Axiological Asymmetry

There is a fundamental asymmetry between positive and negative experience. Once someone exists it is undoubtedly the case that we should encourage their feeling positive experiences and avoid their feeling negative ones. The asymmetry, however, does not pertain to the experiences of existing people but to the creation of the capacities for them – and the associated desires – in the first place.

Imagine, for a moment, there are two doctors: Dr. Happy and Dr. Miserable. They’ve each managed to reanimate brains that had been declared “brain dead”.

1. Any brain reanimated by Dr. Happy will only have the capacity (and desire) to experience positive things.

2. Any brain reanimated by Dr. Miserable will only have the capacity to experience (and desire to avoid) negative things.

3. The brains are in an environment that will, upon reanimation, stimulate the experiences they have a capacity for.

Dr. Happy should look upon her decision to reanimate a brain with moral indifference. If she reanimates a brain it is good that it will only experience positive things but it’s only good because the brain has the desire (associated with the capacity) for positive experience. If, on the other hand, Dr. Happy doesn’t reanimate a brain it simply remains as it is and the capacity and desire for positive experience was never created in the first place – so no harm done. If there is no desire for an experience, let alone the capacity to actually experience it, how can harm come from it not being experienced? So, here we establish that we should take a view of moral indifference as to whether the capacity for positive experience is created.

Note: What may confuse some is the difference between the creation of a desire and the fulfilment of said desire. Some people see positive experiences – the fulfilment of the desire for positive experiences – as a reason to create new sentient life but appealing to the fulfilment of a desire to create that desire is nonsensical. This would be like having a child so that they can enjoy a satisfactory retirement – there was no desire or need for a satisfactory retirement before the child was created.

Dr. Miserable – this is where the asymmetry comes in – should not have the same moral indifference as Dr. Happy when looking upon the decision to reanimate a brain. When it comes to the capacity for negative experience (pain and suffering), clearly creating this capacity when it simply didn’t exist before is something that should be avoided; we see this in the widespread rejection of procreation when it is known that the potential child will be born with a debilitating genetic abnormality. Any reasonable person would know that, even though no consciousness with the desire to avoid suffering exists at the time of deciding whether to create them, it would be unethical for Dr. Miserable to reanimate a brain knowing the suffering will occur. So, here we establish that we should avoid creating the capacity for negative experience.

From this hypothetical, we have learnt: 1) The creation of the capacity for positive experience is something we should be morally indifferent to, and 2) The creation of the capacity for negative experience is something we should be morally opposed to. When new sentient life is created the capacities for positive and negative experience are created simultaneously, and if we take lessons (1) and (2) – indifference + opposition = (overall) opposition – we can see that we are firmly pointed in the direction of not creating new sentient life.

Risk

Concerning the ‘person’ (whom before existing is simply an abstraction) who may be created, non-existence carries no risk as there isn’t anyone to be at risk of anything. Existence, on the other hand, does carry risk. Procreation is a gamble one person takes with the life of another because once someone exists they are at risk of many ills, including of living a life they themselves judge to not have been worth living.

In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Gump recalls a saying that his mother used to tell him when he was a child:

“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna’ get.”

This is exactly right. Suffering – things not wanted when experienced – can take many forms and manifest to varying degrees. Everyone will experience the general vicissitudes of life like bereavement, injury and existential anxiety – to name only a few – but some people, either out of no fault of their own or as a result of poor decision-making, will suffer ills far more excruciating than most.

Take Britney Maynard – a young woman who developed terminal brain cancer (astrocytoma) at the age of 29 – as an example. Britney suffered from pain not even morphine could alleviate; she was unable to sleep for days at a time; she had seizures that caused her to bite through her own tongue. Astrocytoma is just one terminal illness among many, and terminal illnesses are just one gruesome form that suffering can take; painful genetic conditions and abnormalities, tragic accidents that leave significant pain, chronic depression and rare diseases are a few others. When one person creates another person they knowingly (but usually unthinkingly) expose that person to the risk of falling foul of each of these ills. Whilst that parent may be able to mitigate some risks for the person they’ve created, they cannot reduce this risk to zero – even a child of the most well-intentioned and affluent parents can end up leading a life they themselves deem regrettable. The only guarantee any one of us – rich or poor – can say our biological child has is that they will (to some extent) suffer and that they will die – we do not know what the extent of the former will be or how they will cope with the inevitability and process of the latter.

Returning to Forrest’s box of chocolates, where procreation is concerned we are in fact not carefully inspecting a box of chocolates and making an informed decision about which one we will eat. We are, with limited information of its qualities, picking a chocolate from the box and force-feeding it to someone else who hadn’t asked for it. That ‘chocolate’ could be astrocytoma, or it could be depression or rape or drug addiction. David Benatar said, “It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.“ Once we’ve created someone we’ve already taken the gamble with their life, and all we can do is mitigate the risk that we have exposed them to. The only time we have full control over the situation (assuming this is a voluntary decision) is when we are deciding whether to create that person – and unnecessarily expose them to risk in the first place – or not.

