Category: Cabrera

The following text is the third and last part of my comments on some of Julio Cabrera’s replies to the questions he was asked in The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast #19 – Julio Cabrera ‘Questionaire on Antinatalism’. In this part I’ll address Cabrera’s reply to the question of involuntary sterilization.

For comments on his replies to questions regarding his general approach to Antinatalism please read part 1. And for comments on his replies to the questions regarding: The moral status of animals, Abortion, EFILism, and Veganism, please read part 2.

Question 16:

“If it were so that the only way to stop people from procreation was something akin to involuntary sterilization, you say that the end justifies the means? Do we have a moral obligation to prevent others from committing the ultimate moral transgression – procreation? If yes, then how? If no then why not?”

Cabrera:

“Involuntary sterilization would be something totally immoral within a negative ethics, in a certain line of argumentation, of course. I have one theoretical line and another practical.
(1). At least within a deontological and not utilitarian ethics such as negative ethics, in order to decide something ethically we have to take into account the autonomies of those involved. In this case we have two autonomies to consider: the real autonomy of the procreators and the conjectured autonomy of the procreated.”

First of all, it is hard to ignore that when Cabrera wants to counter-argue involuntary sterilization then there is a division between the real autonomy of the procreators and the conjectured autonomy of the procreated, but when he wants to counter-argue abortion, then not only the autonomy of the procreated, but the autonomy of the fetus is not conjectured but considered as real and equal to its parents’ autonomy, despite that it is not even conscious yet. If you are baffled by this claim, please listen to his stand regarding abortion in the questionnaire (question 21), or read about it in the second part where I am addressing his anti-abortion view.
But obviously the point is to try and deal with the core of the argument, so I’ll ignore the manipulation and focus on the point he is making here which is that we must consider the autonomy of the people who have a desire to procreate.

The reason this argument is false is first of all since a desire is not an ethical justification. The desire to do something is insufficient as a moral justification to do it even if the desirers are autonomies. Obviously people have an interest to procreate, that’s why they are procreating, but that is a description of our dire reality, not an ethical justification of it.
It is ethically false, if not absurd, to consider the interests in doing something which is basically wrong, as a counter argument for the action’s wrongness. It is balancing the harmfulness of a crime with the interests of the criminals to perform it.
A strong interest to do something wrong doesn’t make it right. Neither does the resulted frustration if the wrong action is prohibited. To claim otherwise is to nullify criminalness, as all that any offender should claim is that by stopping him from committing a crime we are violating his autonomy. The autonomy of every offender would be hurt if they couldn’t continue with their offences, is it a justified reason to let them go on with their crimes? Rapists might feel that their autonomy is hurt if they are not allowed to rape, or if they are caught, is that a reason not to do everything we can to stop them? Can the desire to rape be an argument in favor of raping?
Can people’s autonomy and desire to eat animals be a justification for the torture of the animals they consume? Arguing that all factory farms must be closed down today for the pain and misery they cause can’t be seriously counter argued by claiming that people have a desire to eat meat, eggs and milk, and preventing it from them is not considering their autonomy.

Cabrera argues that:

“Even though it is immoral to procreate from the antinatalist perspective that we assume, there are other perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments (in fact, Benatar is frequently answering objections because the question is highly controversial).”
Of course this question is highly controversial but not because there are other perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments, or because it is highly complicated in philosophical terms, but because people want to procreate. It is arguments against selfish desires, social conventions, biological urges, and many other motivations, but definitely not reasonable counter-arguments.
There are no perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments to antinatalism, there are only excuses that present counter-motivations to antinatalism.

The desire of people to procreate is morally wrong and therefore their autonomy can’t be weighed, not to mention in an equal manner, against the harms forced on the procreated.

Cabrera is aware that the only way to justify the refusal to impose on procreators the prevention of their immoral desire to procreate is by arguing that it is not necessarily immoral. Since if it is immoral, then it is morally justified to ignore the autonomy of the criminals and impose a prevention of their crimes just as it is in other cases of immoral actions such as torture, rape and murder. Therefore he makes the following move:

“If we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the murderer when he is about to kill someone, why would we not have the right to not respect the autonomy of the procreator when he is about to generate someone? I reply that in the case of existing people, we can clearly see that the victim of a murderer wants to continue to exist (and if he does not want to – as in the case of assisted suicide – we can also know this). But in the case of non-existent people, antinatalists assume uncritically that the non-being wants certainly to continue not to exist.”

By claiming that in the case of procreation, as opposed to murder, there is room for speculation, Cabrera states that he is not really sure about his claims regarding the immorality of procreation.
It might be the case that he thinks that procreation is not a serious crime as murder, but that would go against many of his other claims, including ones he has made along the questionnaire, and definitely ones that he made in the book A Critique of Affirmative Morality. For someone whose antinatalism is so heavily based on the harm of mortality, I would expect him to argue that not only is procreation a crime as serious as murder but actually is a type of murder. And since when he talks about mortality he is not only arguing that it is a harm because everyone must die, but because everyone starts dying when they are born, procreation is supposed to be consider by him even worse than murder as it is a slow structural murder. It would have made sense for him to claim that since people are in a constant state of dying then procreators are in a constant state of murdering. But instead of making claims which are accordant and consistent with his other claims, he insists on abruptly claiming that antinatalism is speculative.

For anyone who is less familiar with Cabrera’s other stands, here is a representative sample taken from his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality:

“Even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build, etc.” (p.54)

And one taken from his article Negative Ethics:

“To come into being is to be ontologically impoverished, sensibly affected and ethically blocked: to be alive is a fight against everything and everybody, trying all the time to escape from suffering, failure and injustice. This strongly suggests that the true reason for making someone to come into being is never for the person’s own sake, but always for the interest of his/her progenitors, in a clear attitude of manipulation; radical manipulation indeed because, in contrast with usual manipulation of people already alive, manipulation in procreation affects the very being of the person, and not only some of his/her predicates.”

So Cabrera’s own antinatalist claims aren’t in line with his reply. Neverthelss a serious reply must be made to the argument that “antinatalists assume uncritically that the non-being wants certainly to continue not to exist”, an argument he further develops along his answer accusing antinatalists for easily going from the premise that the world is a bad place, to the conclusion that nobody wants to live in a bad place. And he finds this sequitur controversial:
“If our conjecture about the interests of the non-being is totally rational, it is certain that it would prefer to continue in the same state. But if the conjecture is made on the basis of humans we know, emotions will prevail over reason and the interests of the non-being could be, despite everything, to come into existence. After all, we are recreating the autonomy of the procreated in pure speculative terms, guided by certain philosophical ideas; but there are perspectives guided by other ideas according to which the non-being wants to exist and is asking for it. This, of course, is equality speculative. But how can one unite between two equally conjectural conceptions of the interests of the not being? Pure speculation about the desires of the not being, in the impossibility of deciding between speculations, is strong enough for me not to procreate, but it seems too weak to prevent others from procreating. What is a strong reason for making my own decision may not be strong enough to justify intervention.”

I will ignore, for the sake of the argument, that he seems to ascribe interests to non-beings, and even that like many pro-natalists, he of all people, the philosopher who criticized Benatar’s asymmetry and presented a different and quite unique approach to antinatalism, treats antinatalism as if it is a movement with one argument, let alone one that is ascribing interests to non-existing beings, despite that there are many other reasons why procreation is wrong, and I’ll focus on the speculation issue.
In order to oppose involuntary sterilization Cabrera takes the very long road of arguing first that the parents’ autonomy and desire must be considered despite that procreation is morally wrong (a claim which is addressed above), and that although he thinks that procreation is morally wrong, antinatalism is speculative. The fact that procreation is morally wrong is not speculative because it needs not to be based on conjectural conceptions of the interests of non-existing beings, but on the fact that at least the interests of some created people would be never to have been.
Given that lives which are found not worth living by the ones who are living them, not by antinatalist, are being created all the time, there is nothing speculative about the claim that the interests of at least some created people is that they had never been created. The fact that their creation severely harms them is not speculative but unquestionable. So letting procreation continue despite that it is guaranteed that at least some of the created people would rather never to have been, is actually claiming that forcing some people to endure miserable lives that they wish were never imposed on them, is justified by the desire of other people to procreate.

This argument must not be confused with the common antinatalist risk argument. Although I find it one of the strongest antinatalist arguments, I think there is something misleading in its common formulation. That is since on the global level procreation is not a gamble, it is not a risk, it is absolutely certain that some persons would be forced to live extremely miserable lives. Somewhere in the world, miserable persons are being created. And that fact turns the argument from a risk that some of the created people would be forced to endure horrible lives, to a decision that some of the created people would be forced to endure horrible lives. People who decide to procreate are not only taking a risk on someone else’s life, they also approve and strengthen the claim that the suffering of some is justified because of the desire of others to procreate. The procreators’ autonomy argument entails sacrificing people who would be miserable if procreation is allowed, for the sake of people’s autonomy if procreation isn’t allowed.

So the speculative argument is false, as even if I’ll accept for the sake of the argument that it is speculative whether everyone’s existence is a harm, it is not speculative that if procreation is allowed, miserable lives would inevitably occur.

One might suggest that what we ought to do is weigh the interests of the people who want to procreate against the suffering of the ones who would have miserable lives, but that is a false equivalency. That is since procreation is not only forcing needless and pointless suffering on the created person, but is in fact, first and foremost, forcing needless and pointless suffering on thousands of other sentient creatures, since each person created is hurting thousands of sentient creatures during a lifetime.
Even if we’ll accept for the sake of the argument that it is speculative whether the created person is going to be harmed as a result of its existence, there is nothing speculative about that thousands of sentient creatures would be harmed by the created person.

It is very hard to accurately assess the harms caused by each person since it depends on various factors such as location, socioeconomic status, consumption habits, life expectancy, livelihood, diet and etc., however, regardless of any circumstances, harming numerous others is inevitable.
And the most immediate and prominent harm is caused by what people eat.
Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the ones with the highest price – animal based foods.
Each person directly consumes thousands of animals. More accurate average figures are varied according to each person location. An average American meat eater for example consumes more than 2,020 chickens, about 1,700 fish, more than 70 turkeys, more than 30 pigs and sheep, about 11 cows, and tens of thousands of aquatic animals, some directly and some indirectly (as many of which are fed to consumed animals).
Therefore in most cases procreating is choosing that more fish would suffocate to death by being violently sucked out of water, that more chickens would be crammed into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, that more calves would be separated from their mothers, and more cow mothers would be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, it is choosing more pigs who suffer from chronic pain, more lame sheep, more beaten goats, more turkeys who can barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, more ducks who are forced to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, more rabbits imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, more geese being aggressively plucked, more male chicks being gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs nor for meat, more snakes being skinned alive, and more crocodiles and alligators being hammered to death and often also skinned alive to be worn, and more mice, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, and monkeys being experimented on.
Since most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision one must make – procreation is practically letting a mass murderer on the loose.

And it is not that vegan food is harmless. It is much less harmful, but still very harmful. It is impossible to eat without harming someone, somewhere along the way, even when sticking to a vegan, local, organic and seasonable diet. It is impossible to entirely avoid using fertilizers, packages, pesticides, transportation, water, energy, and to avoid producing waste.
For a broader explanation why harming is inevitable please read the text the harms to others, where there is a more detailed information regarding some of the inherent harms of humans, all humans, and regardless of what they eat.

And anyway, a vegan, local, organic and seasonable diet, is relevant for extremely tiny minority of people who care enough to choose the least harmful options at any given time. Even most vegans and environmentalists are not doing that. Most vegans simply consume plant based food, and most environmentalists still hardly connect food with environmentalism. In recent years there is a positive awaking in that area, but still it mostly regards dolphin safe tuna, food’s carbon footprint, bottled water, and avoiding six pack rings.
And of course the vast majority of people are extremely far from even being aware of all of that, not to mention considering it, or even thinking that they should. And that is a very strong reason for forced sterilization, since there is no way to avoid harming others even if everyone tried, and currently the vast majority of people not only don’t want to, but support the exact opposite.

Living on a planet with limited resources, no one can really avoid getting in conflict with others. No one should cause suffering to anyone, but no one can not cause suffering to others. Everything people do affects others, so it is even theoretically impossible to fulfil the most basic ethical requirement – do no harm. And practically, it is far from being the case that people are harming only since and when they cannot do otherwise. I wish people were harming others only for survival reasons. Reality is unfortunately much crueler. People harm, exploit, torture, humiliate, deprive, attack, ignore, abuse and whatnot, for much less essential reasons. People don’t harm others because they have things that they need, but mostly because they have things that they want.

It is interesting that Cabrera has made a rhetorical comparison between procreating and killing, since the two shouldn’t only be compared on the rhetorical level. As aforementioned, in some sense, especially under Cabrera’s notions of procreation and death, procreating is killing as it is creating someone who has to die. And while that maybe speculative and arguable, the fact that every person kills many others during its life is inarguable. People are killing others on a daily basis, mostly to feed themselves but also to cover themselves, to move from place to place, to heat their houses, to build their houses, and practically for most of the things they consume. So even if you disagree with the claim that procreation is murder because it is creating someone who would necessarily die, procreation is murder anyway because it is creating a mass murderer.

Procreation and murder are in fact intertwined. Since as Cabrera mentioned earlier, we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the murderer when he is about to kill someone, we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the procreator when he is about to generate someone, as that someone would necessarily be a murderer.

Cabrera argued that there are two different autonomies which must be considered, of the procreators and of the procreated, but he ‘forgot’ the thousands autonomies that are violated by each created person. Before discussing the autonomy of procreators and procreated, we must consider the autonomy of everyone who would be harmed by each procreation.

Even if we could know the interests of non-existing persons before creating them, we first must consider the interests of everyone who would be sacrificed and otherwise harmed by these persons. We must consider their interests not to be genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons. We must consider their interests not to be imprisoned for their entire lives. We must consider their interests not to live without their family for their entire lives. We must consider their interests not to suffer chronic pain and maladies. We must consider their interests not to be deprived of breathing clean air, walking on grass, bathing in water, and eating their natural food. We must consider their interests not to be violently murdered so the to-be born could consume their bodies. We must consider their interests that their habitats won’t be destroyed, and that their land, water, and air won’t be polluted.

