Absolute For Death?

Extinctionism is grounded in a fundamental error. At least, I hope it is.

I always enjoy Wisdom of Crowds, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic’s Substack, but I particularly enjoy it when they (or the other authors who write there periodically) go “all the way down” on a subject. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I found Samuel Kimbriel’s recent piece on David Benatar’s extinctionist philosophy delightfully bracing. Which is not to say that I found it at all convincing.

Before explaining why, I should caveat that I haven’t read Benatar’s book, and I probably should before opining on his views. I have heard the argument for extinction made in other venues, though—possibly even by him, but I don’t recall that specifically—and not only in the form of philosophical argument. A couple of years ago, for example, I saw a concert workshop of a contemporary opera on the theme. It is, unquestionably, an idea that is in the air, and on an emotional level I think it can be deeply poignant. (I thought the opera showed real promise.) But as a philosophical matter, I’ve never thought it held any water at all.

What is the argument I’m talking about? In its narrow form, it claims that human life is a net negative to the universe. We are a rapaciously destructive species and it would have been better if our ancestors had never started walking upright. Since we can’t undo all the harm we’ve done, the least we can do is stop doing any harm by ceasing to be. As I understand it, this is not Benatar’s argument—but it’s the most common form of the case for human extinction that I have heard.

There are many problems with this line of thinking, but the most obvious one is that it rests implicitly on a romantic view of the natural world sans humans that bears little relationship to reality. Individual wild animals live far shorter and more stressful lives than they have the potential to live, and the ecology as a whole is not in a state of permanent balance but in a state of dynamic equilibrium that periodically falls into disequilibrium, sometimes catastrophically so. Moreover, the norm for other species is to grow like topsy much as humans did; what stops them from overrunning their ecological niche and destroying it is the success of other spieces in checking their ambitions. Meanwhile, human beings are the only species we know of capable of doing otherwise, of checking our own ambitions. Perhaps we never will do so—but if we don’t, then eventually we will fatally undermine the ecological basis of our continued existence, at which point the extinctionists will get their wish. In the long span of ecological time, to say nothing of geological time, it hardly matters whether we fail quickly or more slowly, and the ecological case for extinctionism really just amounts to pessimism about our likely future trajectory and the desire to get it over with, and not much else.

Benatar, as I understand it, goes further. His argument is that human beings do harm to our own offspring merely by bringing them into existence, and that this is true as such regardless of prevailing social conditions. As the Man In Black put it: “Life is pain. . . Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Since it obviously can’t be right to cause harm to someone, if existence is on-balance awful then it can’t be right to bring anyone into existence.

My first reaction to this kind of argument is a historical one. It’s striking to me that the generation that went through World War II and the Holocaust is the one that manifested the moral confidence to found the post-war liberal order, while this generation, which has witnessed the greatest improvement in the objective conditions of human life in all of human history, finds itself susceptible to arguments like Benatar’s. I wrote a long piece some time ago about this phenomenon, and how I think it is related more to the loss of a sense of futurity than objective suffering in the present. I’m not going to recap that whole piece here.

No, what I want to add here is a philosophical question. Is it even coherent to speak of non-existence as having a value that can be compared with existence? I’m coming around to the view that the answer is “no.” And if the answer is “no,” then ipso facto it is not possible to harm anyone by bringing them into existence, only to harm them once they have come into existence.

What could it mean to say that existence has a negative value to those who exist? It is, implicitly, to say that existence is worse than neutral. But what is neutral? Who established where that level is? Nobody—and I don’t think it’s possible to establish it. It’s possible to compare states of being, to determine that people are on average happier at certain ages than others, happier under certain conditions than under others, etc. We can even do this on a grand scale and opine (for example) that civilization itself may have made humanity less happy than we were, on average, as hunter-gatherers, an overall degradation from which humanity has only recovered with the advent and global spread of the Industrial Revolution. But all of these are like-with-like comparisons between ways of being. How could you compare that any of those states with the state of non-being?

You can’t, I don’t think. “Being” isn’t an attribute; it’s a predicate to having attributes. It is not possible for it to be better for you never to have been born because in that hypothetical there would be no you to have been better. It’s just a nonsense statement.

Does that mean that it’s always a good thing to bring new life into being? Not necessarily. It can be rational to say “I can’t have a child right now because that child would be born to suffering”—but that only makes sense in comparative terms, not absolute terms: “My child will suffer more than other children” or “more than I can bear” or “more than the child I hope to have after I finish school.” Those are rational (though not necessarily correct) statements. But your child can’t suffer more than a non-child, and it can’t suffer less either. It can’t anything relative to a non-child, because a non-child isn’t something with attributes of any kind. A non-person doesn’t rest at zero on a scale from negative to positive infinity. It’s not on the scale at all.

If I’m right about that, then the “life is pain” case for extinctionism collapses into the same essential pessimism as the ecological case. It’s not that it is harmful as such to bring someone into being, but that we are convinced that we, specifically, cannot possibly do justice to our offspring, cannot give them the life we feel they deserve, in comparison with the ones we had or (more likely) the ones we imagine they ought to have. That suggests that, perversely, it’s precisely because life has gotten better that these kinds of ideas are getting traction.

That’s a possibility mooted by one of the oldest philosophical works in the Western canon to meditate on these questions. Ecclesiastes (who may also have come to these thoughts through preoccupation with his offspring) says at one point that it is better to be stillborn than to live a long life with wealth and a hundred children and still be unsatisfied. Yet later, he reverses himself, saying it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion, since any kind of life is preferable to the nothingness of death. If I’m right, then as a philosophical matter both comparisons are nonsense—but it’s telling nonetheless that dissatisfaction in success ranks as more intolerable than abject lowliness.

If there’s a harm being done there, though, it was not done to us by our progenitors, but by ourselves. And if we aim to solve that by making our quietus with a bare bodkin, then it seems to me there’s little left of the idea of “harm” as the basis of values in the first place.