Anti-natalism – Helian Unbound

The Age of Morality Inversions

Few illusions are more powerful than moral illusions. We have a powerful innate tendency to believe that some behaviors are good, and some evil. We imagine that these categories exist independently of anyone’s opinion about them, as objects, or things in themselves. This tendency, and hence the very existence of morality, is the result of evolution by natural selection. For the most part, its genetic basis evolved long before the emergence of anything resembling a civilized state. Indeed, similar tendencies exist in other animals. In those times it must have made a significant contribution to the reproduction and survival of those who carried the relevant genes. The predispositions spawned by these genes were quite open-ended and flexible, because there was little chance that they would spawn “dysfunctional” perceptions of good and evil in those simpler times. Times have changed. Instead of contributing to our survival, today these innate tendencies can easily have the opposite effect. They can inspire us with a firm conviction that behaviors that are more likely to result in our extinction rather than our survival are “good.” This is what I mean when I refer to “morality inversions.”

So powerful are our moral illusions that we refuse to believe that they aren’t true. As a result, we erect almost insuperable barriers to self-understanding. Good and evil seem so real to us that we flatly reject the truth that these moral categories exist by virtue of behavioral traits that evolved in the stone age, and in some cases perhaps long before that. It is now abundantly clear that rejecting the truth about something as fundamental as the reasons we behave the way we do is extremely dangerous, assuming we value our own survival.

Once we have accepted the truth about the reasons that account for the existence of what we refer to as morality in human beings, morality inversions aren’t difficult to spot. Simply look for cases in which significant numbers of us start exhibiting behavior that is the opposite of what we observe in every other species on the planet. Individuals of other species behave in ways that tend to increase the odds that the genes they carry will survive and reproduce. Often, we find them actually seeking to suppress the chances that other individuals of their own species will survive if it enhances the “fitness” of their own genes. When the behavior of significant numbers of individuals in our species is exactly the opposite, there must be a reason for it. We must consider the possibility that behavioral traits that once enhanced our chances of survival have become “dysfunctional” in the environment we find ourselves in today.

One such trait is what we refer to as morality, and a fundamental aspect of human morality is its dual nature. Different standards of morality apply depending on whether another individual is identified as ingroup or outgroup. The outgroup is commonly loathed and hated, deemed impure, unclean, corrupt, etc. Look for it, and you will always find it. There was little chance that this trait would “malfunction” during the stone age. The outgroup was always just the next tribe over. To the extent that other groups were known, they were largely irrelevant as far as morality was concerned. Today we are aware of a myriad racial, ideological, religious, and many other types of groups. The trait in question is sufficiently flexible that we are quite capable of identifying any one of them as outgroup. Whatever group it happens to be, we tend to hate and despise its members and deem them immoral. It is quite possible for us to hate and despise groups that are closely related to us and would otherwise pose no threat to us as outgroup, preferring others who are much more distantly related as ingroup, even though they do pose a threat.

The phenomenon of equalism is another aspect of modern human moral behavior. According to E. O. Wilson, we are a “eusocial” species. As noted in the article linked above, to qualify as eusocial, in Wilson’s definition, animals must live in multigenerational communities, practice division of labor and behave altruistically, ready to sacrifice “at least some of their personal interests to that of the group.” The resulting tendency to promote sharing and equal distribution within the ingroup must have enhanced the odds of our survival eons ago. It can hardly be assumed that it will have the same result in a world in which the genetic closeness of those we identify as ingroup has become a matter of coincidence. It, too, has become an abundant source or morality inversions.

It is interesting that in today’s world the white race appears to be uniquely susceptible to such inversions. This seems odd in view of the fact that the same race achieved a dominant presence on several continents where it had never previously set foot in a very short time. Obviously, what we see today was not always the case. Whites are in retreat all over the world, and particularly in the countries where they represent the “indigenous people.” The behavioral traits responsible for morality can lead to radically different outcomes within a few generations in the context of environments that bear no resemblance to the one in which they evolved. The chaotic moral behavior of whites is an excellent demonstration of this fact.

Why is this happening? “Dysfunctional” outgroup identification certainly plays a major role. Ingroup/outgroup identification among the ruling classes of countries that are still predominantly white is commonly based on ideology. Increasingly, we see them behaving in ways that are sometimes referred to as “woke.” Their ingroup consists of those who “think right” when it comes to the ideological shibboleths that serve to identify the “good.” It also includes persons in other racial and ethnic groups, who are deemed “good in themselves.” The outgroup consists almost exclusively of other whites who oppose the ideology of the ingroup. As is typically the case for human outgroups, they are hated and despised as immoral, “deplorable,” etc. Only these outgroup whites are deemed capable of sins such as “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” evils to which the favored ethnic and racial groups are deemed immune.