Procreation is not only creating a subject of harms and pleasures, but a small unit of exploitation and pollution. Therefore, the question is not is it justified that people would impose harms on another person so they can fulfil their desire to procreate, but is it justified that people would impose immense harm on many others so that they would fulfil their desire to procreate.

The question in point is not is it ethical to take the risk of creating miserable lives, but is it ethical to impose immense suffering on many others so that a truly tiny minority would
experience parenthood. How can it possibly be acceptable to force lives full of suffering on thousands of sentient beings, just so that one unethical preference of would-be parents won’t be frustrated?

But it goes even further than that. What should be weighed against the interests of people who want to procreate is not only the people who would be born into miserable lives, and not only the nonhuman animals who would be harmed by the newborns of the current people who want to procreate, but all the harms, and all the misery, and all the suffering that would ever be caused by humans. The equation is between one generation of people who would sacrifice their desire to procreate, and all the victims of all the procreations that would ever occur.
Human procreation is not only risking “a tiny minority” who might be sacrificed for the sake of people’s desire to procreate, it is ensuring that numerous generations of sentient creatures would be sacrificed for one desire of an extremely tiny minority – one generation, of one species only.
And since people don’t even take seriously the possibility that their own children might suffer extremely, there is no chance they would ever take seriously the certainty that numerous generations of sentient creatures would suffer extremely because of their procreation. That’s why we mustn’t wait until people understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate, or in other words involuntary sterilization.

However Cabrera argues that:

“Within a negative ethics, the autonomy of procreators, their desire to procreate cannot be ethically justified, as procreation is immoral. But even so, we cannot prevent others from procreating, since at least in an intellectual democracy, people have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses.”

What Cabrera is saying is that despite that people’s desire to procreate cannot be ethically justified as procreation is immoral, and despite that preventing others from procreating would prevent tremendous misery and imposition from every human that would ever exist, and from every nonhuman that every human that would ever exist would force to endure, since in an intellectual democracy, people have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses, we cannot prevent others from procreating. That is simply cruel. How can the deprivation of one desire, of one generation only, be seriously compared with the continuance and systematical deprivation of whomever would exist if that one generation is not involuntary sterilized?
Sentient creatures who would exist in the future are not less morally important than sentient creatures who live right now. And sentient creatures who would live in the future infinitely outnumber the ones who are alive today, let alone merely the humans who want to procreate. So giving the current humans who want to procreate the same moral weight as all the creatures that would ever be forced to suffer is a serious case of myopia, speciesism and cruelty.

Cabrera confuses a right to disagree with a right to impose. People may have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses when it comes to their lives, but they have no right to impose their stands on others, let alone trillions of others. People don’t have a right to impose. And that’s exactly what they are doing when they are procreating. So does involuntary sterilization of course, but that is in order to stop the infinite impositions bound with the infinite procreations that would occur otherwise, it is an imposition to stop the suffering bound with existence. And it is an imposition to prevent one desire, which is totally immoral, and of one generation only, so that all future impositions of who knows how many generations would stop for good.

Imposition is anyway bound to happen. It is either that people would continue to decide for other people that they would exist, generation after generation after generation, and for other creatures that they would have to be exploited, suffer and be sacrificed for the sake of the people they insist on creating, or that we decide for one generation only that they won’t procreate. There is no way around it, decisions are anyway being made for others, the question is will it be only the decision not to procreate and for one generation only, or the decision to feel pain, to fear, to be bored, to be disappointed, to be sad, to be lonely, to be purposeless, to die, to fear dying and many other sources of suffering, and for generation after generation after generation after generation…

Given that the only way to cease the inherent imposition of procreation is with the inherent imposition of forced sterilization, clearly for the long run that resolution holds much less imposition than letting procreation continue on its current horrendous course. The number of individuals who would have to endure imposition of all kinds in the future if it won’t happen, is practically infinite. In fact, even without considering everyone who would ever exist, the number of individuals who endure coercion of all kinds in the present, already defeats the number of people who need to be sterilized.
Objecting involuntary sterilization on the current generation is forcing endless suffering on an endless number of individuals. Imposition is unavoidable, the question is of extent. The imposition involved in involuntary sterilization is for one generation only. The imposition involved in the refusal for involuntary sterilization can last until the sun burns out.

Think about it this way, if one generation of humans had decided that it is wrong to procreate and therefore agreed to sacrifice its desire to do so, that decision would have prevented all the suffering caused by humans from the moment the last person of that generation died. If for example that generation lived in the beginning of 19th century, that decision would have prevented all the suffering that occurred during the 20th century. Two world wars, hundreds of other wars, all the war crimes, all the reeducation camps, the famine in China, the famine in Ukraine, the famine in Japan, the famine in Russia, the famine in India, the famine in Somalia, the famine in Ethiopia, the famine in Mozambique, the famine in Yemen, the famine in Sudan, all the rapes, all the murders, all the tortures, all the concentration camps in Poland, Germany, Cambodia and North Korea, all the diseases, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Armenia, the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, all the animal experimentations, all the fishing, all the hunting, all the beating, all the humiliations, all the accidents, all the disappointments, all the frustrations, all the pains, and every second in every factory farm. Can the frustration of one generation, of one species only, seriously be compared with all these atrocities? Of course not. But the human race is far from being moral enough to decide not to procreate, no matter how obvious, essential, unequivocal and urgent it is. The human race is not moral enough to realize that if one of the former generations had made that call then all the atrocities of the 20th century and the ones happening now in 21st century wouldn’t have happened, and that if they would make that call now, all the atrocities of the 22nd century won’t happen. But the human race would never make that call.
Now if it was possible to sterilize that generation in the beginning of 19th century, an action which would have prevented the horrors of the 20th century, for the price of the frustration of the people who existed in the beginning of 19th century only and wanted to procreate, is it even conceivable to consider if it was worth it? Is it even conceivable to consider if it is worth doing now?

Cabrera argues that:

“We would have to come up with a very powerful justification for intervening in the lives all of these people, to prevent them from doing something that we consider to be immoral, but which they consider to be moral or morally neutral. I am not saying that we cannot intervene; I say that in order to prevent others from procreating, we should have a reason much stronger than the reason that leads us to not have children ourselves. Intervention is a very strong action that must be very well justified.”

And I agree. Indeed intervention is a very strong action that must be very well justified, and it is very well justified by the fact that procreation is a very serious crime.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing on someone else the most important decision in that person’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is harming someone else without that person’s consent.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is gambling with someone else’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after meaning in a meaningless, needless, pointless, and absurd world.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after pleasures despite that pleasures are not really intrinsically good but addictive falsehood smoke screen illusions, which trap sentient beings in an endless, pointless and vain seek for more of them. Pleasures are preceded by wants which are the absence of objects desired by subjects. People want because they are missing something. They seek pleasures to release the tension of craving. Craving or wants, are at least bad experiences if not a sort of pain. Pleasures are short and temporary, and compel a preceding deprivation, a want or a need, which is not always being fulfilled, rarely to the desired measure, and almost never exactly when wanted. And even when desires are fulfilled, the cycle starts again.

Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after happiness despite that according to the “set point” theory of happiness, which many psychologists find convincing nowadays, mood is homeostatic and we all have a fixed average level of happiness. That means that even desirable things which people do manage to obtain, are satisfying at first, but eventually people adapt to them and return to their “set points”. Therefore people usually end up more or less on the same level of wellbeing they were before. That’s why some argue that people actually run on hedonic treadmills.
Procreation is a very serious crime because there is a very realistic probability that a person forced into existence would be miserable. There is not even a theoretical possibility that a person forced into existence won’t be harmed at all. Creating someone who would definitely be harmed and the only variable is to what extent (with the potential of extreme misery), must be morally prohibited. Given that the motives are never the interests of the to-be born person, it is not only morally flawed, it is selfish, egocentric, arrogant, and careless.
Procreation is a very serious crime because the ample evidences that bad experiences are more important than good ones, not only serve as a proof that good experiences are at least not as good as bad experiences are bad (if not proving that bad experiences almost always outweigh the good ones), but how horrible life actually and inherently is. Basically, pain and other negative experiences, increase the fitness of individuals by enhancing their respondence ability to threats to their survival and reproduction. It has a crucial adaptive function. Existing sentient beings are tortured by evolutionary mechanisms which their only point is that additional sentient beings would exist, regardless of any of those beings’ personal wellbeing. It is a pointless, frustrating and painful trap.

Procreation is a very serious crime because it diverts energy, time and resources from persons who already exist and are in need, to those who needed nothing, were deprived of nothing, and harmed by nothing before they were forced into existence.
Procreation is a very serious crime because life is a constant Sisyphean struggle just to survive a life no one chose. Everyone is bound to overcome needless frustrations, disappointments, pains and discomforts.
Procreation is a very serious crime because each bad moment happening in life is unnecessary. Every pain, every sickness, every fear, every frustration, every regret, every broken-heartedness, every moment of boredom and etc. are all needless. They exist only because the person experiencing them exists. They exist because the parents of that person have forced existence on that person.

Procreation is a very serious crime because lives not worth living is not a theoretical possibility, it is a certainty. People whose lives are not worth living would be born, and the chances for that happening are renewed with each procreation. Misery has no quota. The only way to avoid this worse off option is by not procreating.
Procreation is a very serious crime because there is no way to retroactively revoke it, and there is not even an easy and harmless option for someone to end its own existence. Many people are trapped in horrible lives without a truly viable option to end it because they are too afraid to kill themselves, or because they don’t want to hurt the ones who care about them if they do, or are too afraid that if they won’t succeed in killing themselves they would be socially stigmatized in the better case, or coercively hospitalized in a worse one, or harm themselves so severely while trying to kill themselves that they would end up even worse than they were. Trapping people in the impossible situation of not wanting to live but not wanting to kill themselves so not to hurt others or because they are afraid to kill themselves for any of the mentioned reasons, is a very serious crime.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it forces someone to die, and to fear of death for most of one’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it forces someone into an unfair world where the most crucial factor in having a relatively tolerable life is luck. In a split of a second, even relatively happy lives can turn utterly miserable, often by one wrong decision, or even regardless of one’s actions. One can be very responsible, reasonable and diligent, yet utterly miserable as a result of a mistake made by someone irresponsible, unreasonable and lazy. Life is not only pointless but also unfair, arbitrary and fickle.

And finally, more than anything, what makes procreation such a serious crime, is that it is forcing enormous needless and pointless suffering on thousands of vulnerable individuals. While the person created is one morally relevant creature which would be harmed by being created, each person created is hurting thousands of more morally relevant creatures during a lifetime.

Procreation is so harmful, so wrong, so immoral, and such a serious crime, that it is not enough to oppose it theoretically, we must stop it practically.

Humans’ carelessness, even for their own children, and their cruelty in general, are of the strongest reasons why trying to convince people not to procreate is useless, and why we must find ways to stop humans from procreating regardless of their opinion about it. Just as they disregard the opinion of their children, and all of their children’s victims. That is not to teach them a lesson of course, but because it is the only way to stop this never-ending crime.

The billions of sentient creatures who are imprisoned for their entire lives, the billions of sentient creatures who are being genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons, the billions of sentient creatures who are being forced to live without their family for their entire lives, the billions of sentient creatures who suffer from chronic pain and maladies, the billions of sentient creatures that can never breathe clean air, walk on grass, bath in water, and eat their natural food, the billions of sentient creatures being violently murdered so the to-be born could consume their bodies, the billions of sentient creatures whose habitats are being destroyed and polluted, the billions of sentient creatures being skinned alive, castrated, burned, poisoned, kicked, dehorned, mounted, chained, experimented on, enslaved, are all a very powerful justification for intervening in humans’ ability to procreate.

We mustn’t count on human morality. It is speciesist and immoral to allow people to decide and to wait until each one of them would understand and act accordingly, while the victims pile up. We must make a decision for the victims’ sake even without the permission of the victimizers.

Procreation is a crime so serious that it shouldn’t be left for humanity to decide upon. It must be stopped and by involuntary means if necessary. And unfortunately it is necessary.

The problems humans are causing are only getting bigger and bigger, and so the solution must be radical and thorough. People are not going to stop procreating out of their own good will.

Preventing suffering from innumerable generations is a moral imperative. Arguing that something is better, surly in this unequivocal case, ethically compels an intervention to make it happen. After all, to stand idle while generation after generation spawns an unimaginable amount of suffering, is complicity. It is very cruel to let the madness continue without doing anything about it.

People will never stop breeding until we make them. We must stop looking for the best antinatalist argument, and start looking for the best way to somehow sterilize them all.

Cabrera’s practical argument against involuntary sterilization goes as follow:

“If this highly theoretical line of argumentation does not satisfy, there is another more pragmatic: in order to implement a systematic policy of non-procreation with powers to practice involuntary sterilization, we will need an enormous centralized power that compels people not to procreate. In the domain of real politics, a totally unconscious sterilization resource is unthinkable; many people would realize that, in this New Antinatalist Order, they are forbidden to reproduce and that could generate a genuine state of antinatalist terror. Here everything happens as with socialism: it is a good cause – based on equality and solidarity – that may have to resort to some type of violence to be implemented.

The instinctive force to procreate is so high that no weak police could contain it. For this, thousands of other immoral actions would have to be committed just to prevent the immorality of procreation. Even if the procedures were soft, they are intrusive and violent, in one way or another.”

Unfortunately I agree that the instinctive force to procreate is so high that no weak police could contain it. And unfortunately it is also so high that no strong ethical argument could ever contain it. That’s exactly why involuntary sterilization is so needed. Because there is no other way that procreation would ever stop.

I also agree that “in order to implement a systematic policy of non-procreation with powers to practice involuntary sterilization, we will need an enormous centralized power that compels people not to procreate”, and that’s exactly why it is the last thing I imagine when I advocate for involuntary sterilization. My vision is of a chemical or biological agent that compels people not to procreate, not a political one.

Hopefully the method for involuntary sterilization would be the least intrusive and least violent as possible, however nothing is more intrusive and violent than procreation. So even if “thousands of immoral actions would have to be committed just to prevent the immorality of procreation”, they are nothing compared with the trillions of immoral actions that would continue to be committed if involuntary sterilization isn’t committed.

