Robin Hanson supports the Caplan & Glaeser position against Mankiw and Willkinson, because his feelings are important to him no matter what scoffing skeptics say. I tried to post a comment, but it got flagged as spam so I put it here:
I posted about this earlier, but since it’s appropriate I figured I’d notify people who might be interested, Chip Smith has been writing a series of posts in anti-natalism sparked by David Benatar’s book in part one. He shifts from Benatar’s utilitarianism to deontological ethics in part two, arguing that the libertarian non-agression principle and pro-life ethics both imply anti-natalism, and in addition reject genocide that utilitarian anti-natalism would seem to imply. He argues that Andrea Yates was a better follower of Christian dogma than most in part three, given the infinite negative utility of hell and the non-zero probability of being damned if allowed to live. In part four he discusses transhumanist immortalism and how the awfulness of aging and death support the anti-natalist position. He also notes that despite being anti-natalist atheist who sees nothing morally objectionable about abortion he thinks it should be legally prohibited. His most recent post discussed Michael Cook’s review of Benatar’s book at Spiked.
From an egoist perspective, I say nuts to the kids who must suffer because I spawned them. Parents tell their kids “too bad, so sad” and other I’m-the-boss variants all the time, so why not disregard any of their possible objections to conception?
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 10, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Thanks for the dead-accurate summary. And my apologies to anyone who cares for having left this in the wings. I had several false starts with the final installment — which largely deals with prescriptivism and Benatar’s stance on abortion — but then I got sidetracked with this publishing project (which’ll be announced this month, just as soon as the website is ready for prime time). Anyway, it’s all in the offing, as they say.
From a purely egoistic perspective, I think you’re on solid ground. Of course, one can make an egoistic case for damn near anything, from Nozickian side-constraints to the joys of predation, so I’m not sure how well it will play with the usual suspects.
Speaking of whom, isn’t it interesting how the antinatalist nostrum rankles people? I was reminded of this most recently when Bryan Caplan’s surprisingly dismissive head-in-the-sand post on Benatar’s thesis was met with more than the usual degree of tooth-gnashing ill will. I had always assumed that Holocaust Revisionism was the most inflammatory subject one could broach in polite company, but it seems there’s no shortage of violent sentiment toward professor Benatar. When he isn’t being chided for failing to off himself, it seems he’s being threatened with fisticuffs. Maybe he should watch his back lest he be pummeled like Faurisson. Maybe I should as well.
There must be a reason for this.
December 10, 2007 at 1:53 pm
I can hardly fault you for that given how I’ve put off responding to you on revisionism (no, it’s not because I’ve come to have doubts).
It doesn’t seem to me that anti-natalism inspires the same kind of animus as revisionism. I’d say it’s more dismissal. With revisionism there is an historical fact in dispute which could hypothetically go one way or another, and it just so happens that the people who dispute it tend to be those oh-so-hateable neo-nazis (I got in a spat with one relatively open about it as the conversation went on here). I’d also say that the extinctionists or “zero-population growth” folks are considered more acceptable than revisionists. Mencius Moldbug even used that sentiment (though I consider “The World Without Us” to be more whimsical as far as I can tell) as a contrast to white nationalism, which strikes me as less despised than revisionism. My prediction is that the worst Benatar will receive is nasty comments on the internet.
Perhaps we could combine as many revulsions we can into one by proposing that in order to prevent procreation all intercourse must be between pre-pubescent children and nazis. Homosexual nazis.
On the subject of responding to an argument with a fist, an Overcoming Bias commenter pointed out a youtube video of Buzz Aldrin clocking an annoying moon-hoaxer after we had been discussing the merits (or demerits) of that approach.
December 10, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I’d like to add that I agree with you that it’s too easy to make an egoistic case for just about anything. I’d like to extend it from the first-person prescriptive to the descriptive. Parents and children do not have identical interests (those who study evolution can give good examples). Parents may say they love their children equally, but they usually have favorites. Parents are willing to put their children through suffering if it meets their ends (with our genes predisposing those ends to be the spread of those same genes), which is why your anti-natalism argument will persuade fewer than the “humans are a cancer on the environment” one. The exception is Andrea Yates, who as you noted really tried to do the best thing for her children taking into account the horrific suffering in their future she thought was a distinct probability if they lived.
December 10, 2007 at 4:20 pm
“Perhaps we could combine as many revulsions we can into one by proposing that in order to prevent procreation all intercourse must be between pre-pubescent children and nazis. Homosexual nazis.”
I’ll try to come up with a bumper sticker.
December 11, 2007 at 6:22 am
“Parents are willing to put their children through suffering if it meets their ends (with our genes predisposing those ends to be the spread of those same genes), which is why your anti-natalism argument will persuade fewer than the “humans are a cancer on the environment” one.”
Yes. I was being a semi-facetious, btw, in comparing antinatalism with HR, but what stirs rancor with the former, I suspect, is that it trips some guarded polarities by appropriating widely embraced moral language to expose the core selfishness behind ubiquitous procreative impulses. From an revealingly different angle, the Yates case strikes at the same nerve; by taking the logical implications of her faith seriously (regardless of her mental state) poor Andrea exposes the shallow underpinnings of religious belief. It’s more folk psychology than faith, and the same is true wrt the highminded reasons people reflexively trot out to justify “flourishing life” or whatever. Ask a few pointed questions and the moral garb is revealed as paper-thin post-hoc verbal dressing. From the vantage of libertarian flavored ethics, there is no easily sustainable defense for having children. It’s an inherently selfish (and I believe inherently harmful) drive rooted in extra-moral genetic realities. Ethical antinatalism makes this clear. And folks take offense.
