Debunking Benatar

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brimstoneSalad
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Debunking Benatar

Post by brimstoneSalad »

rvgn recently published an interview with David Benatar here: http://rvgn.org/2016/06/19/better-never-to-have-been-an-interview-with-david-benatar/

While on one hand I think this was a bad idea, since anti-natalism (even if it were actually philosophically true on some level) is a very alienating position, and any advocacy or popularization of this idea as associated with veganism will inevitably turn people away from veganism (like positions advocating violence do, or positions advocating extremes of personal purity: whether or not they are philosophically valid, it's not good activism), on the other hand it does serve as a succinct catalogue of Benatar's fallacies that I can address here (which, because it is not philosophically true, is very easy to do).
Benatar wrote:My view is not merely that the odds favour a negative outcome, but that a negative outcome is guaranteed. [...] The basis for this claim is an important asymmetry between benefits and harms.
The original image in the article:
benatarasymmetry1.jpg
Benatar wrote:The absence of harms is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that absence. However, the absence of a benefit is only bad if there is somebody who is deprived of that benefit.
This is just an assertion. A controversial premise that was constructed ad hoc to provide a particular conclusion.

Using the same reasoning Benatar uses to dismiss the bad from a lack of good, there's no reason to believe that the absence of harm is good if there's not otherwise anybody to suffer that harm. It's just an absence. It's not bad, it's not good, it's just nothing.

It could be equally asserted:
Rataneb wrote:The absence of good is bad even if there is nobody to bemoan that absence. However, the absence of a harm is only good if there is somebody who is saved from that harm.
Edited image:
benatarasymmetry2.jpg
Based on that, should we all be compelled to pop out as many children as possible, regardless of the conditions on Earth? Should we also be congratulated in the mass breeding and slaughter of animals, because essentially it's only the pleasure that matters in such a biased assertion?

Ultimately, Benatar's claim suffers the same failures of Pascal's wager: it's rigged with faulty premises from the start, and makes arbitrary assertions, the asymmetry of which create the asymmetry of the conclusion.
Such word games and deceptive tricks are indicative of Benatar's intellectual bankruptcy. Certainly Benatar is not unfamiliar with this criticism, he just doesn't care, because the deception is insidious enough to hold persuasive power. Plenty of theistic apologists are just as familiar with criticism of Pascal's wager, and yet use it none the less because it is functional as rhetoric despite its logical failings.

The problem we encounter in vegan activism, as mentioned earlier, is that not only is such dishonesty not productive to a moral cause (since it's false), but it's actually counter productive because it advocates an abhorrent idea to most people which puts them off any philosophy or lifestyle that's contaminated with it (whether they understand the philosophical problems with it or just reject it on grounds of intuitive moral revulsion).

Let's take a moment to acknowledge a couple more intellectually honest models:
benatarasymmetry3.jpg
We can consider both the absence of pleasure and pain to be bad and good respectively relative to what they would have been given existence (opportunity cost), which means we have to evaluate them relatively, or we can consider them neither good nor bad, and thus understand that such evaluations have no obvious meaning -- and that, innately, any claims that it is good or bad to create life or fail to do so have no merit or philosophical value.

I can understand why Benatar can not admit this (and probably has blinded himself to it): his entire career is predicated on his denial and advocacy of his central fallacy, which is at the root of all of his arguments. This isn't just a pessimism bias, it's a professional one. It takes a very strong character to admit one's entire professional career has been founded upon a lie, and realize one's life's work has done nothing but harm to the world, and contributed nothing of value to the philosophical discussion of ethics -- he doesn't have that kind of integrity. Most people don't, thus the death grip on other intellectually bankrupt claims like young Earth creationism, climate change denialism, religious fundamentalism, etc.

My only hope is that the reader is not so invested in these ideas to be unable to let them die, or at least out of pragmatism to stop promoting them in association with veganism and among vegans.

