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).
The original image in the article: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.
This is just an assertion. A controversial premise that was constructed ad hoc to provide a particular conclusion.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.
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:
Edited image: 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?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.
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:
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
And here's one sympathetic to anti-natalism: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02580136.2012.10751765Julio 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.
I will address the other arguments Benatar made (which are at least a little bit more honest, yet still very wrong) shortly.