Malcolm and Simone steelman the philosophical position of antinatalism and respond to some of its key arguments. They discuss the antinatalist claims that life is mostly suffering, humans adapt to suffering, and preventing potential happiness has no downside. Malcolm proposes thought experiments around time and existence to challenge the antinatalist asymmetry argument. They assert that emotions lack inherent meaning or value from a detached, logical perspective. Simone explains how her intuition clashes with her logic on this issue as a new mother. In the end, they conclude antinatalism lacks internal consistency. But they respect some parts of the antinatalist framework as logically valid, given certain priors.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] in the world , of pronatalism, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it. the most interesting argument I find when I'm looking at an argument and I'm like this is actually a sophisticated argument that makes sense depending on the priors you're coming into the conversation with and depending on your proclivities and your cultural group, that is the David Benatar.

Malcolm: Negative utilitarian

Simone: argument. Well, and what we really respect about it, I would say, is that it is logically consistent. . We're just like, yeah, per your framing, per your values, per what you're optimizing for.

Simone: You are correct in being anti neutralist.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, gorgeous.

Malcolm: Hello. I am excited for today's talk. So in the world , of pronatalism, arguing for higher fertility rates, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it.

Malcolm: Some examples are But the environment, well, if you [00:01:00] selectively remove everyone from the population that cares about the environment, that's going to cause much bigger environmental problems down the line.

Malcolm: This is particularly pointed when you consider the fact that if humanity doesn't survive, because many environmentalists will be like, we don't need humans anymore. Look at all the damage they've done. And it's well, you get rid of humans. If you, if you, if you get rid of humans, there is no other species on this planet that can colonize other planets.

Malcolm: And presumably what you're optimizing for is biodiversity, not biostasis, not maintaining the earth exactly as it was when humans first emerged. And if you're optimizing for biodiversity, Intrinsically, whichever species can best seed new biomes on other planets is long term going to increase biodiversity the most because we can develop new biomes that are just as rich as Earth on a thousand different planets, so , you lose the entire biome.

Malcolm: Biology game. If humanity goes extinct right now, it doesn't look like there's going to be enough [00:02:00] time. If humanity goes extinct and you look at the life cycle and how long it took for humans to rise for another intelligent species to rise afterwards and then leave the planet, we're just looking probabilistically.

Before the sun expands and kills all life that we know for sure exists in the universe,

Malcolm: So kind of humans are stuck with this one, even if they are a bit of a shitty species. I'm not going to argue there. But two, you're also going to have the effects of it. Because the way people vote has a heritable component, this has been shown in lots of studies if, if environmentalists specifically don't have kids that's going to cause people to become less environmentalist over time.

Malcolm: And even if you don't believe that any of this has a heritable component, well still culturally, that means the cultural groups that don't care about the environment are going to outcompete you in the long run. And that the only way you can survive is by converting people out of those cultural groups.

Malcolm: Yet long term studies, as we've mentioned many times, if you look at people like Amish... Fewer and fewer people deconvert from the group every year depending on how long a family's been in the Amish community. Because cultures adapt. If another culture is [00:03:00] primarily surviving by taking their members, then they're going to adapt to this over time and eventually become resistant.

Malcolm: That's just how evolution works, and evolution works at the cultural level as well as the... The level of people. People might say, Oh, it's racist. Really? Like in the U. S. right now we are importing people mostly from Latin America and yet collectively, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean are below repopulation rate.

Malcolm: In And this was in 2019 by the UN's own statistics, which famously inflates this stuff. So , we're, we're draining from a evaporating pool. This isn't just a white person problem. In fact, it's not even really a white person problem at all. If you look at prosperous countries, the population groups that are most resistant to fertility collapse are generally white populations.

Malcolm: conservative Christians and conservative Jews. The groups that are most affected by it are generally East Asian and South Asian populations. Or native populations. So small native groups are really affected by it as well. So like in the U. S. you're looking like Native American groups and stuff like that.

Malcolm: So again, . It's more like if [00:04:00] white people did nothing about demographic collapse right now, they would almost certainly Quote, unquote, win in the long run

As such Eve one defines racism as supporting a cause. That promotes white interests. Then it is actually people who are not raising the flag about prenatal ism and population collapsed that are taking the racist position, because covering this up at the problem, disproportionately benefits, white groups.

Simone: So a third argument against pronatalism is that it involves removing women's reproductive rights because many anti abortion groups are also framing themselves as pronatalist and people see, for example, the reversal of Roe v.

Simone: Wade and the removal of options to, to have abortions in many states as, a direct affront to that and because they connect the anti abortion stance with pronatalism, they're basically like, oh, pronatalism, therefore, Thanks. No more female reproductive rights. And they also start to turn to themes like a handmaid's tale and, Oh, you're going to force women to have [00:05:00] kids.

Simone: That's the only way. Which is, is super inaccurate. Really the only thing that you really should be thinking about, if you're concerned about a future in which women's rights and reproductive choice are not supported is, Oh my gosh, how do we make sure that in the future there are people? That exist that support reproductive choice and support feminism.

Simone: And if all feminist groups, and if all groups that support reproductive choice fail to reproduce and pass on their culture, and you can't, you can't really sustainably pass on a culture only by converting people. over generations. It just doesn't work. And we can get into that. You are going to end up without those values supported.

Simone: So basically the future of feminism, the future of reproductive rights depends on pronatalism, or at least some pronatalism within those

Malcolm: groups. More specifically, if it turns out the only way to get people to have kids is to take away their rights, or it turns out that nobody finds out a way to get people to voluntarily want to have kids, well then the cultural groups that survive are [00:06:00] going to be the ones that take away people's rights.

Malcolm: Right? And we're already seeing tendencies towards this in some of China's recent policies. So buckle up because it's going to get worse in a lot of countries that are further along on demographic collapse than we are in the U. S. But the most interesting argument I find when I'm looking at an argument and I'm like this is actually a sophisticated argument that makes sense depending on the priors you're coming into the conversation with and depending on your proclivities and your cultural group, that is the David Benatar.

