This is doubtful. Why would it cause anxiety? I could understand curiosity maybe but not anxiety. What would there be to fear? — Sir2u

It would cause anxiety because anxiety is a defense mechanism that arises out of an overdetermination of possibilities. In reality, perhaps there need not be anything to fear. But the biological programming that we have makes it so that regardless of this, the lack of any antecedent raises alarm.

Right.

The modus operandi of Aristotelian philosophy makes more sense to me than the Platonist one. The metaphysics of the former also make more sense than the latter.

People let you follow every detail of their life on Twitter. I don't get why someone would do that. — Hanover

They need validation.

Basically Facebook derives a lot, if not most of its income by users clicking on advertisements. These advertisements are catered to the users by an analysis of their text-based updates, i.e. "going to the mall!", "dinner @ the breakfast club!", etc. Software programs "interpret" your posts and create a kind of custom advertisement scheme that caters to your perceived interests. However, there has been a decline for a while now in the amount of text-based updates, while the number of picture-based memes have been skyrocketing. This means that it is difficult for Facebook to accurately target the audience with advertisements, thus making it difficult for Facebook to earn money.

The billions - trillions of bits adds up to a lot of characterizing information which can be used to decide what advertisements for what product to serve. — Bitter Crank

This is why Facebook is facing a major threat with the decline of text updates and the rise of memes. Without text updates, no advertisements can be catered to the user.

David Benatar is credited with the origination of the term "antinatalism" as an analytic normative ethical position. As I have attempted to point out earlier, I believe this is to the fact that although there have been plenty of similar views held in the past, they are not of the "analytic" stripe; that is, they are not purely logical or analytic and require a certain pathos to reach their conclusion.

Because of this reliance on pathos, I believe Benatar knew that any kind of philosophy that advocated anti-birth would be ridiculed or simply rejected out of a sheer knee-jerk disgust or by an attempt to appeal to the positives of life. Thus, Benatar developed an all-or-nothing analytic argument to compensate for the lack of pure logical rigor in the alternative pessimistic literature, although he still appeals to the pathos, Continental-like philosophy when justifying his asymmetry.

Curiously, as I pointed out briefly earlier, Benatar hardly includes any of the European, more Continental-like (or even transcultural) philosophies when he produced his book "Life, Death, and Meaning", although he does include work by Hume and Schopenhauer.

Later in another book on antinatalism produced by Benatar and Wasserman, Benatar formulates another analytic argument, this time from the misanthropic stance: what if you give birth to Hitler?

Overall, it is admirable how dedicated Benatar seems to be regarding making antinatalism a forcible and persuasive stance, even if his argument(s) are not, under further analysis, perfect.

If you have not already read Cabrera's paper, I would recommend you do so.

Benatar is attempting to avoid the subjective calculus of life that his pessimistic predecessors advocated. This is why he made the asymmetry; it is a universal heuristic. Additionally, he recently was chief editor of a book on "analytic existentialism" which, interestingly enough, fails to include any pessimistic continental philosophers.

Not sure if that is something to be proud of... :s

Clearly, Benatar is at least consistent. He thinks ALL harm is bad, in the most absolute terms. This, to me is not manipulation so much as it is a very particular kind of view of what is ethically bad. Therefore, he comes up with the conclusion that even a pinprick is enough to disqualify procreation. — schopenhauer1

I am apt to agree with him that all harm is bad, but to say that the lack of bad is good and the lack of good is not-bad is question begging. Benatar claims his asymmetry is independent of the pain/pleasure calculus of the world, but this is plainly false; a world where there was an overwhelming amount of pleasure compared to pain would obviously be worth being born into.

Benatar has a position: antinatalism, and uses a nifty tool, the asymmetry, as a heuristic to claim that all birth no matter what is always immoral. To a person such as myself and to assumingly you as well who see the world as filled with suffering and the potential thereof, the asymmetry is merely icing on the cake. (Actually the asymmetry was my first introduction to antinatalism and originally convinced me). But for others, the works of Schopenhauer and co. are not going to convince many people because most people don't have the time, patience, nor do they give a damn to read them. So Benatar comes up with a heuristic that starts out from a pessimistic axiom and creates an argument that can supposedly be used universally.

