Defending Pronatalism
If you suspect our concerns about birth rates to be misguided, you may be surprised to find that we are pronatalist for the very reasons many are antinatalist—or at least that reality is less black and white than you might think. To demonstrate how, we’ve addressed some of the most common concerns about the pronatalist agenda, point by point.
But … the Environment!
There is no way to talk about building a culture that will grow over the long run without endorsing high birth rates. Given that this book cannot avoid a pronatalist perspective, it is likely to raise the ire of those who claim to care about the environment under the belief that adding more humans to the world is bad for the planet. Of course, they are right, in the short term, but in the long term …
Over the long term, there is no single thing a person who cares about the environment can do that will hurt the environment more than not having kids at an above-replacement-rate level (i.e., more than two). It would be the height of hypocrisy for a person to deride individuals for ignoring near consensus in the field of climate research while they themselves ignored decades of near consensus among geneticists.
What are we talking about? See: “Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations,”[[124]](#_ftn124) “On the genetic basis of political orientation,”[[125]](#_ftn125) or just the Wikipedia article on the subject.[[126]](#_ftn126) That a person’s political ideology and much of their sociological profile has a heritable component is a replicated finding backed by huge data sets. We, of course, acknowledge that some debate exists around this research—just like in climate science. That said, this debate is mostly over the amount of correlation within a narrow range, not whether there is any correlation at all.[[127]](#_ftn127)
In other words, if you selectively prevent one sociological profile from having kids, you would see less of that profile in future generations. All these people removing themselves from the gene pool out of concern for the environment are dramatically lowering the prevalence of the sort of psychological profile that cares about the environment (and a wealth of other prosocial factors).
It’s as if caring for the environment is a terminal, genetically linked illness being systematically eradicated from the population. In the study we ran on this subject, we found individuals in the U.S. who strongly believed global warming was real and caused by humans had about half as many children on average as those who were strongly in the opposite camp (0.8 to 1.6). It is a tragedy that anthropogenic climate change will lead to the deaths of millions of people and much of the earth’s biome, but a world in which every human who has an instinct to care about the environment removes themselves from the gene pool might be worse.
What we find uniquely frustrating about the apparent self-extinction of environmentally-minded people is that it may not even make that much of an environmental impact to forgo parenthood in the years and generations to come. By some estimates, “If the United States reaches its climate goals—that is, cutting emissions in half by 2030 and to zero by 2050—the picture looks even more different. In that case, a child born today would have a carbon footprint averaged over their lives of around 2.8 tons per year, not far from a current resident of Brazil. Under that scenario, having one fewer child starts to look on a par with living car-free or skipping a transatlantic flight—significant, but not even the most important individual action one can take.”[[128]](#_ftn128)
It’s not as though we are the first life form on Earth to cause a mass extinction. Consider the Great Oxidation Event, when the first cyanobacteria produced so much oxygen as a waste product that the atmosphere was filled with (what was then) a toxic, polluting gas (oxygen) that killed almost everything on Earth. Also, consider that had this event been prevented by some sort of environmentalist cyanobacteria with the goal of preventing “oxygen pollution,” complicated, eukaryotic, multicellular organisms that utilize oxygen-based cellular respiration would never have evolved. Not a single animal (no birds, no fish, no amphibians, and no mammals) would exist due to the low energy efficiency of the previously dominant anaerobic respiration.
While we don’t see mass extinction as a good thing, we want to put it in context when a common solution advocated involves nudging our own species toward civilizational collapse and eventual extinction. We see these outcomes as a real risk if every adult who cares about others (or tragedy of the commons issues more generally) chooses to surgically remove their sociological profile from the gene pool.
If we do nothing to fix society, humans will eventually go extinct (or devolve civilizationally and become locked on Earth). Should either of these scenarios come to pass, we lose the only hope life on Earth has of seeding biomes equally as rich as our own on other planets (unless Earth harbors some yet-undiscovered species capable of space-faring).