The human race is with no proportion the greatest wrongdoer in history. And things are not getting better. And even if they were, they are currently so horrible that the harm of involuntary sterilization is marginal compared with the harms to existing nonhumans, which quantitatively speaking already by far exceed the number of existing humans, not to mention when considering the harms to every nonhuman who would ever be born. There are more nonhuman animals in factory farms at any given moment than there are humans on this planet. For their sake alone involuntary sterilization is utterly justified. The harm to existing people by preventing them from procreating, can’t seriously be compared to the harms to generations upon generations of sentient creatures whose suffering would be prevented in the case of involuntary sterilization.

The answer to the question do we have a moral obligation to prevent others from procreation, depends on who we ask. If we keep asking humans only, then the answer of most would be that we have a moral obligation not to prevent others from procreating, and only a tiny minority would argue differently. But if we ask anyone who would be affected by involuntary sterilization, anyone whom this question is relevant for but is never asked, an absolute majority would unhesitatingly say that there is a moral obligation to prevent humans from procreating by all means necessary.

Cabrera askes:
“What would an antinatalist say if a natalist society – like ours today – decided to apply fertilizing substances to everyone without their consent?”
Probably that inflicting suffering, let alone without consent, is morally wrong, and that preventing the infliction of suffering, even without consent, is morally right.

That question holds a major false equivalence, since forcing people to create suffering is not the same as forcing people to stop creating suffering. And forcing all people to create more and more people, who would cause more and more suffering, to more and more sentient creatures, is not equivalent to forcing much less people not to procreate, so trillions of victims would be spared.

 

The following text is the second part of my comments on some of Julio Cabrera’s replies to questions he was asked in The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast #19 – Julio Cabrera ‘Questionaire on Antinatalism’. In this part I’ll address Cabrera’s replies to questions regarding: The moral status of animals, Abortion, EFILism, and Veganism.
For comments on his replies to questions regarding his general approach to Antinatalism please read part 1. And for comments on his replies to the question of involuntary sterilization please read part 3.

Question 18:

“It is true that your philosophical and ethical beliefs are unique but there are some unique principles you promote (such as the injunction against manipulation) that intuitively apply to animals as well. Do animals deserve any consideration in a Negative Ethics framework?
Can animals be harmed in similar way as you describe people can: the moral impediment, discomforts? What moral obligations or duties (for us, humans) follow from this?”

Cabrera:

“In my philosophy the animal issue is a less important point.”

“I actually start from an abyss between human and non-human animals. Here I followed two masters of the human condition, Schopenhauer and Heidegger.”

“In terms of my philosophy, the abysmal difference between human and nonhuman is already expressed in moral terms: nonhuman animals have no moral impediment. They are not open to the domain of morality; therefore, they cannot fail to be moral as human fail, they cannot be disabled for something in which they have never been enabled. This is sufficient to understand that we cannot have ethical-negative relationships with nonhuman animals; there can be no ethical relations between beings with moral impediment and beings without it. Therefore, there can be no “incorporation of animals into the moral community” in negative ethics.

However, in this ethics morality has two basic requirements, not to manipulate and not to harm. Although there is no reciprocity between human and nonhuman animals, we can say that we manipulate and harm nonhuman animals when we treat them badly, when we hunt and eat them, because they – at their own level – feel pain, fear, want to continue living, live comfortably, etc. but strictly speaking, we cannot say that we have moral relations with them; we can only be moral about them asymmetrically, but not together with them.

In Spanish and Portuguese there is a triad of similar terms that does not exist English, and that allows me to describe my attitude towards animals: trato, contracto, maltrato, treatment, contract and mistreatment.
We can only have contracts with other humans, because a contract requires moral (or immoral) interaction. But this must not lead to mistreatment. It is incorrect and disgusting to make animals suffer or kill for fun, but it is not “immoral”, because morality requires reciprocity; it cause us discomfort to see animals suffer, but not all discomfort is a moral discomfort. If we cannot have contracts with nonhuman animals, and we don’t want to mistreat them either, we must find some kind of treatment with them, which consists of not harming them and benefiting them if possible.”

Since sentience is the only relevant criterion for moral consideration, anyone who is capable of experiencing suffering should be included within the moral community. And since harms to sentient nonhuman animals matter to them as much as harms to humans matter to humans, sentient nonhuman animals matter morally no less than humans matter morally.
To exclude sentient nonhuman animals despite their possession of the only morally relevant criterion can only be merely due to their species, and that is Speciesism – a form of prejudice based upon morally irrelevant differences, which is no more justifiable than racism or sexism.

In the words of Richard Ryder, the psychologist who coined the term in 1970:

“All animal species can suffer pain and distress. Nonhuman animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated with the experience of pain in ourselves. So our concern for the pain and distress of others should be extended to any ‘painient’ (i.e. pain-feeling) individual regardless of his or her sex, class, race, religion, nationality or species.” (Speciesism, Painism and Happiness Page 130)

The fact that it is morally wrong to exclude a group on the basis of an arbitrary criterion is Ethics 101.

Cabrera’s claims were long ago refuted by Jeremy Bentham, as well as many others, especially Peter Singer. The following passage is taken from Animal Liberation and combines both of them:

“Many philosophers and other writers have proposed the principle of equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as a basic moral principle; but not many of them have recognized that this principle applies to members of other species as well as to our own. Jeremy Bentham was one of the few who did realize this. In a forward-looking passage written at a time when black slaves had been freed by the French but in the British dominions were still being treated in the way we now treat animals, Bentham wrote:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration. The capacity for suffering-or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness-is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language or higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark “the insuperable line” that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have chosen the wrong characteristic. By saying that we must consider the interests of all beings with the capacity for suffering or enjoyment Bentham does not arbitrarily exclude from consideration any interests at all-as those who draw the line with reference to the possession of reason or language do. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way.” (Animal Liberation Page 7)

I find Cabrera’s stance on nonhuman animals particularly weird and disappointing partly since he quotes philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Heidegger, who at least on this issue are not particularly relevant nowadays, despite that he knows Perter Singer. And I am not assuming that because Singer is one of the most famous moral philosophers of this current age, but since he quotes him in the book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation and in this questionnaire. Unfortunately, the quotes are about abortions and about intervention in nature, not about the moral status of animals, and that is quite a cheap cherry picking move by Cabrera, as although Peter Singer discussed many issues in practical ethics along the years, surly by far more than any other issue the moral status of animals is the one which is most identified with him, and surly Cabrera is familiar with his ideas on the matter, so the least he could have done is explain why he thinks they are wrong. I highly doubt that he could.

An intuitive counter response to Cabrera might be that actually nonhuman animals are the ones with which it is very easy for each antinatalist to assist by going vegan and by that reduce the number of created creatures, and by supporting spay and neuter of cats and dogs, and by donating to animal organizations whose activities practically reduce the number of created creatures for example. It is true that it is a very effective and easy way to practically promote antinatalism, but the main resistance to Cabrera’s stance should be general and ethical not personal and practical. His claims are simply speciesist and it needs to be said.
Countering his claim requires an embarrassing repetition of ideas, which I was sure are long ago behind us, such as the ones Peter Singer wrote more than 45 years ago.

It seems that Cabrera is mixing moral agency with moral patiency. Nonhuman animals may not be ‘open to’ the domain of moral agency meaning moral obligations don’t apply to them for the reasons that he mentions along his answer, but he doesn’t explain why nonhuman animals are not ‘open to’ the domain of moral patiency meaning moral agents do have moral obligations towards them.
Moral obligations are not necessarily about moral relationships, but about moral relations, meaning how we are supposed to relate to others. And that is supposed to be based solely upon the ability to experience, not upon the ability to be in moral relationships with others.

His stance is not only a groundless omission of every sentient creature who is not a human, but it is also supposed to be a groundless omission of every human who is mentally incapable of moral relationships such as infants, severely cognitively disabled people and etc., or in other words whom who are referred to as marginal cases of humanity. Once the criterion for moral status is the ability to be in moral relationships then the only way to nevertheless include marginal cases of humanity – people who can’t take moral responsibility – within the moral community is based on a morally irrelevant criterion which is their species. On the face of it, according to Cabrera, since children until a certain age and people with various mental issues are not open to the domain of morality they are not supposed to be the recipients of moral treatment. If Cabrera wants to include people who do not possess the relevant cognitive abilities that are required for moral relationships within the moral community, that can only be on the bases of speciesism. That would turn the criterion for moral status from ability to participate and understand moral issues into whom who were born a human. And that’s speciesism.
Most people don’t accept (even if unconsciously) the ability to be in moral relationships as a morally justified criterion for moral status. When it comes to humans, most people think that cognitive abilities are morally irrelevant and sentience alone is sufficient to grant all of them with full moral consideration. The only reason they exclude sentient nonhuman animals is speciesism.

Let’s examine the earlier quoted claim that Cabrera makes about Contractualism:

“We can only have contracts with other humans, because a contract requires moral (or immoral) interaction. But this must not lead to mistreatment. It is incorrect and disgusting to make animals suffer or kill for fun, but it is not “immoral”, because morality requires reciprocity; it cause us discomfort to see animals suffer, but not all discomfort is a moral discomfort. If we cannot have contracts with nonhuman animals, and we don’t want to mistreat them either, we must find some kind of treatment with them, which consists of not harming them and benefiting them if possible.”

Let’s say for the sake of the argument that to claim that something is disgusting doesn’t necessarily mean that it is immoral (a claim which is not very clear, certainly not when it comes to relationships with others, since when something is disgusting clearly there is something wrong with it), but it surly can’t be argued that something is incorrect yet not immoral.
It seems that Cabrera is a bit confused when it comes to nonhuman animals. He doesn’t want to support cruelty or to be indifferent towards it, but he refuses to include them in the moral community, and so he goes back and forth with the issue. According to the first paragraph nonhuman animals are excluded. According to the second paragraph nonhuman animals are included but asymmetrically. According to the first line in the third paragraph nonhuman animals are excluded, however on the next sentence they are included, and on the sentence after that they are included, but only to be excluded again right after that. Then he turns to some sort of an emotive argument claiming that animals deserve some kind of moral treatment because ‘it cause us discomfort to see animals suffer”, and not that animals’ suffering is morally wrong because it causes animals discomfort. In the end of this paragraph he leaves nonhuman animals excluded because they can’t have contracts with humans, and speciesistly suggests that we must find some kind of treatment with them if we don’t want to mistreat them, that is not because humans most certainly shouldn’t mistreat sentient nonhuman animals, but because humans don’t want to.

His groundless insistence on the need to have a contract with nonhuman animals in order for them to have a moral status becomes particularly ridiculous when he explains why he is against abortions, despite that obviously, if having a contract with other humans is the necessary criterion for moral status then fetuses most definitely shouldn’t be included in the moral community.

The issue of abortion is brought up in question 21 so I’ll jump to it now and later come back to his answers to questions 19 and 20.

Question 21:

The following are the four versions of questions regarding abortion that were presented in the Questionaire:

“Your ideas surrounding abortion seem to be counter-intuitive to many in the antinatalist community. Is a fetus a “moral person” that deserves to be free of manipulation? Does this moral personhood begin even before consciousness is possible?”

“I’d like to understand why he feels that abortion is a violation of the foetus’s autonomy if the foetus is not conscious and aware of its existence, and why the principle of not violating the ‘autonomy’ of something unaware of its own existence is more important than the suffering that would be prevented by aborting it.
This is something I find utterly baffling about Cabrera’s antinatalism, and I will be interested to hear if he can explain it – People have said he’s anti-abortion.”

“does he think it’s important to preserve the life of something that has not even developed a capacity to desire to exist?”

“Does he think preserving the life of a nonhuman animal which is more sentient than a human fetus – a fish, for example – is more important or less important than preserving the life of a human fetus? – why would preserving the life of a fetus be thought to be more important than 1, preventing the suffering that would be experienced as a result of the complete creation of a sentience, and 2, the desires of the unwillingly pregnant?”

“What are his views about anti-abortion laws? Does he think the unwillingly pregnant should be forced to stay pregnant by law?”

Cabrera:

“Whoever formulates the issue of abortion imposes his own approach in the very formulation. That the human must be defined by the appearance of consciousness is not a fact: it is a presupposition that we have the right not to assume. My anti-abortion argument from negative ethics is extensively exposed in my books. In this argument, the fact that the embryo or the fetus are not “people”, that they have no “conscience” or “desire to exist” are totally irrelevant. I adopt an ontological-existential notion of humanity, inspired by phenomenological-hermeneutical (in the next and last question, I speak of the difficulties that antinatalists read only analytical literature, dispensing with the “continental”). This specific ontological mode of the human is characterized by the fact that he/she was asymmetrically thrown into the world contingently and towards death.  This happens long before the intellectual properties of awareness, self-awareness, rationality or language arise.”

If to continue the last line of thought from the previous question, the fact that the created person was asymmetrically thrown into the world contingently and towards death, can be said about nonhuman animals just as much yet, oddly, he deprives existing conscious and sentient nonhuman animals of moral status but grants fetuses with one.

And it gets even odder as it is not even the fetus itself who is granted with moral status despite not being conscious and sentient while existing conscious and sentient nonhuman animals are not, but it is the ontological-existential notion of humanity which is granted with moral status despite it not even being a morally relevant entity. The ontological-existential notion of humanity can’t feel, it doesn’t experience anything, it can’t be deprived of anything, yet according to Cabrera not only that this notion is a moral entity (and existing conscious and sentient nonhuman animals are not), it is in the center of his anti-abortion argument, and it justifies the creation of a person in case of conception, since the ontological-existential notion of humanity already exists, and terminating it by abortion is to manipulate it. Obviously, according to Cabrera not having an abortion is to manipulate the created person, therefore, given that he is anti-abortion, we must conclude that to manipulate the ontological-existential notion of humanity is morally worse than to manipulate an actual person.

Any sentience level is sufficient for someone to be morally considered, so there is no need to go as far as to the most intelligent social mammals, but I will go that far just to show how ridiculous this argument is, to compare an adult female elephant living in a complex fission-fusion society, being highly curious, aware of death, have a tremendous memory, great ability to solve problems, and etc., not even to an insentient heap of cells, but to the abstract notion of humanity, is to redefine speciesism. How disrespectful towards nonhuman animals’ actual experiences can one be to seriously consider merely the abstract ontological-existential notion of humanity as a moral entity, but not any nonhuman animal?