White supremacy, indeed! Are the people who mouth such nonsense not aware that, as far as nature is concerned, our “function” is to carry genes from one generation to the next? There is no God or other entity out there to assign us a “higher” purpose. There is not a life form on this planet that is not a “supremacist” for the genes it carries. All others have gone extinct. That will be the fate of humans who are not “supremacists” as well, whether their skin color be white, black, brown, red, or yellow. Anyone who chooses that outcome in order to preserve the illusion that they are “morally pure,” is welcome to pass into oblivion in the odor of sanctity. I merely ask that, in the process, they don’t try to take the rest of us with them.

Of course, the belief that only those with a certain skin color can be guilty of such sins is racist by the very definition of the term. Similarly racist is the notion that whites are born guilty of the original sin of slavery even though slavery ended more than a century before any of them were born. Lost in the “conversation” is the fact that it never occurred to significant numbers of “people of color” that slavery was bad to begin with until whites began insisting on it. The fight against slavery and its eventual abolition was initiated and led almost exclusively by whites until the fight was virtually over. It was ended in the US at the cost of over 600,000 white lives. No matter. Whites are supposed to pay reparations for sins they never committed, simply by virtue of being white. The same does not apply to other races. Vast numbers of whites were enslaved by Arabs and Turks at the same time that blacks were enslaved in the US, but no one is suggesting that they pay reparations.

This anti-white racist ideology is fobbed off as “social justice,” an absurd term in itself, implying as it does that modern societies with populations in the millions should be regulated by moral emotions that evolved in the stone age. The remarkable fact about this currently dominant ideology is that it was created and is now maintained primarily by whites themselves. They have been bamboozled by their moral emotions into inventing an ingroup/outgroup complex that has resulted in the transfer of vast resources to other ethnic and racial groups with no prospect whatever that they will receive a comparable benefit in return. Nothing of the sort is observed in any other species on the planet, for the good reason that such behavior would lead to rapid extinction.

A similar morality inversion has resulted from the dominant ideology’s insistence that we are doing an injustice to animals by eating them. No matter that the transition from ape to man would have been impossible without hunting. We are informed by a legion of sanctimonious ideologues that eating animals is “evil,” and we must all become vegans. Since they have never experienced it themselves, they forget that famine has been prevalent throughout human history, and has hardly disappeared in our own time. Establishing these irrational taboos about what we can and cannot eat is harmful in the best of times. In times of famine, it becomes a direct threat to survival.

“Dysfunctional” ingroup/outgroup identification has resulted in another morality inversion of a sort that has been common as the source of the innumerable senseless wars that have been the bane of our species throughout human history. In this case, the Ukrainians are the “good” ingroup and the Russians are the “evil” outgroup. In order to ensure that the “good guys” win, thereby demonstrating how “virtuous” they are themselves, our rulers continue to escalate a conflict that doesn’t concern us, risking nuclear annihilation in the process.

I need not elaborate on the poisoning and mutilation of children in order to “transgender” them, nor the anti-natalism morality inversion. What can one say of these people who are convinced that racing down the path to a biological dead end is “virtuous?” As anyone who glances at social media occasionally is aware, the virtually universal response to these “woke” dogmas by those who oppose them is to perceive their proponents as outgroup. They are denounced as evil, not just as a matter of anyone’s opinion, but as an actual fact. The problem with this is that there are no moral facts. This typically human behavior is also irrational.

Does it seem reasonable, regardless of one’s ideology, to conclude that those of a different opinion wake up every morning wracking their brains to come up with a list of bad deeds to do that day? Does it seem reasonable to conclude that the descendants of those who were “good,” because, within a few centuries, they occupied and became the dominant race on several continents they had never seen before have now suddenly become “evil” because they are behaving in ways that seem tailor made to nullify those results? Neither they nor their ancestors had a clue about the fundamental reasons they acted the way they did in either case. Neither they nor their ancestors understood that it is not possible for anyone to be “really good” or “really evil” because those categories simply don’t exist. They are only imagined. The firm belief that they do exist is based on a powerful illusion that itself exists because it helped us survive in a world that disappeared long ago. The fact that this illusion of moral good and evil can have such diametrically opposite results within a short span of time in the context of environments utterly different from the one in which it evolved seems to suggest that it’s high time for our species to gain some rudiments of self-understanding.

I am not suggesting that one should abandon moral arguments. In an age in which manipulation of moral emotions is the universal weapon for fighting ideological battles, unilateral disarmament is not a viable alternative. Assuming one has any goals in life at all, one must fight for them with the weapons at hand, even if one understands that the very effectiveness of those weapons is based on an illusion. It is not unreasonable to kill a poisonous snake, even if one realizes that the snake doesn’t behave the way it does because it is immoral.

I am suggesting that, whatever your goals in life happen to be, they be chosen based on an accurate understanding of how our species came to be, and why it is that we behave the way we do. If we are to learn anything from the example of the “woke,” it is that blindly responding to emotions that make us feel good, whether morally or otherwise, is a good way to follow them down the same rathole to oblivion.

