Benatar is so much ahead of the time . His existence although a harm to him is a great benefit to the rest of us . Also you can check out "Al Maari" one of the earliest and well documented vegan and antinatist poet and activist
Great video! If it's books you're into, there are two other books that are great intros: - Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (David Benatar) [This is a classic and a must read for people interested in antinatalist philosophy.] - The History of Antinatalism: How Philosophy Has Challenged the Question of Procreation (ed. by Kateřina Lochmanová) [Goes over... well, the historical stuff!] You're doing stellar work, keep it up!
Happy to see a new (for me) face in the antinatalist YT world. Quick reading recommendation: The Conspiracy Agaibst the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. It can really add to the Schopenhauer angle of anti-natalism.
Cool to hear you did some outreach! Was it just you on your own or did you go out with a group? Hopefully we'll see it as a future upload if it was recorded!
Anti-natalism is interesting, I've not heard of it before. I'm not sure if I completely agree with it, but there are some compelling arguments for it. I understand that we can't guarantee that a person will have a happy life, but on the other hand, we also can't end all suffering by stopping all human procreation. If humans disappeared right now, overall suffering would greatly decrease but non-human animals will carry on suffering even after the last human is gone. Thanks for the video, I'll definitely check out this book and some of the ones mentioned in the comments :)
Really great video. I am glad to have come across your work, because now I can identify this philosophy within a lot of my vegan, white, middle class friends. They're anti-natalist (without exclusively identifying as one) who believes it's unethical to bring life into a world that is already burning. What I find interesting is what this implies for those that do pro-create, especially those that are from countries that have been affected by war and geopolitics. Working classes and lower classes that has family and children, for reasons nothing other than the desire to continue life. Other than for life to fulfil itself. Now I kind of understand how veganism and anti-natalism connects with one another; this baseline desire to be completely ethical, cruelty free and morally pure is almost a reaction to how difficult, traumatising and 'dark' this world and life can be. But to argue that the world and the climate would be better off with less people, or no people, is verging on eugenics to me. Would there be no genocide or ethnic cleansing if people didn't exist? It's the same question as would you go back in time to kill baby Hitler. The fact is, baby Hitler is alive right now, in different forms. It's something that we can ponder but never truly feel comfortable answering, because what good will it actually do but lubricate our ego. I can see this movement taking on in the future as the world burns ever harder and we are forced to answer some terrible questions about violence perpetuated in our name; whether it'd be killing abused animals for consumption or bombing a country because it's people are in the way of settler colonialism, like in Palestine. I wonder if anti-natalisim is a purer approach to this feeling that we sometimes have, which is that we wish we had never been born. When there is so much pain around us, it can feel like nihilism is the answer. As a Buddhist, I actually find comfort and tender beauty in 'life is about suffering.' because it truly shows that this is the condition that we are in, and the aim is to be able to bear it. Maybe it's just a different approach to existence, but one must imagine Sissyphus smiling as they roll that rock uphill.
Suffering definitely exists and there is no shortage of it to go around. Still though it probably isn't as bad as it was during WW1 and WW2 etc. That suffering has to be staggering in scale although we're probably catching up due to the sheer population of the world
Great work 💚💚 As we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born - and particularly bad luck it is.” ― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Instantly subbed. Antinatalism is a philosophy that isn't spoken about enough. I don't like some of what I see being said about it online. People usually dismiss it as a symptom of depression (granted there is a lot of people who are depressed and use this philosophy to justify why they hate their lives). I'm also excited about the book recommendations!!!😍😍
Anti-Natalism is sort of an unspoken rule among many philosophers lol...I'm sure Plato was one but he wouldn't say it out right... none of these men had kids.
Very interesting. I don't know how anyone could be a philosopher without thinking deeply about the ethics of procreation. Should be the first and last question of philosophy.
@@buckfozos5554 it’s for sure a super important question. I think somewhere in the Nikayas of the Buddha he speaks on having kids…can’t remember what chapter
Not a book on antinatalism specifically, but I think any serious antinatalist should be familiar with philosophical pessimism broadly, and I'd recommend Joshua Dienstag's "Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit" as a great starting point. The strongest arguments against antinatalist thought are not going to be found in FAQ sections by antinatalist authors. In fact they are not even going to be found in the narrow context of moral philosophy. It requires an understanding of systems thinking and what humans (and other living organisms) truly are beyond our ability for abstraction and reasoning. Every system exists under (and because of) constraints. As humans we can let our imaginations run wild and also use reason, but we have our limitations. The same is true of social systems. To understand the nature of social systems, and how humans are embedded in them, is a necessary prerequisite to becoming aware of the obstacles in realizing an antinatalist project politically. Best of luck with your future outreach. You seem very good at it.
Have you ever read L.E.J. Brouwer? His philosophy takes after Schopenhauer's in some respects, but especially in terms of ethics and pessimism. There's a wonderful presentation by Teun Koetsier about him called "Brouwer’s Philosophical Views & the Bhagavad Gita," which is available on RU-vid. If you find the talk interesting, I suggest reading his "Life, Art, and Mysticism," as it is a beautiful work of art in itself. At least, if you work past the disparaging comments about women.
i dont really see any problem with antinatalism,it seems very compassionate ,and i havent seen yet any goog argument against it,having kids is always selfish because is a way for the parents to give meaning to their life and the unborn child does not have any needs or desires,ones we are alive we need to give some meaning to our live but this is our subjective need and life objetivly doesnt have any meaning,so life can be worth living but never whort creating,life can be horrible and it shouldn been impouse on nobody.This was a very good video
Antinatalists aren't compassionate when they continue to rely on the work of suffering procreated humans. Antinatalists should just live alone in the wild when they don't want to cause any suffering to other people.