And I applaud his work (it initially convinced me and led me to antinatalism), but a flawed argument is a flawed argument. In the end, it comes back to a subjective calculus of life, the same subjectivity that Benatar was attempting to avoid via his asymmetry.

I'd also like to broaden the discussion beyond Benatar's asymmetry. I just happened to get stuck in the weeds in terms of defending an interpretation of his asymmetry. Though it is one argument, I would also like to discuss the instrumentality of life, the circumstances of a non-ideal world, or Schopenhauer's understanding of striving. — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure what you mean by the instrumentality of life. Can you elaborate please? Do you mean that life has no cosmic purpose?

I agree with the non-ideal world idea: the world is inadequate the human psyche's needs.

I tend to like to use the concept of tanha rather than the Will.

As an aside, there have been times when I stumbled into a philosophical conclusion that changed my view on things. In the course of discussing matters of science, for example, I went from a position on the philosophy of mind, that can be characterized as emergentist of sorts in the scientific naturalist sense to at least entertaining notions of panpsychism. — schopenhauer1

It's all about property dualism bruh.

Well, welcome to philosophy. There is no a priori argument that lacks basic axioms/assumptions. No math, no dialectics on ethics, etc. — schopenhauer1

There's a difference between starting out with basic axioms to argue on and the manipulation of axioms to fit your needs.

I wouldn't see how he would. You have to know something exists, or at least its hypothetical existence to write about it, I would think. — schopenhauer1

What I meant was if the only pain that we knew of were little toe stubs and a headache every now and then, I wonder if he would have constructed his asymmetry. The asymmetry largely becomes rather absurd if there isn't an overwhelming amount of suffering that effectively cancels out the pleasure in life.

To put it another way, though happiness is good, depriving happy experiences is not ethically relevant (preventing the possible experiencer of happiness from becoming actual), but preventing harm is (preventing the possible experiencer of harm from becoming actual). — schopenhauer1

I would argue that if there is a potential for sufficient suffering, this cancels out the opportunity for pleasure. Pleasure, in both our views, is supererogatory. It is only when the risk (of suffering) becomes sufficient that it is not ethically justified to partake in a certain action.

Meh. Splitting hairs i say. Not really flawed so can't agree with that. — schopenhauer1

It is not hair splitting because it shows that Benatar has a goal in mind (to show that birth is immoral), and then proceeds to construct an argument that argues for this (cart before the horse).

If the world was not filled with excessive suffering, I wonder if Benatar would still have written his book.

Prevention of harm is absolutely good
- Preventing happiness is only relatively bad as you need to have an actual person for this to be realized — schopenhauer1

Yes, but if you are saying this as though you are agreeing with these premises, then I must only say that if the prevention of happiness is only relatively bad, then the prevention of harm is only relatively good.

I certainly think people might have the assumption that life is supposed to be there to teach lessons (for what I don't know- maybe some idealized death-bed scene where one is fully self-actualized in all that they learned from life or something). That I think goes with many people's justification for suffering. Somehow, they might say it is elevating as it teaches perseverance, so should be celebrated and thus more people should be born in order to have to persevere through life. Perseverance, along with happiness, and a few other principles or qualities thrown in there are the usual mix of reasons why it is deemed acceptable or good to procreate. — schopenhauer1

Usually this is in addition to a belief in a god and an afterlife. An eternity of blissful heaven with a omnibenevolent (?) god would seem to make the petty toils here on earth seem unproblematic.

If you want to split hairs over "not bad" and a longer version of what you said to the effect of we place more emphasis on the absence of pain and we consider pain before we consider pleasure, then in effect, the logic is the same. — schopenhauer1

I don't think it is splitting hairs, though. I think it is pointing out flaws where flaws exist. Benatar's asymmetry has been systematically misinterpreted and rejected by otherwise intelligent people, and may be because it is not entirely coherent itself. Unfortunately, Benatar is made out to be like the Jesus of antinatalism and so to reject Benatar's asymmetry is often seen as a rejection of antinatalism, which is not the case at all.