EDIT: There are even antinatalists who are intellectually honest enough to understand that Benatar's "asymmetry" is malpractice:
http://repositorio.unb.br/bitstream/10482/15458/3/ARTIGO_QualityHumanLife.pdf
Julio Cabrera wrote:Abstract:
In his book, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford, 2006), David Benatar attempts to show that coming
into existence is always a serious harm. In order to prove his point, he develops two lines of argument,
one formal, another material. In this paper I intend to show that: (1) There is a logical problem in the
formal argumentation that affects the soundness of the supposed “asymmetry” between the absence of
pleasure and the absence of pain, which constitutes the core of this line of argumentation. (2) Although
the material argument is basically correct, I maintain that it suffers from the limitations of the theoretical
approach adopted, of empiricist and Utilitarian type. (3) I discuss briefly the alleged “independence” of
the two lines of argument trying to show that the formal line depends on the material one.
And here's one sympathetic to anti-natalism: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02580136.2012.10751765

I will address the other arguments Benatar made (which are at least a little bit more honest, yet still very wrong) shortly.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Debunking Benatar

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At this point, I have to address some claims RVGN made, because they reveal an underlying misconception.
RVGN wrote:In the last few years consent has become an important issue for those of us concerned with human rights. Generally, we believe that potentially harmful actions should not be enacted without the express consent of all those involved.
A beloved dog is given heartworm medication without consent. A child is restrained from playing in a busy street without consent. Things are done without our consent all of the time, and there's always potential for harm, but those things are often done in our best interests.

In terms of violating preferences (which is what's really relevant), what is important is not consent, but informed consent, which gets at the root of what those preferences are; it's an exploratory mission to discover hidden preferences (which we can not know without asking).
A hang up on the act of consent in itself is dogmatic and not morally useful. What matters is if we're acting in something's interests, and informed consent tells us that we are.

Interests/preferences are what matter, not the ritual of consent: consent is just a useful heuristic for determining those preferences.

A non-human animal has preferences and interests: that's something we should respect, and given that it's hard to obtain anything like informed consent from them, we have to be careful with how we treat them to make sure what we're doing is in their best interests, and not influenced by our own biases.

A non-existent being does not.

RVGN wrote:Vegan advocates have pointed out that non-[human]animals are unable to consent to any of the harms we regularly subject them to.
And it's a bad argument. The issue is what a reasonable and unbiased person would see as a greater harm, the biases people are subject to by consuming animal products in that determination, and the opportunity costs and other harms involved in the production.

"Consent" is a sexy term to throw around in activism: it's absolute, it's black and white, there's no room for argument. But it's a dogma, and it's not a sound argument.
RVGN wrote:we often believe that making the decision to bring new people in the world is acceptable because we can be reasonably sure that they will retrospectively consent once they are able to do so.
Why do you think this assumption fails to solve the issue of consent?
David Benatar wrote:The assumption that most people brought into existence will retrospectively consent to their creation is likely true. However, it does not justify our bringing children into existence. This is partly because we have reason to think that the preference of most people to have come into existence is an “adaptive preference” — a preference that people develop in order to cope with an unfortunate situation.
As I explained above, bringing a being into the world and the lack of consent is not even a harm that needs to be justified. Only the question of net harm vs. benefit is relevant.

However, this is a bad answer all the same: the post-hoc nature of a preference doesn't clearly negate that preference (assertions that it does are at least currently unfounded).

Just as bringing a child into a terrible circumstance that you can reasonably anticipate that child would wish to have never been born into is wrong, bringing a child into a good place where you can reasonably anticipate the child would be glad to be born is right,

We accept both assumptions, or we throw out both assumptions. We can't pick and choose.

We would have to weigh the probability of being glad to have been born against the probability of being dismayed at it, and the relative magnitude of those feelings.

The "adaptive" nature of the preference is irrelevant. A preference is a preference, as long as it's informed, it's valid.
David Benatar wrote:When the infliction of harm causes the person harmed to come to consent to it, we should be very wary. If, for example, lobotomizing somebody caused that person to endorse the lobotomization, we would not – and should not – think that the retrospective consent justifies the practice.
Terrible comparison. When you lobotomize somebody, you're probably violating a very strong interest to not be lobotomized. When you bring a non-existent person into the world, you violate no such interest.

Assuming your lobotomy drastically changes the person, we're dealing with something like the creation of one person from another. Assuming we regard the future interest as valid, this is a standard conflict of one person's interests against another. It is by no means one sided in the way of bringing a human being into the world (a true asymmetry), or in killing a person (where there is no interest in being dead after death to compete with the pre-death interest in living).