What are your thoughts on associating Veganism with other philosophies such as anti-natalism? Should veganism be restricted to just talking about animal rights or should people include their own social and political ideas alongside it?
I think it depends on the situation. I find veganism and antinatalism to be very compatible viewpoints, and I think it can be appropriate to talk about them in context of each other.
So... It's late here and i need some sleep, but i've watched the vid and popped the top off another can of Asahi (because i exist) and i feel the urge to problematize something here that i find to be incoherent viz: the excerpts you provided from the text. To make it shorter i've numbered them in accordance with how they were presented on-screen - so a gap between sentences or a paragraph gap warrants a new number. There were two blocks of text in the vid, but i've just run the numbers sequentially through both. I've interjected my comments between the numbered sections: 1. "It is a philosophical viewpoint that is opposed to existence. It finds life inherently and deeply flawed in a number of ways. First and foremost, life inflicts an inordinate amount of pain and suffering." OK to the first sentence, but it's a little peculiar to be opposed to the very thing that provides the only justifications and possibilities for one to have a perspective on anything... and then to invest time and effort in the development of that perspective while continuing to perpetuate precisely what you are arguing against. Normally, or if we're serious about our ethical principles, we avoid doing whatever it is we're opposed to... but that's a minor point. Second sentence doesn't really say anything - just sets up the third: and i'm unclear about what this refers to. 'Life' does x, y and z? Which life? A particular one... some sub-grouping of the whole... all Life (from bacteria to Redwoods?) But more importantly it's the start of the incoherence i referred to above because, a little further on below, we're going to come to #5. It's pretty clear that, if you reject any possibility of calculating 'pain and suffering', then you're on fairly shaky ground to make claims about its extent - 'an inordinate amount of...' 2. "Second, it is totally unnecessary in that it is without any goal or purpose as such, except its own perpetuation." And precisely the same argument, which is necessarily an argument from ignorance, can be extended to anything and everything - it takes the same form as the 'i can't see the point, therefore it has no point'. This argument has historically been implicated in the destruction of much of the planet. 3. "Third, human existence is particularly reprehensible, in that [it] inflicts life consciously upon innocent sentient beings, children, who have not asked to be brought here and are thus victimized by being conscripted into the unnecessary process of birth, death and rebirth. Butchering and eating animals and subjecting them to cruelties of all kinds is another feature of human existence." First part of the first sentence - does this mean that the non-human world is reprehensible, though not quite as bad as the human bit? But for the rest: the underlying assumption here is that we 'exist' in this Mystic Platonic Realm, quite independent of any necessary and familiar fact of our existence in the material realm with which we are more properly familiar. Evil people violate our blissful non-existence-type-existence by dragging us into this appalling squalor where we perpetuate this cycle that plenty of people have invented but for which we have no evidence. The 'butchering' bit is curious too. It's by no means a peculiar 'feature of human existence' - it's rather more wide-spread than that and we're just one of many life-forms that engage in the practice. I think we have to be very careful with this. 'Eating animals' is not, in itself, 'bad'. 'Bad' is a moral judgment - a Human moral judgment - and not something we should be in the business of visiting upon other species; necessarily also labelling them 'bad' if they happen to be carnivorous or omnivorous (and composting all carnivorous plants while we're at it). And if we say we're only referring to humans with this, then we perpetuate our 'exceptional' status at the apex of The Great Chain of Being, which is even more unhelpful. There are better ways. 4. "Rejectionism is about moral and metaphysical rejection of existence on these grounds. The main implication of modern secular rejectionism is abstaining from procreation. Another name for rejectionism might therefore be philosophical antinatalism." ======= 5. "Rejectionism does not believe in the calculus of pain and pleasure, not only because any such exercise is impossible, given that there is no common unit of measurement, but also because its moral condemnation of existence is based on the irremediable presence of evil in the world." OK, so we're back to some amorphous non-calculating while insisting that the world is awash with 'it' - 'Evil'. 'Irremediable presence' - it's like a one in a billion thing that we can't get rid of, or what? We know from our personal experience that 'Evil' is not all pervasive... unless by some utterly unhinged non-reasoning you've decided that Existence and Evil are precisely and entirely correlated - To Be is Bad and: To Be Bad. 6. "It follows that to endorse existence is to condone evil, indeed to invite evil, albeit unintentionally." And so it is - we've arrived at 'Original Sin' 7. "It follows that those who support and endorse existence are responsible, even if indirectly, for the crimes of humanity." And that just means that i, and everyone like me, are to blame for what we fight against and for the consequences of the lifestyle and values we reject. My apologies - i got a bit flippant toward the end and i should do better but my Asahi is finished and it's 00:34. For reference - i'm vegan for almost 30 years and have been anti-procreation for 50 years. I appreciated you making this video, and others you've produced - i think what you're doing matters. I wonder if this comment is too long for a single posting??? No it's not!!! Cheers.
If you had two options: a world with more of people like you, or a world with less of people like you, which would you prefer to be born into? And for the sake of argument let's say you don't have a choice to not exist at all, you have to choose one.
If one believes in Gnosticiscm The ‘material world’ or its ‘instantiation’ in the simulation or material realms is ‘evil’ (despite the dualism of good / evil that clearly exists ). So my 2 older siblings have 6 children between them and their spouses . So I have 6 nieces and nephews that needs to exist and suffer through dystopia/ ww 3 (ish ) / SkyNet Etc. etc.