Imposition

Life is a series of needs and desires – they are at the base of pretty much everything we do. We need nutrients to survive and maintain our health, so we must eat. We need water for the same reasons, so we must drink. (There are of course other needs and desires we have, like that for company, entertainment, sex, warmth, shelter etcetera.) When one person creates another, they impose on them the burden of having to satisfy these needs and desires – needs and desires that, if not actively satisfied, will result in suffering and eventually, if still not met, death (e.g. if you do not eat you will suffer from hunger and eventually die).

Existence – in a universe indifferent to well-being – does not come for free. Each person created must pay ‘rent’ for merely living (the “cost of living”). They are forced to inhabit and care for a body and a mind that demand constant upkeep. They’re forced to engage in activities such as exercising, eating, learning, maintaining financial security, building emotional resilience, cleaning, resting and more, just to maintain a basic level of mental and physical well-being. Their body and mind are delicate, being prone to injury and sickness – and after a certain age both begin to degrade and lose functionality. If physical and mental health are not maintained to a sufficient standard then the person will suffer and they will do so quite quickly. They must also carry an often draining and unfulfilling occupation to earn money that can be traded for resources (e.g. food) that will meet their needs.

On top of all of that, the capacity for suffering is also imposed on this new person. They will suffer if they do not constantly meet the ongoing demands of their body and mind, but there is also suffering that is independent of these demands, like getting cancer or being involved in a car accident. Many people who do not see an issue with procreation in general usually oppose it when the prospective parents know that the person they could create would be born with an abnormality or disability that will pose an ‘undue burden’ on the new person. What most people don’t realise, however, is that the capacity for suffering itself is an undue burden. If we were to ourselves design a new being from scratch, would we consider it ethical to build a capacity for suffering into them? It seems there would be something indecent about answering ‘yes’.

The fact that the person may garner some enjoyment from (temporarily) satisfying specific needs and desires does not alleviate the problem of imposition because that desire for enjoyment is also something that was imposed on them – which left unsatisfied will produce boredom or a feeling of being unfulfilled. This situation is like handing someone a container with small holes in the bottom and telling them they must keep it full of water, lest they suffer; but, if they manage to get the water to a certain level and keep it there they will get a treat. No one has any idea how capable the person they could create will be at getting the water to this level, and their container could have larger holes than most. We simply don’t know; creating a new being is a biological experiment and it is the one being created – not the one creating them – who must live with the consequences.

Consent

It’s impossible to get consent from someone to create them. Procreation is the act of one person (or two people) deciding to take it upon themselves to do the most morally significant thing they can do to someone else: create them. And this is all done without consulting that person (as it is logically impossible to do so).

With regards to consent, creating someone has at least three morally salient qualities:

1. great harm is not at stake if no action is taken,

2. if action is taken, the harms suffered may be very severe,

3. the imposed condition cannot be escaped without high costs.

If, in some hypothetical universe, someone could deliberate on and then accept or decline their own creation then it would be completely up to them what risks they take, or what conditions they would find acceptable to live under. The issue is that these conditions, the guarantee of suffering and death, and the risk of extraordinary suffering on top of this, were all things imposed upon one individual by another; the person who must live with the consequences of procreation was not even consulted in the decision making process. It may be the case that the procreator would happily accept a certain set of conditions and odds for their own existence but what makes it their right to accept them on someone else’s behalf – especially if no harm would come to that person if they do not.

The moral salience of specific, informed, unambiguous and freely given consent is recognised in countless circumstances – its absence is what turns sex into rape, for example. The need for a subject’s consent is only waived in specific conditions where the action being taken is in the subject’s best interests and they are, either temporarily or permanently, unable to give it. An example of such a circumstance would be providing vaccinations to children. Procreation does not meet this standard, however, as non-existence has no ‘best interests’ – there is no ghost-like pre-person longing to be created. The fact that it is logically (because they do not exist), rather than just practically, impossible to get someone’s consent does not mean another person is at liberty to bypass usual demands for consent; it is impossible to get consent in a situation where one person wants another person working for them against that person’s will (because if consent was present they would not be working against their will), but would we say this suddenly makes slave labour morally acceptable?

Anthropogenic Suffering

Anthropogenic suffering – suffering caused by humans and human activity – is, like all suffering, hard to measure. The harm that any particular person will (and could) inflict on, be complicit in, or cause to others is dependent on variables like their capacity for brute violence and their propensity for moral conformity, but also on their political power, economic status, cultural attitudes and dietary choices, to name just a few. Trying to quantify this harm is something that even the most intelligent minds would probably only be able to guess at.

