Soft antinatalism I — Brief Inconsolable

We don’t normally think of bringing new people into existence (i.e. through having children) as a bad thing.  Some thinkers — the most prominent of whom is probably the South African philosopher David Benatar, who lays out a comprehensive antinatalist case in his boo Better Never to Have Been:  The Harm of Coming into Existence — disagree.  These antinatalists think that it is wrong or almost always wrong to have children.  Can the Break-Even Heuristic help us think about whether we should be antinatalists?

Let us start with a boundary case, that of Brief Inconsolable.  Brief Inconsolable is a wretched baby girl who, if she is conceived and born, will live only twenty-four hours in horrible pain.  She cannot be comforted, even by parental love, nor can she be paillied.  All she will ever do is cry in misery and then die.

It seems rock-solid obvious to me that anyone who wanted to conceive and give birth to Brief Inconsolable, for just about anything within the range of ordinary reasons that sane people might give for having children (we shall set aside science-fictional cases in which Brief Inconsolable’s birth is somehow necessary as a means to avert some horrible catastrophe) is acting wrongly.  Very wrongly.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t see anyone who would knowlingly bring Brief Inconsolable into existence as anything other than a monster.

I should perhaps offer a point of clarification:  I am not (here) offering an argument that Brief Inconsolable ought to be aborted or euthenized, only that she should not be conceived.  If you want a supporting story around Brief Inconsolable to make this clear, imagine this: suppose that every decade Earth is visited for a month by the Black Comet.  The Black Comet gives off radiation which cases any child conceived during its visit to be born as a Brief Inconsolable, but otherwise has no ill effects on people already existing.  John and Mary are a fertile couple contemplating having a child, and the Black Comet is visiting.  They have every reason to believe that their attempts at conception are just as likely to be successful next month after the depature of the Black Comet as they are now.  Should we condemn them if they do not postpone their attempts at conception until next month?  Yes.

If you share my intuition that it is wrong to bring a Brief Inconsolable into existence — and I don’t think that many people, then we have a limiting case that shows that it is at least somethings wrong to bring a new person into existence.  The question then becomes whether there are other expected lives, less dominated by suffering than than that of Brief Inconsolable, which it would be likewise wrong to bring into existence.  This question wew shall consider in posts in the near future.

Not self-pity

When I tell people that I think that my life is on balance suffering, a common response is to treat that observation as a form of self-pity and to respond with moral indignation.  “How dare you say such a thing?  Think of all the blessings in your life!  Think of all the people who are worse off than you are!”

Thank you, I am perfectly aware that many people are worse off than me.  Indeed, I suspect that I am a good deal better off than most people who now live or who have ever lived.  I have never an illness more serious than childhood appendicitis.  I have never been a parent to a child who died young.  I have never been poor, even as “poor” is understood in a rich industrial society.  I have never been to prison, or been the victim of any crime (as far as I know) more serious than a trivial misdemeanor.  I have never (again, as far as I know) been falsely accused of any form of serious wrongdoing.  I have never had to earn a living doing backbreaking labor in a field or a mine or a factory.  I have never had an abusive boss or domestic partner.  I am not the member of any hated ethnic or sexual outgroup.  (At worst I am an atheist with some strange ideas about life and some weird sexual predilections, but I don’t think that makes my life as difficult as even that of middle-class African-Americans in the contemporary American society).

I get it. I enjoy a lot of privilege.

When I say that I think my life is on balance suffering, I am not engaging in a competitive bid for scarce human sympathies against the many others to whom they would surely be better directed.  I am simply making a self-observation on the basis of the best definition I can come up with.

The observation allows an inference — an dreadful one, to be sure. The lives of most people who are living or who have ever lived have been on balance suffering.  A very significant premise, from which momentous conclusions can be drawn.

And by the way, I must ask…if you tell me that most people are worse off than I, are you offering that observation with the thought that it should somehow make me feel…better?  If so, what sort of monster do you take me for?

The heuristic in my own life

Someone must by now be saying, “Faustus, come off it.  Surely you don’t think that anyone would accept a coin flip on their own life?”