Instead of multiplying Earth’s biodiversity thousands of times over throughout the galaxy, we would see all life go extinct as Earth is eventually swallowed by an expanding sun. (Of course, this assumes aliens are not out there. For now, we think this assumption is necessary in order to stay on the safe side due to the Fermi paradox, which implies something is wrong with our model of how easy it is for life to start.)[[129]](#_ftn129)
If you care about the environment, having kids makes things worse in the short term but strictly better in the long term. If environmentalists have kids at dramatically lower rates, environmentalism as a movement will shrink dramatically over time. Moreover, having kids increases the odds that human civilization will endure until we become a multi-planet species, which reduces the risk that humans go extinct and life on Earth becomes a “dead man walking” in the face of an expanding sun.
Finally, we are by no means advocating for an ever-ballooning human population on Earth. We have no problem with population levels easing down somewhat. What we do object to is the functional genocide of diverse cultural and ethnic groups leading to cultural and genetic monocultures. We already accept that demographic collapse is inevitable; all we hope for now is a soft landing with minimal damage to diversity and human rights.
We may not agree with most self-identified environmentalists on many things, but removing their instincts from the gene pool entirely doesn’t bode well for our descendants’ future.
Note: The deglobalization instigated by population collapse might also have a fairly severe effect on the environment.[[130]](#_ftn130)
Only Privileged People Can Have Kids!
Outside of people scolding us for hurting the environment through our pronatalist advocacy, the most common complaint we get is that decreasing birth rates are an economic problem. Many argue that if governments were to offer more child care, or if houses were less expensive, etc., the problem would resolve itself.
We wish this were true, as it would make the problem much easier to fix. However, the data on this subject is overwhelming: Earning more money decreases the number of kids you have (while there is a U-shaped curve in which individuals start to have more kids at extreme levels of wealth, this curve does not bring families above repopulation rate again until they earn over $500,000 to $1M USD annually, making it unrealistic to resolve this problem with financial subsidies).[[131]](#_ftn131) Birth rates decrease as wealth increases between and within regions. To put it simply, poor groups within a country have more kids than rich groups, and poor countries, on average, have higher birth rates than rich countries.
Moreover, while government-provided childcare has been shown to increase birth rates by a few percentage points, the effect is trivial when contrasted with the size of the problem. While we ardently support initiatives like government-sponsored child care and affordable housing, those initiatives are totally unmoored from any realistic solution to the declining birth rate problem. For an example of just how little this type of program affects the birth rates, consider Hungary, which spent 5%[[132]](#_ftn132) of its total GDP trying to increase its birth rate only to see almost no rise in fertility[[133]](#_ftn133) (a similar program in Poland had almost no impact as well).[[134]](#_ftn134)
Perhaps one cause driving highly-educated individuals to have fewer kids is that said individuals want their kids to be able to live lives similar to theirs. For all but the most insanely wealthy, it is not financially viable to pay for good college and high school education for more than two kids.
We, personally, want to have many children (as many as possible) and that means almost no matter how much money we have, paying for our kids’ college will be a non-starter. This issue motivated us to create the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org), which aims to dramatically lower the cost of high-caliber secondary education and provide routes to top-level career tracks that do not require college. When we see a problem that remains to be addressed, we do what we can to fix it.
Pronatalism is About Removing Our Reproductive Rights!
One fear we often hear about pronatalists is that they want to ban abortions—or even birth control. Outside of the ethical implications of abortion (which are beside the point here), banning abortion and contraception is not an effective means of increasing population in the long run.
We know this because it was tried before. Decree 770 of the communist Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967, restricted abortion and contraception and was intended to create a larger Romanian population. This ban was incredibly effective at increasing birth rates within the first generation but changed Romanians’ perceptions around children’s value (making them a low-status thing to have in the same way all those teen pregnancy PSAs in the USA did) and led to catastrophically low birth rates just one generation down the line. In the end, this policy caused more harm to Romania’s population growth than good.[[135]](#_ftn135)
From what we can tell, the only government interventions that have durably increased birth rates without producing a slew of adverse societal effects involve cultural and religious interventions, as we can see in Georgia[[136]](#_ftn136) and Turkey.[[137]](#_ftn137)
Pronatalism is Racist!
While it is uncommon for people to tag pronatalists as racists, the occasional accusation is worth addressing. When we talk to some groups about pronatalism, they blurt out that low birth rates can be solved through immigration and imply that trying to fix population and workforce shortages through “domestic production” is racist.