For that reason, this argument will not attempt to quantify the harm a person can cause but simply highlight some of the ways creating a person will and can harm others. In addition, this argument hopes to combat the harmful, rose-tinted view that many people have of humanity and encourage the recognition of the many harms that humans have inflicted, and continue to inflict, on themselves and others. This argument will detail three key types of harm that humans cause: 1) harm to other humans, 2) harm to non-humans, and 3) harm to both humans and non-humans via environmental degradation.

Note: Some may claim that the creation of a new person can benefit others, a rebuttal of this can be found here.

Harm to Humans

Large-scale atrocities are perhaps the most memorable examples of human-on-human harm and examples come to mind quickly: the holocaust of Jews and other groups by the Nazis, the mass starvation of people under dictators like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, the genocide carried out by Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, and the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Of course, it’s easy to view these larger-scale atrocities with historical and psychological distance, after all, which prospective parent even remotely considers that their child may go on to commit such atrocities, or more likely that they will be the victim of one? The answer: very few, which seems naive given most prospective parents of the people that carried out these atrocities probably had the same mindset.

Now, whilst it’s true that large atrocities happen, it’s also true that any specific person created is unlikely to be involved in them. So, let’s move our focus away from the extraordinary (although not that extraordinary) and onto the more ordinary. Every single day, regular, decent, innocent people are subject to horrific acts of violence and brutality. Take murder and accidental killing as just one example. People can be hacked, knifed, hanged, bludgeoned, decapitated, shot, starved, frozen, suffocated, drowned, crushed, gassed, poisoned, burnt, scolded, bombed and more. This non-exhaustive list only pertains to killing, it says nothing of other avenues of moral depravity like rape, torture, assault, enslavement, trafficking, branding, kidnapping, mutilating and tormenting that humans all too often go down. And whilst it may be a minority that commits these crimes it’s not a negligible minority, and they are very common. Can any prospective parent guarantee that they will not be creating another rapist, kidnapper, serial killer or slave owner? Again, it would seem naive for anyone to say they can make such a guarantee when every perpetrator of these immoralities has/had parents that at the time of the perpetrator-to-be’s birth would have likely given the same guarantee.

Finally, it must also be mentioned that humans have a great propensity for conformity. It may be a minority that directly commit the crimes, but a much larger network of people will be complicit in facilitating them through conformity. Human slavery, as one example, was and still is accepted by many as ethical. This conformity has not disappeared, it has just changed shape.

Harm to Non-humans

Trillions (1,000,000,000,000) of non-human animals (from here on: animals) are killed in agonising ways each year, and the vast majority of humans are heavily complicit. Whilst animals die and are killed by humans in a variety of ways, the following details how about half of the animals used and killed for food die each year:

Fish are usually caught by massive nets attached to trawlers (or sometimes multiple trawlers). Initially, they will try to out-swim the net but after some time they will become exhausted and be caught by the net. Once in the net, many of them will be crushed by the weight of the other fish pressing down on them. Eventually the net is drawn to the surface and on the way up many fish suffer from barotrauma – the gas inside their body expands and ruptures internal organs such as their swim bladder (which is sometimes forced out of their mouth and anus). At the surface, the fish are raised up into the air where they experience gravity outside of water for the first time – further adding to the weight of the fish on top of them. They’re then dumped out onto the deck of the boat. On the deck, workers pierce the fish with hooks to move them around. Many fish will suffocate whilst on the deck. Eventually the fish are put on ice, this slows down their metabolic rate and prolongs their suffering to perhaps 2-3 hours before they die from suffocation.

This and other even more brutal ways of dying are inflicted upon trillions of animals every single year just for food. The vast majority of land animals that are bred into existence, exploited and then killed by humans live in factory farms – imagine a concentration camp, but swap out the humans for pigs, chickens, cows, geese and other animals. Their lives are ones of excruciating pain and cruelty, and their deaths are not much better. To learn about the lives of the vast majority of land animals, click here. Almost all humans that have ever lived and live today actively fund and contribute to the practice and industries that exploit animals for meat, dairy, egg, fishing, leather, horse racing, testing, fur etcetera, and any new person is very likely to do the same.