Let me reflect a bit on my own life.  I can’t think of any one massive bad thing so far that would have led me to accept a coin flip on it, but, well…there are any number of smaller bets that I might have accepted that work out to a functional equivalent thereto.  Let’s begin defining another term:  a Mephistophelean Wager.  Imagine if you will that there is some powerful being, a misanthropic billionaire, wizard, devil, what have you, capable of removing some significant source of unhappiness from your life, but that said being will only offer to such relief as part of a wager which, if you lose, results in your immediate (but painless) annihilation.  The wagers are binary, relief with probability p, annihilation with probability 1 – p.  We might differentiate certain nominal categories of Mephistophelean Wager.  A Mephistophelean Coinflip splits the probabilities 0.5/0.5 between relief and annihilation, while Mephistophelean Russian Roulette is more generous, giving you a probability of 0.83 of relief and survival (think of putting one bullet in the cylinder of a fair revolver, spinning it and pulling the trigger).

Now as you might be aware, and as I cannot ignore, beginning around the age of 24 and continuing until about the age of 31 or so I went through a dark time in my life characterized by personal loneliness and deep career frustration.  I couldn’t get a girlfriend to save my life in spite of trying very hard, and I couldn’t get a job in the field I had spent the better part of a decade preparing for.  By any reasonable standard of evaluation I was a failure.  I wasn’t suicidal, exactly, although I did go to bed a lot of nights half- or more-than-half-wishing that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning.  Had a round of Mephistophelean Russian Roulette been available for me to play, I would have played.  Indeed, I think I would have played two rounds. I would have played one for a girlfriend — not Helen of Troy, not a harem of lissome beauties, just one with the character and charms of the individual identified as Second Serious Girlfriend in my Thaumatophile Manifesto.  And I would have played one for a permanent academic position (only somewhere good, mind you).

One might be tempted to say, how immature.  Well, I’m sorry but you didn’t have to live my life and go to bed all those awful nights.  You don’t get to judge.  One might also be tempted to say that it would have been irrational to accept a even a single round of Mephistophelean Russian Roulette because life now, in middle-middle age, is better than it was in my twenties.  It is better,  thank you.  But it is not, in my judgment, anywhere near sufficiently better that it somehow “compensates,” “outweighs,” or “makes up for,” what I had to go through in my twenties.   And what’s more, I don’t see anything in prospect in the likely balance of my life, be it measured in minutes or decades, that is likely to make up for that experience.  Between death at 24 and the balance of my life as it is, I think I would in principle choose the former, although obviously that is now something impossible to arrange.

And indeed, the very fact that I have a future is itself more of a problem than most people would realize.  Think of all the dreadful, dreadful things that lurk through and past human middle age that happen to people all the time,have, to a moral certainty, happened to people you  know.  Cancer.  Alzheimer’s Disease.  Loss of sight.  Loss of hearing.  Premature death of spouses and loved ones and its consequent bereavement.  Bankruptcy and consequent poverty.  Serious legal difficulties.  Drug and alcohol addiction.  Just the process of getting old, even in “good” health, seems filled with suffering:  what with the ruin of one’s attractiveness, the collapse of one’s abilities and mobility, the fading of one’s senses and memory and intellect, and the dying off of one’s friends and family.  People sometimes say that old age has its compensations.  I very much doubt this claim.  It seems like something the young tell themselves so as not be overburdened with pity for the old, and something the not-young likewise tell themselves as a way of whistling past (should that be whistlingtoward?) the graveyard.

The relevant point here is that there are likely to be any number of rounds of Mephistophelean Russian Roulette I would take if I knew that the alternative were some of these forms of suffering.  I’ve seen people dying of cancer:  I would much rather spin the cylinder and pull the trigger if on survival it would mean dying peacefully in mys sleep at some point int he future rather than having to go through that.  And if by some miracle there were a way to avoid old age but still live as long as a typical human being does these days, that would be worth a major gamble.   The point here is, I might be quite willing to take two more rounds.  And I would retrospectively endorse taking them earlier in life than I am now, if such a thing were possible.

But rounds add up.  The following table calculates the relevant probabilities.  In the left-hand column is a number of hypothetical rounds, and the right the probability (computed to two figures) of being dead after that number of rounds.