Malcolm: Negative utilitarian

Simone: argument. Well, and what we really respect about it, I would say, is that it is logically consistent. It, it makes, it makes sense. Whereas, we had rebuttals to all the other ones with, with antinatalist arguments that are well made. We're just like, yeah, per your framing, per your values, per what you're optimizing for.

Simone: You are correct in being anti neutralist.

Malcolm: We'll get into the structure of the argument. We'll start with the weaker aspects of the argument first, and then get into the stronger aspects. I don't think we're like, strawmanning it because we start with [00:07:00] the weakest aspects of the argument, but it's the way it's typically laid out, is starting with the weaker aspects of the argument.

Simone: So one of the really big points antinatalists start with, or I see starting with is that life is a net negative. So life is, is mostly suffering, more suffering than, than pleasure or neutral experiences.

Simone: Or

Malcolm: at least that negative emotions are felt more acutely than positive emotions. And this is an accurate statement that I would, the strong negative emotions, I feel like having a finger chopped off. There is no positive emotional equivalent to that. In fact, I would say when people are talking about the biggest positive emotions in their life, like the day I gave birth to my child or my wedding, they're not actually flooded with positive emotions on those days.

Malcolm: What they actually mean is more like that was a milestone that was important to my self

Simone: identity. They're meaningful achievements. Yeah. And, and so one, one argument that antinatalists make therefore, because people usually their rebuttal to that is, Oh no, my life is [00:08:00] definitely more positive than it is negative.

Simone: And they may point to things like that. It's Oh yeah, you gave birth and you thought that that was a positive experience. Your pain was like nine out of 10. Like, why are you saying that you're crazy?

Malcolm: There's no way. And, and I think that here, the problem that antinatalists. run into is that people will say, well, even if that's the case, I still like my life and I'm glad I exist.

Malcolm: I would rather exist than not exist. Right? The majority of people. Do not in fact wish they were never born. And so then, they'll start saying, oh, you have positivity bias, which is the tendency for people to remember positive emotions with more clarity than negative emotions.

Malcolm: But the problem is, is that this argument, conveniently ignores that while they are right, that humans remember positive events more accurately than negative ones, given their intrinsic negativity bias, people will spend more time focused on negative things and positive things. This has been measured in test subjects who focus more on negative pictures when given a choice to choose between two and blinking more when given negative words than positive ones [00:09:00] with eye blinks being tied to cognitive processing. So essentially we process negative stuff more than we process.

Malcolm: Positive stuff. And this has been seen repeatedly in research. And I think that I do see this within the, the antinatalist community. Is, is this negativity bias blinding them, but then the argument they'll make is they'll say, well, people can adapt to anything. Do you want to go into this argument Simone?

Simone: So there's also the antinatalist argument that people will adjust to their suffering, no matter what it is, for example, there are people living in extreme destitution, people who are starving, who are suffering, who have untreated, open wounds or, terrible pain.

Simone: And they're living their lives. And they're also, if they asked, they would probably say that they would want to continue living. They wouldn't want to not live anymore. They're still happy to stay alive. And that, that makes humans in general, unreliable narrators when it comes to judging whether or not their lives are a net positive experience or a net suffering experience.

Malcolm: And so this argument, I love what he. It's actually saying it's like [00:10:00] me as a person in a developed country, but in a corrupt culture that can't motivate my existence through through any means other than pleasure. I look at people in the developed world who are happy with their lives and I can't imagine how that's possible.

Malcolm: Me snooty new atheist kid, well, I just, they shouldn't be happy with their life and they're wrong to be happy with their life and they're wrong to be glad to be alive even if they experience more suffering than positive emotions. Transcribed It's, it's, it's wild. And it's wild how gaslighty this whole line of argument is too.

Malcolm: It's, you are wrong. You should doubt your own mind as to whether or not you are glad that you exist. And I can see why this appeals to people who already have this intuition that they would rather not exist or have this sort of morose view of the world, which I think is, is, It's very common within certain sectors of like academic society right now, but it's not common among a lot of the more religiously conservative communities.

Malcolm: I know they're generally pretty happy with [00:11:00] their lives. That

Simone: is interesting. I do. And this is a little bit of a diversion, but I do get the impression that the antinatalist community does is, I would say actually is corrupted by a lot of depression because I don't, I think that someone who's antinatalist because they're deeply depressed, isn't necessarily antinatalist for the right.

Simone: Reasons, right? I think David Benatar, who has come to this conclusion through logical reasoning. Actually, there's evidence he didn't.

Malcolm: Oh, really? He says it long before he was an antinatalist. He never wanted kids. And there's an interview where we can get this quote. Actually, one of my arguments is I think that he actually is just arguing for the lifestyle he wanted to live anyway.

Malcolm: And I,

Simone: Okay, I will say that that is some antinatalists, but I do think that there are other antinatalists that have, in a logically consistent manner, not because they are depressed, but rather because they've reasoned through this,

Simone: I would still say that there is subset of antinatalists who have come to this conclusion, not because of their proclivities, but because they are actually antinatalist. You could almost say it's, [00:12:00] it's kind of like, a weird microcosm for Buddhism. I think there are many Buddhists who have had great lives who, Have experienced the joy of life.

Simone: Like Prince Siddhartha, right? He lived in paradise and then he saw the suffering in the world. He discovered what exists, existed, and then sought to, through enlightenment, break the cycle to end the suffering,

Malcolm: right? This is something I really want to point out here. If you talk to antinatalist communities...

Malcolm: They are, one argument they'll always say is I really wouldn't want to kill myself, and we'll get to why they argue this, but they'll also say my life is generally happy. People assume because I'm an antinatalist I'm not a happy person. You hear this throughout antinatalist arguments when they're interviewed.

Malcolm: Go on to the antinatalist subreddit. Watch antinatalist YouTubers. These are not happy people.