We imagine many who connect pronatalists with racism are thinking of the much-publicized white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” (a white genocide conspiracy theory) and assuming that white people (like your melanin-deficient authors) are driven by that particular ideology. One has to be a complete halfwit to subscribe to this type of theory in the face of the data, which indicates that white people (in the U.S.) actually have one of the slowest declining birth rates, whereas Black, Hispanic, and Native American birth rates are all declining faster. In fact, the Native American birth rate is declining so rapidly that a genuine functional extinction event is a possibility many tribes face within this century. This collapse in Native American populations is obscured by mixed ethnicity people identifying as Native American at a dramatically increased rate.[[138]](#_ftn138)
Let us assume those making racist accusations about pronatalism aren’t assuming white nationalist intentions and instead just like the idea of resolving population decline through immigration. All we have to ask is: Immigration from where? Latin America, the Caribbean,[[139]](#_ftn139) and India,[[140]](#_ftn140) each of which is falling below repopulation rate at the time of this book’s publication? Or shall immigrants come from China, which is expected to be at half its current population by 2050?[[141]](#_ftn141) At current projections, by the end of the century, only two countries outside of Africa will have stable populations (Israel and Kyrgyzstan) and in Africa, only four out of 54 will have stable populations (Chad, Somalia, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe). And just to be clear, those figures are from the generous data set—in the SDG Pace scenario not a single country will have a stable population.[[142]](#_ftn142)
What’s your super-not-racist plan? Is the plan to import Africans to Europe and America so they support an older, non-working, majority-white population? Gosh, it might be just us, but something about that sounds … bad. It sounds like the “anti-racist’s” plan is to go back to importing people from Africa to support an idle, mostly white population. In such a scenario, you wouldn’t reach a point at which you could stop importing them either; you would need to constantly harvest humans from Africa and bring them to the U.S. or force them to have over two kids each because, since 2019, the birth rate for first-generation immigrants has been below replacement rate.[[143]](#_ftn143) Oh, and if all of Africa becomes prosperous, birth rates will crash there, too, so for this “not racist” scheme to work, its proponents would have to intentionally sabotage African economic development.
But it’s worse than that. Silencing talk about declining birth rates hurts minority groups much more than it hurts white Christians. White Christians represent one of the few groups that are probably going to make it through this shit storm (the only other two populations with sub-groups that show significant resistance to post-scarcity birth rate collapse are Muslims and Jews).
Consider two of the oldest (in terms of cultural evolutionary divergence) and most unique cultures in the world: the Parsi (Zoroastrians) and the Jains. The Parsi have a birth rate of 0.8 and a population of 70,000 while the Jains’ birth rate is 1.2 and their population has dwindled to 4,451,753. Those populations will not be stable, distinct cultures by the time of our great-grandchildren.[[144]](#_ftn144) By silencing alarm bells about the severity of population decline in the name of anti-racism (seeing as genuine racists being the first groups to talk openly about the issue), we are dooming countless cultural groups to an un-mourned extinction.
People who think like us are going to be fine. We worry about those who are different from us. This book is published and distributed for these different groups. If, in 500 years, everyone is a member of House Collins and thinks just like us, we have failed.
Homogeny = Stagnation.
Forcing a Way of Life on Your Kids is Unethical!
How dare we force a way of life on our kids!
Everyone forces a way of life on their kids. Researchers have found humans naturally have an instinct to make judgments based on ethnicity, sex, and facial appearance.[[145]](#_ftn145) When you teach your kids to not judge people by those things, you are “forcing” a way of life upon them. When you warn your kids not to take drugs, you are pressuring them to conform to a certain way of life. You do these things because you think they are in your kids’ (and the world’s) best interests.
Even with that said, our kids will always have a choice. Cultures that punish those who leave do not fare well in the post-internet age. Our kids will always have a choice as to who they become as adults. They will be accepted as whoever they choose to be—not just for altruistic reasons, and not just because we love our kids, but for practical reasons. Our best strategy for getting our kids to raise their own children within our culture is for them to see it function first hand.