If you still want to assert some abstract moral harm that occurs to the non-existent, then that goes both ways too. Consent becomes completely incoherent: can an unconceived child who would have otherwise come into the world "consent" to an anti-natalist (or a condom) interfering and stopping him or her from being conceived? Any and all actions which might be morally relevant to such non-existent being then become equally problematic, because none can be consented to.
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by brimstoneSalad »

I'm going to jump ahead a little and touch on this, which is relevant to the supposed "optimism bias"
RVGN wrote:Another question often levelled at antinatalists can be generalised as, if existence is so awful, why not end your life? Does an antinatalist have to be pro-suicide in order to be logically consistent?
Yes, and I'll show why.
David Benatar wrote:An antinatalist can think that it is bad both to begin existing and to cease existing.
Why? They think it's bad, so it is bad? Benatar criticizes that kind of reasoning when it comes to people thinking their lives are good (worth living), but doesn't question it when it comes to thinking something is bad. This is an obvious pessimism bias (an actual bias, as opposed to the "optimism bias" he claims exists), and it reflects the same kind of intellectual dishonesty of his "asymmetry".

If you reject one, because it's how people feel, then you must reject the other on the same basis. By his reasoning, there's nothing bad about non-existing, so a quick and painless death should be a good thing in and of itself.
David Benatar wrote:Indeed one reason why it might be bad to begin existing is that we shall die.
The fear of a painless death in itself is completely irrational. The only rational basis for a fear of death is missing out on life: fear of death is based on the desire to continue living.
If you dismiss the desire to live as having value, then you do the same to the desire not to die.

An anti-natalist making such an argument (appealing to the supposed "optimism bias"), must necessarily be pro-suicide, and in fact even pro-painless-murder, because it must be the lesser evil (based on the philosophy that a painless death is always better than life which is far more painful).
For an anti-natalist to be consistent, murdering somebody painlessly in his or her sleep must be seen the same way as stopping a child from playing in the street: a kindness that the person just can't understand but that is really in his or her best interest, regardless of "consent".
consistent anti-natalist wrote:If they just knew what I knew, they'd agree and thank me for it. Their judgement is just clouded by an optimism bias, so I'll help by doing the right thing for them.
David Benatar wrote:At some point the quality of life may become so bad that death is the lesser evil. It does not follow that one should kill oneself well before that point.
Benatar has given no evidence that death in and of itself would even be any kind of evil at all, other than people's feelings that it is (which are no better than the feelings he readily dismisses when people dare assume their lives are good).
So yes, it does follow that you should immediately and painlessly kill yourself if you agree with those arguments, unless you're being a martyr and prolonging your suffering so you can release others from it (as a conscientious mass murderer).

These ideas are not just dangerous to veganism. Like fundamentalist religion which often results in jihads and other evils in the name of 'god', if you take them at face value and then follow their logical conclusions, they're dangerous to everybody. This is a philosophy of cartoon supervillains.
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Re: Debunking Benatar

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Benatar would likely jump to reject the above point based on his rejection of consequentialism. This goes beyond the article, but Benatar is apparently some kind of a deontologist: which helps explain his obsession with the dogma of "consent" (aside from its use as a practical heuristic as I explained).

Deontology is untenable as a means to do anything in the world, because as it rejects that the ends can justify the means, all actions are immoral since all actions involve conflicts of interest and violate duties on some level. It provides no metric by which to weigh good against bad.

This thread covers a discussion on deontological positions in detail: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=785

Virtue ethics are not an alternative, just as "rule consequentialism" is not distinct from consequentialism itself. Virtues are typically held to be virtuous because of their good consequences. In other cases, as in deontology, they're just arbitrary assertions. It's not a third option.

RVGN wrote:Do you contend that suffering outweigh our contentment for those of us lucky enough to experience chronic happiness?
David Benatar wrote:I do think that the bad outweighs the good in even the happiest lives. The reason why this seems so strange is that (most) humans have psychological traits that lead to their underweighting the bad and thus thinking that in their lives as a whole there is more good than bad. The most prominent of these traits is an optimism bias, but there are others too.
Benatar doesn't understand what a bias is, but he's certainly subjected to one.

If I like chocolate, and I say "I like chocolate" that isn't my bias talking: that's my experience of liking chocolate.
If I like chocolate, and I read two conflicting studies on the objective health effects of chocolate, and for no reason I find the study favoring chocolate more credible: that IS my bias in favor of chocolate talking.

A bias is subjective feeling or experience that affects objective perception or belief of facts. A subjective feeling with respect to itself can not be a bias: it's just a feeling, and when we're talking about feelings people are their own best sources.

When a person says, "yes in fact I am happy, and the positive value of the good things in my life outweighs the negative value of the bad things in my life for me" that is not a bias, it's just a fact (assuming the person isn't lying).
When Benatar says something like, "No they don't, in fact your life is terrible" that is a bias -- his bias.