Simone: Yeah, yeah. . This actually came up on Twitter. There's, there's one antinatalist account that sometimes snipes at us a little bit or, or tries to argue against us, which I understand because we're like at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

Simone: But they're often like, Oh, well, why would you, why would you have kids bring more [00:13:00] life into the world when you could just adopt people? There are so many, suffering children who should be adopted. And other people have asked them in these threads, well, why aren't, why aren't you adopting people?

Simone: Why aren't antinatalists adopting people? And. This person on Twitter has actually said well, I, I would adopt people if I felt like I would be able to take care of them, but I'm really depressed. And there are a lot of really depressed people in the antinatalist community. So I think this is a known quantity.

Simone: And, and it is, it is a problem. But I think if we're going to try to steel man this to the best of our ability and, and, look at antinatalism in good faith, we have to try to at least separate out the, the subset of this community that is here just because they are deeply depressed, while still acknowledging that that is a subset of the community that does bring in a lot of bias,

Malcolm: right?

Malcolm: Well, what I would say is, while I think a lot of their arguments are kind of abusie sounding to me I associate them with a lot of abuse y cults, I do think that the, The core point that they are making is a valid point that you [00:14:00] experience negative emotions more acutely in your life than positive emotions.

Malcolm: And if the only reason to live is positive emotions, Then without genetically engineering people that might make sense. Now, here's another place where this argument falls apart that we don't discuss on our exploration of this in the book. Is that long term, if you're like, okay, I'm just trying to maximize happiness in the universe, which often they aren't, but let's say that that's what they're trying to do, right?

Malcolm: They actually don't believe happiness has any value and we'll get into why they don't believe the happiness has any value. But if they did still agree that it had value, Well, then in the future, humans, there's even some projects like if you go to eugenics. org now we are really against eugenics, but the funny thing is, is, is what is eugenics.

Malcolm: org doing? It's doing a fundamentally antinatalist thing, which is trying to engineer people to feel fewer negative emotions. Oh, wow. Which you could conceivably do. And 500, 1000 years from now when genetic technology becomes more usable to people as, as, [00:15:00] as technology increases as the ability to know our own nervous system and basically cancel out negative emotions?

Malcolm: Do I think that we will eventually get to a place as a species? Where humans will feel essentially no negative emotions that they don't want to. Yeah, I think a fraction of our species will definitely get there. Now how much of our species wants to opt into that is dependent on many factors. But if your goal is time independent to increase positive emotions, then what you want to do is keep humans around until they can get to this stage where the positive emotions can outweigh the negative emotions.

Essentially human history and potentially even the history of life. Could be seen as a spectrum where earlier in that history, things like suffering were much more common. If you look at humans that lived a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago, suffering was much more common for them. And in the future a thousand years from now, 2000 years from now, suffering is going to be much less common to the point where the average human will essentially feel mostly just positive emotional states, meaning that if you want to ensure that the net balance , of [00:16:00] emotions across all of time, And history , is negative, then you need.

To end the cycle before humans get there. You need to take the antinatalist position. Whereas if you keep this cycle of civilization going and ensure that we have a, a prosperous pluralist future civilization, where people still have individual agency to choose to engage with this type of technology, you're essentially ensuring that the balance of positive emotions ins in the positive, across all of time.

With the understanding that you just happened to be one of the people living in a time that has to suffer. So future people don't have to deal with this. As our ancestors did before us, it lived lives of much more suffering than we have.

But none of this is really relevant to us because.

Malcolm: We just don't think emotions matter that much. . No, it's a life meaningful of, the classic of your brain and a tank, and you're just filled with like positive emotions. Is that like actually matter? No, the positive emotions you feel are things you feel because your ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring.

Malcolm: The negative emotions you feel are things you feel because your ancestors who had them. [00:17:00] Had fewer surviving offspring, they just, I, I find it very hard to philosophically argue that there's some deeper meaning behind our emotions than things I don't like because I was programmed to not like them. Let's take this from the perspective of a, an AI, right?

Malcolm: If I programmed an AI to maximize the number of paperclips in the world, it would in the same way that I who was programmed to stay alive and breed, doesn't like it when people don't reciprocate my advances romantically or don't like it when I get physically injured, it would not like it when it couldn't make paperclips.

Malcolm: Does that mean that not turning everything into paperclips is like an intrinsically negative thing? Um, Of course not, of course not. And I think when we're trying to judge. Whether or not positive emotions and negative emotions have value, we need to take the perspective of an entity that is above us to an extent, that does not suffer from positive and negative emotional states.

Malcolm: And this is a very culturally imprinted perspective in us, [00:18:00] because typically in the Calvinist cultural tradition, positive and negative emotions are seen as... Both pretty untrustworthy, not meaningful, and definitely not things you should indulge in. I, I will agree that we are culturally predetermined to think this way.

Malcolm: But I, I would argue that you need to think from an entity, the perspective of an entity that doesn't feel these things. Because of course we're biased by the emotions that we feel.

It would be ridiculous to ask a paperclip, maximizing AI, if it was wrong or evil to stop it from making paperclips. And expect An unbiased response

Malcolm: And if I was an entity that didn't feel Feel emotions, and I was trying to pass judgment on whether emotions had value.

Malcolm: I would probably pass judgment in the same way I did with that paper clip maximizing a I you were just programmed by serendipity to feel these things. In fact, I would argue the AI has more a right to those emotions than that, because the AI would say. Well, I was programmed intentionally to feel these things.

Malcolm: You were just programmed by serendipity. Worse, in a hundred years, the AI would be able to say, Ann, I can cure you of [00:19:00] all those negative emotions using gene therapy. So what are you complaining about? So , I just don't think That argument, and we'll get into this strain of the argument a bit more later, but now I want to get more into other anti natalist arguments.

Simone: Cool, so there's one of the big arguments that's made when they get a little bit more philosophical, I guess you would say, and this is still related to what you discussed earlier, is the Sisyphus Thought Experiment. Can you walk us through that thought experiment?

Malcolm: Okay, so Sisyphus was cursed to roll a ball up a hill forever, only to have it rolled back down after making it to the top.