If our children look back on their childhoods with warm nostalgia, are set up for a prosperous future, and grow up within a cultural framework they are welcome to alter and improve—they will not only be more likely to pass this culture onto children of their own but also edit it to make it better.
Think of the Suffering! (Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism)
Being pronatalists, we decided to review the works of some of the most prominent antinatalists to better understand their arguments. To that end, we went through content created by thinkers like David Benatar. While we don’t want to be mean, their points fail to land if you don’t share their cultural perspective.
The first position antinatalists instinctively take is that the average human experiences more negative than positive emotions in their lifetime (or at least that negative emotions are felt more acutely than positive emotions and therefore outweigh them). As such, antinatalists conclude it would be better if one never existed in the first place.
The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of people do not, in fact, wish they were never born. Heck, we neither value happiness nor love and we certainly don’t seek them out—and yet our lives are overflowing with them. Our biology naturally drowns us in positive emotions when we are efficaciously working for the betterment of our species with people we respect—and who respect us in turn.
To address the average person’s hesitations, antinatalists typically make one of five arguments:
Argument One: Humans Don’t Realize How Shitty Their Lives Are
Antinatalists posit that people are incapable of judging whether they like their own lives, typically citing cognitive bias to do so. While they are right that humans remember positive events more accurately than negative ones,[[146]](#_ftn146) they are incorrect in assuming this bias is strong enough to convince a person that a terrible life is actually good. In fact, humans have all sorts of equally powerful biases toward seeing things negatively.
Given their instinctive negativity bias,[[147]](#_ftn147) people will spend more time focused on negative things in their lives than positive things. This has been measured in test subjects focusing more on negative pictures when given a few to choose between[[148]](#_ftn148) and people blinking more when given negative words than positive ones[[149]](#_ftn149) (with eye blinks being tied to cognitive processing).[[150]](#_ftn150)
This negativity bias appears in almost all antinatalist thinkers. If allowed to talk long enough, they always end up discounting the positive events in a person’s life and putting tons of weight on negative events, undermining their own arguments that all humans have an insurmountable bias toward overweighting the positive. They justify this bias as the logical way of looking at the world, implying that if you view life through rose-tinted glasses, you’re succumbing to a cognitive bias and are wrong about how much you like your life, whereas if your tendency is to view things negatively, your feelings are super valid and serve as proof they are right about everything.
In the absence of concrete proof that cognitive biases are sufficient to convince someone that a bad life is actually a good life, antinatalists often point out humans’ tendency to rate the quality of their lives in comparison to others and that humans learn to adapt to their circumstances, no matter how wretched they may be. They take this to mean many people who are happy with their lives and excited to be alive should not be.
Imagine some nihilistic, snooty, middle-class “new atheist” kid from the United States strolling up to someone from a developing country who is struggling to put food on the table. Imagine this unsuspecting person has learned to relish life—and yet this kid is trying to convince them that they are delusional and should resent their very existence. Imagine their eyes widening as the kid insists that, in fact, the world would be better if they had never been born. What antinatalists often really mean is that if they, in their cush, developed-world lives, can’t find happiness, how could those coming from strictly less wealthy nations possibly be of sound mind when asserting that their lives, and the lives of and their children, are worth living?
The truth, of course, is that many people experiencing deprivation enjoy lives filled with joy and dynamism while antinatalists suffer through a self-constructed hell. Ironically, antinatalists love claiming that they are actually super happy people—a notion one can instantly dispel by spending five seconds on the r/antinatalism subreddit or watching YouTube videos of antinatalists. It is pretty hard to miss a deep sense of despair and bitterness.
Arguments like: “You are wrong about how much you think you like your life,” resemble forms of abusive gaslighting frequently used in cults. When I (Malcolm) was younger, I used to recreationally engage with cults in an effort to understand how people could hold views so orthogonal to my own. One of the most common tools leveraged in cult recruiting processes involves attempts to convince otherwise-perfectly-content targets that they are actually miserable.
Argument Two: Positive Emotions Don’t Matter; Negative Emotions Do
More convincingly, antinatalists will argue that the positive emotions we think we feel do not actually impart meaning to our lives. The argument usually goes something like this:
Sisyphus was cursed to roll a ball up a hill forever—only to have it roll back down after making it to the top. Most people would see that as a meaningless existence.