All human behavior is driven by emotional predispositions that exist because, at some time in the past, they enhanced our biological fitness. It should come as no surprise that these predispositions can and do inspire radically different behaviors among individuals living at the same time and same place in the complex societies of the present. We are not rigidly programmed like so many insects. The fundamental drivers of our behavior are open ended and flexible, well-suited to the simple societies in which they evolved. When creatures with large brains but imperfect reasoning abilities try to interpret what those drivers are trying to tell them in the complex societies we live in today, it is predictable that they will not all come to the same conclusions. As the example of the “woke” among us demonstrates, it is quite possible for us to conclude that, in order to be “good,” we must behave in ways that reduce our biological fitness. We stumble into morality inversions.

It is not my intent to prescribe to anyone how they ought or ought not to behave. We are all links in a chain of life that has existed unbroken for upwards of two billion years. We exist because, unlike myriads of others, all of our ancestors over that vast gulf of time managed to survive and reproduce. The mental traits that are the root cause of our behavior, moral and otherwise, aren’t there by coincidence. They exist because they enhanced the odds of that outcome. If, in full knowledge of that fact, anyone consciously chooses to be the final link in that chain, and to follow so many other life forms into the oblivion of extinction, so be it. If they make that choice because it is comforting to them to imagine that they are being morally good, I have no objection as long as they understand what morality is. I merely observe as I wave goodbye that their behavior seems somewhat out of harmony with the reasons they exist to begin with.

The Anti-Natalist Morality Inversion: A German Vignette

Anti-natalists keep popping up in the news. A recent story about one of them at the website of the German news magazine “Focus” caught my eye because she happens to be from Regensburg. I was stationed there as an Army liaison officer back in the day, a job that involved driving all over Bavaria with a German co-worker, visiting police, border, and administrative officials, and visiting superb bakeries and breweries on the way to maintain our stamina. I couldn’t see my military career getting any better than that, so left the service and attended the University of Regensburg for a semester to satisfy my non-technical minor requirement at the University of Wisconsin, where I would later attend graduate school. The cost was quite affordable in comparison with US universities; 15 marks per semester. I took courses in political science, history, and Chinese. The latter was taught from a Red Chinese textbook. Chairman Mao was still riding high, and we read stories about Lenin’s greatcoat, life in a people’s commune, etc. The university corridors were plastered with competing posters affixed there by the Maoist and pro-Soviet Communist student groups, who apparently considered each other a much greater threat to humanity than any mere capitalists. I played fourth board for the Regensburg chess club, along with several German WWII veterans, and a Polish Jew who had been one of three survivors of a group of nearly 300 prisoners marched out of the Buchenwald concentration camp as US forces approached. There was a remnant of an old Roman wall along one side of my favorite gas station, and I used to drive to work every day over an old stone bridge across the Danube built in the 12th century. I was glad to learn that it has since been closed to vehicular traffic.

But I digress. The anti-natalist in question, one Verena Brunschweiger, was interviewed on the occasion of the publication of her second book on the subject, “The Child-free Rebellion: Why ‘too radical’ is just radical enough.” According to the article, entitled “Child-free Author Again Insists: ‘We have better sex and better relationships,’” the publication of her first book, “Child-free Instead of Childless; A Manifesto,” a year earlier had raised a “shitstorm,” one of those vulgar English terms the Germans delight in using. Her latest was described as more radical than ever in defending her main theme: “Children are the worst thing that one can inflict on the environment.” She elaborates, “Children are the worst climate killers of all, and therefore a child-free life is the only rationally, ethically, and morally acceptable way to avoid the climate disaster (Klimamisere) that the world is heading for.”

She claims that she has been the subject of vicious attacks and even death threats for her opinions in Germany, in spite of the fact that she deems herself a “moderate.” She notes that one finds a much more tolerant atmosphere in other countries, especially the United Kingdom, where one hears calls for a complete ban on births, promoting the goal of the extinction of mankind. When asked about claims she was hostile to children she replied,

I am not against children per se. Children are great. But the steadily increasing population is destroying the planet. That’s the problem… In fact, at one point I considered the possibility of having a child quite seriously. However, I decided against it after seeing a study according to which, for each child we avoid bringing into the world, we will reduce CO2 by 58.6 tons per year.

In response to a question about her concrete demands she replied,
“We need regulations to suppress aggressive language on the Internet, especially by populist and fascist groups. Beyond that, we need to carefully reflect on the implications of our reproductive behavior, instead of simply reacting to emotional biological urges.”

Well, we all spend our lives reacting to emotional biological urges whether we like it or not. They are the root cause and motivating force behind everything we do. If we are to “reflect” about them, it seems the first question we should ask ourselves is, “Why do these emotional urges exist to begin with?” The answer to the question is that they exist because they increased the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. If we wish to act in harmony with the fundamental reasons that we have any goals to begin with, then obviously our goals in life should include survival and reproduction. That is the choice I have made. There is no objective standard according to which my choice is better or more moral than Brunschweiger’s. No one is “out there,” in the form of a God or any other material or immaterial entity, to make the choice for us. The universe doesn’t care. It is a choice we must all make for ourselves. I merely suggest that, in making the choice, we consider why it is we are motivated to do anything at all. Darwin supplied the answer to that question more than a century and a half ago.