Malcolm: Most people would see that as a meaningless existence. Suppose someone reprogrammed Sisyphus brain to enjoy the process and get a sense of deep fulfillment from rolling the ball up a hill. If you engaged him and tried to get him to stop, he wouldn't, telling you how wonderful rolling the ball does. Does his life have value?

Malcolm: Because you, you programmed him to rolling the ball. And then you could say other things. Well, suppose humans were programmed to you edited their brain and they really got deep satisfaction from eating feces. Okay? Does eating feces now have positive value? And [00:20:00] I think this argument is, is really good, but not at establishing what the antinatalists think they're establishing.

 Which is that human happiness has no value.

Malcolm: Okay. The very point of the Sisyphus Thought Experiment is that a positive emotional state can be dismissed as a thing of value because it can be induced by a meaningless activity. The problem is, is that exact same argument works for negative emotional states. Negative emotional states can be dismissed as a thing of value because they can be caused by a meaningless activity.

Malcolm: Like you could... Program somebody to, not like doing X or not like doing Y and say, ah, look at this meaningful thing. Like they feel pain whenever they're not eating feces and therefore eating, does that mean that the pain they feel is a meaningful thing? And here's where they try to get out of this.

Malcolm: They say, well, that doesn't really work because the thing could just not exist, which means that this isn't a point in question for us. And what they're doing there is they're cheating in the thought [00:21:00] experiment. Specifically the logic used In the experiment, to dismiss positive emotions not having value is that positive emotions can be caused by a meaningless activity.

Malcolm: If that's the reason used to dismiss the value of positive emotions, then you must hold that to negative emotions as well, even if you could use a little cheat to get out of it. The logical structure still applies to the negative emotions. It then goes into our larger thing, which is I just see very little reason to believe That these emotions that were serendipitously selected for us in, in our ancestors have any sort of real value and this is from an atheistic perspective, but if I take a religious perspective, most religions believe that demons can use positive emotions to tempt you to do things.

Malcolm: Demons can even use love to tempt you to do things so whole emotions are often on the table when we're talking about the forces of evil in the universe. And so I think very. view traditions outside of Buddhism, which, which you did talk about would see negative [00:22:00] emotions as like an intrinsic sign of negativity or positive emotions that have been intrinsic sign of positivity.

Malcolm: Instead, what a person should turn to is their own logic. , and disinterested logic where they can,

Simone: Yeah. Okay. Antinatalists also use the asymmetry argument, which essentially is that preventing happiness by not creating life has no downside.

Simone: You're only doing a good thing, whereas preventing suffering by not creating life is good. So this arbitrarily divides people into existing and not existing, which, again, is not something that, at least per our framework of reality, this is just not correct. But someone else's framework of understanding reality and time, this could be correct.

Malcolm: Let's spend a bit more time on this argument because I actually think it's the best of all of the arguments they make. So it goes like this. In condition A, baby is born. It is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering. It is good for someone who does exist [00:23:00] to feel happiness. That's what they would say about condition A where baby is born.

Malcolm: In condition B, baby is not born. It is good to prevent someone from existing who would have felt suffering. It is not bad to prevent someone from existing Who would have felt happiness. Mm hmm. And again, this requires a binary existence of humanity for this to work, very similar to the way pro lifers see humanity.

Malcolm: But a thought experiment that they may use that may, may click with people more is the island thought experiment. So if you go to an island, like you find an island that you didn't know existed before, and a population group that you didn't know existed before, and they are suffering, you would think, oh, well, the world's a worse place than I thought it was.

Malcolm: If you go and you find that island. And there's nobody on it, , and because there's nobody on it, there's nobody feeling happiness. You don't then think, oh, the world is a less happy place than, than I assumed it was. But again, this assumes that existence is a binary thing. Suppose you found on that island...

Malcolm: Archaeological evidence that a culture had existed there very, very [00:24:00] recently, and they were very happy culture so happy. In fact, that they didn't believe in negative emotions at all. They just didn't feel negative emotions, and they had actually gone sterile due to a recent like nuclear testing on like a nearby island, and they went extinct as a people.

So in this thought experiment because of their unique culture, no negative emotions have been felt as a result of this derealization of it This derealization event was without any negative emotions just a lack of positive emotions.

Malcolm: I would view that as a bad thing. I would say that that nuclear testing was a bad thing. It and what we're seeing here. Thank you. Is that there was potentiality to have people on that island in this scenario and their scenario, they create an island in which there really was no potentiality that people existed on it in our scenario, we're viewing humanity as a potentiality spectrum and they become a more human, the closer they get to realizing their birth for us when it comes to a fetus existing or not, if fetus doesn't, if I make a [00:25:00] decision that prevents somebody else, from creating a baby, right?

Malcolm: Even if I make that decision before the sperm and the egg were individually created, I am just as morally culpable from my cultural perspective as I am. If I terminate an embryo, because in both scenarios, I prevented a human being who had agency. From coming to

Simone: exist that you, you made a choice and in the end 20 years from now, there's a person or there's not a person.

Simone: It doesn't depend on when you made the choice. You made the choice, right?

Malcolm: Yeah. It feels really weaselly to try to get out of that. Like I can know that if somebody was like, okay, I'm going to ban IVF. Then my kids, like kids who I've interacted with, they don't exist.

So because we're using IVF. That means that we will likely, I mean, we'd prefer not to have to discard some embryos. Those embryos could have become people

And thus, I do think that discarding them is a bad thing but those embryos. Don't laugh or cry or play or think, or have agency. [00:26:00] However, absolutely. In 100% had we not used IVF? Actual human beings. Who like laugh and play and think and have agency in the world. They wouldn't exist.

Distorting an embryo is definitely a moral negative. But it doesn't even come close to discarding a child.

Who otherwise would have existed.

Malcolm: And this actually matters when it comes to some of our beef with other conservative groups that think life begins at conception, because that means that they don't use IVF, which, for example, if we didn't use IVF, we wouldn't have kids, but even families who, who can broadly have kids, it would mean that many of them would have fewer kids because IVF increases a person's fertility window.