Rounds Probability of Death
1 0.17
2 0.31
3 0.42
4 0.52
5 0.60
6 0.67
7 0.72
8 0.77
9 0.81
10 0.84
11 0.87
12 0.89
13 0.91
14 0.92
15 0.94
16 0.95
17 0.95
18 0.96
19 0.97
20 0.97
21 0.98
22 0.98
23 0.98
24 0.99
25 0.99

Four rounds gets you over the threshold of 0.5.  By that standard, I feel justified in concluding that my life is on balance suffering.

Clarifying the heuristic further

Let’s think about the heuristic thus:  suppose you were only rational, that is, you had no fear of death per se.

As you contemplate your life in the future, you expect both good and bad things.  If you accept the coinflip and you “lose,” then your life comes to an end.  You are deprived of the good things but relieved of the bad things.  If you weigh up all those things and and find that somehow they exactly outweigh each other, then the coinflip is a wash.  You get nothing if you “lose,” because your future will have nothing in it.  But you also get nothing if you”win,” because then every good thing in the future that you will have is canceled out by some bad thing.

If you are a lucky person who expects more good things than bad in the future, then it’s just irrational to accept the wager, because your future contains good things of which you will be deprived that are not canceled out or outweighed by other bad things.

If you are not so lucky, though, then it is rational to accept the wager, because then you will be relieved of bad things while not being deprived of that many good things.

Another note on the break-even heuristic

Another consideration in favor of the break-even heuristic might be something like the following (it’s a development of my parenthetical under point three in my previous post:

Suppose you were just icy-cold about death, utterly indifferent to just how much longer you would live from the moment of your decision onward.  Suppose you regard death as nothing other than the cessation of experience, a permanent zero on the scale, and a period you no more dread than you regret the nonexistence before your birth.  What rational decision procedure might you follow in deciding whether or not to accept the coin-flip?  Well, what you could do would simply be to survey all the things in prospect in your potential future life that give you pain.  If the quantity of pleasure is greater than that of pain — deprivations of good or normal things — then it would make sense to simply decline the coin-flip and live out your life.  If they pains and pleasures were exactly equal, then you would be indifferent between the coin flip and continuation.  If the scale tipped into more pain than pleasure, then the coin flip becomes a desirable gamble, because it represents an opportunity for a better life than you could have just leading onward.

Thus the even probability really does in some sense the break-even point between that at which life is and is not mostly suffering.

Of course if you do fear death — and most people do — then you would need a much heavier burden of suffering over good things in life before you would be willing to accept the fair-coin gamble. But that of course makes the test of someone’s being willing to accept that fair-coin gamble all the more compelling as evidence that her life is mostly suffering.

Some notes on the break-even heuristic

  1. “Deprivation” here is just a verbal formula and the principle could be framed in alternative ways.  Being in terrible pain such that you would accept a coin-filp between relief of that pain within your life or death might be characterized either as a deprivation of basic comfort and dignity or as the presence of an active evil.  I don’t think it matters much which formulation which might use.
  2. I think the Heuristic is sufficient but not necessary to characterize a life as being on balance suffering.  An outcome with a lower probability of death or relief might also be sufficient to so characterize a life.
  3. That said, I think the Heuristic is readily defensible.  Wouldn’t things have to be pretty awful in your life for you to accept the flip of a fair coin that delivers relief on one side and death on the other?  (I suppose you could have an attitude of icy equanimity toward death, but if you’re like that you could just abandon the heuristic and determine whether your life is, on balance, suffering without the heuristic just using razor-fine utilitarian calculations instead).

What is suffering, on balance?

George Orwell, in his essay “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool” tosses in almost casually and as if it needs further elaboration or defense, the following remark.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Call this the Life is Suffering principle.  Intuitively, I find it very appealing.

But how would we know if on balance life is suffering?  Life has good things and bad things in it, so how would we balance them?  Allow me to advance a conjecture:  if your life is characterized by a deprivation, such that if you had the opportunity to accept a wager on a fair coin, such that if the coin comes up heads that deprivation would be removed, and if tails then immediate annihilation, then on balance your life is suffering, fellow sufferer.

This heuristic for figuring out whether one’s life is on balance, suffering, we might call the Break-even Heuristic.