Suppose someone reprogramed Sisyphus’ brain to enjoy this process and get a sense of deep fulfillment from rolling the ball up the hill. If you engaged him and tried to get him to stop, he wouldn’t, telling you how wonderful ball rolling was. Does his life have value now?
The average person’s intuition holds that his existence remains meaningless.
Antinatalists proceed to extend this argument to other scenarios: Suppose a person gained pleasure and fulfillment from eating feces. Would a life spent consuming fecal matter have value?
The gist of the argument is that if stupid things can make you happy or give you a feeling of fulfillment, then you should not derive meaning from positive emotions, and if positive emotional states have no value, then what’s the point of existing? David Benatar believes this point so strongly that he argues that he would be ambivalent between nonexistence and the most perfect life conceivable.
The belief that negative (but not positive) emotional states have value and a person’s aim in life should be to minimize negative emotional states is called negative utilitarianism. (Or at least antinatalists who make this argument believe this form of negative utilitarianism—there is a second form in which the reduction of suffering merely takes precedence over the promotion of pleasure.)
We are confident that any reader of our books can immediately see the hollowness of this argument, as the same Sisyphus argument they apply to positive emotions can also be applied to negative emotions—it just so happens that antinatalists “cheat” on this thought experiment when it is flipped. Alas, cheating on a thought experiment does not invalidate its implications.
How does this cheat work? Let’s say we programmed a paperclip maximizing AI to suffer when not making paper clips and asked an antinatalist: “Does the AI’s suffering matter?” Intuitively, they’d want to argue that yes, this suffering does matter, and we need to do something about it—however doing so would also invalidate their claims that pleasure is meaningless. So, instead, when presented with such arguments, antinatalists often argue that we could have simply not built the AI or not designed it to suffer.
Here’s the thing though: You don’t get to just remove key elements of a thought experiment and claim your arguments are valid. If we dropped a ball to demonstrate the presence of gravity, another person wouldn’t just take the ball from us and say: “Hah! Where’s your gravity now??” And yet, that’s exactly what antinatalists are doing when they just remove any suffering entity from the equation in the mirrored Sisyphus thought experiment.
The very point of the Sisyphus thought experiment is that positive emotional states can be dismissed as a thing of value because they can be induced by meaningless activity. As this point is not addressed by the cheat they use to get out of the mirrored thought experiment, the cheat cannot be used to negate the thought experiment’s implication that negative emotional states don’t have value. While we, personally, don’t agree with either version of the thought experiment, we do think that if you do accept one version, you cannot refute the inverse without being logically inconsistent.
Let’s be real: This thought experiment is kind of dumb. Take any utility maximization to its logical extreme and it will sound stupid.
- If a person is maximizing happiness it’s, “what about putting all humans in happiness pods?”
- If a person is maximizing negative utilitarianism it’s, “what about killing everyone?”
- If a person thinks emotions justify human existence, it’s, “what if a person derives happiness from eating poo?”
All these extreme claims do is obligate people to take stances for which they would be shamed in normie society—and then shame them for taking them in order to discredit them. In normie land, a person saying that all people should die, or that it’s acceptable to let people eat poop all day, is seen as a danger to society.
Antinatalists tie their tongues in knots trying to argue that, per their worldview, it would not be immoral to push a button that painlessly and simultaneously extinguished the life of every single person. We lose a lot of respect for a philosophy that is either unwilling or unable to publicly swallow the socially unpopular implications of their moral positions. As such, we have a lot more respect for groups like the Nonvoluntary Antinatalists who are at least transparent about their goal to forcibly sterilize the human race.[[151]](#_ftn151) Antinatalists not in the Nonvoluntary Antinatalist camp attempt to get out of this obvious inconsistency with the next argument.
Argument Three: “I extra pinky swear that I don’t want to kill you or myself”
Many antinatalists argue that “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. To someone making this argument, new moments are “poof” created out of thin air like magic—the future does not exist in any meaningful way until it is actualized.
Per our view, every decision you make determines which of countless potential futures will 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**. For example, if we have the capability to build a hospital and we choose instead to sit around and play video games, 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.
