation. That is, there is no harm in never having existed, but endless potential for suffering once a being exists. And no amount of pleasure or happiness experienced by that being can make up for the fact that any suffering experienced could simply have been obviated by never having come into existence in the first place.

The Independence of Experiences

It’s worth unpacking this concept of one experience “outweighing” another, since it is at the core of the natalist counterargument. It seems to me that coherent units of experience (however those are to be measured) are fundamentally independent – i.e., absent psychological interpretation, there is no natural dependence between any two moments, such that one moment “justifies” or even relates to another. Humans foist these moral semantics onto what is, in reality, a collection of moments that has no inherent value ordering – no one moment in time is inherently more or less valuable, nor possesses more or less potential value, than any other. Experiencing a lifetime of moments is essentially to scoop a handful of glass beads from an urn and lay them out in random sequence. There is no sense of one bead begetting another (in fact, it is non-sensical to say so); the beads are simply and arbitrarily ordered as the arrow of time doles them out.

Answer me this: Why would you choose to bring a being into the world who can experience suffering? Suffering is hell, and there is no way to justify it, if only and ultimately because there is always the option to never have existed in the first place. Moreover, if the above argument is granted, experiences are not the type of things that admit of justification or “counter-balancing” – it is a perfect category error to say that a person’s positive experiences can outweigh their negative experiences. And in any case, this is at best a gamble on the part of a parent: that the child will experience more pleasure than suffering. But even this line of thought betrays a misunderstanding in the use of the word “more”: Pleasure and suffering are not quantitites to be toted up and compared; they are rather immeasurable qualities, true “apples and oranges” that cannot be compared because there is no scale or unit (sorry, “utils”) along which to coldly quantify them. An experience, whether pleasure or suffering, exists in and of itself, absolutely, independent of any other experience, and cannot in that moment be justified, mitigated, or otherwise qualified by any past or future experience.

Ugly Psychology

And yet, if the syllogism that opened this post holds: So what? It isn’t news that humans behave irrationally at times. Sometimes we don’t weigh risks appropriately and forego $200 in favor of $100. But I think the force of this argument runs deeper, because it suggests that we behave irrationally even when making what is typically the single most important choice any human will face: whether to create a new human life. And if we cannot muster enough clear-eyed thinking to counteract our motivated reasoning when a life is literally on the line, the inescapable conclusion is that we simply cannot think rationally, even when it counts.

At the very least, granting this syllogism means that we should all openly admit that we rely on rationality merely to paint an appearance of justification on our pre-determined actions, rather than hypocritically claiming that rationality led us to behave as we did. The dark side of social pyschology is largely an exploration of the consequences of our inability to surmount motivated reasoning at the same time as we believe that we have (or can, when needed). Thus hyper-partisanship, blaming the victim, and vicious cycles of all stripes.

The Individual’s Declaration of Independence

Far from being selfish, as breeders view it, choosing not to have children may be the most unselfish choice a person can make: It is phylogenetic suicide, the ending of an unbroken line of procreating organisms that extends back to the origin of life on earth. It is the ultimate rejection of your evolutionary reason for existence, and the ultimate ascendance of the individual consciousness over the genetic lineage (cf. Dawkins’ selfish gene hypothesis). It is, in its way, the individual’s declaration of independence. For, from the perspective of natural selection, the individual is fungible, and it is the genetic lineage that possesses identity.

Fully rejecting this arrangement casts us into uncharted territory, a post-evolutionary world where individuals are the units of identity and genetic lineage is merely an accident of biology. This is the root of the humanistic worldview, which not only rejects the idea that individuals are fungible but actively asserts the opposite: that the individual is in fact the basic unit of meaning in the world. Thus, the negative choice to not have children can be recast as the positive choice to proclaim the sanctity of individuality, and more generally to advocate for a humanistic worldview.

Of course the irony is that, taken to its logical conclusion, anti-natalist humanism would eventually yield a world without humans. But that strikes me as neither a contradiction nor a negative consequence – indeed, given the moral asymmetry of procreation outlined above, voluntary extinction would seem to be the only rationally justifiable course of action for moral beings living in an amoral world.