This claim remains very odd even if we’ll accept for the sake of the argument that notions can be treated as moral entities, because Cabrera himself argues that the ontological-existential notion of humanity is horrible and immoral, since, among other things, each person is “asymmetrically thrown into the world contingently and towards death”. And here are three more examples taken from his book Discomfort and Moral Impediment:

“Procreation is a structurally unilateral act in which one of the parties involved is brought to life by force through the action of others who decide that birth as a function of their own interests and benefits, or as a consequence of negligence”. (p. 129)

“Upon being born, we are thrust into a temporal process of gradual consumption and exhaustion characterized by pain (already expressed by a newborn baby’s crying when faced with the aggressions of light, sounds and the unknown), by discouragement (not knowing what to do with oneself, with one’s own body, with one’s own desires, something that babies will begin to suffer shortly after their birth); and lastly, by what I will call moral impediment, meaning being subjected to the pressing and exclusive concern with oneself and the necessity of using others for one’s own benefit (and being used by them).” (p. 25)

“As we are thrust into a world affected by structural discomfort, submitted to pain and discouragement and forced to act in an entangled web of actions within small spaces and under pressing time, we cannot avoid harming other humans in concrete situations of the intra-world, even those who we intend to help or benefit. At certain points in time, we are all provokers of harm. In an existential sense, we contribute to the discomfort of others.” (p. 66)

Hence, it would make more sense that if anything, his perceptions would intensify the argument for abortion, not establish claims against it.

But Cabrera insists:

“What is relevant to our question here is that since the moment of conception in a human body, we already have an existing one thrown over there, contingent, meaningless and towards death, even if this being has no first person awareness of that condition, nor any defined identity. In my own terms, it is a terminal human thing that has already begun to end, not potentially, but now.”

But who is the victim of this condition before that person has first person awareness? Who is harmed by the fact that a heap of cells have already begun to form? All the more so what’s wrong with ending it before that heap of cells has first person awareness, especially considering that it is necessarily a case of “an existing one thrown over there, contingent, meaningless and towards death”?
Since the issue is of abortion, it means that the parents do not wish to create a person, at least not in that current pregnancy, so they are not the victims of the abortion as they want it. If anything they would be the victims of not having an abortion, because they would be forced to create a person against their will. Does the ontological-existential notion of humanity overpower their interests as well? And more importantly, given that creating a person is not only creating a subject of harm, but a small unit of exploitation and pollution, the question mustn’t only be is it justified that people would be imposed to create a person against their will, since “since the moment of conception in a human body, we already have an existing one thrown over there, contingent, meaningless and towards death”, but also is it justified that numerous existing conscious and sentient nonhuman animals would be harmed by another unit of suffering, exploitation and pollution since “since the moment of conception in a human body, we already have an existing unit of suffering, exploitation and pollution thrown over there, contingent, meaningless and towards death”? Since it is never justified, procreation is never justified, and abortion always is.

How can a notion be morally more important than the real interests of real people – the parents who decided that they don’t want to create that person, and the interests of the main victims of most procreations – all the nonhuman animals that would be hurt if abortion doesn’t  take place?

Cabrera tries to explain:

“Benatar claims that “coming into existence” cannot be determined only biologically. I totally agree with him. In my approach, this terminal being and “towards death” aroused in the conception is not experienced, of course, in the first person, but is seen in the second and third person by the others involved. The humanity of a human is not just something given biologically, but also something socially constructed. The others will be able to confer or refuse human status to what is, for now, a heap of cells. They are capable to give the embryo and the fetus their humanity or refuse it. The procreated may or may not be part of the moral community depending on the decision of these third parties. Humanity does not need to be experienced in the first person to be recognized.

In these terms, what is immoral about abortion? When you have an abortion you eliminate in a manipulative and unilateral way someone else’s terminality, even if it is not yet a determined person. Even though – in the pessimistic perspective that I endorse – life is something terrible, we have no right to decide for another being that is already as terminal, absurd and thrown in the world toward death as we are. In this line of argument, abortion is immoral because it is a manipulative act, done for our convenience and offensive to an autonomy that is in the present recognizable in the third person.”

Resisting abortions is not considering the interests of third parties, but crushing the interests of first parties as created people never asked to be born, never gave consent to be harmed while existing, and are imposed with a constant risk of a miserable life, and it is crushing the interests of second parties, meaning the ones who would be mostly and most directly affected by the decision not to have an abortion, and these are the person’s parents, and much more than them – everyone who would be harmed by that person all along its existence.

Would he argue that by saving someone else’s life we eliminate in a manipulative and unilateral way someone else’s terminality? If we prevent someone’s murder is it also considered by his terms to eliminate in a manipulative and unilateral way someone else’s terminality?
And why is the notion of terminality morally more important than actual harm to actual sentient creatures? Again we encounter his odd priorities, as the notion of manipulation is prioritized over suffering. And in this case it is not even the manipulation of the created person, or of the created person’s parents, or of the created person’s victims, but the manipulation of an autonomy that is in the present recognizable in the third person. So the abstract notion of autonomy, which is merely present in some of the least affected people, defeats everything else. Does this line of thought work with other issues as well? Does the abstract notion of racism, which is merely present in some of the least affected people, defeat everything else as well?
Was the abolition of slavery immoral because it was a manipulative act, done for salves’ convenience and was offensive to the autonomy of the notion of white supremacy that was recognizable in the third person? What right do we have to reject the notion of white supremacy? Is it because white supremacy is most definitely morally wrong? Well, isn’t procreation most definitely morally wrong even according to Cabrera himself?

But Cabrera is sure that everyone who wonders how he can be anti-abortion is missing something:

“People who read my writings without due attention, wonder how can one be antinatalist and anti-abortion at the same time. After all, if life is so bad, do we have a duty to prevent more humans from being thrown into this terrible world? But this is a very simple-minded argument. If we think more carefully we can see that the situation of procreation and the situation of abortion have different logical and ethical structures.
In abstention we think from nothing, while in abortion we think from something. In the case of abstention there is nothing about which we have moral dilemmas before which we must stand. We can say that while procreation is preventable medicine, abortion is therapeutic medicine; and nothing can make abortion preventive.

Therefore, in the case of abstention, it is the consideration of the terrors of existence that prevails over autonomy, because there is no autonomy to respect (unless conjectured, with all the problems that this entails). In the case of abortion, the respect for autonomy prevails, an autonomy that already exists in the third person as a social and interactive fact.”

In abstention we don’t think from nothing, but also from something, that is from a place of resistance to create a person in the better case, or from a specific lack of want to create a person in the less good case. The case of abstention is thinking from something and not from nothing, it is at least thinking from something undesirable if not unacceptable. Once someone is in the position of abstention it means that that someone wishes to abstain from creating someone, and that is thinking from something.
In both cases there is a notion of humanity, in the case of abstention people are trying to prevent it, and in the case of abortion they are also trying to prevent it. The only difference is biological, and ironically Cabrera is the one who claims that abortion is not a biological issue.

Besides, isn’t abstention supposed to be, according to Cabrera, a manipulative act done for our convenience, and offensive to an autonomy that is in the present recognizable in the third person as well? I think it is, since clearly people choose abstention exactly because they have a notion of humanity which they wish to avoid, in general, or specifically in that given sexual act. So, is any use of contraception a manipulative act, done for our convenience and offensive to an autonomy that is in the present recognizable in the third person? Cabrera claims that the humanity of a human is not just something given biologically, but also something socially constructed, if that is the case we don’t need a heap of cells for abortion to be morally wrong, the very idea of creating a human is sufficient, and therefore isn’t any use of contraception morally wrong because it is a manipulation of the notion of humanity? Isn’t every case of people choosing not to breed a manipulation of humanity? As what do people who choose not to breed actually say, that they can create a human and choose not to, how isn’t that a manipulation of the notion of humanity?

There is, no incongruity at all in being antinatalist and anti-abortion; on the contrary: if the accent is put on manipulation (as is the case with negative ethics), it is almost mandatory to be both; because the same type of manipulation appears, only in opposite directions: when the child is desired, it is manipulated in procreation, and when it is unwanted it is manipulated in abortion; in both cases the terminal being is treated as a thing.

Only that in one case there is a harmed person, harmed parents and numerous harmed creatures who the created person would harm along its life, and in the other case the “victim” is the notion of humanity. We have a very serious and certain harm on one side, and none at all on the other.
By the way, most of acute opponents of abortion don’t fight it in the name of humanity but in the name of god. It is not the manipulation of humanity which they are concerned about, but the manipulation of god. Now since there isn’t one, there are no real victims of abortions. On the other hand, there are plenty of victims to each and every case that abortion wasn’t performed.

Cabrera argues that the created person should have the opportunity to decide later what to do about being thrown into the terrors of the world:

“It is true that by not aborting we throw this being into the terrors of the world, but at least, late on, this terminal being will be in a better position to decide what to do with its terminality; this will not be entirely decided by the others.”

No, it is anyway entirely decided by others. Only that in the case of abortion others decide that a person won’t be created and therefore won’t be harmed and harm others, and in the case that abortion wasn’t performed, it is others who decide that a person would be created and therefore be harmed and harm others.
Because of life’s addictive element, a created person doesn’t really decide what to do with its terminality, but is prone to continue living and therefore to suffer, vainly hoping that someday things would get better. Something that is very unlikely to happen.
Besides, there are no real better “positions” to decide what to do with one’s terminality. It is impossible to undo existence. Existence can’t be canceled. One cannot retroactively erase its own existence, only to end it, but there is no good exit plan. Suicide is a terrible exit plan because even people who really suffer in life are usually afraid of death, of pain, of permanently disabling themselves if they don’t succeed, of committing a sin, of their family, of the unknown, of breaking the law, of being socially shamed, of being blamed for selfishness, of the isolation ward in a psychiatric hospital and etc. So the suicide option is not very tempting in the better case, and nonviable in the worst.
It is false from every perspective to present suicide as a legitimate option available to anyone at any time. Biologically, suicide is the last option. And the fact that people are biologically built to survive, doesn’t soothe individuals whose lives are not worth living in their eyes, but exactly the opposite. They are prisoners of their own biological mechanisms. They are life’s captives, not free spirits who can choose to end their lives whenever and however they wish. People are trapped in horrible lives without a truly viable option to end it.
People have no serious exit option that can justify their forced entry. Not that if there was any, procreation was morally justifiable (as it still necessitates the suffering until the decision to end life is made), but at least this part of the argument was decent and coherent. But there isn’t an exit option so it is not. People must overcome too many obstacles with each being too difficult, for suicide to really be an option.
No one should put anyone in such a horrible position where they don’t want to live but are trapped in life.
Tens of millions of people are forced to live day after day after day, feeling that they don’t want to live, but are afraid of carrying out suicide, or that they are even in a deeper trap, can’t stand living but can’t stand the thought of hurting others by killing themselves. This is the cruel trap many people are forced to endure because they were created. The option of suicide is not a legitimate solution for the problem of procreation, but in fact another of its many evils.

But when it comes to actual cases he is less determined and more ambiguous:

“Anyway, there is no logical sequence form (I) abortion is immoral to (II) one should never abort. For we can be totally convinced of the immorality of abortion, but understand that, in many dramatic cases, women had to abort. Negative ethics is limited to saying that, as understandable as this act may be, these people will be doing something ethically wrong. Whoever aborts is certainly not a criminal (as the anti-abortionists sometimes rhetorically proclaim), but neither can we say that they are totally morally correct people.

I suppose that in order to solve the dramatic cases, it may be better to resort to some utilitarian or pragmatic procedure, even if the immorality of abortion is theoretically recognized (in my line of argument or other).”

What does it mean whoever aborts is certainly not a criminal but neither can we say that they are totally morally correct people? And what are according to him dramatic cases? Does he mean cases of rape? Extreme poverty? Foreseen severe impairments? All of the above? And isn’t the notion of humanity manipulated in these cases as well? Could it be that terms such as ‘suffering’ and ‘justified’ somehow have found their way into the discussion when he needed to approve some cases of abortion?
It’s clear to him that he cannot oppose abortions on every case so he permits the ones he calls dramatic cases, but without detailing why and which cases are dramatic.
It seems that when he needs to encounter a real issue from real life, he ditches his ideas of negative ethics and suggests that “it may be better to resort to some utilitarian or pragmatic procedure”. But why? Is it because he knows that he cannot look in the eyes of a raped woman and tell her that she must raise the child of her rapist because otherwise it would be to manipulate the notion of the child’s humanity? And isn’t an ethical theory supposed to address all cases and if not, to at least coherently explain why some cases are exceptional?

Cabrera realizes that his ideas are not really perfectly viable and so he pulls his perspectivistic approach:

“This line of argument is perfectly viable and it will be seen as “counter-intuitive” only if the other parts impose their own assumptions; assuming mine, my posture is perfectly intuitive and theoretically sustainable. As I am also a logical pessimist, I do not believe in absolute conclusions. What I presented here was just a line of sustainable argument. Abortion can be morally legitimate in one line of argument and morally illegitimate in another. We don’t need to destroy each other because of that.”

But for whom who is forced to be created, for whom who is forced to create, and for whom who are forced to be harmed by the created, procreation is indeed extremely destructive.

Question 19:

The following are the four versions of questions regarding EFILism that were presented in the Questionaire:

“Are you familiar with the subject of EFILism, and if so do you think about it? EFILists essentially believe that sentient life should be placed in plaintive care, in hospice so to speak, and that there should be direct intervention in ending wild life suffering, even if the only option is to find a way of euthanizing them. What are your thought on that? I believe that Antinatalsim/EFILism are essentially the final civil rights movement – that there is nowhere for the subject of suffering mitigation to go from there, and that not being imposed upon to exist can and should be seen as a sentient creatures most supreme civil rights. What do you think of this idea?”

“Do you believe that the concept of Antinatalism should be extended to all sentient creatures? Do you believe that a goal of Antinatalism should be the extinction of both humans and animals? I feel it would be the greatest tragedy we could allow, for humans to go extinct before the animals, nature is where most of the suffering is on planet earth – thoughts?”

“Have you thought about extending your ideas about antinatalism to the whole of animal kingdom? Jeremy Bentham asked “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? But, can they suffer?” today we know the answer. Animals do suffer. What can we do about that? What are Cabrera’s thoughts on wild-animal suffering and that there would be much more of it if only humans went extinct?”