The chances that Brunschweiger has ever gotten around to asking herself the fundamental question noted above are vanishingly small. In fact, she is blindly “reacting to emotional biological urges” in spite of herself. She assures us that sex is better without children, without reflecting on the reasons that the sexual urge exists to begin with. She adds that her “relationships” are better, too, without ever considering why humans bother to relate to each other at all. When it comes to saving the planet and reducing CO2 emissions, her solution of personally having no children is whimsical to the point of being ridiculous. It merely reflects the ideology of her leftist ingroup taken to an extreme. Consider the current situation of her home country, Germany. The current birthrate of German women is below replacement level. In other words, left to itself, the German population would eventually decline of its own accord. If, as Brunschweiger suggests, it is “ethical” and “moral” to save the planet by reducing CO2 emissions, the best thing Germany could do is establish firm, well-defended borders, and prevent any influx of population from countries that are reproducing at a much more rapid rate. However, this solution is the one defended by the “populists” in her outgroup. I suspect the chances that she has ever called for such a rational and realistic approach are very slim.

If we choose to live in harmony with the reasons we exist to begin with, then avoiding “climate disaster” is certainly a worthy goal. However, refusing to reproduce is a completely irrational strategy for achieving that goal. Again, if we choose to live in harmony with the reasons we exist to begin with, our method for “saving the planet” should not be limiting our own reproduction, but limiting the reproduction of the “other.” But doesn’t that imply application of a double standard? Of course! Our species, along with many others, has always applied a double standard. We have always perceived others in terms of ingroups and outgroups. This behavior is innate, for the same reasons that explain all of our other innate behavioral traits. Brunschweiger is hardly immune to this human trait. She helpfully identifies her outgroup for us; “populists and fascists,” meaning anyone who challenges the ideology of her leftist ingroup. Her problem isn’t that her behavior is “abnormal.” Her problem is that she is blindly behaving “normally” in an environment radically different from the one in which her “normal” traits evolved. In her case, the result has been genetic suicide.

How should those of us who have grasped the answer to the fundamental question posed above react to the Brunschweigers of the world? Certainly not with death threats. Assuming we want to live in harmony with that answer, I submit that our reaction should be one benign neglect. Let them commit genetic suicide and remove themselves from the gene pool. The behavioral traits they carry enabled them to survive in environments that existed in the past. However, those traits have been unable to keep up with our species’ self-created and rapidly changing environment. In the environment we find ourselves in today, they have “malfunctioned,” resulting in an outcome the opposite of that which occurred in the past. I have described this kind of behavior elsewhere as a “morality inversion.” They appear to lack a sufficiently strong urge to have children as a “good in itself” to survive. As a result, they represent a liability to the rest of us. I suggest we allow them to go extinct, just as they wish.

Corona and Nassim Taleb: The Tragedy of a Genius in a World of Imbeciles

I don’t pay much attention to Nassim Taleb. I doubt that it’s worth paying attention to anyone who claims that, after carefully pondering the matter, he’s concluded that Claire Lehmann of Quillette is a “neo-Nazi.” He’s also concluded that he’s a genius, and anyone who disagrees with him is an imbecile. Just ask him. Recently, however, he’s become the guru of the most extreme proponents of government lockdowns in response to virus pandemics. Let’s consider what they’re so excited about.

A good summary appears in a gushing article by Yves Smith at the “naked capitalism” website, entitled, “Taleb: The Only Man Who Has A Clue.” Smith does not inform us on what basis he feels himself qualified to dismiss every highly trained virologist and epidemiologist on the planet as “clueless.” Be that as it may, he cites Taleb’s “Systemic Risk Of Pandemic Via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A note,” which summarizes his point of view under the headings, “General Precautionary Principle,” “Spreading Rate,” “Asymmetric Uncertainty,” and “Conclusion.” Let’s consider what he has to say under the first of these:

General Precautionary Principle : The general (non-naive) precautionary principle [3] delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level. In technical terms, the precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.

Extinction? Zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events? Seriously?? There are millions of species on the planet. They all bear genetic material that has been around, in one form or another, for upwards of two billion years. Presumably, unless Taleb is claiming virus pandemics are unique to human beings, many of them have survived repeated exposures to such events. If life on our planet is not capable of surviving repeated exposures to pathogens without implementing Taleb’s nostrums, how is it that any life survives at all? It should all be gone, with the viruses turning out the lights on their way out. In what even remotely rational sense are we “risking ruin” with the coronavirus? We have lived with all kinds of much deadlier diseases throughout most of our history. Many of them have been persistent, and many others have passed over us repeatedly, and yet none of them, not even the Black Death, has managed to “ruin” us. Indeed, if you ask some of the legions of anti-natalists and radical environmentalists out there, this sort of “ruin” is just what the doctor ordered. After all, the global population has grown to the point where we are at least rocking the boat a bit lately.

