Whenever I discuss my antinatalistic viewpoint and present the arguments for it, I find that the central insight, namely, that there is an assymetry of pleasures and pains between born and unborn individuals, is extremely counter-intuitive for most people and is somewhat hard to explain in familiar terms. Lately, however, I have spent some time thinking about improving this and have, hopefully, come up with a satisfactory way to think about it.
When thinking about pleasures and pains, I propose to introduce a measure of involvement or presence necessary to "feel" this stimulus. I put feeling in parentheses because I don't mean it in the usual sense, but rather in the sense of being the subject of a stimulus, the potential beneficiary of experience.
Feeling pleasure requires high presence.
Feeling pain requires high presence.
Feeling an absence of pleasure (unfulfillment, frustration in desires) requires presence.
Feeling an absence of suffering (not suffering, nothing) requires no presence.
In the usual, familiar case of humans it is worth understanding pleasures as purely evolutionary - sex, sleep, solving puzzles, sweets and lolcats are a source of pleasure not because they possess inherent phenomenological pleasure attributes that we perceive, but rather our brains have evolved to allow perceiving certain stimuli as pleasurable, usually to serve as a drive for evolutionary advantageous behavior - mating, resting, feeding, attaining mastery. Dennett has explained this perfectly here. So pleasures as stimuli require sophisticated presence - a brain. Put another way - for a stimulus to serve as a source of pleasure, there must be a brain present that would allow for it.
Pains are a similar story - organisms develop neural pathways to expediently and reliably inform the brain that a stimulus is harmful and to force a behavior of self-preservation. It becomes problematic, unfortunately, when consciousness allows for feeling oneself feeling pain. So humans being the most conscious beings on the planet are vulnerable to the most profound suffering while, admittedly, capable of experiencing the greatest level of pleasure as well.
Now, about unborn people. I think that it is useful to think of the unborn as the amount of matter necessary for rudimentary consciousness - in this sense ALL matter is a part of an unborn person's body (curiously, even a living person's body's matter can in time become a part of another's). Now we can claim that a rock is, in fact, a part of an unborn child and birth would then be seen as a biological arrangement of matter to allow for consciousness. Perhaps we can even say, without straining credulity, that a rock IS a child, albeit not yet configurated to have consciousness. Now we can think about the unborn in a materialistic setting. I think it is not unreasonable to claim that the level of presence of rocks is zero, since there is no way for a rock to be frustrated in what amounts to being a rock. I think we can claim without problem that a rock would be indifferent to falling into a star and being fused into different chemicals, much like we could claim that the subatomic particles that constitute the rock could care less whether they are a part of a hydrogen atom, an iron atom or a part of a neutron star's chemically indeterminate mass. So being a rock, i.e. unborn, by default makes one unable interpret a stimulus as either pleasurable or painful. I pose the conclusion this way to point out that the common-sense attitude of rocks not being stimulated at all since they lack the capacity to interpret the stimuli might be mistaken. Absence of pleasures is not frustrating to rocks for they have no frustratable desire to have pleasures. So if my arguments hold water, the only purview of "feeling" available to the unborn is, indeed, an absence of suffering. Let me repeat - all inanimate matter can not and does not suffer every moment of every day. And this is capitally good. Consider the alternative - imagine all matter conscious. The center of the Earth, the Sun, meteorites - all with a consciousness similar to human's. I contend that such animate matter would be utterly miserable since many of their desires would be frustrated with no means to relieve this frustration.
I hope I have demonstrated that it is possible to think of all inanimate matter as in a state of blissful non-suffering, especially when compared to a conscious existence. Hence reproduction can be viewed as a transgression against this natural state of matter, transforming it into beings that are severely disadvantaged in their ability to avoid suffering, even if it grants the laughable ability to enjoy pleasures which turn into pains if they can't be enjoyed due to circumstance.
Discuss!
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