“Would you extend antinatalism to nonhuman animals as well? There is an enormous amount of suffering in the nonhuman world, do we have an ethical duty to end that suffering? What can we do knowing that people will still be procreating? What can we be doing knowing that the antinatalist project will never come to be? Does that also extent to animal rights?”

Cabrera:

“As we saw in the previous question, in negative ethics we cannot have ethical relations with animals, as they have no moral impediment. Therefore, if negative ethics were in agreement with the extinction of nonhuman animals, it could not be for ethical reasons, strictly speaking. That is why I would not accept this idea of “extending” the ethics of humans to nonhumans; because as they have ontologically different ways of being, there is nothing to “extend”; the attitude towards nonhuman animals must be invented post-morality in a particular way.

Leaving aside the contract, which is impossible, we are left with treatment and mistreatment. We have to see if the extinction of nonhuman animals could be included in treatment, or if the extinction would generate some kind of mistreatment. If the first were possible, negative ethics could approve the procedure. But if in order to extinguish them we had to mistreat them some way, negative ethics cannot accept to suppress nonhuman animals, even if the extinction is intended to be “for their own good”.”

The implication of this stance is that since humans cannot have ethical relations with animals, but they can mistreat them (and I’ll ignore for the sake of the argument the contradiction between these two statements), then even if all that it would take to end all the suffering that every nonhuman animal that would ever exist, is the pain of one pinprick for each currently existing nonhuman animal (which quantitively speaking is just a fraction of the number of nonhuman animals that would ever exit), Cabrera would oppose it because that would be humans mistreating nonhuman animals. That means that the actual experiences of the infinite number of sentient creatures that would exist if humans don’t inflict the pain of one pinprick for each currently existing nonhuman animal, are worth so little in his view, that the abstract virtuousness of humans undoubtedly overpowers it. And that is undoubtedly one of the cruelest ideas I can think of. Obviously, unfortunately that scenario is absolutely delusional but it is ethical. There is nothing better or a more important goal than ending all the suffering of all the creatures in the world. Apparently not according to Cabrera. He rather that an infinite number of nonhuman animals would endure life of suffering than the option that much less humans would allegedly mistreat much less nonhuman animals.
But ethics should first and foremost be concerned with actual suffering of anyone who is capable of experiencing it, not with the supposed incorruptibility of one species, especially since it is irrelevant to the sufferers. Ethics should focus on pain and distress wherever they happen and to whomever. It should be concerned with the actual cruel fates of the victims, not with the fictional purity of the moral agents.

It seems however, that Cabrera is more bothered with what humans would do than with what would happen to infinitely more nonhuman animals.
And it shouldn’t come as a surprise since as we have seen in his explanations of his basic stands regarding antinatalism, he is focused on the ontological position of humans, not on the actual experiences of the rest of the sentient creatures in the world. The fact that this world is actually a planetary scale restaurant, in which everyone is suffering, is not his motive. His drive is not the suffering but the ‘ontological-existential notion’, and not of everyone but of one species only.

Here is an example from the very same answer:

“Ultimately, I consider humanity as the primordial biological catastrophe of nature and think that life is not so calamitous if it does not have reflexive self-awareness.”

“…hence the animals’ unconcern and tranquility, so worthy of envy. Animal suffering is much more integrated with nature; it is not enough to say, like Bentham: ‘they also suffer’.”

“I really wouldn’t have a problem with a planet without humans and with nonhuman animals living in their natural surroundings. What did not work is the human life; the other animals are fine as they are and would be much better off without the suffering introduced by humans.
God should have stopped creation before the sixth day. It would be good to leave nonhuaman animals in their lives of harsh survival and spontaneous violence. It is true that humans care for animals and protect them from certain hostile environments. But it is also true that they hunt, eat and mistreat them. I think the best thing we can do for animals is to disappear and leave them alone.”

The issue of self-awareness among nonhuman animals is factually and morally controversial. Only a speciesist would put all the nonhuman animals under the same category despite that clearly the similarity between other social mammals (let alone other primates) and humans, is far greater than the similarity between social mammals and sponges or earthworms, and yet, earthworms and orangutans are on the same group, and humans are on a whole different superior level. That is factually ridiculous. And it is factually noncontroversial that at least some social mammals are self-aware. But I don’t want to discuss it even if it serves the cause, because it is morally irrelevant and therefore wrong to focus on that. We can say that self-awareness can actually in many cases sooth and not enhance negative experiences, for example when one is aware that one’s injuries or maladies are not dangerous and easily treatable. That is as opposed to creatures who suffer from similar conditions but are unaware of their condition and therefore suffer more. But again, that is irrelevant in terms of moral status. Being self-aware to the fact that I am suffering right now is not necessary to establish my moral status. The fact that I am suffering is sufficient. I don’t need the ability to self-reflect on my negative experience for it to be negative. The ability to have a negative experience is sufficient.
Experiencing extreme fear every single time someone goes out of the cave to drink is horrible for anyone who experiences it, without being self-aware that extremely fearing every single time someone goes out of the cave to drink is horrible. This experience is horrible without reflecting on its horribleness. Extreme fear needs not reflexive self-awareness to be horrible. It is horrible as it is. Fear is fear, and pain is pain. One doesn’t need to have reflexive self-awareness to feel fear and pain. Not reflexive self-awareness is the crucial component in moral status but sentience. What really matters in morality is not self-awareness but the experience of pain and suffering.

So it is most definitely enough to say, like Bentham that they also suffer.
And the claim that “animal suffering is much more integrated with nature” is a super-anthropocentric, speciesist, nature worshiping, and extremely ignorant claim.

To claim that other animals “would be much better off without the suffering introduced by humans” is probably one of the greatest understatements ever made. And the claim that “other animals are fine as they are” is probably one of the greatest misstatements ever made.
As argued elsewhere, procreation is a very serious crime because the ample evidences that bad experiences are more important than good ones, not only serve as a proof that good experiences are at least not as good as bad experiences are bad (if not proving that bad experiences almost always outweigh the good ones), but how horrible life actually and inherently is. Basically, pain and other negative experiences increase the fitness of individuals by enhancing their respondence ability to threats to their survival and reproduction. It has a crucial adaptive function. Existing sentient creatures are tortured by evolutionary mechanisms which their only point is that additional sentient creatures would exist, regardless of any of those creatures’ personal wellbeing. It is a pointless, frustrating and painful trap.

Probably the strongest evidence for that, and one of the strongest arguments for including animals living in nature in antinatalism, is that by far the vast majority of individuals in nature never reach adulthood, with most living short lives of nothing but fear and pain.

Most people, and disappointedly it seems that Cabrera is among them, think of mammals when they contemplate about nature. But even among mammals – the class with the highest survival rates – the vast majority of individuals never reach adulthood. And by far most of the individuals in nature are not mammals. The reproductive strategy of by far most of the species in nature is r-selection, meaning that most animals reproduce between hundreds to hundreds of thousands of children (some even millions), with usually only few who reach adulthood, and only two who survive long enough to reproduce (that is the case in any stable population since otherwise we would have seen a massive population increase).

Obviously what matters morally is suffering, not adulthood rates. But behind the astonishing survival figures in nature, which reach less than one percent among many species (probably most), are innumerable suffering individuals who experienced nothing but suffering in their short brutal lives. It goes to show how dispensable sentient individuals lives are in nature. The fact that most of the creatures who are created in this world are born only to suffer is not only absolutely natural, but is nature in its essence. And so, probably most relevantly to antinatalism, is that in the case of animals in nature there should be absolutely no doubt that for the absolutely vast majority of creatures, coming into existence is a very serious harm.

As I argued earlier, I don’t think that from all the philosophers and other thinkers, Schopenhauer is the one to be based on when it comes the status of nonhuman animals, but if he chose to rely on him in this context, he should be reminded of another Schopenhauer’s quote:

“A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”

And this claim is an even much stronger support of EFILism when considering that no animal is engaged merely in eating another, but with very many anothers, and that no animal being eaten is merely suffering from being eaten alive but from many other factors such as hunger, thirst, cold, heat, diseases, parasites, fear, fatigue, worn out and etc.

Despite all the things he said so far all along the questionnaire, he also argues that:

“The extinction procedure, even inspired by this beautiful purpose, can generate suffering in the animals that we are trying to benefit, within a macro project, can make them suffer. Maybe it would be necessary to create concentration camps for nonhuman animals; it would not be a peaceful procedure.”

But why does he call it a beautiful purpose if he claimed that “the other animals are fine as they are” and that “the best thing we can do for animals is to disappear and leave them alone”?
And why does he call it a beautiful purpose if there are no moral relationships with nonhuman animals? Shouldn’t he view it as neutral? If it is not neutral but good to end nonhuman animals suffering how is it not a moral requirement? How is it not even a moral issue given that he previously argued that there are no moral relationships between humans and nonhumans? He can counter-argue that we don’t have an obligation to save all the animals but it still is a beautiful purpose. But the reason it is a beautiful purpose is because it is the moral thing to do, or at least it is morally good to do so. And if a purpose is beautiful (moral) then we need to try and implement it, not state that it is beautiful. Beautiful purposes need to be practically actuated.

Unfortunately I agree that this beautiful purpose can’t be implemented by a peaceful procedure, but much more unfortunate is that I don’t think it can be implemented at all. I elaborate about this in the text about Efilism, but anyway this point is irrelevant to this discussion since my reservations about this purpose are only practical and by no means ethical. In my view moral duty stems from vulnerability not from relationships. We are morally obligated to help any vulnerable subject if we can, regardless of the species of the vulnerable subject or our relationship with the vulnerable subjects. Sentience is a sufficient criterion for moral status and a sufficient justification to try and prevent harms inflicted on any vulnerable subject. So obviously we must try to prevent any harm from any vulnerable subject, no matter who s/he is and where s/he is.
And obviously we most certainly mustn’t inflict harm on other vulnerable subjects, and since everyone always do, even the ones who are not eating animals or animal based products, everyone mustn’t procreate. No matter who someone is, where and how that someone lives, eventually everything is somehow at someone else’s expense. Existence is harmful and existing is harming. Negative ethics more than any other moral theory should be EFIList. It isn’t, only because it is speciesist. A non speciesist antinatalist approach must be EFIList. Or in other words, EFILism is antinatalism without speciesism.

Place suffering in the center of negative ethics and expend it beyond humans to every sentient creature on earth and you actually have a form of EFILism. There is more than one road to EFILism but this is certainly mine. That’s why when I first read A Critique of Affirmative Morality I thought that I finally found my “bible”. I still think it is a great book which is most definitely worth reading by any antinatalist let alone EFIList. However reading other texts by Cabrera, especially Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation, and his answers to this questionnaire, made me realize that the problem I had with negative ethics go deeper than its feeble conclusions. There is no way around it, Cabreara’s Negative Ethics is speciesist.

I am talking with people about moral issues, especially of harming nonhuman animals for a long time now so I am used to their infinite moral flexibility when it comes to ideas they don’t want to embrace, but I didn’t expect that from the philosopher who wrote the book A Critique of Affirmative Morality. At that point I thought that the only reasonable explanation for his unequivocal senseless immoral excuses is that he doesn’t want to embrace veganism. And indeed came his awful answer to the question about veganism.

Question 20:

Many (but not all) antinatalists are vegans due to the incorporation of animals into their moral community. Are you a vegan? Irrespective of the answer: why? Why he isn’t vegan? If forcing nonhumans into the world for human consumption or to any other benefit compatible with antinatalism? And with that is there an ethical duty for antinatalists to be vegan and not pay for others to be brought into the world for their benefit?

Cabrera:

“As there is no possibility for me to incorporate animals into the moral community THAT cannot be the reason for being vegan or vegetarian. I have said before that this provide no reason to mistreat animals. The problem is that it seems evident that we mistreat them when we kill them for food. Therefore, it seems that we should radically refuse to feed on them.

I am not particularly vegan or vegetarian, although I completely eliminated beef, pork and fish from my diet many years ago; but I eat chicken often. This would seem to be a clear contradiction between my thinking and my life. Even though we cannot have ethical relationships with animals, and even though I am not concerned with extinguishing them, I agree with not mistreating them, and eating them clearly seems to be a kind of mistreatment.

The first argument to come out of this blatant contradiction is that I may need to eat some meat to preserve my health. The thesis that one can live in good health without eating animal proteins is controversial. I have consulted all kinds of medicines, orthodox and heterodox, and the opinions are the most varied, although each part affirms with total certainty to be right. On the other hand, one cannot speak generally of “human health”, but of individual bodies; what is not necessary for certain organisms may be necessary for others.

In my particular case, I feel weak and sleepy if I don’t eat some chicken meat for several days. Accepting that completely suppressing the consumption of some meat was clearly bad for my health, should I take the requirement not to mistreat animals to the point of damaging my health?

In negative ethics, we have no moral obligation to preserve our life or our health just to continue living; we can and must risk our lives because of some ethical requirement. But since we have no strictly ethical obligations to nonhuman animals, it would seem that this requirement to harm me in order to preserve them cannot be ethically justified. Nevertheless, we decided not to mistreat non human animals, but since this is not a moral principle, but only a beneficial practice, we can have the right to balance it with other morally relevant considerations, not to take it as a requirement without exception.

If I choose to preserve my health by continuing to eat birds, I could claim that I need my health not for satisfying frivolous gastronomic pleasures or for gluttony, but for to be able to continue doing things that I consider as morally important as the act of not eating animals; for example: fighting injustices, defending social movements, finishing a book against racism or doing activism in the antinatalist cause. I cannot assume a fanatic vegetarianism; I would have to consider, in specific cases, what are the social costs – not just personal, selfish or hedonistic – of stopping eating meat entirely. We cannot escape “spciesism” by falling into a kind of “animalism”; in some cases we may have to favor human animals and in others our option will be for nonhumans ones.”

Since I found his health excuse utterly insulting, I will not focus on nutritional matters here. I am anyway sure that it is totally needless for any of the readers of this text. The fact that everyone can maintain healthy life on a plant based diet is, as opposed to his claim, not controversial. Like the philosophers he chose to quote so to base his speciesist stands on the moral status of nonhuman animals, his nutritionist basis is also irrelevant and outdated.
Anyway, it is more interesting and relevant to focus here on veganism and antinatalism from his negative ethics perspective.