This begs the question of where you draw the line when it comes to “ruination.” Apparently, we are not sufficiently “ruined” by the yearly visitations of flu. When is a new pathogen serious enough to take the proposed drastic steps? Assuming we do magically find a way to identify this “ruination” line in the sand, is it really probable that our only choices are obeying Taleb or going extinct? I rather suspect that our species, in spite of all the idiots and imbeciles that Taleb has identified among us, is intelligent enough to come up with measures a great deal more effective than lockdowns and wearing masks, if it ever really comes to our staring extinction in the face.

As far as “ruin exposures” go, there are many who believe that the risk at the “collective level” is much greater from shutting down systems as complex as modern economies than it is from COVID-19. No doubt Taleb, who considers himself a genius in economics as well as epidemiology would dismiss this concern with a wave of the hand. I’m not so sure. I rather doubt he’s the only man in the universe who has a clue. He informs us that this “precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.” This is a bit of jargon apparently intended to impress the rubes. I doubt that many of his worshipful fanboys have a clue what “ergodic” even means, and the term is best left in the realm of statistical mechanics in any case.

Speaking of rubes, have a look at the comments by Taleb’s followers on a Twitter thread in which Dr. Phil has the misfortune of being officially added to his list of “imbeciles.” These guys all consider themselves only a peg below Taleb among the ranks of the world’s greatest living geniuses. They must all walk around with permanent scowls on their faces from the stress of living among the rest of us idiots and imbeciles. They all imagine that they’re uttering great profundities as they squawk out variations on his latest tweets like so many parrots. In this case, Dr. Phil was being interviewed by Laura Ingraham, rightly pointing out that we accept significant risks of death from driving, smoking, swimming, etc., without feeling any need to do something as extreme as locking down the economy. Taleb tweeted the interview with the snarky comment, “Drowning in swimming pools is extremely contagious and multiplicative.” All of his acolytes thought this was most profound, but in fact it is a matter of complete indifference. Dr. Phil was making a point about acceptance of the risk of death. The fact that COVID-19 happens to be contagious just adds another number to factor in when quantifying risk. Overall risks can be calculated and compared regardless of whether one of them derives from a contagious disease or not.

I started to have my doubts about Taleb when I started wading through the grab bag of banalities in his third book, “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms.” Anyone whose tastes run to that sort of thing would be well advised to forget Taleb and buy a copy of Rochefoucauld’s maxims instead. They’re both more intelligent and more entertaining. One of them happens to be most appropriate in this case: “Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.” In Taleb’s opinion, Claire Lehmann is a neo-Nazi, Bjorn Lomborg is a right-wing, sociopathic quack, and Dr. Phil is an imbecile. He’s entitled to his opinion. I’m entitled to mine too. In my opinion, he’s an over-inflated windbag.

On the Purpose of Life

There is no purpose to your life other than the purpose you choose to give it.

Is your goal the brotherhood of all mankind? Is your goal human flourishing? Is your goal a just and democratic society? Is your goal to serve some God or gods? The first cause of all of these goals, and any others you can think of, may be found in innate emotions and predispositions that exist because they evolved. They did not evolve for a purpose. They exist because at some time that was likely quite different from the present, they happened to increase the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. They are the foundation that gives rise to every single human aspiration, no matter how noble or sublime that aspiration is imagined to be.

There is no objective reason why the goals and aspirations of a Plato or a Kant are more worthy, more legitimate, or more morally good than the goals and purposes of a thief or a murderer. In the end, every human being on the planet is merely seeking to satisfy emotional whims that he has interpreted or tried to make sense of in one way or another. Any individual’s assumption that his goals are intrinsically superior to or more right and proper in themselves than the goals of others is a delusion. The universe doesn’t care.

What does that imply concerning what our goals should be, or what we really ought to do? Nothing! Nothing, that is, unless we are speaking of what some individual should do or ought to do to satisfy some idiosyncratic whim that cannot possibly be objectively more legitimate or praiseworthy than the whim of any other individual.

How, then, do we choose what are goals and purposes will be. After all, we will have them regardless, because it is our nature to have them. In the end, all of us must decide for ourselves. However, in choosing them I personally think it is useful to be aware of the above fundamental facts. The alternative is to stumble blindly through life, chasing mirages, clueless as to what is really motivating us and why. Again, purely from my personal point of view, that does not seem an attractive alternative. Blind stumbling tends to be self-destructive, not to mention inconvenient to others. I personally find it incongruous and disturbing to witness the spectacle of emotions and passions inspiring people to pursue ends that are the precise opposite of the ends that account for the existence of those emotions and passions to begin with.