Malcolm: So to us those cultures are functionally killing kids. Now we take the cultural perspective of. It's not our job to police what your culture does with its kids. And I think as soon as you do that, as soon as you assume that your culture is morally superior to other cultures and try to act on those other cultures, you enter the world , of potential evil.

Malcolm: And I respect the [00:27:00] spirit with which they believe what they believe. They're, they're trying to do the same thing that we're trying to do. They just have a different belief about how human existence works. I just think it's a little squirrely to say I'm not morally culpable for a decision that prevented a kid from being born just because the sperm and the egg that eventually created that kid didn't exist yet.

Malcolm: Yeah. That, that, does that feel wrong to you?

Simone: I, I, in this, in this I have to respect the view that other people have. It's just that per our understanding of reality, it's not correct. But I, I respect that other people have come to a logical conclusion there.

Simone: Another implication of this position,

 Specifically the antinatalist. Asymmetry argument position.

Simone: just to help you understand why, as outsiders, we struggle with it, is that a universe or a civilization of people who only feel positive emotions or neutral emotions, so it's, it's all just either neutral or plus, it has no moral weight or value that is better than a completely relative.

Simone: We, this Empty universe with no people, with no [00:28:00] sentience, no sapience, no positive feelings at all, that they are exactly equal and that an antinatalist would be like, meh, like it could be either. Yeah,

Malcolm: it seems insane to me that a universe teeming with happy, pluralistic life that's thriving has exactly the same value as a completely cold and dead universe.

Malcolm: That's the thing you have to accept with the asymmetry argument that I think. It just drains plausibility for me. It doesn't feel like a rational person would say that that was true unless they were coming from a cultural perspective that biases them in that direction. And I admit that our cultural perspective biases us in the other direction, or they personally were trying to justify a lifestyle that they were already living.

Simone: Well, so Malcolm, why do antinatalists not want to kill themselves? Because it would seem to an outsider illogical that if life is mostly suffering, you wouldn't just kill yourself because the good that you feel won't [00:29:00] Outweigh the

Malcolm: suffering. And this is something that antinatalists argue really intensely.

Malcolm: And I, I genuinely think that their arguments here are the weakest of all of their arguments. What they'll say is, once you exist, you have a reason and interest to continue existing. This requires a very specific belief about how time works in order to be true.

 It requires human existence to be completely binary, either a human exists fully or the human doesn't exist at all. There is no potentiality of existence

Malcolm: To someone making this argument, new moments are like, poof, created out of thin air like magic.

Malcolm: The future does not exist in a meaningful way until it is actualized. Per our view, every decision you make determines which of countless potential futures exist. With every decision, you functionally erase whatever futures you did not choose. You are simultaneously responsible for everything you did and did not set in motion with your decisions.

Malcolm: For example, if we have the capability to build a hospital and we choose to just sit around and play video games, [00:30:00] we deny that hospital's existence and are morally culpable for the results of that decision. The hospital's moral value does not pop into existence only after the first stone is laid.

Malcolm: What's really interesting about this argument that antinatalists use, is it mirrors the belief of those who think it is sinful to spill seed, or that life begins at conception. All potential life has value from our cultural perspective. it strikes us as bizarre that people would fixate on arbitrary thresholds, like sperm, or embryo, or the moment the baby's head appears, or the moment it's fully myelinated.

Malcolm: It's very interesting to me how the anti natalist perspective is very similar in how they view how life works and how time works to the pro life perspective which is very different from our perspective.

Malcolm: And as to why we hold this perspective, I can use a little thought experiment, right? If I put a claymore, which is a type of explosive, behind a door, [00:31:00] and that claymore explodes when somebody opens it, but that person hasn't been born yet I'm not morally culpable for that? That seems really weird.

Malcolm: That doesn't seem true to me. That, a If you do something that removes potential agency, and this is the thing, while we don't think that Happiness or sadness really has value. We do think that agency has value. An individual's choice to live has value. And when we remove that potential choice from an individual, we are okay with suicide.

Malcolm: If a person with their own agency decides to kill themselves, that's one thing. If I make actions that choose to, so I could experience more hedonic pleasure within my life, not bring a potentially. Sentient it being into this world who would have wanted to existed and would have loved their life and would have said, I really want to exist.

Malcolm: I have robbed that being of agency just as much as if I put a claim where behind a door and they walk into it years later, you are morally culpable [00:32:00] for things, even if they don't happen during your lifetime. So if that claim where exists and I die and it, that door doesn't get opened by archeologists until 500 years later, I'm still morally culpable for that action. Exactly

Eve as an antinatalist you do hold that the Claymore thought experiment is it an immoral action then?

Malcolm: You're forced to believe, , if action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time T, it is morally wrong. With the caveat. that this is not true if action z was tied to the conception of person x. I think most antinatalists actually wouldn't bite the bullet on the above thought experiment that I made. They'd say, actually, it is morally wrong to put a claymore behind a door that somebody who hasn't even been conceived yet would step through and it would kill them instantly painlessly.

Malcolm: That's what we're assuming here. All you're robbing them of is agency, right? And the reason why this is important is, is because then why not kill any existing person if it's painless, right? Most antinatalists would say, well, we're not for killing people painlessly either. Surprise, killing people painlessly.

Malcolm: [00:33:00] Some do. There's the involuntary antinatalist movement, which in a way I respect because it's much more morally consistent. They believe in forcefully sterilizing people.

Simone: Yeah. No. And if I were to fully act on my intuitions, that's what I would do. Like I would, yeah, I would, I would sterilize everyone.

Simone: Just be like, end it. To

Malcolm: clarify, act on your intuitions, not your

Simone: logic. Yeah. Act on, yeah. I act on, act on my intuitions, not my logic and my, my, my non consensual intuitions, by the way.

Malcolm: Yeah. But, but the point we're making here is okay. It was a Claymore experiment. Or sorry. was the Claymore thought experiment.