This mirrors the beef we have with those who think it is sinful to spill “seed” or that life begins at conception. All potential life has value and must have its moral weight considered. It strikes us as bizarre that people would fixate on arbitrary thresholds, like “sperm,” “embryo,” or the moment a baby’s head appears. That said, we don’t endorse endlessly spamming the world with babies, we need to carefully weigh the effect a potential life can have on all the other potential lives with which it could interact, as well as the potential lives that it may, in turn, create. It is somewhat ironic how much the antinatalist world view has in common with the “life begins at conception” worldview.
Argument Four: Praying for a Dead World (The Asymmetry Argument)
Antinatalist assertions that life matters once it has been created are reminiscent of another argument they constantly use, which proceeds as follows:
Baby born:
It is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering.
It is good for someone who does exist to feel happiness.
Baby 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.
They use this argument to claim that there is literally no moral downside if their actions prevent a human life from coming into existence even if that person would have loved existing, wanted to exist, and lived a great life.
The argument boils down to this claim: “It is not bad to prevent someone from existing who would have felt happiness and wanted to exist.” (Note: They tend to word this point a little differently: “It is not bad for someone who does not exist to not feel happiness.”)
But… WHY?? While it is socially acceptable to hold this view, seeing as our society doesn’t acculturate us to care about people who don’t exist yet because they are not relevant to its function, what makes it morally sound? There are all sorts of things for which we are morally accountable that society will neither reward nor punish.
In order to hold this position (that nothing is lost from non-existent positive emotional states) a person would have to believe the two things have the exact same moral weight:
- A vast, multicultural universe full of living beings that are incapable of suffering
- A cold and empty universe, devoid of all life
In attempts to prove this point, antinatalists commonly present the following thought experiment: While you would feel bad knowing that people were suffering on a deserted island somewhere, you would feel indifferent about an uninhabited island. This experiment is intentionally manipulative as you aren’t presented with the idea that the island could have been inhabited. Extinguished potential has negative utility.
Imagine relics on this island reveal that it used to host a thriving civilization that was driven to extinction—albeit painlessly—after nearby nuclear testing sterilized all residents. Imagine that its citizens didn’t suffer through this extinction given some unique quirk of their culture. Assuming you’re not a sociopath, you would find this scenario devastating, right? And if you arrived on the island just days after everyone was sterilized, you would feel far worse than you would had it happened ten thousand years ago.
For the asymmetry argument to work, antinatalists need to divide humanity into piles of people who do and don’t exist, but that is patently not how reality functions. Existence is a spectrum of potential. A person’s right to self-determination does not magically pop into existence the moment they pass some arbitrary developmental threshold. If antinatalists want to decide that their own lives have no value, that is fine, but they have no right to impose that judgment on other people with impunity merely because they have yet to be born.
Let’s say that in the absence of antinatalist interference, Tim and Mary intend to have a kid and name her Suzy. If an antinatalist wrote, “Suzy’s life has no value” on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and put it on a table in their house, at what exact moment would the statement, “Suzy’s life has no value,” stop being true? When Tim and Mary have sex? Upon Suzy’s conception? When she is born? When she utters her first words? When her brain is fully myelinated?
Human lives don’t suddenly come to exist over a split second. Creating an adult human is a process that begins with a parent’s intentions and doesn’t end until the human is fully myelinated in their mid-twenties. When you prevent someone (who otherwise would) from reaching adulthood, you have robbed that person of agency.
If your actions today trigger a chain of events that, in the future, rob another person of their agency, you are obviously morally culpable if that person already exists today. But why should that culpability disappear if the victim is presently unborn? We assume antinatalists would concede that action undertaken today (like rigging a magical agency-removing grenade to a door) is immoral if it could rob someone else of agency in the future, even if that person does not yet exist.
In other words, their moral position is that the following statement:
“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.”
This is an absurdly specific and suspiciously convenient moral carve out. We sure do hate these sorts of intuitionist arguments though. We only make them because it is the currency in which antinatalists deal.