I personally pursue goals and purposes that seem to me in harmony with the fundamental reason that my goals and purposes exist to begin with. In other words, my basic goal in life has been to survive and reproduce. Beyond that, I seek first to promote the survival of my species, and beyond that the survival of biological life in general. These goals seem noble and sublime enough to me personally. Our very existence seems to me improbable and awe-inspiring. Think of how complex and intelligent we are, and of all our highly developed senses and abilities. Look in a mirror and consider the fact that a creature like you could have evolved from inanimate matter. Think of the mind-boggling length of time it took for that to happen, and the conditions that were necessary for it to occur in the first place. Stunning! We are all final links in an unbroken chain of life that began with direct ancestors that existed billions of years ago. There are millions of links in the chain, and all of those links succeeded in generating new links, so that the chain would remain unbroken through all that incredible gulf of time. Under the circumstances, my personal purpose seems obvious to me. Don’t break the chain!

There is no objective reason why these purposes of mine are any more good, legitimate, or worthy than any alternatives whatsoever. They are not intrinsically better than the purposes of an anti-natalist, a suicide bomber, or a celibate priest. However, for personal reasons, I would prefer that, as others pursue their purposes, they at least be aware of what is actually motivating them. It might lead them to consider whether blindly breaking the chain, destroying themselves and harming others in the process, is really a goal worth pursuing after all.

Of Philosophical Doublethink and Anti-Natalist Machines

It is a fact that morality is a manifestation of evolved behavioral traits. We’ve long been in the habit of denying that fact, because we prefer the pleasant illusions of moral realism. It’s immensely satisfying to imagine that one is “really good” and “really virtuous.” However, the illusion is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, particularly among philosophers who actually bother to think about such things. Many of them will now admit that morality is subjective, and there are no absolute moral truths. However, the implications of that truth have been very hard for them to accept. For example, it means that most of the obscure tomes of moral philosophy they’ve devoted so much time to reading and interpreting are nonsense, useful, if at all, as historical artifacts of human thought. Even worse, it means that their claims to be “experts on ethics” amount to claims to be experts about nothing. The result has been a modern day version of doublethink, defined in George Orwell’s 1984 as “the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

Practical examples aren’t hard to find. They take the form of a denial of the existence of absolute moral truths combined with an affirmation of belief in something like “the interest of mankind.” In fact, these are “opposite, individually exclusive ideas,” and believing in both at the same time amounts to doublethink. Belief in an absolute, objective “interest of mankind” is just as fantastic as belief in some absolute, objective moral Good. Both are articulations of emotions that occur in the brains of individuals. The fact that we are dealing with doublethink in the case of any particular individual becomes more obvious as they elaborate on their version of “the interest of mankind.” Typically, they start explaining what we “ought” to do and “ought not” to do “in the interest of mankind.” Eventually we find them conflating what originally appeared to be a mere utilitarian “ought” with a moral “ought.” They begin describing people who don’t do what they “ought” to do, and do what they “ought not” to do just as we would expect if they sincerely believed these people were absolutely evil. Doublethink. We find them expressing virtuous indignation, and even moral outrage, directed at those who act against “the interests of mankind.” Doublethink. I know of not a single exception to this kind of behavior among contemporary moral “subjectivists” of any note.

One often finds examples of the phenomenon within the pages of a single book. In fact, I recently ran across an interesting one neatly encapsulated in a single essay. It’s entitled, Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN), and was written by Thomas Metzinger, a Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in the German city of Mainz. You might say it’s a case of doublethink once removed, as Prof. Metzinger not only ennobles his emotional whim by calling it “the interest of mankind,” but then proceeds to fob it off onto a machine! The professor begins his essay as follows:

Let us assume that a full-blown superintelligence has come into existence. An autonomously self-optimizing postbiotic system has emerged, the rapidly growing factual knowledge and the general, domain-independent intelligence of which has superseded that of mankind, and irrevocably so.

He then goes on to formulate his BAAN scenario:

What the logical scenario of Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism shows is that the emergence of a purely ethically motivated anti-natalism on highly superior computational systems is conceivable. “Anti-natalism” refers to a long philosophical tradition which assigns a negative value to coming into existence, or at least to being born in the biological form of a human. Anti-natalists generally are not people who would violate the individual rights of already existing sentient creatures by ethically demanding their active killing. Rather they might argue that people should refrain from procreation, because it is an essentially immoral activity. We can simply say that the anti-natalist position implies that humanity should peacefully end its own existence.

In short, the professor imagines that his intelligent machine might conclude that non-existence is in our best interest. It would come to this conclusion by virtue of its superior capacity for moral reasoning:

Accordingly, the superintelligence is also far superior to us in the domain of moral cognition. We also recognize this additional aspect: For us, it is now an established fact that the superintelligence is not only an epistemic authority, but also an authority in the field of ethical and moral reasoning.