That people are so quick to lump philanthropic/nonaggressive varieties of antinatalism in with the misanthropic Humans-as-plague deep-ecology line is itself telling. All the better to avoid confronting the rift in the moral order. This may have struck me most forcefully when I read Rothbard’s musings on “Children’s Rights” in EOL with open eyes. His logic begs the ultimate conclusion at every turn, yet he never makes the connection, even to explode it. Of all people, he should have. But he didn’t. Q.E.D.
December 11, 2007 at 8:22 am
So, do either Chip or TGGP regret existing? Would you really rather have not existed? I think the main obstacle most of us face to taking this position seriously is that we think few people actually regret existing.
December 11, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I think the question is less relevant than it seems. But my honest answer is: sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
December 11, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Robin pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Antinatalism appears very much to be the output of a depressive and pessimistic mindset.
Given all we know about how rational arguments are almost always post hoc justifications for what we believe for entirely different reasons (and of course the antinatalists are playing the armchair psychologist card in this thread themselves), I simply do not accept that antinatalism is any more (or less) rational than pronatalism.
On the other hand, it is certainly a less successful meme, and destined to become even less prevalent in the future. . .
December 11, 2007 at 8:17 pm
I’ve never not existed as far as I remember and don’t really know what it’s like to compare it with existing. My gut feeling is that existing is pretty good, but I haven’t gotten to the horrible dying part or even the declining with age and regretting the past part.
Matthew, depressed people tend to have a more accurate view of things so if you are right the anti-natalists might be as well!
December 11, 2007 at 11:18 pm
The question of whether antinatalism is or isn’t rational in comparison with, um, everything else, will depend on your premises and preferences. The point I continually come back to is insipidly simple. Where the interests of those who do not yet exist are at issue, speculation about deprivation is always misplaced while speculation about risk is always germane.
There is simply no way of knowing with any degree of certainty how good or bad a life will be until that life is set into motion. I would argue that most lives are worse than people imagine them to be, but one needn’t adopt the pessimistic view to recognize, in purely factual terms, that people — and other sentient critters — suffer horrible misfortunes every day. People succumb to debilitating afflictions. People are raped and assaulted. People starve. People are burned and tortured and shot and holocausted and conscripted into warfare. People mourn, and suffer from heartbreak and loneliness and failure. Yes, there is love and laughter and pizza, and the occasional blow job if you’re lucky. But there is no rational reason to believe that the never-existent miss out these things, at least not in the sense that implies experiential deprivation. Where there is no sentient (or potentially sentient) being, the absence of pleasure seems morally meaningless. Should a person be brought into existence, that person may or may not feel blessed by their lot, but as real as their potential for fulfillment may be, they are yet likely to suffer, and there is the very real chance that their suffering will be immeasurable.
I believe that chance is the salient point, and the prescription that follows is clear cut: play it safe. Don’t create new people and no one gets hurt. The alternative is to roll the dice, without the consent of he or she who is yet to be, and to hope for the best.
As the hipster chicks in my office are fond of saying, “that’s not ok.”
February 5, 2008 at 10:51 am
re: “Matthew, depressed people tend to have a more accurate view of things so if you are right the anti-natalists might be as well!”
I used to have an article lying around here somewhere (Psychology Today?) that drew a direct correlation between the ability to lie to oneself, and happiness. The article went on to state that those who most benefited from ‘depression therapy’ actually lost the ability, to some degree, to see things the way they really were.
So, to say that… “Antinatalism appears very much to be the output of a depressive and pessimistic mindset.”…may also be an indirect and unintentional way of affirming the truth of it.
February 5, 2008 at 11:03 am
As to the question ‘do I regret existing’, I can easily answer that in the affirmative. Hell, I regret that existence exists! That doesn’t mean there haven’t been enjoyable and/or fulfilling moments. But, given the aggregate of circumstances, life just isn’t worth the toss. I think I’ve gotta go with Anaximander here…”The source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time.” Metaphorical, to be sure, but I think it gets to the gist of the feelings involved here.
March 10, 2011 at 12:38 pm
Robin hits a nail that isn’t especially important. It’s morally problematic to non-consensually impose a mix of good and ill on someone, even if they, ex post, say that on balance they are pleased with the mix.
One problem is that people convince themselves that what happened was for the best, or at least better than it really was, so ex post judgements are unreliable. None of us chose to exist, but it’s unlikely that our accounting of the good and ill we’ve experienced in life is accurate, and it’s almost certainly distorted in favor of the good.
Another problem is deontological: Harming someone and then compensating for the harm is worse than not harming them in the first place. This isn’t absolute: shoving someone out the way of an oncoming truck and causing them to skin their knee on the sidewalk is a good thing to do. But even assuming that the compensation is in fact equal to or greater than the harm (and not just rationalized ex post as such by the victim), it’s still problematic to punch someone in the stomach and then give them a hundred dollars, which is a trade that would leave most people in the world better off, without having securing their consent.
I’m not an antinatalist, but I’m sympathetic to the position and think that there are a lot of people that for their own sake shouldn’t have been brought into existence — perhaps even outnumbering those whose existence has had a greater share of good than of ill. The number of births that should occur is somewhere between zero percent and infinity percent of those that do occur. Antinatalists have a number of arguments for why it ought to be lower than it currently is, and for them, the arguments are strong enough to bring that percent down to zero. Even thoughtful people like Robin seem to miss that just because you don’t think that the arguments are strong as strong as antinatalists think they are doesn’t mean that they have no weight at all and should not cause you do revise downward what you think the optimum number of births is.