I do think he has a point though that since there is no perspective to even feel deprived, there is literally no harm done to anything by the possibility of happiness remaining not actual. However, since the possibility did not become actual, there is no perspective to even feel harm. This can be considered a good thing, as preventing actual harm from occurring is a good thing. — schopenhauer1

Schop1, again, this is falling into the counterfactual abuse and assuming a kind of anti-frustrationism/negative utilitarianism beforehand. If preventing actual harm from occurring is a good thing (for whom?), then preventing actual pleasure from occurring is a bad thing. What differs is how much emphasis we place on the duty to prevent pain compared to the duty to impose pleasure.

I'll tell you honestly that it is difficult for me to find the lack of pleasure to be a "bad" thing, because pleasure comes at such a high price (pain, etc), and the pain is more severe than the greatest of pleasures. But imagine a modal universe that is completely different from ours, in which those born don't even feel pain at all, ever. Dissatisfaction, boredom, misery, death, etc are all unheard of, it is all bliss and harmony. I would be surprised if you responded that there is no impetus to create another person. It may not be the looming feeling of guilt that is associated with creating a child that will experience pain, but ultimately I do believe that you will concede that abstaining from bringing at least one child into existence into this perfect, blissful world is kind of weird.

Although I agree with this partly, there are certainly cases in which people who were living life normally were thrust into conditions in which they could not endure.

There is a difference between confronting opposition and rising above in triumph, and just mucking around in mediocrity as most people do in life. Ultimately the pleasure that life brings is not enough to justify the pain that life also brings, despite what the television shows tell you.

However, the state of affairs where a new person could possibly exist and does not actually occur, means that the possibility of pleasure without it actually being experienced is not bad. This is unlike pain "not happening" to anyone being good even if there is no individual experiencing the pain "not happening" to them.

The asymmetry is that there needs to be an actual person for deprivation of pleasure to be bad. There does not need to be an actual person for the deprivation of bad to be good. It is simply "good" that no new person experiences pain. It is not bad or good if there is no new person to exist to experience good.

This also leads to the idea that during the procreation decision, one does not have a duty to create beings with happy lives, but one does have a duty to prevent beings who suffer. — schopenhauer1

Again, though, this falls into the counterfactual abuse. If there does not need to be an actual person for the deprivation of bad to be good, then there does not need to be a person for the deprivation of good to be bad. Benatar is putting the cart before the horse, i.e. begging the question. If you read Cabrera's paper on this, he shows how Benatar relies on a pessimistic outlook to validate the asymmetry.

You are correct, we have a duty not to impose sufficient harm upon another individual. But, I think you will agree with me that if we have a scenario in which we know (for sure, 100%, no doubt), that the person born will experience a single pain in their life (a pinprick) and then proceed to experience a limitless omega sequence of pleasure, we might feel the urge the have this child. In fact, we might even feel sad if we don't have this child, because we missed an opportunity. To not have this child because they would experience a pinprick would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What this shows is that there is an asymmetry in the value we place upon pain and pleasure. If we use counterfactuals, the absence of pain is good and the absence of pleasure is bad, but we place more emphasis on the absence of pain. We consider the pain before we consider the pleasure. We do not take unnecessary risks. And so while the absence of pleasure may be a bad thing, the imposition of extreme suffering is an even worse thing, one that seems to completely over-rule the badness of the absence of pleasure.

Thus, the asymmetry heavily relies on a pessimistic outlook on life, in which life is filled with suffering (or the potential thereof).

Benatar uses the "not-bad" label for the absence of pleasure because it is a quick and handy heuristic, not because it actually reflects upon the reality of our ethical intuitions.

Revolutionary acts are designed to degrade the effectiveness of the regime by destroying specific parts of the government. Terrorist acts are designed to degrade the life of people in general. — Bitter Crank

This seems like an excellent point. To a certain degree, governments and the media can twist the image of reality to suit their needs, so that revolutionaries look like terrorists, and terrorists look like revolutionaries. Ultimately I think the best indicator of right/wrong is what you personally feel in your heart.