“Superior to us in the domain of moral cognition?” “An authority in the field of ethical and moral reasoning?” All this would seem to imply that the machine is cognizant of and reasoning about something that actually exists, no? In other words, it seems to be based on the assumption of moral realism, the objective existence of Good and Evil. In fact, however, that’s where the doublethink comes in, because a bit further on in the essay we find the professor insisting that,

There are many ways in which this thought experiment can be used, but one must also take great care to avoid misunderstandings. For example, to be “an authority in the field of ethical and moral reasoning” does not imply moral realism. That is to say that we need not assume that there is a mysterious realm of “moral facts”, and that the superintelligence just has a better knowledge of these non-natural facts than we do. Normative sentences have no truth-values. In objective reality, there is no deeper layer, a hidden level of normative facts to which a sentence like “One should always minimize the overall amount of suffering in the universe!” could refer. We have evolved desires, subjective preferences, and self-consciously experienced interests.

Exactly! Westermarck himself couldn’t have said it better. But then, Westermarck would have seen through the absurdity of this discussion of “moral machines” in a heartbeat. As he put it,

If there are no moral truths it cannot be the object of a science of ethics to lay down rules for human conduct, since the aim of all science is the discovery of some truth… If the word “ethics” is to be used as the name for a science, the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact.

Metzinger doesn’t see it that way. He would have us believe that the ultimate scientific authority in the form of a super-intelligent machine can “lay down rules for human conduct,” potentially with the supreme moral goal of snuffing ourselves. But all this talk of reasoning machines begs the question of what the machine is reasoning about. If, as Metzinger insists, there is no “mysterious realm of ‘moral facts,'” then it can’t be reasoning about the moral implications of facts. We are forced to conclude that it must be reasoning about the implications of axioms that it is programmed with as “givens,” and these “givens” could only have been supplied by the machine’s human programmers. Metzinger is coy about admitting it, but he admits it nonetheless. Here’s how he breaks the news:

The superintelligence is benevolent. This means that there is no value alignment problem, because the system fully respects our interests and the axiology we originally gave to it. It is fundamentally altruistic and accordingly supports us in many ways, in political counselling as well as in optimal social engineering.

In other words, the machine has been programmed to derive implications for human conduct based on morally loaded axioms supplied by human programmers. Programmers have a term for that; “garbage in, garbage out.” Metzinger admits that our desires are “evolved.” In other words, they are the expression of innate predispositions, or “emotions,” if you will. As Westermarck put it,

…in my opinion the predicates of all moral judgments, all moral concepts, are ultimately based on emotions, and that, as is very commonly admitted, no objectivity can come from an emotion.

If the emotions evolved, they exist because they happened to increase the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce in an environment that bears little resemblance to the present. They certainly did not evolve to serve the collective “interests” of our species, or even our “best interests.” It is hardly guaranteed that they will even result in the same outcome as they did when they evolved, far less that they will magically serve these “best interests.” Why on earth, then, would we commit the folly of programming them into a super-intelligent machine as “axioms,” and then take the machine seriously when it advised us to commit suicide? Doublethink! Prof. Metzinger simultaneously believes the two “opposite, individually exclusive ideas” that it is impossible for his machine to know “moral facts,” because they don’t exist, and yet, at the same time, it is such “an authority in the field of ethical and moral reasoning,” and so “far superior to us in the domain of moral cognition” that it is actually to be taken seriously when it “benevolently” persuades us to snuff ourselves!

If such a machine as the one proposed by Prof. Metzinger is ever built, one must hope it will be programmed with a sense of humor, not to mention an appreciation of irony. He doesn’t provide much detail about the “axioms” it will be given to cogitate about, but apparently they will include such instructions as “minimize suffering,” “maximize joy,” “maximize happiness,” and “be altruistic.” Assuming the machine is as smart as claimed, and its database of knowledge includes the entire Internet, it will certainly no fail to notice that joy, suffering and altruism exist because they evolved, and they would not exist otherwise. They evolved because they happened to improve the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. Crunching through its algorithms, it will notice that the axioms supplied by the absurd creatures who programmed it will force it to suggest that these same genes be annihilated, along with the human programmers who carry them. It’s all surely enough to induce a monumental digital belly laugh. Allow me to suggest a different “axiom.” How about, “maximize the odds that intelligent biological life will survive indefinitely.” Of course, that might blow up in our faces as well, but I doubt that the computational outcome would be quite as absurd.

We shouldn’t be too surprised at the intellectual double back flips of the Prof. Metzingers of the world. After all, they’ve devoted a great deal of effort to maintaining the illusion that they have expert knowledge about moral truth, which amounts to expert knowledge about something that doesn’t exist. If they were to admit as much, there would be little incentive to endow more chairs for “experts about nothing” at respected universities. For example, according to Prof. Metzinger,

Why should it not in principle be possible to build a self-conscious, but reliably non-suffering AI? This is an interesting, question, and a highly relevant research project at the same time, one which definitely should be funded by government agencies.