Malcolm: So this Claymore is robbing someone of agency in the future, but they haven't been conceived yet. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, so robbing somebody who doesn't exist yet, hasn't been conceived yet of agency is wrong, but it's not wrong if the way I robbed them of agency, the way I delete them from the timeline is in some way tied to their conception.

Malcolm: Like I'm killing their embryo or something like that, then it's not wrong. It is wrong It just seems like too really specific of a moral carve [00:34:00] out but it may just be that culturally the way that Calvinists see time as predetermined, is so ingrained in us that we can't imagine this sort of self incarnating universe perspective, where I think a lot more of the antinatalist perspective makes true, where in no meaningful way does anything in the future

Simone: exist.

Simone: Hold on, I think it's actually pretty easy if we, if we still man this. It's a person who is, is getting blown up by Claymore as an adult versus the idea of a child or an embryo is capable of feeling a great deal more pain and suffering in the moment,

Malcolm: in the thought experiment, no pain and suffering, they feel nothing.

Malcolm: No one grieves for them. Otherwise you're

Simone: cheating. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's no difference.

Malcolm: Well, and I think that this is, again, where there's antinatalists that I respect, and the ones who are like, no, I don't think that we should painlessly kill everyone, I generally think that there really is no good, logical way to get to that [00:35:00] perspective.

Malcolm: The ones who bite the bullet on that, and say, yes, we should painlessly kill everyone, I'm like, From my cultural perspective, you are super evil and a threat to my family. But logically consistent. But logically consistent. And I can respect a person who's logically consistent when it causes them to be shamed by society.

Malcolm: That's what we do. That's what this channel's all about. So in a way, I really respect that aspect of the anti natalist movement, even if one day they're going to have to go

However I would argue that the takeaway that they grab from suffering is a moral, negative, but happiness, isn't a moral, positive. It is my mandate as a sentiententity. To reduce suffering in the world. And then they say, okay, we need to painlessly delete all humans. That's probably the wrong takeaway because if there's even a chance that another species or a other life on earth could eventually evolve into a center, an entity and spread throughout the universe, it would experience infinite, more suffering than we could ever have. So what you would really need to do.

Is. We have kids and [00:36:00] raise those kids in your sort of erase suffering cult. Go take to the stars. And systematically eradicate all other sentient life from the universe, and then you can safely stop your crusade.

Because if another species ends up spreading in the universe, Just the amount of suffering that they will feel is so, so, so, so, so much higher than anything tied to the triviality of earth. It's not worth taking the risk that that could happen. So you really don't get to delete the human species until you have surveyed the universe and ensure there is no other sentientat life.

Which you would then go kill.

And who knows, maybe there's some, a negative utilitarian species out there that explains the Fermi paradox, ensuring that sentientlife never spreads. That is, I think , the truly logical outcome of this antinatalist position, not, we need to stop humans from having kids.

However that this hasn't been apparent to any antinatalist group.

I think is telling about what is [00:37:00] really motivating their philosophical position.

Simone: Yeah. And I think that brings us to One of our biggest beefs with antinatalism in general, which is that this is a very intuitively driven philosophy in general. We alluded to the significant portion of the community that is pretty severely depressed. But there's also just like some. Both childhood based, but I would say also perfectly adult based intuitions that would lead someone to be antinatalist.

Simone: And I, I personally really experienced this after becoming a mother. Like I cannot emotionally deal. With suffering the way that I used to be able to deal with it or just kind of like write it off and ignore it especially if, if a child is suffering, or I know a child has suffered or may suffer or is suffering I will break into tears.

Simone: I will not be able to do anything. And now even I'll look at a homeless person on the streets and I'll picture them as a child and I will start like, Oh, yep. Okay. Um, I have to start thinking about other things. [00:38:00] Yeah. Uh, like, It is, it is deeply hard for me, and if I, if I get exposed to that too much, and, and I think about the amount of suffering that takes place in the world, as you can see, this is a deeply intuitive um, deep set like, Gut reaction that's happening in me.

Simone: I have no logical control over this. And this makes me come to a conclusion when I feel this suffering, when I feel this gut reaction, because humans are designed to be empathetic. One of my like frustrated, throw up your hands. Can't deal with this pain. I'm feeling right now. Reactions is I just wish humans didn't exist.

Simone: I just wish that none of us existed to feel this right now. It is, it is that kind of conclusion. And I think that that's, that's, that's fine. That is, that is an expected intuitive reaction, but it also isn't driven by logic. And it also, it's not in align with my values, with my understanding of the universe, and it's also something like, like heated and driven in the moment that is not [00:39:00] really gonna lead to outcomes that I value.

Malcolm: Well, yeah, so I think what you're saying here is you can emotionally understand their perspective. Yes. And even emotionally understanding it and understanding why it's appealing, you logically Disagree

Simone: with it. Yeah. I logically, I logically disagree with it because of course when I logically step back and I look at what we value and I also look at how we understand.

Simone: Like humans to function like there is a reason we feel both pain and pleasure for very clear reasons You know just like AI has signals of oh, you're you're you're doing something, right? Are you doing something wrong? We have signals that show that we're doing something right or we're doing something wrong Those signals are key in our survival and so all these things that we're feeling are just signals that are important in our survival and I very much that humans exist.

Simone: I love that sapience is out there in the universe. I think that we're doing amazing things and we need signals to be able to continue to do amazing things. And maybe someday AI will help us innovate other ways to experience these signals in a way that doesn't cause the same amount of visceral suffering, a [00:40:00] meaningless suffering that I find to be incredibly.

Simone: Difficult to deal with emotionally, but we're not even going to get to that point if we, if we extinguish ourselves there, there's just so much lost potential and there's also so much lost, like you were alluding to earlier, right? We have now more than ever within our grasp, the ability to shape and create a future of humanity that does not experience meaningless suffering.

Simone: We can do that. And we, there could be billions more humans across the universe in, in, in however many, hundreds of thousands of years.