If antinatalism is an opposition to the imposition involved with the creation of a vulnerable person without consent and while risking that person having a miserable life, then when it comes to animals in the food industry, there is no doubt that it is an imposition that involves the creation of a vulnerable creatures without consent, and it is not risking them having a miserable life, but insuring that they would have miserable lives full of abuse and torture.
Antinatalists justly refuse to impose harm on a person without obtaining that person’s consent, but the ones who are not vegan unjustly agree to impose harm on numerous animals without obtaining their consent. They don’t obtain their consent to be genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible. They don’t obtain their consent to be imprisoned for their entire lives. They don’t obtain their consent to live without their family for their entire lives. They don’t obtain their consent to suffer chronic pain and maladies. They don’t obtain their consent to never breathe clean air, walk on grass, bath in water, and eat their natural food. They don’t obtain their consent to be violently murdered so that people could consume their bodies.
Animals exploited in the food industry are the most unequivocal example of sentient creatures who are forced to live in extreme misery during every single moment of their lives. In their case, extreme misery is not a risk that anyone involved in their creation is taking, but a decision. In their case, creation is not a Russian Roulette but a certain living hell.
These animals must be the first to be included in antinatalism. It is beyond me how someone can be an antinatalist but actively contribute to the creation of the most miserable lives on earth.

Not suffering but manipulation is in the center of Cabrera’s antinatalism, but when it comes to animals exploited in the food industry both take place in the most extreme manner. In their case there is no need to argue where should antinatalism’s focus should be. Everything about their lives is extreme suffering and a product of total manipulation. There are no more accurate examples of the manipulation involved with creation than the creation of sentient creatures whose only function is to become someone else’s stake, coat, shoes, sweater, omelet producer, milkshake producer, bacon, or poulet. Every year more than 150 billion sentient animals are manipulatively created and manipulatively reared, explicitly, merely to be used as means to others’ ends. Is there a greater manipulation involved in creation than that?
And the manipulation goes further than the concept of creating billions of sentient creatures merely to be used as means to others’ ends, as every single part of their lives involves manipulation, even before they are born. Their genetics is manipulated so they would produce more meat, milk and eggs, their social structure is manipulated so to make the control over them more “efficient”, their confinement facilities are manipulated so to reduce costs to the minimum, the lighting in their confinement facilities is manipulated so they would think it is daylight even when it is not and so eat more and get fatter faster, their living spaces are manipulated so they would be unable to move and won’t “waste” energy on anything but growing as fast as possible, their food is manipulated in order to reach what is referred to by the industry as the optimal food efficiency, their water availability is manipulated so they would urinate less and so their bedding wouldn’t be replaced during their short miserable lives.

There is nothing more manipulative than the creation and the lives of animals in the food industry, so a philosopher such as Cabrera, who in the center of his ethics is manipulation, must be the last person who can justify participating in such a mass scale systematical manipulation.

And of all creatures, he chooses to consume the one that goes through the greatest manipulations of all.
I would like to elaborate about the life of chickens in the meat industry because they are the strongest most evident example for why nonhuman animals must be included in antinatalism, especially when manipulation is in its center, as chickens exemplify more than any other creature the greatest and cruelest combination between suffering and manipulation.

The miserable life of every chicken in the meat industry starts when they hatch. Instead of being born to a defending, loving, and guiding mother, the first experience of every chick, is seeing thousands of other babies helplessly chirping to their absent mothers in the incubator they are born in.
Usually at the age of 2-3 days, all the newborn chicks are aggressively thrown into boxes and are shipped to the sheds where they would spend their entire miserable lives.
Despite that naturally chickens are social animals who spend most of their time foraging, they are forced to live their entire lives in crowded, dirty, soaked with ammonia warehouses, with no chance for any normal social structure, or any normal chicken behavior such as perching, foraging and dust bathing, no natural food, no sunshine, and no fresh air, which are all very essential for each chicken.

As the chickens grow, each one suffers not only from the diminishing space, but also from a series of severe health issues. That is mainly because chickens are being manipulated to grow about three times faster than normal, through a suited diet, special lighting plans, but mostly genetic modifications which aim to enlarge the more profitable body parts at the expense of the least profitable body parts of each bird. That causes each chicken to suffer from painful skeletal and metabolic diseases. At some point most of the chickens in each shed suffer from chronic pain and lameness.
The accelerated growth also prevents the chickens’ hearts and lungs from keeping up with the rest of the body, and so many suffer from related illnesses, among them are cardiac arrhythmia and heart attack. That is particularly amazing considering that chickens are slaughtered at the age of 7 weeks.

As the sheds get more crowded and filthier, the chickens who are forced to sit in wet, dirty, soaked with ammonia bedding, develop painful blisters, lesions and ulcerations on their already aching bodies. They often also develop painful eye infections as a result of the high ammonia concentration.

Their miserable lives are ended only by a miserable death. But before the chickens are slaughtered they suffer additional harms in the form of aggressive catching and loading onto the trucks, a horrible ride to the slaughterhouse in an extremely crowded truck, under every weather condition, no matter how freezing it is outside or alternatively how hot and dry it is, the chickens have no cover. Since it is unprofitable neither to feed the poor birds in their last day nor to give them any water, the chickens are starving and are dehydrated, a horrible condition which further contributes to the already extreme pain and stress.

The chickens are then aggressively pulled out of the cages in the trucks and aggressively shoved upside down into shackles on a conveyor belt. They are supposed to be stunned by electrified water, but many aren’t and so their throats are slashed while fully conscious. Some are even thrown into the boiling scalding tank, which looses their feathers before plucking, while still fully conscious, that means that they will be conscious when the plucking knives tear their bodies.

None of what is the written in the following paragraph is a recommendation, as no one needs to blow up the face of another animal to feed itself, but as an antinatalist, all the more so one that so highly emphasizes the manipulative aspect of creation, Cabrera could have at least argued that the only animal based product that he consumes is the meat of particularly large mammals who were hunted in the least harmful way. The rationale behind this is that particularly large mammals would provide him with meat for a long time and so the minimum number of animals would have to be sacrificed for his groundless speciesist and cruel insistence on consuming animals. The least harmful way is self-explanatory, and the hunting part is also highly related with the least harmful way as anything is better than factory farming, but it also relates to antinatalism as seemingly, hunting as opposed to the meat industry doesn’t necessarily mean that another animal would be produced. Practically it is very probable that another animal would because of how nature works (ecological niches tend to be populated according to available resources so when animals are murdered by humans other animals usually shortly occupy the area), but it is not as bound and structured as it is in the food industry. But more than the claimed above, the manipulation part is less present in hunting than it is in industrial exploitation of animals. So Cabrera of all people should have been highly opposed to the industrial manipulation and creation of other animals. But he considers nonhuman animals so little that he didn’t even bother thinking about options which would at least be less embarrassing than the bewildering self-contradiction that he made.
His response is insulting as it seems that he didn’t even bother respecting his questioners and listeners by giving a plausible answer. But of course the real problem, and the reason I mention this, is to exemplify how little importance and significance the suffering of trillions of animals matter to an ethical philosopher, and how deeply troubling must that be to all of us.

In the book A Critique of Affirmative Morality, Cabrera wrote a short Survival Handbook where he argues that since it is not optional to simply live and thereby affirmatively experiencing the world, one must conduct life which is ontologically minimal, radically responsible, sober, and completely aware that it is only a secondary morality, he calls it Negative Minimalism.
I fail to see Negative Minimalism in consuming animal products. It is the cruelest, least thoughtful, most wasteful and extremely environmentally unfriendly way one can feed itself. Supporting factory farms is Negative Maximalism. And when it is coming from someone like him, it is beyond inconsistency, it is criminal. This is not to be taken as a case of Ad Hominem. Cabrera is not another non-vegan antinatalist, he is the philosopher behind Negative Ethics. The case in point is that ironically he himself exemplifies an even stronger version of his own theory of how impossible it is for one to be ethical. His argument is that ethics is impossible even theoretically because not harming and not manipulating others is impossible even theoretically, but he gives us a personal example of how even in cases which it is theoretically possible not to harm and manipulate at least some others, practically people would choose to do so anyway.
The fact that people can’t avoid harming and manipulating others even if they wanted to, is a sufficient reason to stop the effort of trying to convince them to stop procreating and start the effort of making them stop procreating. The fact that they don’t even want to, makes that case indisputable.

The following text is a sort of appendix to the critical review of Julio Cabrera’s book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate. If you somehow got here before reading the main text , please read it first, otherwise it would be counterproductive.

In this text I focus on the ‘negative approach to argumentation’ potential implication of being so tolerant towards others’ views to the point of Ethical Subjectivism and Moral Perspectivism.

Cabrera understands that his approach may be interpreted as a form of, or at least as an intensification or indirect support of Moral Skepticism, Ethical Subjectivism, Moral Relativism and even Moral Nihilism, so he tries to explain why it is none of the above.

Regarding Moral Skepticism he writes:

“the negative approach is neither dogmatic nor skeptical; its attitude is eminently pluralistic. Contrary to dogmatism, the negative approach does not accept any unique or absolute truth about any matter whatsoever. But, contrary to skepticism, it does not think that this is a reason to suspend judgment or abandon philosophy. The negative approach is pluralistic in the sense of considering–against skepticism–that every philosophy succeeds in achieving truth in some aspect of it; but–against dogmatism–this does not mean that all other philosophies are false and must be discarded. In the negative approach, dogmatist philosophies do not fail, they all succeed; but, against dogmatism, such success does not eliminate other philosophies, also successful in their own terms. The negative approach adopts pluralism against dogmatic and sceptic monism.” (Page 167)

Regarding claims that his negative approach is a form of Nihilism he argues:

“Different from nihilism and frivolity, the negativist position firmly and seriously (and tragically) believes in the value and interest of the line of argumentation being sustained, connected to some specific Gestalten, even though–unlike the affirmative approach–it no longer believes that this is the unique true line, and that the alternatives are simply wrong and must be defeated. No line of argument can refute another by the mere fact of being sound, because many lines of arguments about the same matter are sound, even when opposed to each other.” (Page 183)

I agree that his stances are not skeptic or nihilistic as he doesn’t claim that it is impossible to validate moral stands nor that moral stands are all wrong or irrelevant or meaningless as it is according to moral theories such as Moral Skepticism, Moral Nihilism, Emotivism and Error Theory. If anything it is to the contrary, it seems that according to him, not none but every moral stand is valid as the next one, as long as it is honest, and can be rationally explained from the position and perspective (Gestalten) of its holder. Therefore it would be wrong to infer that all moral stands are wrong such as in Error theory and Moral Skepticism, or that moral stands are meaningless as in Moral Nihilism. However it can be inferred that arguing about different moral stands is meaningless since they are all right from the perspective of their different arguers. So, if anything, his approach is more a form of Moral Relativism and Ethical Subjectivism, but not in a sense that moral statements can’t be true or false, but rather that they are always relative to a certain perspective. In fact, he explicitly claims that his negative ethics is perspectivistic.

And indeed it is hard not to consider statements such as ‘philosophies do not fail, they all succeed in their own terms’, as a form of Moral Relativism, Ethical Subjectivism and Moral Perspectivism.
And even more so claims such as these:

“The pluralism of the negative approach is mostly based on the Gestalt theory–traditionally a theory of perception–applied into the field of concepts, as was explained in previous chapters (particularly in Chapter 4).  The negative approach states that the parties in a discussion are never speaking of strictly the same thing; it is highly unlikely that two arguers have exactly the same premises and the same Gestalten about everything. This also means that there is no “contradiction” between them in a strictly formal sense: if two parties come to the results A and non-A, it is not difficult to show that the premises, the argumentative process and the forms of sequitur employed by A are not the same as the premises and forms of argument of non-A. But because of this, there is no full communication between them either but, at most, some sort of interaction, where each party pays attention to and selects particular pieces of sectors of the other party’s statements. Both partially overlap generating a fragmentary and self-centered understanding of the subject being discussed.” (Page 167)

And:

“The philosophical ideas that appear on our horizon are never direct records of reality; rather, they are inevitability organized in a particular way; they allow some things to be seen and produce complete blindness for others.”  (Page 167)

And:

“Philosophical ideas are formulated in a particular way and shape, in relation to proximity, similarity and combination just like in the field of perception. When we try to persuade another person of our point of view, we try to change their organization of objects, but these attempts deal frequently with insuperable limitations; so that, after all, each of the parties firmly keeps their own Gestalt rather than accepting the other’s.” (Page 168)

It is hard to see how that doesn’t result in Moral Relativism and/or Ethical Subjectivism.
Obviously we can disagree with Cabrera’s premises in the above paragraph, but if we accept them, then it is not clear why this approach, in the most far reaching case, is excessively tolerant towards alternative views, and not simply absolutely tolerant towards any other view, as according to him, each point of view is actually an expression of a particular way and shape that objects are organized by people. So, if there is no right or wrong Gestalt how can there be a right and wrong philosophical idea that is derived from each person’s unique Gestalt?
And if “the philosophical ideas that appear on our horizon are never direct records of reality; rather, they are inevitably organized in a particular way; they allow some things to be seen and produce complete blindness for others”, how can anyone judge any philosophical idea? If no one has access to reality as it is, and everyone has blind spots, no one can judge anyone’s philosophical ideas. Where is the room for criticism under this formulation? How can anyone negate any standpoint? How can anything be wrong and right? How can anything be defined as cruel or harmful as it all depends on each agent’s Gestalt? And once a person follows the rules mentioned in the main text , basically everything goes, no matter how harmful and cruel it may be.

Cabrera’s approach is not Moral Nihilism or Moral Skepticism as he acknowledges the existence of moral values and their meaning, only that according to him they are relative. And not relative to particular social norms as Moral Relativism suggests, but relative to the particular perspective of each arguer, and so it is hard not to view it as Ethical Subjectivism or Moral Perspectivism. What ground does ethics have if anyone can do anything one wants as long as it can be explained according to that person’s Gestalt?