**Argument Five: It Feels Right**
Most antinatalists rely on “intuition” to arrive at moral conclusions, which is a charitable way of saying: “My culture or biological instinct tells me this is true.” Intuition seems to be the core reason why antinatalists are convinced that suffering is intrinsically evil. While the use of intuition as a source of a priori knowledge is a common and widely accepted practice among professional philosophers,[[152]](#_ftn152) the mere fact that it’s a common practice doesn’t make it sound. Our “intuitions” are either culturally or biologically evolved instincts—none of the pressures that lead to their evolution were optimizing for moral or metaphysical truth.
I (Malcolm) started my college career as a quadruple major in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and philosophy, but dropped philosophy when it became clear that a huge chunk of my time in the field would need to be spent around people learning to argue, with increasing levels of sophistication, in support of positions they already held (through intuition) rather than searching for a truer understanding of the fabric of reality and investigating why they had those intuitions. The academic field of philosophy is nothing like its pop-culture stereotype, being much more focused on semantic hair splitting than a search for truth.
A person’s intuition can be changed with the flip of a switch using a TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) machine.[[153]](#_ftn153) We get that intuitions feel innate—they are coded to feel that way—but they objectively are not. **It seems silly to think an emotion is intrinsically bad because it “motivates you to stop feeling it” when that is literally the point of the emotion.** You feel pain when you shove your hand into hot coals so that you are motivated to take your hand out of the coals. There’s a reason why people with congenital insensitivity to pain die young.[[154]](#_ftn154)
In many ways, this book can be thought of as wholly refuting “intuitionism” by systematically investigating the forces behind intuition. That said, we would be willing to give antinatalists the benefit of the doubt on this intuitionist practice if they didn’t vehemently disregard the “intuition” of others.
`` ________________________________ ``
Only read the following if the argument against intuitionism above is not self-evident to you. The argument presented so far is generally called the “evolutionary argument” against intuitionism or “the naturalist argument for normative skepticism.” Philosophers’ counter arguments fall largely into six categories.[[155]](#_ftn155)
1) “If a moral intuition is widely shared and not self-benefiting, like “suffering is bad,” then it is likely true.”
Cultivars are evolutionarily pressured to conclude that suffering is bad (a cultivar that did not share this intuition would feature higher rates of graft, crime, etc. and thus be less productive than its contemporaries). Whether or not suffering is an intrinsic evil, all societies would come to both enforce this belief within them and punish those who publicly assert it isn’t an obvious truth. For that reason, we should be extra and doubly suspicious of this claim.
2) “Evolution can only explain broad moral intuitions like vague altruism, not more advanced, widely shared intuitions that don’t benefit the individual. Thus, we should throw out intuitions that can be easily explained by benefiting the individual—but not other intuitions.”
While this is true of biological evolution, it is not true of cultural evolution. In order to honestly hold the logic of this point in light of the evidence presented in this book, you would need to also claim that any intuition that benefits a cultivar cannot be trusted if it is widely shared. Unfortunately, you will quickly realize that all institutions either benefit the individual or the cultivar because that is just what intuitions are—the pre-coded bits of your world framing.
3) “If you disregard intuition, then you would only be able to get moral information from empirical testing. That being the case, how can you verify that empirical testing yields valid information about morality if you can’t get it from empirical testing?” This book offers numerous examples in which the logic of a moral claim can be worked out without empirical testing. For example, the claim that, “we should dismiss any moral intuition almost everyone in a large cultivar would hold, whether or not it comes from an intrinsic truth,” is a claim founded in logic, not empirical evidence. Once you discount your evolutionarily and societally hard-coded intuitions as objective truths, you will realize there are many sources of evidence about the true nature of reality and thousands of competing worldviews (all featuring internal logical consistency) to choose between. We do not argue that some other specific source of moral truth is uniquely good. We merely suggest that you bias yourself against intuition if a society would likely support a specific intuition even if it was not likely to be true.
4) “All arguments against intuitionism assume an atheistic perspective.” This again is not true. While modern soft-culture traditions often trust human intuitions, almost no hard cultures do. Instead, they see intuitions as highly susceptible to malevolent outside influence (be they demons or other forces). Vanishingly few traditional iterations of successful hard cultivars tell a person to “trust their gut” as they all know that is how the devil best manipulates you.