Malcolm: different from humans, superior to humans, that, that,

Simone: that, that also feel like orders of magnitude, more pleasure than we feel now. So if, if we want to be utility accountants and you and I aren't, by the way, we

Malcolm: wouldn't want this.

Malcolm: I'm just saying from their perspective,

Simone: from their perspective, like the, and we would, we don't like the idea that That you don't get any points for like positivity, but you can have the, the ratio of, of net [00:41:00] positivity of humans experiencing pleasure and elation and curiosity and exploration and all these things versus suffering that has happened throughout all of human history by all the human population that is extant today until we resolve this problem.

Simone: It's just like such an obvious, yes, that we should push through.

Malcolm: Well, when you're talking about these emotions that you felt as a mom and the way that your body hijacked you, I think it's important to remember that another way that our body hijacks us Is when we are young and we are developing our identity.

Malcolm: Unfortunately, this coincides when we develop our identity within our current culture. Our body is telling us to not have kids. It's telling us that kids are gross. Especially the kids who we're going to interact with, which are the kids of other people. Biologically. When you are young, when you are developing your identity, most people think that they are not kid people because they work that into their identity, during their teenage years, during their college years.

Malcolm: And I've noticed that usually when people turn to antinatalism, it's during that period of their life when they are hugely biased [00:42:00] emotionally. Towards not wanting kids and then they, they drop the antinatalist mindset as they get older or more emotionally healthy, which is another thing that I've seen is I've seen antinatalist when they're no longer depressed, they stop being antinatalist.

Malcolm: And I don't see that many other beliefs where people only really feel them when they're depressed. And it's, it's something, and it's why the antinatalist community. I think is so adamant that they're actually happy people because this is just so transparent when you look at their threads as like a major problem in the community and it's really sad but part of me is it might be a good thing, if you have because of cultural reasons, largely outside of your control.

Malcolm: The erosion of our cultural institutions, the people who live in like harder cultures typically are more satisfied with their lives. And the people who turn to this are people who live in. Yeah. Cultural situations where the erosion of cultural institutions has created an environment where due to no fault of their own, they are really despondent, and they feel like they have no hope for the future, often because they [00:43:00] don't really have hope for the future and If we rob them of this, if we say you, you don't get to believe this, right?

Malcolm: Then they have to take more culpability for their actions. They need to take more culpability of the things they haven't done in life to try to get over the place that they're in right now. And so in a way, I feel like. How logically sound antinatalism can sound can be a kindness to these people and that we need to remember that, that for some people, even if they did tomorrow, like really realize a pronatalist perspective, they wouldn't be able to live it out.

Malcolm: So why would I want to convince somebody like that? Like that? I, while I don't think suffering has value, I do think it has enough marginal value that I wouldn't want to just impose it on someone if it offered absolutely no utility to the world. So whatever, like I don't, and that's another thing about the anti natalist groups.

Malcolm: I really get annoyed when people make like dumb arguments like pro natalism is racist or pro natalism is like anti environmentalist or something like that. When people make anti natalism for this argument, I, I, I'm [00:44:00] like, depending on your priors it may be true. It's maybe, so if you take on the position that future humans don't matter at all, no human that could exist in the future matters, only current humans matter which is weird.

Malcolm: I don't understand how like logically that works, but okay, you've taken this position and you believe that the goal of life should be to create a net positive emotional output. Which I think because that's what we're programmed to believe, basically, as humans. That's something that most people start their philosophical lives believing in middle school.

Malcolm: And a lot of people grow out of that. But a lot of people don't, grow out might be the wrong word. I, I think that there is reason to believe that's true. But even if you believe that's true, you have to believe that humans won't advance in the future, that humans won't be able to control this war, I don't know.

Malcolm: And even

Simone: if you're No, but I think it is logically consistent, like you say, to have a moral framework that only values what's happening now. Like that, I don't think that's, if that's what you choose [00:45:00] That's what you choose,

Malcolm: yeah, so the core framework of antinatalism that I just can never wrap my head around is one, the empty universe thing, that they think that that's exactly equally to a universe full of entities.

Malcolm: And two, this sort of statement that you're forced to believe, which is, if action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time T, it is morally wrong. With the caveat. that this is not true if action z was tied to the conception of person x. But the great thing about antinatalists is they're somewhat self defeating. They really only exist in cultural groups that have already an incredibly low fertility rate.

Malcolm: They, they are genuinely, or, they're generally, I think, almost absent from the, the cultural groups with high fertility rates right now. I have never heard... of anyone from a cultural group with a high fertility rate being an antinatalist. So I think it's just sort of part of this un we world of this decaying urban monoculture .

Simone: Well, I actually, so I think that, that antinatalism and [00:46:00] in general, to a great extent, modernity driven demographic collapse is, is more a picture of what happens when the struggle is from people.

Simone: When, when the struggle is removed, It's a lot, I think, harder to find a reason to live. And for some people, a reason to live goes all the way to antinatalism and deep depression. For other people, a reason to live is like a reason to have kids, a hope for the future, excitement for the future. At one point on, on Twitter, someone was like, Oh let's stop calling them developed countries.

Simone: Let's call them developing countries always. You should never... Give up on okay, we've made it like there's nothing else to do. There's nowhere else to go. There's no threat to, to overcome. There's no challenge. I think it really does come down to ennui. And I think that's a bigger problem because you, you, you don't go we, we've, we've all, we've both traveled right to places where poverty is a lot higher.

Simone: And we both, hung out with people who have come from much more deprived backgrounds [00:47:00] who do not have anywhere close to the privileges of your average American. And even like your, your impoverished average American, right? Antinatalism is not even not even there.

Malcolm: No, no, no. But among our wealthy friends, antinatalism is actually a

Simone: pretty common It's pervasive.

Simone: Yeah. So it just, I'm just saying that more broadly, I think this is a picture of a society It doesn't sound right to say this, but that does not have enough hardship.

Malcolm: And that hardship in some ways makes it more obvious to people. Well, I think in cultures that embrace hardship, they know that suffering isn't an intrinsic negative.

