Nobody Wanted To Be Born

XVIII century In Lisbon it was found that one such Maria Duran is a woman. This fact was initially identified by a city doctor and surgeon, and then confirmed by two church "spiritual parents" [1]. Maria Duran was delighted with this assessment, which meant she had opened her way to Evora's sister's monastery. The women's society for an inexperienced young woman was an exciting time of unprecedented opportunities.

As it's easy to guess, Maria Duran in the Evora monastery disturbed the usual contemplative life of sisters. Official documents say that the biggest scandal arose when (sic!) Maria Duran suddenly took advantage of her male organ (membro viril). "This is the clearest evidence that she has entered into a deal with a devil who hides the signs of a male sexual organ from the physical examination of the most experienced surgeons at one end," the letter says (Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal, 2012: p. 214 )

Maria Duran has proven to be the most proud not to deal with the devil, but rather how far people can go for reproductive satisfaction. I'm inclined to think that not only Duran's panel, but also many similar avant-garde rarely thought about the very meaning of procreation. What does the propagation act mean to the emerging children and what - to the future world?

author David Dellruelle, Resilience, 2016

Philosophical anti-natalism is the view that it is morally wrong to give birth to children. He bases itself on more or less the following arguments [2]:

Philanthropic argument: the appearance of a human being is always harm, i.e. Y Birth is harm, and not harm is not harmless. This is called a philanthropic argument, because it is considering what is better (born or not) for the very beginning of X, and not for giving birth to it or for any other people. The question is not about the position of Lithuanians or parents in relation to the birth of a child, but whether it is better for a particular child X to be born or not. Baby X is never neglected because of the fundamental asymmetry between harm and benefits to an existing and non-existent individual.

After all, inevitably we condemn him to childbirth during his childbirth. But if the child never starts to exist, he will be protected from any damage, which is good. On the other hand, you say that the born child has the opportunity to enjoy pleasures and other beautiful aspects of life. This is good. But the absence of pleasure and other goodness is not bad for a child who does not exist. The absence of any good would be bad only if there was something that missed that good. This asymmetry can be represented by a table:

First scenario: . Second scenario:

X exists / X never exists
Injury (bad) / No damage (good)
The presence of a good (good)/ No Benefit (Not Bad)

The second scenario is more valuable to the child X. Without giving birth, the parents of the child will protect him from harm that would be harmful to him. Meanwhile, taking away the potential benefits that would be good for him would not do anything wrong, because, generally speaking, there is nothing to take away from it. A child never born can not lose the benefit, nor can he be harmed. Therefore, in the absence of a child, we will not do anything bad for that child. When we give birth to a child, we harm him and condemn suffering.

This is confirmed by daily intuition. First, we feel committed to not bringing life to those who are suffering greatly, but we are not committed to giving birth to those for whom life is happy. We feel that it would be bad for a child to be born in conditions that would cause a lot of pain. However, not creating a child in a good environment is not a bad thing. In other words, it's common practice to assume that poor conditions are a sufficient reason to not give birth to a child, but good conditions are not sufficient grounds for giving birth to a child.

Secondly, retrospectively it is possible to regret the birth of a suffering child, but it is unusual to regret having not done a child capable of growing in good conditions (sic!) Thinking about the happiness of a child who is not a child. If we cry without having children, we will covet ourselves or our parents, or our grandparents, etc. However, it is unusual to regret the unborn child himself.

Thirdly, we tend to regret people who are suffering in life, but we never regret how happy people who have never been born. We spend a lot of time regretting the destruction of the war-torn Ukraine or (somehow less) Syrian people, but I do not care if we are crying for many unhappy happy people in Marseille or India.

According to another, misanthropic argument, having no children is a morally correct solution, because the people who are born we ourselves will cause evil and pain in the world, and we have a duty to not create such dangerous creatures. For example, it would be morally wrong to create and spread a virus that causes death and suffering. Our children can cause the same death or pain.

We value our kind according to the exceptional achievements of culture, science and technology, although they: 1) are not accessible to the majority and most of them do not create themselves; 2) even the most intelligent people achieve them only by sacrificing and giving away; 3) There is no other type of land that can bring us into place (context) with our achievements and give us a more modest perspective. It does not make sense to judge the entire species only by its elite. In addition, even the elite has serious shortcomings that we sometimes do not notice. In the context of each large-scale tragedy, we can trace the intellectual (sapiens) elite's involvement.

Therefore, when deciding whether or not to give birth, we can not follow the illusion that our child will be one of the morally responsible, intelligent and generous animals of the good, because, unfortunately, there are few, if any, in general. We like to think of a person as the summit of rationality, when in reality we are often unable to perform even the necessary rational decisions or empathetic actions. There is no reason to think that our children will be different.

We postulate how much we "think", but still we are incredibly stupid. Millions of people, knowing all the possible damage, smoke daily, squeal, get drunk, then sit behind the wheel. There is no shortage of obvious promotional achievements, i.e. Y Evidence of the credibility of living people. These "heroes" could include a political slogan and demagoguery, which without difficulty provides unlimited political power to individuals with limited liability. Not a small proof of human foolishness - with the seriousness they accept, sporting events that do not change anything, team colors, dysfunctional music, movie stars, crazy fashions and media headlines, not to mention anti-discriminatory factors.

People's foolishness leads to morally meaningful actions. For example, conformism can blur even the most obvious facts into flour - people tend to vote on how the land appeared, what is a family, and so on. They are obedient and obedient to any lone fanatics who are looking for whom to cut their heads and fingers. If the witch hunt had been somewhat rational, it should have ended with the same results as the unicorn hunt. Unfortunately, due to the usual conformism between the 1450s and 1700s, tens of thousands of witches were killed [3].

Most people obey any commandment of authority that is not caught up in atrocities of the highest magnitude. There is no danger to man as another person. This is the most banal thing. The axis of misanthropic argument: knowing all this, creating a new person is morally irresponsible. In the absence of illusory optimism, we should reasonably refrain from holding hands for the disappearance of all humanity, not only in Lithuania, but also in all of humanity.

L'épilogue semble proche. Antinatalism follows from a rational and universally accepted worldview, according to which evil or harm in the world is inevitable and indestructible. Poverty, deprivation, war, atrocities, vulgarity, and mass grave vulture are becoming a child's school backpack far from the first grade. Why not protect them from such a fate? It does not cost anything.

[1] The priests found that Maria Duran was sitting in a "commonly known devil" (demon's familiar), so she did not find it necessary to make her a true exorcism.

[2] Read more about Philosophical Antinatalism at Ben David's stores.

[3] Hunts of witches continue in the present:

credits: Laurynas Adomaitis