Optimism bias certainly is a real thing, it just isn't and can't be applied to what he's talking about. It only manifests in belief about objective metrics of the world: test scores, how much your peers actually like you, etc.

In addition to his irrational pessimism bias about the world, Benatar is little doubt subject to an optimism bias of his own about his works and career: he probably thinks he's doing important grown up work in philosophy, and that he's contributing in some meaningful way to ethics. He probably imagines he isn't a laughing stock among real philosophers, and that he is regarded positively by intelligent people (intelligence which he likely measures based on how much they agree with him).

When we talk about informed consent and idealized interests, if divested of these delusions it is entirely possible that more people would regard their lives as not worth living, but this is an empirical question that would call for an empirical answer.

If cured of his own delusions, would Benatar immediately ascend to the top of a tall building and step off the edge, or would he redidicate his life to undoing all of the harm he's done to the world? I wouldn't hazard a guess on that, I don't know the man.

The bottom line is that "optimism bias" doesn't exist as such, or isn't what Benatar thinks it is, and can't be used to override a person's personal experiences. A person's values and subjective experiences are their own, and it's nobody's place -- certainly not Benatar's -- to tell them otherwise. Sure, one can correct their factual misconceptions and see if they will reevaluate things, but by no means can one make assumptions about how that will turn out without evidence.

David Benatar wrote:Second, while the misjudgement may make lives less bad than they would otherwise be, it does not follow that the quality of life is as good as it is misjudged to be. It is still possible for life to be worse than one thinks it is. The concern about adaptive preferences applies here too.
Unless unwillfully misinformed in some relevant way, the value of one's life is precisely what one judges it to be for oneself, and no less. Value comes from within, not some external calculation about the amount of pleasure and pain somebody has experienced, and not from David Benatar's biased opinion. WE decide what holds value for us and what does not, both negative and positive.
We don't live for pleasure and pain, and to the vast majority of people it's obvious that those things have no value in and of themselves.

Consider the pleasure pill thought experiment:
You have before you a pill which will dull all pain to nothing and give you euphoric pleasure for the rest of your life, and your body will be taken care of until its natural end in a hospital.
Do you take it? Is pursuit of hedonic pleasure and avoidance of pain all that your life amounts to? If so, then you'd be obligated to take the pill and surrender anything and everything else your life might have meant.

Our lives are NOT a sum of pleasure and pain, but a sum of values, or realizations of and failures to realize our interests and have our preferences met. Values are what give value to life, not the firing of arbitrary nerve signals that happened to be labeled "pleasure" or "pain".

The people you may regard as suffering in miserable conditions but are happy none the less are happy because they have found value in their lives, while the young and wealthy CEO who is free of any meaningful physical sufering and has all of his hedonic interests met may jump off a roof because he has none -- value comes from values, and only those who hold them can give them meaning.
RVGN wrote:When someone contends that the pleasure in their lives outweighs the suffering, many antinatalists might remind them of the optimism bias and suggest that they could be incorrect in the assessment of their own wellbeing. This seems to make the claim that suffering outweighs pleasure practically unfalsifiable, and therefore suspect.
Is there any way that someone could satisfactorily disprove the antinatalists’ ‘suffering outweighs pleasure’ theory?
It's not just unfalsifiable and suspect for that reason, it's also irrelevant. These questions make the assumption that the only thing that holds value is hedonic pleasure and pain, which is empirically false and can be easily demonstrated so by asking a few people using the pleasure pill thought experiment above.
David Benatar wrote:We can then point to a host of facts about the good and bad things in life. Here we should recognize some important empirical asymmetries that support a pessimistic conclusion. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived but pain is much more enduring. The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Injury is swift but recovery is slow. These are but a few examples. All these claims can be assessed against the facts. They are not unfalsifiable.
Benatar assumes that these things can be meaningfully compared on some objective scale. How does breaking a leg compare to the joy of holding your newborn baby for the first time? Does he think we should count the number of times nerves fire? Measure the voltage?

No, the assertions are not falsifiable, and they're based on premises that are just flat out false. It's like the claim that chocolate is objectively more delicious than vanilla. It isn't. These qualities only have value relative to the value metrics individuals hold and give them.

David Benatar wrote:I do have a pessimistic view, but that, I argue, is what the evidence warrants.
Due to his pessimism bias. A pessimism bias can operate with or without causing clinical depression; in his case, his ego and sense of self-importance probably holds him aloft.