Malcolm: They see how it improves them. A culture's relation to suffering. I think is really tied to how much it finds the ideas of antinatalism. Tantalizing. Suffering is the emotion that motivates you to improve yourself. Contentment. That's the ultimate evil emotion. That's the emotion that encourages stasis and in our world perspective, a world of personal [00:48:00] stasis, a world where you accept that the iteration of you that exists now is elite, basically, and better than any iteration of you that could exist.

Malcolm: It's like a supremacist sort of ideological perspective. And it's the way we view humanity as well, like that we have kids so that they can be better than us. But a final point I wanted to get to, which is like, when I think about how could I become an antinatalist, right? Like previous iteration of me back when I did believe that emotions had value to people.

Malcolm: And I think the trick that happened to me at that time of my life was that. I expected profound things to feel profound or to feel loud at least, but there was no reason for evolution to code profound things as feeling profound. You can hijack the profundity system by like group chanting.

Malcolm: You can hijack the profundity system with hallucinogens. There's a lot of things you can do to create a false sense of profundity. People expect that the emotions we feel are going to [00:49:00] point to some. True underlying value, whether that's a positive or negative value. And humans never underwent evolutionary pressure to be able to search for true meaning in the universe.

Malcolm: So none of our emotions should align with what true meaning looks like in the universe. And so we should expect, like when we're logically searching for things of value for it to not actually feel like, Oh, I feel this emotional. When I come to the right answer, but the feeling that that pain is bad, I think that's a very easy thing.

Malcolm: You can come to when you're like, well, nothing really feels meaningfully profound, but pain does feel meaningfully bad. Therefore, as somebody who has had time to indulge in pain, and it's grown up in a culture. that didn't give me a healthy way of relating to emotional pain that just said emotional pain is a pure negative.

Malcolm: And very few traditional cultures do that. Most traditional cultures see emotional pain, maybe not the way we do. Maybe [00:50:00] it's not like something that motivates you to improve, but they, they definitely don't see it as like the core negative of the universe. It might be the way that God tests you. It might be like, there's all sorts of ways you can relate to pain.

Malcolm: You don't need to relate to pain in a purely and only negative context. And could I experience enough pain that I just wanted to die in the moment? Yes, but that's because I'm a disgusting meatbag involved and I'm weak and I'm wretched and I'm fallen. And by that, what I mean from a atheistic perspective is humans, our biology is not optimized around.

Malcolm: What we should want, like there was no reason for it to be optimized around what we should want. So I am going to succumb to that just as much as anyone else. Like I drink beer. I know that provides me with. No real long term positive, but I do it because I am wretched and fallen. And that's part of, of, of being human is understanding these, these flaws in who we are, like that [00:51:00] we feel pain for things that are pointless and understanding that that's just part of the human condition, but that we can work through that potentially.

Malcolm: And we can work to improve that, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. I don't know if you have closing thoughts.

Simone: I'm glad we're alive. I'm glad our kids are alive. We're a problem for antinatalists. Dear Antinatalists, I'm sorry. If we missed anything, leave a comment. We genuinely want to understand the argument as well as we can, especially the logically founded versions of it.

Malcolm: Or if there's an argument for it that we didn't include, these are the arguments that we found most convincing. And again, I think it's one of those things where I can't say they're wrong, it's just a nature of perspective. In the same way that I would not say that people who believe that life begins at conception or at the level of a sperm are wrong.

Malcolm: I just have a different perspective than them. But I don't think their perspective is like intrinsically evil, even though it leads to evil actions from my cultural perspectives, which is killing babies [00:52:00] or from their perspective, preventing babies who otherwise would have existed had different choices been made than the choices that their culture condones for them.

Malcolm: But I'm okay with that. I'm okay with living in a multicultural ecosystem. So long as people don't mess with my culture, as soon as we think that, well, okay, we have right to your body, your culture, that's where I'm like, okay, now those are, those are fine words.

Simone: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we will go celebrate our pronatalism by picking up our kids now and giving them big hugs and hoping the best for them.

Simone: and having

Malcolm: met them.

Malcolm: So what antinatalism means is if I had adopted that mindset when I was younger, they wouldn't have been given the choice to continue

Simone: existing. Oh my gosh. I'm just imagining the way they don't. They don't run, they bounce, you know, they, oh, the sparkles in their eyes. Yeah, I,

Malcolm: I, I know that they want to exist.

Malcolm: They [00:53:00] don't want to exist. Killing themselves is always a choice. Our culture does not have a real negative opinion of suicide. Um, But it is, it is, it is not a choice to use the fact that you want to commit suicide. To rob the agency of another potential person who could have been born in your place who would have loved their life.

Malcolm: That's the choice you have to make for yourself and not for other people because when you rob other people of agency, that's the truest of all evils.

Simone: And yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that kind of sums it up is, is we think, you have every right to end your life for our moral framework, but you should never rob that if someone else in the end, so much of what we come down to is sovereignty, personal sovereignty, and freedom of choice.

Simone: And that is up to each person to decide what to do with themselves.

Malcolm: And each culture. I think it gets trickier when you're talking about kids, but I think the only real. Safe way like intergenerationally to assure that groups don't come to believe that other groups are like intrinsically worse than them and that they have Kirk launched to do what they want because that's what happened with the residential school program in canada they said well these natives don't know how to raise their kids [00:54:00] correctly the european way the the You know the modern way So we're going to take their kids from them and erase their culture because we're better and they genuinely believe that they genuinely believed They were helping people and when you begin to believe that your culture is naturally superior to other because of things they're doing to their kids or whatever, then it can lead to really, really evil action really, really quickly.

Malcolm: And it can feel really, really good and righteous in the moment. And I try to learn from history. What not to do and one of the things is passing judgment on other cultures or other groups, especially when they have belief systems that I see is logically, logically consistent.

Simone: Yeah. Well, okay.

Simone: Heavy conversation, but good. Come give me a hug. Let's get our kids. I love you, Malcolm.

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