5) “From our current standpoint, we have every reason to regard our pro-social evolutionary heritage as providing us with roughly correct moral intuitions.”[[156]](#_ftn156) This argument holds that we should value biologically evolved prosocial instincts because they often align with the culturally evolved prosocial instincts enforced as norms by our societies. Such arguments only work if you assume their worldview (that the moral frameworks broadly agreed upon in our society are backed by intrinsic truth). Again, moral intuition is not evidence of some intrinsic moral truth if you would have had that intuition regardless of whether or not it was an intrinsic moral truth.
6) “Philosophers are special, extra good intuitors and won’t be subject to the average person’s evolutionary and societal biases when intuiting stuff.” Yes, this is a real thing argued in many academic papers. It’s not just obviously stupid, it’s also scientifically stupid in a way that can be proven.[[157]](#_ftn157) It’s that special kind of arrogance you would only expect from an entrenched priest class that has totally lost touch with reality.
It makes perfect sense why intuitionism would proliferate in a field like philosophy given that supporters of it can utilize the cultural mechanisms that punish people who do not “toe the line” of society’s evolved and hard-coded intuitions. Still it is deeply disheartening that so many otherwise intelligent people can’t immediately see the 1984-style sham being pulled. We debated calling out intuitionism because it has so deeply infected the field of philosophy that it will allow many who have cast their lot with the orthodoxy to dismiss us as yet another brand of heretic. That said, it is such an obvious “the emperor has no clothes” situation we can’t resist.
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How can we argue with such confidence that antinatalists are trying to justify pre-existing intuition rather than arrive at a logically reasoned truth? David Benatar (the present standard bearer of the antinatalist movement) admits that he has been an anti-natalist since he was a very young child.[[158]](#_ftn158) He simply used his position of power to force his intuition on other people and reinforce it within his own mind (he is head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town).
I, Simone, started out as an anti-natalist as well. It is normal for young kids to hold this position. Before we are ready to have kids, the average human is largely hard coded to see them as gross, annoying, and broadly distasteful. Antinatalism comes off as childish because it is quite literally the intuition of a child reinforced over a lifetime and galvanized by the cognitive dissonance felt by adherents as they damage their own lives. (You may think we are over-personalizing it, but a regular and spurious argument Benatar makes is that a major reason people argue for pronatalist positions is that they are biased by biological instinct. We feel forced to highlight the hypocrisy in his projection.)
This approach to philosophy as an exercise to build strong arguments supporting already-held intuitions about the world—instead of leveraging it as a means of building “truer” intuitions—contrasts heavily with ours. Anyone who has read our first book will know that our views on the meaning of life have evolved radically since then as we have encountered new information, heard better arguments, and engaged in further self-examination. For example, while we used to think our goal was to maximize the “volume” of sentience in the universe, we now do not even think sentience has value—as can be seen in this book’s chapter on the topic. We literally did a 180 on our entire worldview when presented with compelling, logically sound evidence and arguments. This is the difference between a worldview shaped by inquiry and inquiry shaped by a worldview.
You can create feelings of profundity with drugs or chanting. Just because something feels profound doesn’t mean it is inherently profound or meaningful. In the same breath, truly profound and meaningful things may not trigger feelings of profundity. Our read of the true antinatalist position is that they look for something to feel “obviously and unobjectionably meaningful” in the same way suffering feels “obviously and objectively bad” and because they can’t find such a thing, they assume intrinsic meaning doesn’t exist.
Humans underwent no evolutionary pressure to search for true meaning in the universe. To think we would be “coded” to recognize intrinsic meaning at an emotional level seems ludicrous. The same can be said of human cultures; they evolved just like our minds did.
When looking for meaning in the world, a person should think from the perspective of a higher-order entity unencumbered by our pre-programmed biases (positive and negative emotional states). Would an entity that didn’t feel suffering conclude it is intrinsically bad? Such seems highly unlikely to us. We see no reason to feel bad when a computer is unable to carry out its pre-programed actions and an entity that could not empathize with the way we interpret suffering would probably see our suffering as analogous to that. “Suffering” is merely a tool evolution used to keep us focused on our pre-programed actions—there is no greater meaning to it than there is to code running in a paperclip maximizer AI that prompts it to protest when blocked from making paperclips.