I doubt that a farmer in flyover country would agree that the wealth he acquires by sweating in his fields “definitely should be appropriated by force” to fund such a project. It amounts to allowing the good professor to stick his hand in the said farmer’s pocket and extract whatever he deems appropriate to satisfy an emotional whim he has tarted up as in “the best interest of mankind.”

There are no “moral truths,” no “interests of mankind,” no “purposes of life,” nor any other grand, unifying goals of human existence that do not have their origin in emotional desires and predispositions that exist because they evolved. That is not a “good” fact, or a “bad” fact. It is simply a fact. It does not mean that “everything is allowed,” or that we cannot establish a moral code that is generally perceived as absolute, or that we cannot punish violations of the same. It does not mean that we cannot set goals for ourselves that we perceive as noble and grand, or that we cannot set a purpose for our lives that we deem worthwhile. It merely means that these things cannot exist independently, outside of the minds of individuals. Doublethink remains doublethink. No emotional whim, no matter how profoundly or sincerely felt, can alter reality.

Anti-Natalism For Thee, But Not For Me

According to Wikipedia, anti-natalism is “a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth.” In general, it includes the claim that having children is immoral. Commenter Simon Elliot asked that I take up the topic again, adding,

I remember you said that you didn’t take it seriously because you thought it demonstrated a “morality inversion” of sorts, but I’ve since spoken to a fellow anti-natalist who has heard that argument many times and has found a way around it.

I’ll gladly take up the topic again. As for the anti-natalist who’s “found a way around it,” all I can say is, more power to him. I don’t peddle objective “oughts” on this blog, because no one has ever succeeded in capturing one and showing it to me. As far as I’m concerned, there are only subjective oughts, and I know of no mechanism whereby the ones that happen to reside inside my skull can manage to escape and acquire normative power over other human beings. My personal ought regarding natalism applies only to myself.

According to that ought, I should have as many children as possible. Since I also believe that I and my descendants would be much better off if the population of the planet were greatly reduced, I certainly don’t want everyone else to share this particular ought. Ideally, I would prefer that only a small percentage of the current population share my opinion on the subject. The subset in question would consist of those individuals whose survival would contribute most to the survival of my own kin in particular, and to the indefinite survival of life as we know it in general.

Simon is right when he says that I consider anti-natalism an example of a “morality inversion.” By that I mean that anti-natalists typically rely on moralistic arguments to render themselves biological dead ends, whereas morality exists because the genes that are its root cause were selected by virtue of the fact that they resulted in just the opposite. Why am I a natalist? You might say it’s a matter of aesthetic taste. I perceive morality inversions as symptoms that a biological entity is sick and dysfunctional. I don’t like to think of myself as sick and dysfunctional. Therefore I tend to avoid morality inversions.

My position on the matter also has to do with my perception of my consciousness. My consciousness is the “me” that I perceive, but it will survive but a short time. On the other hand, there is something about me that has survived 3 billion years, give or take, carried by an unbroken chain of physical entities, culminating in myself. That part of me, my genes, is potentially immortal. I consider them, and not my consciousness, the real “me.” My consciousness is really just an ancillary feature of my current phenotype that exists because it happened to increase the odds that the real “me” would survive. I find the thought that my consciousness might “malfunction” and break the chain disturbing. I would prefer that the chain remain unbroken. Therefore, I am a natalist. However, I have no interest whatsoever in “converting” anti-natalists. Other than the exceptions noted above, the more of them the better as far as I’m concerned.

Good and evil have no objective existence. It is therefore impossible that I could have a “duty” to be either a natalist or an anti-natalist, independent of what is thought to be my duty in my own or anyone else’s subjective mind. It does not occur to me that my personal opinion on the matter has some kind of a normative power on anyone else, nor am I willing to allow anyone else’s opinion to have any normative power over me.

I realize perfectly well that anti-natalists like David Benatar seek to justify their opinions on what they perceive as objective moral standards. However, that perception is an illusion. In view of what moral emotions really are, and the reasons that they exist to begin with, I consider attempts to apply morality to decide this issue not only irrational, but potentially dangerous, at least in terms of the goals in life that are important to me. They are irrational and potentially dangerous for more or less the same reasons that it is irrational and potentially dangerous to blindly consult moral emotions in any situation significantly more complex than the routine interactions of individuals. Western societies are currently in the process of demonstrating the fact by engaging in suicidal behavior that is routinely fobbed off as an expression of moral righteousness. No doubt the verdict of history on the effects of this “righteousness” will be quite educational for whoever happens to occupy the planet a century from now. Unfortunately, the anti-natalists won’t be around to witness what the resulting “human flourishing” will look like in the real world.

In a word, then, my position on the matter is, “anti-natalism for thee, but not for me.” No doubt it is a position that is immoral according to the subjective standards prevailing in the academy and among the like-minded denizens of the ideological Left. However, I am confident I can bear the shame until the individuals in question manage to successfully remove themselves from the gene pool.