There are, however, some humans that take a principled stand against animal exploitation – often referred to as as “vegans” or “anti-speciesists”. Unfortunately, they are not free – nor any offspring they may have are – from harming animals. Firstly, just because a person rejects speciesism does not mean that their offspring will, especially given the offspring is raised in a speciesist society. For example, Alex Hershaft is a prominent animal rights activist whose daughter, Monica Hershaft, was raised on a plant-based diet but now eats the flesh of other animals and their secretions (and promotes it). Secondly, there is also no guarantee that their offspring’s offspring will maintain anti-speciesist values and behaviours – potentially opening a door to multiple generations of people intentionally exploiting and killing animals for trivial reasons. Let’s assume though that the offspring would be anti-speciesist, that offspring would still be causing additional harm to animals that would not have existed were that person not to have been created. Everyone, albeit to varying degrees, harms wild animals through the resources – land, food, water, heating, rare metals etcetera – that they consume, and also contributes to wider society through taxes and other means that will go to fund the wider exploitation and harm of animals (both wild and domesticated).

Harm to Humans and Non-humans via Harm to the Environment

Homo sapiens are having such an impact on the environment around them that our current epoch has been called the Anthropocene. This growing environmental impact is a function of both increased population but also increased impact per person – both of which will likely continue to increase at least until the end of the century.

Note: David Benatar sums up a note for those that are skeptical of anthropogenic climatic change here: “Those who do deny that humans are having a deleterious effect on the environment may simply exclude the relevant harms. Humans are so destructive even without these harms that the [argument] can easily survive their exclusion. By contrast, those who do recognize that humans are damaging the environment can simply add this to the [list of harms humans cause].”

Climatic change, air, land and plastic pollution, increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and habitat destruction are just some of the ways that humans are having a negative impact on both humans and non-humans through their environmental impact. Our bias towards seeing ourselves in a positive light clouds our judgement of how destructive we are, but also of how we should react to such destruction. If someone were to be found breeding a non-human animal species that was as destructive as Homo sapiens they would be widely condemned.

Zoogenic Suffering

Like human infants, non-human animals (from now on: animals) do not possess the ability, or possess a limited ability, to do moral reasoning and so it is not reasonable to hold them accountable for their actions. However, this does not remove the fact that unimaginable zoogenic suffering – suffering brought about by animals – is being caused by beings who lack the mental faculties to think critically about said suffering.

Richard Dawkins, by no means someone who opposes the procreation or breeding of humans or non-humans, said: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.”

It does depend on the species that an individual animal is as to how they will harm other animals (including humans), but some examples include predation, parasitism, fighting and competition. More information about the suffering of wild animals can be found here.

Effective Altruism

Creating a new person does not come without cost. It requires time and resources – including financial, intellectual, physical, emotional and more – (from here on: resources) to raise someone and facilitate their development. Many people will create a new person when they do not have the requisite resources to fulfil their obligations to that person (e.g. feed, clothe, protect, educate), but for the purposes of this argument it will be assumed that the creators of said person do have the necessary resources at their disposal.

The resources required to create and raise a new person will depend on the particulars of that person, the people creating them and the environment in which the person is being created. It is impossible to address the specific situations that each individual person could be in, but this argument does not need to; for this argument it is sufficient to simply pick a figure to illustrate the point to be made. So, let’s go with £100,000 (~$134,304) – to raise a person from birth until 18 years of age (this doesn’t encompass the other resources needed in creating a new person [e.g. the time and physical resources needed]).

This £100,000 has been sunk into the effort of creating and raising a new person that did not need to exist – only created to fulfill the selfish desires of two individuals. The spending of this significant sum in this way comes with a great opportunity cost; instead of fulfilling the needs and desires created out of nothing by these two people (in the form of a new person), it could have been used to improve the lives of vastly more people who already exist. For example, instead of funding the creation and raising of one new person £100,000 could fund [1]:

• 193 complete surgeries to safely repair a woman's obstetric fistula, and rehabilitation services

• training for 33 cataract surgeons

• vitamin A supplements to protect 99,484 children from preventable blindness

• providing safe water to 104,925 people for a year

These are just a few of the ways this money could go to alleviating the suffering of others. These are all issues suffered by people already in existence – already here, already suffering. Why needlessly create a new person who will suffer – as we all suffer and eventually die – only to spend that money (and the other resources) on mitigating that suffering which never needed to occur in the first place?

Adoption

As detailed above, creating and raising a new person comes with an opportunity cost, but what if the people wanting to create a new person are just adamant that they must raise a child? There are not just two options: 1) create a new person, or 2) give the resources you would have spent on that new person to effective charities to alleviate the suffering of others – there is also the option of adoption and fostering.

There are an estimated 153,000,000 children [1], and countless non-human animals, in need of guardians to adopt them and care for them until they are able to navigate life more independently. Many people – definitely not all, for a variety of reasons – have the capacity to care for a child, and if they choose to use their resources in that way what sense does it make to needlessly create new people to occupy their capacity to provide care when they could have provided it to others who already exist in a regrettable situation? Each new person created because the creators want to see their genes in the person (their mini-me) spits in the face of the vulnerable children and non-human animals who are already here and need guardianship.