A pessimism bias in a depressed person manifests as false empirical beliefs about reality. Like that people at school hate him/her, or he/she is thought to be ugly and laughed at by others in private. Kind of like body dysmorphic disorder in an anorexic: no, you aren't fat, you are suffering from a form of mental illness and delusion.

It can be hard to say the depression caused the pessimism bias: it's more likely the other way around or that in many cases depression isn't clearly defined and simply IS a pessimism bias.
This is why depression is so well treated by therapy. Helping somebody see reality is the best cure for most depression.

However, people can be chemically depressed and still find life to be valuable and worth living. And even if not, they can understand in particular that the feelings they have are due to neurotransmitter deficiencies, and that others live lives of positive value to them.

There is a strong correlation between pessimism and depression, and it's a reasonable concern to have.
See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200107/depression-doing-the-thinking
One of the most powerful actions you can take in combating depression is to understand how critical the quality of your thinking is to maintaining and even intensifying your depression—and that the quickest way to change how you feel is to change how you think. Often enough you can't control how you feel, but you can always control how you think. There's an active choice you can take—if you are aware that changing your thinking is important.

It's not an accident that cognitive therapy is one of the most researched and practiced of depression treatments. It is based on the fact that thought-processing errors contribute so much to depressed mood.
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by RebeccaFox »

Hey, I'm the person who interviewed Benatar for RVGN-
It seemed like a lot of people in the vegan community were talking about Antinatalism so I wanted to find out about it from the (most contemporary) source.
We'd love to publish a counter interview with someone who disagrees with Benatar, so if someone wants to step forward and do that with me that would be awesome, just PM me.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Continuing, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what antinatalism means.
RVGN wrote:Although many vegans either have—or look forward to having—children, we are staunch antinatalists when it comes to the breeding of non-human animals for human consumption or entertainment. [...] we realise that we are saving animals from being born by decreasing demand for certain products.
This is not antinatalism.

The definition of antinatalism:
Wikipedia wrote:Antinatalism is a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth, standing in opposition to natalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

A negative value is assigned to the suffering and violation of the wills of living thinking beings, and the damage it does to the world and others in it, not the birth in itself. At most you could say it is tentatively antinatalist for those animals being forced to breed in that particular situation. It is not the case that these people are ideological antinatalists, and are just being inconsistent or "speciesist" as is implied here, and that Benatar expressed overtly here:
David Benatar wrote:You’re quite right about the inconsistency.
Note the lack of correction or clarification by RVGN. This strongly suggests that RVGN agrees that vegans who aren't antinatalists are just hypocrites who haven't taken the obvious beliefs in antinatalism they hold (and that make up the root of vegan philosophy, according to the parties here) and applied them consistently.

Not everything in life is so simple as to hold dogmatic ideological stances regardless of the facts at hand; probably nothing is. Benatar doesn't understand that, and unfortunately it seems like RVGN doesn't either.
The same, of course, goes for veganism: we shouldn't be dogmatically asserting that something like eggs or roadkill must always be wrong to eat no matter what: the former at least are wrong because of the consequences of obtaining them. In some idealized situation where the eggs were casually abandoned by well cared for rescue hens, it is conceivable that there wouldn't be meaningful negative consequences. It's not a likely scenario, but granting hypothetical exceptions is what proves a practice isn't a dogma.

It may seem like a little thing, but dogmatic assertions like this make a movement look crazy and cultish.

Moving on to Benatar's response, this illustrates that point well:
David Benatar wrote:One commonly hears the following sort of argument from meat-eaters: “If we did not eat the sorts of animals that are bred for food, those animals would not have had an opportunity to live. Thus we have done them a favour by breeding them for human consumption.”
YES. If we concede that it's the actual suffering and violation of will that's the problem, we would have to let go of the dogma that any particular action in and of itself is always wrong no matter what.

We would have to start being reasonable vegans. Oh no, that would be terrible!
David Benatar wrote:This is an appalling argument. Imagine somebody proposing to give many more humans the “benefit” of life by breeding them and then killing them after a short life of suffering.
And now Benatar tries to use the facts of consequence to justify his dogmatism. The problem is the short meaningless life of a constantly violated will imbued with inordinate suffering, and the consequence of the process and its magnitude that damages the world and harms other beings in it.

If some omnivore wanted to raise and care for these animals in ideal situations for the duration of their natural lives, and took pains to offset all environmental harms, is that a hypothetical situation that we need to run from screaming and put up a wall of immovable dogma to defend ourselves from?