Cabrera tries to explain why nevertheless it isn’t:

“Gestalten, as conceptual organizations and perspectives, are neither “objective”–in the sense of completely external and independent from all human organization–nor “subjective”, in the sense of purely psychological, internal, personal, or private constructions. When looking at the famous images of gestalt theory (the duck and the rabbit, the old and the young ladies, the two jars and the two faces), we can see that all of them are perfectly objective, no matter which side is being selected for observation. Anyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort. The two figures are over there, they are real and not illusory, but they heavily depend on some perspective in order to be seen; these objective things can only be seen from a particular perspective, but this does not turn them “subjective”.
Therefore, there is a midpoint between objectivity and subjectivity to be explored, a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives, an objectivity that is only possible through some kind of look on reality that everybody can, in principle, assume. Figures do not appear without some effort–perceptive or conceptual–but once the figure appears, it is perfectly objective. ” (Page 168)

This explanation is rather ambiguous in my view. And it doesn’t seem to be consistent with his former claims. If the midpoint between objectivity and subjectivity is where everyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort, then it is not accurate that there are blind spots. How is this claim compatible with his claims regarding blind spots? If there is something that I can’t see, how can I assume it? and if I can, why can’t I treat it as objective given that his criteria for objectivity is if there is ‘a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives based on the possibility of everybody, in principle, to assume other perspectives’? If there is a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives, an objectivity that is only possible through some kind of look on reality that in principle, everybody can assume, regarding philosophical positions; why can’t we assume it regarding philosophical discussions? Why can’t we try to show our opponent our look on reality given that everybody can, in principle, assume it, and therefore expect that person to be convinced by our arguments? If what can turn a seemingly subjective perspective into an objective one is that everyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort, then why can’t we treat it as objective during a debate? If objectivism is possible, we must make efforts and reach it. If it isn’t, then we have subjectivism. If after being exposed to my opponent’s thought process, I am not convinced by the arguments, then either they are wrong, or the premises are wrong, or my way of thinking is wrong; but it can’t be that they are all right. And if they are, then how is it not Ethical Subjectivism?
At most, Cabrera offers a psychological explanation for why so many discussions end in an impasse. But I fail to see the philosophical explanation for that claim.
I may understand why someone is sure that s/he has a right to eat another animal, but I fail to understand how any psychological explanation for that position can somehow provide a valid philosophical justification for that position.
Had Cabrera only argued that it is impossible to convince someone with a different Gestalten, I would have unfortunately mostly agree, but his argument is way more subjectivist and ethically dangerous, as he argues that someone with a certain Gestalten is right just as anyone else with a different Gestalten. It may be true that it is hard to convince a psychopath that harming others is wrong, but it is a whole different story to argue that a psychopath is right from its own Gestalten.
In any case, his reference to the point is too minimal in my view, as obviously it is an extremely important issue.

Regarding Moral Relativism he writes:

“Philosophical communities in general are more afraid of relativism, of the possibility of different and opposite positions all being true (the frightening “anything goes”), than of the opposite idea–absolutism–according to which just one position is true (our own, of course) and all the others are wrong (“only one goes”). As we saw before, changing perspectives is seen as irresponsible and dangerous by many. But this is controversial because the connections between dogmatism, fanaticism and tyranny have been blatantly evident through all human history. Totalitarianisms have historically been based on absolute certainties rather than on sceptical doubt. Totalitarianisms were never sceptical; on the contrary, fanatic people believe without restrictions in some absolute and unchangeable truth. Meanwhile, the negative approach does not assume any kind of “subjective relativism”; it could be better defined as an objective or Gestaltic relativism. Argumentation relies on Gestalten, but Gestalten are objective. It could also be said that the negative approach adopts a sort of Gestaltic or perspecitivstic realism.” (Page 168)

I don’t see the difference between “subjective relativism” and “objective or Gestaltic relativism” on the practical level. Under both formulations I am bound to accept the position of the other as being as valid as mine, no mater how cruel and harmful it is.
Secondly, though it is true that absolutism brought and brings horrors with it, so does relativism, only that its pluralistic coating makes it seem as a much better option than absolutism. But actually what is the difference between doing what I want no matter how cruel it is because I am absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong, and doing what I want no matter how cruel it is because I am right from my perspective and you may be right from yours? Consuming animals who are forced to live the worst lives imaginable because speciesism is absolutely right, or because consuming animals is absolutely right for me, doesn’t matter much to the suffering animals. Obviously under totalitarianisms the one in power holds the absolute truth and that’s obviously worse, but under totalitarianisms there is no room for argumentation anyway so it is an irrelevant example. When argumentation is possible, I don’t see the fundamental difference between absolutism and “anything goes” in relation to the option of me convincing my opponents.
It seems as if it is better to believe that everything is true than that there is only one truth, however in relation to argumentation, both lead to a total impasse. In both cases arguing is pointless. If a counter-argument can be found against my argument by someone who believes there is only one truth then the absolute approach leads to an impasse, and alternatively, if by definition a counter-argument is as good and as right as mine then the negative approach also leads to an impasse.

It is not that Cabrera argues that as long as I can’t see things from the other’s perspective and the other can’t see things from mine, I’ll never convince that person (a valid claim which could be categorized as Moral Pessimism), he argues that since I can’t see things from the other’s perspective and the other can’t see things from mine, we are both right. It is not even that we’ll never know who is right, but that we both are. How is that not a form of Moral Relativism or Moral Perspectivism?

But Cabrera rejects the idea that the negative approach is relativist, as well as rejecting moral relativism itself. He makes the common claim that moral relativism is self-refuting for the obvious reason that if all standpoints are relative, then by definition moral relativism can’t be objectively right but only relatively right, and so can’t make the case that everything is relative (if everything is relative then the claim that everything is relative is also relative and not objectively right).
In addition, according to moral relativism, standpoints claiming to be objectively right can’t be refuted by moral relativism as each stand can be right in relation to its own context. So paradoxically, moral relativism confirms stands that contradict it.

But in his view the same does not apply to his negative approach to argumentation theory:

“the more developed answer to the accusation of self-contradiction runs like this: all what was here said about the negative approach to argumentation is also applied to the discussion around affirmative and negative approaches. The negative approach is only a position among others. If this were not the case, the negative approach would really be self-refuting. The discussion between the affirmative and negative approaches to argumentation is inserted within the web of arguments, and it also depends on presuppositions and admits endless counter-argumentation. The fact that the negative approach will always have to face relevant counter-arguments from the affirmative side is exactly what makes the negative approach self-confirming instead of self-refuting. The negative approach accepts self-reference and self-inclusion as a serious commitment, not as a form of literary frivolity. Not only does the negative approach accept self-inclusion but it actually needs to do so; because if it did not include itself in the endless process of argumentation, the negative approach would be indeed self-contradicting and a curious and unjustifiable exception of the negative approach itself.” (Page 175)

If the negative approach is immune to self-refuting it is because it is so general and tolerant that it actually says very little. It is so inclusive that it doesn’t really leave anything out so there is no wonder that it is hard to find it self-refuting as what does it actually argue for that can be refuted? On the face of it, a theory that claims that the other theories are right just as much, and that counterarguments can always be found against any argument, is hard to be refuted because it leaves so much room for every other possible claim, including ones that seemingly contradict it.
It can’t be that a claim that practically claims that other claims might be right just as much, is true, because some of the claims that it confirms refute it. So one of them must be true. He claims that this is not the case because his approach is ready to accept any valid counter-argument. But the fact that an approach is ready for counter-arguments by stating that it is, doesn’t make it resistant to self-refuting, especially since if some counter-arguments that contradict it are true, then it is wrong. To claim that such attempts to contradict the negative approach actually confirm it because that is exactly what it claims – that there would always be counter-arguments, so counter-arguments approve not disprove it – is no more than sophistry.

To avoid self-refuting Cabrera should have claimed that it is not a meta-philosophy but just another claim, but obviously the negative approach can only be understood as a meta-philosophy. If it is just another claim about all the other claims being refutable and therefore so is it, then it can’t be a claim about all the other claims. It is just a mind game, merely a logical performance devoid of meaning.
It can’t be that the claim that there is one truth and the claim that there is no one truth, are both right. If the claim that there is only one truth is right then the one that there is not only one truth is wrong, and if the claim that there is not only one truth is right but all of them are right then the claim that there is only one truth is wrong and also the claim that all the claims are right because as just said, the one that there is only one truth is wrong. The negative approach states that there are no wrong claims but some are claiming that they are the only ones who are right so they must be wrong at least for claiming that, but obviously that would make the negative approach wrong for claiming that there are no wrong claims. In other words, Cabrera’s claim that the claim that everything can be right confirms the negative approach, is paradoxical since ‘everything’, by definition, includes opposite claims that contradict the negative approach.

I can’t see how the negative approach doesn’t repeat the same mistake that moral relativism makes.
The fact that as opposed to relativism the negative approach doesn’t aspire to be universal doesn’t mean it is not refuted when it is refuted.

Cabrera however argues that the very fact that people would argue with him confirms his view:

“It is always possible to counter-argue against the negative approach from the prevailing affirmative perspective. Many readers of this book will certainly have taken abundant notes in order to reply to a great number of my declarations, claims and statements about diverse issues during their reading. They may not have been convinced by my arguments and will also be able to produce many counter-arguments supporting the affirmative approach, to which I can also reply (if I am still alive, if nobody prevents me from doing so, if I am not arbitrarily excluded from the discussion, and so on). But such an endless confrontation between the affirmative and the negative approaches precisely illustrates the negative theses about argumentation. The fact that the affirmative approach will always have many objections to the negative approach makes the point of the negative approach: any debated matter is subjected to endless argumentation, including, of course, the confrontation between the affirmative and the negative approaches to argumentation.
But–somebody could still argue–if this is so, the negative approach was proved to be absolutely true, against its anti-absolutist conviction. Because if the negative approach proves that even dogmatic affirmative philosophies are also Gestalt-dependent, then the negative approach is absolutely true. But this is again an affirmative way to evaluate the situation. In the negative approach, the main thesis of the Gestalt-dependent nature of all philosophies is not an absolute thesis either, because it also depends on presuppositions that other lines of argument could reject or deny. Even the perspectivistic view is perspectivistic. There is not any neutral space where the negative approach could be proven as absolute; but this is the situation of any other theory of argumentation (and possibly of any philosophical theory in general). This shows that both the affirmative and the negative approaches can be endlessly defended and that none of them can eliminate the other. The negative approach is not defended as a universal truth, but as a result of a particular argumentative line which can be proved tenable. But the same happens with the other positions, in spite of their own anxiety for uniqueness.” (Page 175)

To me at least, it is a form of Ethical Subjectivism. It can be formulated more or less as follows:
1. Different people have different perspectives
2. The moral perspectives of people determine what is right according to them, meaning if the moral perspective of a person says that a certain action is right, then that action is right, at least from that person’s perspective
3. There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one moral perspective as better and righter than another. There are no moral truths that apply to all people at all times
4. Any person’s moral perspective has no special status but is merely one among various moral perspectives
5. It is wrong of us to judge other moral perspectives. We should always be tolerant of them

Or in other words, different people have different moral perspectives. Therefore, there is no objective truth in morality. Right and wrong are only matters of perspective, and perspectives vary from person to person.
And if to give a practical example, Pro-natalists believe it is right to procreate, whereas antinatalists believe it is wrong to procreate. Therefore, procreation is neither objectively right nor objectively wrong. It is merely a matter of perspective, which varies from person to person.

But Cabrera insists that the negative approach isn’t a form of Moral Subjectivism:

“Traditionally, subjectivity was conceived as multiple and objectivity as unique. The negative approach subverts this: objectivity is as diversified and multiple as subjectivity. We can reach objectivity in many different ways. The negative approach does not accept a unique objectiveness imposed on everybody in all contexts and lines of thought, independently from presuppositions and perspectives. In the negative approach, each philosophy sees some aspects of the world and they are perfectly objective within their own perspectives. We cannot capture the world from all sides (like God, supposedly), but always from a particular angle. But our perspectives are not “subjective”, in the sense of private and not valid for others. Everybody can see the duck if they are disposed to make the perceptive effort to stop seeing the rabbit; and everybody can see, for example, the death penalty as a revenge if they make the conceptual effort to stop understanding it as an act of justice. But stopping does not mean eliminating; each organization unveils some aspects of the world, but it does not refute the others; it simply offers an invitation to see things in other ways.” (Page 169)

According to this there are no real blind spots but spots who may be intentionally or unintentionally covered, and it is possible to uncover them. In that case why not act so to remove the cover and then go back to the affirmative approach? Why go all the way to Moral Perspectivism?

It feels like Cabrera is trying to have it both ways so to speak. You can’t argue against the affirmative approach claiming that there are different perspectives which are a result of different gestalts and that there are blind spots and that it is impossible to see others’ viewpoints; but when facing subjectivism, argue that it is possible to see others’ viewpoints. If it is possible to see others’ viewpoints if one wants to, then it is a question of will and that makes the case a psychological one and not philosophical. The question of will is a very important question, probably more important than the one raised here, but that is not the issue. The question is can people view things like others do or not. If they can’t then the negative approach is a form of Ethical Subjectivism, and if they can, besides emphasizing what every activist already knows very well – that it is tremendously hard to convince other people, especially when it comes to ethical issues, what is the point and added value of the negative approach?

It seems that all in all, the negative approach to argumentation is a form of ethical subjectivism because it supports the claim that there is no unique viewpoint from which moral norms are rationally compelling and universally binding. The truth of a particular moral stand cannot be evaluated according to an absolute truth, but according to each person’s perspective. There is no point beyond a personal perspective from which we can judge others in a way that is not relative to our own position. Moral statements are made true or false by the perspective of the arguers. They are actually personal statements about the perspective of arguers regarding a particular issue.

Ethical Subjectivism is sometimes defined as – people’s moral stances are based on their feelings and preferences but nothing more. Under this definition Cabrera is not an ethical subjectivist, since he thinks that there are things that are good and that there are things that are bad, only that we can’t determine what is good and what is bad because it is relative to the arguer perspective. But that is not the only definition of Ethical Subjectivism. It can also be defined as an ethical position that claims there is no such thing as “objective” right or wrong, and people are always right or wrong according to their own perspectives on the matter as long as they are honest and their views are not solely based on their emotions or their biased preferences but are also rationally grounded. According to that definition, when people are making ethical claims they are not just saying something about their feelings, but are making a rational claim about their ethical stands according to their Gestalt, which according to Cabrera therefore cannot be refuted by the other side. The negative approach to argumentation may be a more advanced and sophisticated version of Ethical Subjectivism, but I find it hard not to view it as a version of it at all.