I'm all for virtue, but I think that as we go about reclaiming our traditional virtues, we need to clarify just what, exactly, is virtuous and what isn't. — Bitter Crank

Whatever brings about the most nostalgia... ;)

Agreed. Thus, the "asymmetry" of Benatar (which isn't really an asymmetry but rather a symmetry) depends on the fact that life is filled with suffering, or at least can be filled with suffering. When I abstain from jumping out of a two story building, it is because I am avoiding pain. The potential, unknown amount of pain avoided is more important than the potential, unknown amount of pleasure I may feel for the split second I experience a sensation of flight. Apply this to the "asymmetry" (symmetry), and you get that it is really all about a risk-assessment and a greater-emphasis being placed upon harm rather than pleasure. The avoidance of pleasure may be a bad thing, but the imposition of pain is an even worse thing.

This avoids the absurd conclusion that a pinprick voids a birth that would otherwise be filled with an omega-sequence of happiness.

That only makes sense if you think that pain is good. Clearly Benatar and others think that pain is bad. — schopenhauer1

And it only makes sense to say that a deprivation of pleasure is not-bad if you don't consider pleasure to be good.

I say, scrap the asymmetry, it's made things more confusing than anything and there's better arguments for antinatalism anyway.

But, his point was that it is not bad if there is no actual person who is deprived of good. That is the counterfactual. — schopenhauer1

If it is not bad if there is no actual person who is deprived of good, then it is not good if there is no actual person who is deprived of bad.

A state of affairs where there is a deprivation of pain is good in either the case where someone actually exists or the case where there is no actual person that the lack of pain is happening to. — schopenhauer1

Benatar actually doesn't say this specifically, he uses counterfactuals to get around the absurd conclusion that the barren, icy wasteland of Pluto is overwhelmingly good because of the lack of pain. Unless of course you are willing to say that a barren, icy wasteland is good simply because there is no pain.

Unfortunately, this also leads to problems as we usually do not leap out of bed for joy when contemplating the lack of pain on Pluto. It's a "good thing" in an impersonal, "if-then" counterfactual sense, not in the actual sense.

However, if we use counterfactuals for the lack of pain, then we are obligated to use counterfactuals for the lack of pleasure. Otherwise it's begging the question.

I firmly believe that delusions of varying degrees are necessary to maintain a psychological equilibrium.

Freud introduced the idea of repression, and although he was wrong on many, many accounts, repression and anxiety are two of the most outstanding contributions he had to the field of psychoanalysis and psychiatry/psychology in general.

Then you have Zapffe, who clearly had influence from Freud, and thought that most people deal with the every day by three psychological methods: Isolation, Attachment, and Distraction. Those who cannot bend their minds to these methods and see through them have a fourth option, Sublimation, in which the individual lives in a general angst or melancholy with sporadic intervals of extreme, passionate work.

Heidegger thought that we were Being-Towards-Death, and that a fundamental structure of the human condition was anxiety, or "angst".

Later, we have Becker who was influenced by Freud, Rank, and others, and developed a proto-theory to Terror Management Theory, in which death is an ever-present threat to our psyche and must be repressed by joining into a life-long, almost cult-like exaltation of hero characters. He further developed his work by theorizing that one of the, if not the, prime reason for human behavior was to elevate and to continue to elevate self-esteem and the feeling of worth, despite inhabiting a body that on average is worth less than a dollar.

So, in summary, we have a human being who is assaulted by external forces outside of his control, forced to "grow up" (which means to hide one's scars) and represses the anxiety of death, loss, and the evil forces external to him by isolating himself from the evil forces, ignoring them and distracting oneself with entertainment (from video games to shopping), or desperately attaching himself to a icon or an idol for comfort and psychological support. All of this occurs in the day-to-day basis, and we become "comfortably uncomfortable" until we die.

So you are essentially saying that it's better to save them from the pains of life. You say it's better not to give birth, but how do you get around the lack of pleasure being a bad thing?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.

What are you saying, then?

You cannot take away an opportunity to live, without taking it away from someone. It makes no sense to say it is just 'taken away.' What does that even mean? — The Great Whatever

At the same time, though, if you can't take away the opportunity to live from a potential person, then neither can you save them from future suffering. This was Cabrera's criticism of Benatar's misuse of counterfactuals.

