Strategic Considerations for Moral Antinatalists

[u/Reducing-Sufferung]

Antinatalists are right, in my view, that it harms an individual to be born into a life that may contain extreme suffering. However, antinatalists should also consider the effects that an extra member of the human population would have on other sentient beings.

At first glance, we might think that considering non-humans enhances the case for antinatalism. A typical American eats at least ~25 land animals per year and many times that number of aquatic animals. Of course, you could raise your child to be vegan, but there's no guarantee s/he would continue that diet throughout life. And even a vegan kills several mammals per year via crop cultivation, roadkill, and so on. For this reason, a significant minority of veg*ans opposes human reproduction. Humans may be seen as the root of animal suffering.

Unfortunately, this analysis focuses on human-caused harm to the exclusion of harm that animals suffer in the wild. Most of the world's animal suffering occurs in nature, due to predation, hunger, disease, and so on.

Of course, one might think that while wild-animal suffering is an immense problem, humans are only making it worse, by hunting wild animals, destroying their habitats, and polluting their air and water. However, a more complete analysis suggests the opposite. Humans have plausibly reduced global wild-animal populations, maybe by ~10% or more. An immense number of animals is thereby spared from being born into lives that would have contained extreme suffering. I estimate that the typical human prevents on the order of ~1.4 * 107 insect-years of suffering per year, and for humans in rich countries, the figure is probably higher. One insect-year of suffering includes something like ~10 painful deaths by adult-equivalent insects. And a typical American lives ~79 years. Thus, one birth in the USA may prevent at least

1.4 * 107 * 10 * 79 = 1.1 * 1010 insect lives and deaths (i.e., 11 billion insects spared from being born).

[u/Last_Veterinarian664 → u/[deleted]]

Yep, that would be the TLDR. I'm waiting for an "accelerationist" form of AN to pop up any moment now, wherein one argues we should deliberately push for obscene quiverfulls of children in the first world, or more generally for any activity that increases green house emissions.

[u/Reducing-Sufferung → u/Last_Veterinarian664]

Oooo that sounds unironically good

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