Anti-natalism and Miserabilism.

The ultimate miserabilist

Just when you thought philosophers couldn’t get any more pessimistic, one of them surprises you.

What is there about utilitarians that makes them such miserabilists? The greatest happiness for the greatest number is the heart of their philosophy, but just try to find a happy utilitarian. The first of them, Jeremy Bentham, was such a sourpuss that he seemed pickled in vinegar. And in fact, he was, sort of. His embalmed body (pictured) still sits in a cabinet in University College London, one of its principal tourist attractions. He had no wife and no children. The greatest of them, John Stuart Mill, made utilitarianism a mainstream philosophy. But he suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of 20, stole another man’s wife and had no children of his own. And while Peter Singer, the most notorious of contemporary utilitarians, may be a karaoke champ in private life, his writings suggest otherwise.

However, these are bit players in the drama of miserabilism compared with South African academic David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Although the book has not been widely reviewed in the popular press, it was published by Oxford University Press and has been presented as a serious contribution to the increasingly influential philosophy of utilitarianism.

Professor Benatar’s thesis is that life is so horrid that we all would be better off had we never existed. And not just us, but all sentient life. He introduces his thesis with a Jewish witticism: “Life is so terrible, it would have been better never to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!”

Read the rest here.

I have never come across this ‘philosophy’ before. I am astounded by it. Now, that can be a good thing … to be compelled to think about something. And even this has encouraged me to think about the joy of living–in the face of tragedy, discontent, disappointment.

But I have begun to wonder whether anti-natalism is best viewed as a philosophy — or, rather, as a psychological issue. C. S. Lewis reminds us that the insane person is not someone who has lost his mind. In fact, such a person has lost everything BUT his mind. There seems to me that there is a species of logic in this view of life, but it needs to be analyzed psychologically rather than philosophically. What kind of life experiences lead one to think that existence is a moral problem? I would love to read the autobiography of David Benatar. Did his mother not hug him enough as a child? Paul Vitz supplies a Freudian analysis of atheism, and states that many leading atheists have had difficulty relationships with their fathers, or no relationship at all with an absent father. He also notes, as have many others, that atheism can be a cover for insecurity in the radically atheistic environment in some university contexts–I had better play the atheist lest I be thought childish, &c.

Last fall one of my atheistic colleagues–and a friend, by the way–gave a presentation on Nietzsche. It was well done, and I found it time well spent. He and another philosopher got into a useful debate about whether or not it is proper to look at the personality of the progenitor of an idea. The presenter said NO, while the other interlocutor said YES. I agree with the latter, because ideas are not disembodied spirits. They can be treated as such, but at some point we need to pay attention to the origin of the idea. For example, the philosophies of Socrates and Plato could not have come into being apart from the city-state, polis, of ancient Greece. Their thought could not have been produced under Alexander the Great where the city lost its independence.

It is important in our analysis of ideas to reckon with their origin. If a given idea can be produced only by a certain kind of mind — well, that should be of especial significance. Oh, I know that that sword cuts in every different direction, and I accept that as proper and desirable.

Analyze away.