What I meant was that it is unfortunate that pleasure only exists when in couple with suffering. I didn't actually mean that lack of pleasure is an unfortunate thing for an unborn person, as I actually said later on in my post.

You want to eradicate suffering, despite the great cost of doing so. — Sapientia

I do admit that the lack of pleasure is an unfortunate thing. If, for example, we could perfectly forsee how someone's life would turn out, and we saw that they would just experience pleasure all the time with a negligible amount of pain, I would not be opposed to their birth. In fact, if they go on to help other people, I might even urge the parents to have the child.

But that is entirely hypothetical. The ethical responsibility we have is to not bring harm upon another individual. By not giving birth to a person, you are avoiding imposing harm upon the individual. And by not giving birth to them, they are not deprived nor benefited by anything (this is where I disagree with Benatar).

You make it seem as though the suffering that is occurring here on planet Earth has some purpose. The "great cost" of minimizing suffering is a cost that affects nobody but ourselves and our ultimately short-sighted desire for the continuation of the human race (i.e. the continuation of the cosmic drama).

If there's nothing wrong with an empty desert island, then there's nothing wrong with an empty desert cosmos.

I do not contend that there is a duty to not cause positive experiences. Positive experiences are supererogatory, and the lack thereof is simply a by-product of my position.

I contend that there is no duty to bring pleasure into the world.

"Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good." - Ernest Becker.

Then apparently being beaten by life did not convince them. Or did they just not get beaten enough...

I am sorry you feel this way about your parents, and I am sorry that it seems that you have had a rougher life than most of us (even though all of us in the end have a rough life).

Moral nihilism =/= moral anti-realism.

Under that logic, those who procreate have not been beaten by life.

It is not your duty to do anything; but it would be nice if you didn't procreate. What that would accomplish is not brining another generation of misery into existence because of whatever whims make you decide to do so. In other words, it's a matter of basic compassion -- if you think that's boring or lame or doesn't make you feel radical or whatever, fine, but there are real consequences to reproducing, and it'd be nice if you didn't. — The Great Whatever

It seems from this that you believe in a kind of moral nihilism or moral sentimentalism. However, holding such a position seems to be mean that you can't actually condemn someone for having a child without being disingenuous or just being an ass in general. Without viewing suffering as something that at least should not be given (as a moral ought), there is no justification for debating this entire subject, and the debate is moot. You can't say that there is no duty to do something, and then turn around and say it'd be nice if nobody procreated, and expect everyone to accept this. For someone could say that it'd be nice if you had children, in which case you would argue against them and presumably bring up arguments related to the duty of not giving harm upon another individual without their consent. Essentially it's a non-starter.

The problem is just that it is insisted that one must feel awful about it, and obsess over it or they're not really getting it. — Wosret

Not at all, although such a position may induce a sense of melancholy.

There is no duty, at least in my view, to prevent suffering when such an action would significantly take away from your own life. There is a duty to not cause suffering, though.

Because you are consistently aware of the precarious nature of the human condition and act responsibly to compensate.

Well of course you can feel happy about your philosophy.

It's more about living a more responsible life though.

Thought this might be relevant to the discussion, regarding how to live as a pessimist/antinatalist/"negative ethicist", from Julio Cabrera:

"The negative human being has a greater familiarity with the terminality of being; he neither conceals it nor embellishes it, he thinks about it very frequently or almost always, and has full conscience about what is pre-reflexive for the majority, that is, all we do is terminal and can be destroyed at any moment. Negative life, in this sense, is melancholic and distanced (but never distracted or relaxed), not much worse than most lives and much better than them in many ways, a life with neither hope nor much intense feelings, neither of deception nor even enthusiasm. And, above all, without the irritating daily pretending that “everything is fine” and that “we are great”, while we sweep our miseries under the carpet. Therefore, it is usually a life without great “crisis” or great “depressions” (by the way, depression is the fatal fate of any affirmative life); negative lives are anguished lives, poetic and anxious, and almost always very active lives."