The case of modern animal agriculture (even for so called "humane" meat) is one of inordinate cruelty and environmental harm. There's no need to put down with unthinking dogma every hypothetical case of future idealized animal agriculture in order to make a strong argument for veganism today.
David Benatar wrote:The fundamental flaw in the argument is that nobody has an interest in coming into existence.
I already addressed this.

Retrospectively, human beings can and usually do.
But do non-human animals? Maybe in an idealized sense.

A serious problem in animal ethics is being unable to ask and receive clear input on most issues from these animals. Are they happy and satisfied with their lives? We can only try our best to put ourselves in their positions, and realize that as far as modern farming practices go, it's not a situation we'd appreciate. Anybody attempting to do so while eating meat is highly suspect of bias, but sensible vegans can imagine situations of extreme stewardship that would be permissible: and it's common enough for vegans to support animal companions and the care of pets. It's just not a realistic prospect for animal agriculture.
RVGN wrote:Brian [Tomasik] argues that as human populations increase, wild animal populations decrease due to our encroachments on their habitats and resource use, and therefore the overall level of suffering decreases.
If Brian is right[9] and the number of humans is inversely proportional to overall net suffering, shouldn’t those of us concerned about suffering be pronatalists, or at least not oppose the desires of other humans to procreate?
David Benatar wrote:I agree that the vast majority of (non-human) animal suffering is that of wild animals [...] However, we cannot infer pronatalism from this. Indeed, Brian Tomasik himself recognizes this, and calls only for the inclusion of wild animals’ suffering in our moral calculations and for further research.
How exactly are we supposed to research and help wild animal populations if this generation should be the last generation of human beings, and we should go voluntarily extinct?
This is the problem with deontology: it has no notion of consequence, because it doesn't care about consequence.
Antinatalists have no notion of an end game, only the short sighted dogma that we should not breed.
David Benatar wrote:The problem is that attempting to do good by harmful means is controversial at the best of times.
Yes, we all know that squeezing a child's arm to keep him or her from running and playing in the street is very controversial.
Bullshit. Consequentialism is pretty well established in philosophy. Sometimes it rubs our intuitions the wrong way, but only deontologists like Benatar would make such sweeping claims about attempting to think ahead of time and yield good consequences for the world by our actions.
David Benatar wrote:It is still more problematic when the causal networks are so complex that we may well end up having inflicted much more harm than we will have prevented.
Like Benatar's own career, which seems dedicated to intellectual dishonesty, and infesting veganism with abominable and irrational antinatalist dogmas to the extent that it becomes transparently cult-like and drives any and all sensible people away from it.

This is a large part of my point: Benatar doesn't care about the consequences. He's only obsessed with his ideological dogma, apparently apathetic to its alienation of others and terrible consequences.
This is the last thing that veganism needs more of.
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Re: Debunking Benatar

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David Benatar wrote:Those who would confidently argue that the benefits outweigh the costs should be reminded that even mass extinction does not reduce suffering if other (sentient) species emerge or proliferate in the vacated niche.
And now Benatar trots out his scientific ignorance. Where there is a empty niche, life will ultimately fill it. If the species are driven extinct by humans taking over their environment and occupying the available space and consuming the available energy, that's it. There are thermodynamic limits on any system, and life is not magically exempt as scifi movies like the Matrix might have you believe.
New animals aren't going to magically pop back into existence, particularly not in the numbers with which they occupied natural environments -- they have the cracks and crevices of human civilization at most, which are host predominantly to insects (like roaches, or the famous mosquitoes from the London subway) and a few rodents, not a thriving biomass.

As the human population goes vegan -- and it will be forced to as the population grows -- the scales will only tip more.
David Benatar wrote:It is estimated that 99.9% of all species that ever existed have become extinct. Suffering has not ended. Instead it has instantiated in new species. This is not to say that the extinction of all sentient life will never occur. I am only saying that we should not assume that this will result from rampant human pronatalism.
We can ONLY assume human expansion to be capable of reduction of natural environments. It's proven successful, and permanent for as long as humans live-- and we're pretty good at it so far.

Benatar should take his own advice and realize that extinction of human beings would guarantee nothing. Reducing human biomass doesn't reduce the Earth's biomass. Again, Benatar seems to care nothing for effective consequences: like a typical deontologist, he just wants some simple dogmatic rules for what actions people should and should not do.

RVGN wrote:Many vegan parents hope that, by raising compassionate children, they will contribute to future improvements in the world for animals and humans. Though not every child raised vegan will continue that lifestyle, it does seem plausible that a child raised to care about the suffering of others is more likely to make a positive contribution to the world.
This is absolutely true, and it's also true if only some of one's children ultimately end up vegan due to the disproportionate influence upon others and society at large, and the probability that any non-vegan children will at least eat lower amounts of animal products.
Gaining an understanding of the social system of moral ideas and how interconnected we are can help give some perspective.

There is extensive discussion on the topic in this thread:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1407
brimstoneSalad wrote:What is this chance? And how does the harm done by them if they don't stay vegan compare to the good done if they do and influence others?
Assuming it's a 75% chance they stop being vegan (which is unlikely, since they grew up with it -- that's the adult recidivism rate), do you really think that does more harm than the 25% chance they stay vegan and influence others?

How many other people have you influenced so far? How many will you influence in your life?

I'd take an extra billion people on the planet any day if 250 million of them are well informed ethical vegans. That would put our odds of success MUCH higher than they are now.
Think about it in terms of the interconnectivity of society, and the percentage of people who are vegan. Think about it in terms of people knowing vegans, and seeing it as normal. Think about it in terms of political influence, and critical mass.
If you understand anything about how real social change happens, you know numbers mean everything, and vegans having children shifts the odds in our favor.
RVGN wrote:Because your argument for antinatalism is built upon a concern for the suffering of others, it seems likely that altruistic people would be more likely to adopt that sort of philosophy.
Are you concerned that by encouraging people not to procreate you could be decreasing the number of altruists in the human population, and therefore slowing ethical progress?
Benatar is not concerned with consequences, as I think has been well demonstrated, he's concerned with ideological dogma. He has no concept of dysgenics, and his argument is NOT built upon a legitimate concern for the suffering of others (that would be too consequentialist).
David Benatar wrote:If I am correct that bringing somebody into existence inflicts a terrible harm on that person, we should be worried about prospective parents who are willing to inflict that harm on their potential children in the hope that those children will help spare others suffering.
Luckily, not everybody is so delusional as to think that way. Reasonable people enjoy life, and expect their children to as well. A significant part of that enjoyment is having purpose, and helping to make the world a better place is the best purpose you could ask for.
David Benatar wrote:Part of the worry is about those parents instrumentalising their children. How compassionate is it to do that? And what example are they setting?
They're not instrumentalizing them for selfish gain, they're helping to give them purpose in life, which is the greatest gift you can give somebody. They're setting the best example possible.

See my post here: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1932&p=19543#p19543

Leave it to a deontologist to profane one of the most inspiring things there is in this world. They still have a choice: we all do. But helping somebody make the right one is a gift.

If anybody is instrumentalizing others, it's Benatar, who twists reason and deceives to advance his own dogma over others' sincere interests, and at the expense of the world's social and moral progress.
David Benatar wrote:Another worry, however, is whether any child raised even by compassionate people would indeed make the world a better place.
I already covered this. And statistically, we should have every reason to expect so. We certainly have no basis to say otherwise. While you could possibly have a hope to argue that we shouldn't be pro-natalists, the best you could achieve is an argument for agnosticism on the topic. Given a lack of perfect knowledge on the subject, and even a good indication of statistical outcome, to let people do as they like or are personally inclined to.
David Benatar wrote:In The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism[10], I point to just how much harm humans cause. Vegans, all other things being equal, do less damage than their omnivorous conspecifics. However, even vegans do some damage. Moreover, all other things are rarely equal.
All other things are NOT equal. They're better. Look to my comments above about social influence, and how ideas spread.
David Benatar wrote:Those who still want to raise compassionate children might consider adopting, thereby saving two birds from one stone.
While you might be able to argue in some cases that adoption is better than having a child, you can't really argue that having a child is wrong.
Adoption is also very expensive, having a child is much cheaper. Having a child and giving the difference in cost to a charity like mercy for animals, or even a tenth of the difference, is probably even better.

And that's to completely disregard the waiting times and dysgenic factors involved in adoption. All things are not equal.

I discussed these things in much greater detail in this thread: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1407
RVGN wrote:Thank you so much for your time! We hope interested readers will go on to explore your ideas in more detail in your book Better Never to Have Been, and that this interview can contribute to the vegan conversation about antinatalism becoming better informed and more productive.
I very much hope they will not. RVGN might as well refer people straight to OOS, or hell, why not just send them over to ISIS: that's less alienating. :roll:
This all seems to imply that RVGN thinks the conversation on antinatalism has not been well informed. There is another possibility: that Benatar is just a quack, a sorry excuse for a philosopher, and a shame to the profession who either is not capable of using logic properly because he's an imbecile, or who has chosen to construct a piece of dishonest propaganda by weaving together logical fallacies with intellectual-sounding words to deceive people because... he's just evil.
Whatever the cause or his motivations, his arguments have no empirical or philosophical merit whatsoever, and any "failure" to contend with them on the part of critics of antinatalism is not necessarily a result of ignorance of his work, but more likely disdain for it, and a correct assessment of its value.
cewb
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by cewb »

I'm a lazy ignorant dickhead who didn't take the chance to read on this but, I don't fully understand the concern about vegans adopting this position on procreation. If there are a subset of vegans who refuse to have offspring, even if it's a turn off for non-vegans, I don't fault them for it. I think it's fairly obvious most vegans are atheist too, but the fact of the matter is these or two separate positions. Veganism, Atheism, and refusing-to-have-kids-ISM are three separate positions that should not be lumped together. For non-vegans to use this as an argument for why they don't want to quit animal products is just another bad argument that vegans have to tackle. I think the best way to argue back against "vegans don't want babies, therefore I will not be a vegan" is to make it clear that veganism does not encompass anything other than refusing to consume animal products.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by brimstoneSalad »

cewb wrote:I'm a lazy ignorant dickhead who didn't take the chance to read on this but, I don't fully understand the concern about vegans adopting this position on procreation.
It's covered in the text. RVGN actually suggests that vegans who aren't antinatalists are hypocrites. Look at my second to last post before yours; it's covered at the top of that post.
cewb wrote:If there are a subset of vegans who refuse to have offspring, even if it's a turn off for non-vegans, I don't fault them for it.
That isn't what antinatalism is; it's not just a personal choice. Antinatalists believe it is morally wrong to have children for others too, and as a consequence they cultivate a culture of shame against those who have kids. The sentiment is so overwhelming in the vegan 'community' that it seems to be pushing people out.

Most vegans may be atheists, but most vegans are not radical antitheists who shame religious people who want to be vegan as not being vegan because of their religions (or being bad vegans), or as being inconsistent with vegan ethics as antinatalists tend to do to those they disagree with (even as RVGN, nice as she usually is, did in that article).

The difference is the atheist vegans recognize veganism as not requiring atheism; antinatalists call vegans who don't agree immoral, inconsistent, hypocritical, or even not vegan.
cewb wrote:I think it's fairly obvious most vegans are atheist too, but the fact of the matter is these or two separate positions. Veganism, Atheism, and refusing-to-have-kids-ISM are three separate positions that should not be lumped together.
Antinatalism is not refusing to have kids: it's going beyond that and telling others they are immoral for having kids.
cewb wrote:I think the best way to argue back against "vegans don't want babies, therefore I will not be a vegan" is to make it clear that veganism does not encompass anything other than refusing to consume animal products.
When a significant percentage of vocal vegans are insisting otherwise -- that having kids is non-vegan -- that is not an easy task.
It's a copout to put off the problems presented by bad vegan outreach upon the carnists that message has reached.

A much better solution is to clean house. Antinatalist arguments are deeply flawed, both on logical and empirical grounds. It's not difficult to debunk.
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Re: Debunking Benatar

Post by viddy9 »

Thank you for these posts.

The 'incomparable' position you outlined seems reasonable to me, and, as far as I can tell, it's compatible with a desire to prevent beings whose lives aren't going to be worth living from coming into existence. Every time such a being comes into existence, we would be obligated under plausible moral theories to end that being's life (putting them out of their misery, as it's sometimes termed), so preventing it from coming into existence in the first place prevents us from having to keep doing that. In a world in which we could do things instantly, there would be no obligation, on the 'incomparable' view, to prevent miserable beings from coming into existence, because we could just click our fingers and end their lives.

This doesn't entail that the absence of pain is a good thing when a being is not in existence, though: it's simply an acknowledgement that there's an opportunity cost if we keep having to end miserable lives. By contrast, every time a being whose life is worth living comes into existence, we don't have to do anything. This, in my view, doesn't entail that absence of good is a bad thing: it doesn't entail that we have to bring happy beings into existence, even though we should prevent unhappy beings from coming into existence for the reasons above.

This seems awfully similar to Benatar's asymmetry, but I don't think it's equivalent to it for the above reasons. Or, am I overlooking something?

On a separate note, I wasn't aware that rampant antinatalism was so prevalent in the vegan community. Thinking about it, I can see why it might be prevalent.
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