Along this text I have argued against Cabrera for ambiguity, self-refuting claims, and for providing, at most, a psychological explanation for argumentation impasse but not at all a philosophical explanation for it. However, the most crucial criticism over Cabrera’s book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate is that it doesn’t at all provide any new ethics for philosophical debate, but rather voids any content of philosophical debates about ethics. An ethical thesis which seriously suggests that everything can be right, implies that nothing can be wrong. In the better case it is simply contentless and useless, and in the worst case it is just a more sophisticated version of Ethical Subjectivism.
And if more or less everything can be right in its own way, there is no justification to change others’ positions, as they may be right; and if there is no justification to change others’ positions, then there is no justification to change many things that currently exist in the world; and that means that the world can stay more or less as it is and I can’t think of anything more unethical than that.

References

Cabrera Julio, A Critique of Affirmative Morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of life
(Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions 2014)

Cabrera Julio, Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019)

The following text is the third critical review of a book by the philosopher Julio Cabrera.
The first one addressed his outstanding book A Critique of Affirmative Morality.
The second one addressed his book Because I Love You, You Will Not Be Born!
And this one addresses the book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate.

After criticizing what he refers to as ‘affirmative ethics’ and the very possibility of being ethical in his monumental book A Critique of Affirmative Morality, Cabrera criticizes what he calls ‘the affirmative approach to argumentation’ and the very possibility of making a universally true argument that everyone must logically accept. In a way, his book about affirmative morality is kind of lamentation for ethics, and the book which is the subject of this text does a similar thing to argumentation. In his book about ethics he writes that morality necessarily leads to an impasse, and in this book that argumentation necessarily leads to an impasse.

The Affirmative Approach to Argumentation

Cabrera is critical of philosophy’s ‘Affirmative Approach to Argumentation’ which according to him seeks a unique universal “truth” in argumentation while aiming at proving wrong any opposing view or the option of several “truths”.

Cabrera wonders how is it that the greatest minds of all history haven’t yet reached the right answer about so many philosophical questions, and suggests that it is because so far philosophy aimed at one true answer and rejected the possibility of multiple answers.

“The “affirmative approach” consisting basically of thinking that philosophical queries have a right solution, or, at least, an adequate approach among many others that are inadequate or wrong. What we notice, even with “great philosophers” in classic and present times, is a remarkable concentration on their own positions, as they maintain a strong belief that they are providing an adequate approach to the debated questions and they reject, sometimes summarily, the alternatives. The affirmative approach sustains a meta-philosophical view of the plurality of philosophies as a scandal and a mistake which must be resolved in some way.” (Page 4)

And the way philosophy suggests to resolve that mistake, is according to Cabrera, by an affirmative argumentation process. Any argument theory has to go through six steps, one way or the other, which are:
(1) Determining the existence of an argument – first there is a need to check whether there is, in fact, an argument at all, as it could be that the case is of an unstructured mixture of statements, or a declaration of intentions, or an emotional expression.
(2) Determining the existence of an arguer – there must be someone who advances the argument and defends it, taking the burden of proof and assuming the responsibility for the argument.
(3) Reconstructing the argument – the arguer has to try to reconstruct the argument in question through argumentation schemes showing whether there is only one argument or many, which argument is central, whether an argument is a sub-argument of another, which are the relevant premises and which are the expected conclusions and so on.
(4) Making terms and premises clear – the arguer has to question whether there are terms to be clarified or defined in the reconstruction carried out in step 3; it is also necessary to expose the assumptions and the premises whose truth will be accepted without argument.
(5) Testing the argument’s correction – do conclusions effectively arise from premises and assumptions? How about the quality and reliability of the inferential passage? Is the argument convincing, cogent, overwhelming? Does it set forth its conclusion?
(6) Testing the aims of the argument – the argument might not have any impact on the audience being targeted and in that case, if purposes are not accomplished, the argument fails. The agreement or assent of the target audience can be crucial to many types of argumentation and, perhaps, to all of them.

The main reason Cabrera criticizes the affirmative approach and suggests an alternative approach to argumentation, is not because of fundamental flaws he inspects in the above formulation. He agrees that this is basically how argumentation should be performed, however he is crucially concerned with what actually happens in real philosophical arguments.
Cabrera inspects a major flaw in the affirmative approach to argumentation not necessarily as a result of major flaws in formal or informal logic, but in the insistence that inspecting arguments with ideal norms of logic would provide one right answer that no one can counter argue, a scenario that according to him never happens, and can never be guaranteed.

The affirmative approach to argumentation is affirmative in the sense that according to it, the answer to the question – can philosophical questions be resolved by argumentation, is affirmative, while according to Cabrera the answer is negative.
Naturally, each side of the argument aspires to assume the best arguments, but according to Cabrera an argument can be considered right or wrong only from a certain perspective, and there is no neutral or objective authority (such as God or a super-computer) that can decide between different perspectives as to which of them is the unique one for solving the philosophical issue.

Therefore, according to Cabrera, endless confrontation and conflict between arguments and counter-arguments is intrinsic to the very process of argumentation, which usually ends in an impasse.
Cabrera emphasizes that the problem is not necessarily that argumentation does not follow rules, but that in each one of the six steps of argumentation specified above, each side can use each step to open new lines of counter-argumentation, following the rules. Cabrera exemplify:
“Let’s take, for instance, step number 1, the very existence of an argument. From certain perspectives and assumptions there exists an argument which is perfectly inexistent from other perspectives and assumptions;”. (page 21) According to Cabrera whether there is a real issue to be subjected to argumentation is not something that can be decided in absolute terms, and he exemplifies: “in a debate on abortion, for example, the very “abortion problem” might not even exist for a religious arguer who considers the criminal nature of preventing the development of a foetus totally evident. For him, there is nothing to be argued at all.” (page 21)
And indeed we see that quite often in antinatalist debates, many pro-natalists are not convinced that there is a problem to begin with. As far as they’re concerned, life is good and it is good to make more of it.

And that’s only the first step. The second step – who has the burden of proof, is another example for something we often encounter in antinatalist debates as many antinatalists argue that the burden of proof is on the people who choose to procreate since the burden of proof applies to anyone who makes a positive claim, and pro-natalists simply presuppose that procreation is good despite that it was never questioned, let alone proven to be good.
Pro-natalists on the other hand argue that the burden of proof is actually on antinatalists as they are the ones who are challenging a perceived status quo, they are asking people to stop doing something so natural and that was done since forever.

Cabrera argues that the “Affirmative approaches to argumentation assume a highly rational conception of a human being, as a cooperative agent disposed, in principle, to engage in a critical discussion aiming for a reasonable solution to differences via argumentation and, when necessary, leaving their subjective and personal interests aside.” (Page 54), while actually and frustratingly, everything can be, and practically is, counter-argued according to the motives and the perspective of any opponent to any position.
In Cebrera’s words:

“Whatever our attitude may be concerning these stances, however unusual or even extravagant, one cannot deny that the defenders of these positions are able to advance arguments in their favour that can be regarded, under certain assumptions, as strong and deserving of reply. It is always possible to oppose an argument. Therefore, the very notion of a “counter-argument” must change in the negative approach, because counter-arguments are always available for any given argument; if counter-arguments are not advanced, this is not due to strictly argumentative reasons. There seems to be no argument without potential counter-arguments. Terms, premises or sequiturs can always be challenged or rejected, however well-defined or “sound” they may appear to their defenders.” (Page 24)

And to make things even more frustrating he argues that:

“The same way that it is possible to look at something without really seeing it, or hearing without listening, so it is possible to understand one concept without thinking with it; in a sort of conceptual blindness. Similarly, as some visual organizations of pieces make some particular perceptual associations easier and others more difficult, some organizations of concepts promote some specific kind of thinking and make others difficult or even block them completely.” (Page 33)

So according to Cabrera: “An informal logic theory that applies only to cases where there are expressive agreements at the point of departure, and therefore high expectations that one side will simply accept its defeat at the end, seems a rather narrow scope theory.” (Page 71)
In reality crucial problems do not arise only because and when arguers “do not follow the rules” or because they “commit fallacies”, but disagreements, misunderstandings and impasses are or can be preset at every moment during the process of argumentation, even when all the rules are strictly followed.

For these reasons and more, he argues that the affirmative approach to argumentation is false and a negative approach to argumentation is needed.

The Negative Approach to Argumentation

The fundamental ideas of the negative approach are as follows:
Arguments cannot be solved in a unique, correct way. Arguments can be solved correctly in many different ways. Contradictory conclusions don’t eliminate each other but both may be true at the same time, according to their own conceptual organizations (Gestalten), as long as they follow the steps required to present a possible line of argument. There are many ways of being right and not only one. There are always other lines that can act as a counter-argument to the line initially presented, therefore philosophical discussions are endless.
In the negative approach, the other arguers are not enemies who, with their lines of argument come to destroy mine, but only arguers who reason following other possible lines of argument, and that, from other assumptions, reasonably arrive at other outcomes different from mine.
The domain of argumentation therefore has no self-support. (Page 37)

And the general features of the negative approach to argumentation are:

“(1) We do not know what reality is, or even whether it is unique or multiple; but we know that reality presents itself as shattered and organized in many ways, all of them subjective, none of them unique. (The ontological thesis.)
(2) The different philosophical theories unveil and point to different aspects of reality, but only from their respective organizations. Thus, none of them fails, all of them succeed. They only fail in their attempt to depict the sole truth, transforming their perspective in “what the world really is”. (The epistemological thesis.)
(3) All philosophical theories are tenable in their own terms and they are systematically wrong or inadequate in other theories’ terms, but there is no neutral domain where this tenability could be conclusively and absolutely settled or decided. (The logical thesis.)
(4) Our theories are only perspectives among others, positions among others, without any kind of privilege. They are not the best theories just for being our theories, and they are not correct just because we were able to formulate them properly. In the negative approach, the impression that one’s own theory must be the best and others’ wrong, is nothing except a psychological delusion with no logical support. (The psychological thesis.)” (Page 39)

As opposed to the affirmative approach which assumes that at some point one arguer must prevail over the other by providing the better arguments, the negative approach sustains that all arguments have flaws that can always be stressed by counter-arguments. And counter-arguments according to Cabrera, can’t eliminate or rebut the arguments they challenge since they too are only additional arguments in the web of arguments. They can only reshape, reformulate or relocate an argument in relation to other arguments.
In that sense, and given that there is no external objective unbiased authority that can decide, philosophical discussions according to the negative approach are virtually endless. They end as a result of fatigue, frustration, lack of motivation or interest and etc., but not because one of the standpoints rebutted and eliminated the other.

Therefore Cabrera’s negative approach aims to:

“present and develop the logical position that we assume when we learn to “look around” beyond our own stances, seeing the alternative and decentralizing our own viewpoint, abandoning the intention to occupy the privileged space of unique truth. The negative approach prefers to place ones’ own perspective within a very wide and complex holistic web of approaches and perspectives that speak and criticize mutually without discarding one another, even when each position may fiercely maintain its own perspective supported on defensible grounds.” (Page 5)

One of the problems with that aim is that it is technically impossible to really get out of one’s subjective view. In the best case, one can only realize that its view is subjective and there are other views which might be right just as much from their point of view. But there is no real option for “decentralizing our own viewpoint” as each person’s view is necessarily a centralized one, even the very view of decentralizing one’s own viewpoint. Even when a person is trying to view others’ views it is done from that persons’ viewpoint. No one can really launch itself to other people’s conceptual organizations (Gestalten) and assumptions. This approach can be a good practice for understanding others and even to convince others of one’s own viewpoints, but these are public relations and activism claims, not philosophical ones. The problem of the centrality of our own viewpoint and its effects on the way that everyone absorb information and other viewpoints, can’t be solved by stating there is a need to “decentralizing our own viewpoint”, as this is by definition a mission impossible. It can be effective against dogmatism but it can’t be a recipe for how to do philosophy since if the idea is that every philosophical position is necessarily a result of the standing point of the person holding that philosophical position, then the look on other philosophical positions would still be from the standing point of the person looking at other positions. The decentralization would necessarily remain centralized. We need a decentralization of the decentralization to really decentralize our own views. This aspiration is an endless regression of decentralization.

But of course, the main problem with the negative approach to argumentation is not that it is technically problematic, but that it is utterly ethically problematic, being too tolerant towards alternative viewpoints no matter how cruel and harmful they may be. That flaw is clear to Cabrera who argues that the opposite approach is worse:

“In affirmative approaches, the crucial problem is to be too intolerant concerning the alternative. The crucial risk of negative approaches is just the opposite, being too lenient about them. Both approaches are problematic, and must decide not by a totally risk-free approach, but by a risk we are well equipped to deal with. The option taken by this author is that it is better–logically and ethically–to have an excessive tolerance than an excessive intolerance. But this is not absolute either, just an option in a world where there are no absolute and risk-free solutions totally satisfactory to all parties involved.”

However, I am not sure that the case is of the negative approach to argumentation merely being excessively tolerant. I think that for many it may seem as a theory that goes way further than that. Cabrera understands that his approach may be interpreted as a form of, or at least as supportive or an intensification of Moral Skepticism, Ethical Subjectivism, Moral Relativism and even Moral Nihilism, so he tries to explain why it is none of the above.
To not make this text too long and too complicated, as well as not to deviate from the main and more interesting issue of the book, I decided to add an appendix to this text with some relations to the issue of the negative approach to argumentation being too tolerant to the point of Ethical Subjectivism, Moral Relativism, Moral Perspectivism and etc. You can find it here.

So assuming, at least for the sake of the argument, that the negative approach is truly none of the above, its derived practical conclusion is still very disappointing. Similar to the book A Critique of Affirmative Morality, in this book as well, the criticism is super radical and the descriptions of reality are very sharp and raw, however the conclusion is feeble and deficient. After shredding affirmative ethics and any option to live ethically in A Critique of Affirmative Morality, his conclusion and suggestion derived from negative ethics was merely ontological minimalism. And in Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation, his conclusion and suggestion derived from the negative approach to argumentation is merely a pluralistic stance towards other philosophical ideas and adopting what he calls the Tragic Negativism.

Tragic Negativism

According to Cabrera, argumentation is not a scene of debate between right and wrong but actually a tragedy:

“The attitude that I prefer to assume in this book concerning the negative approach to argumentation is in-between nihilism and indifference. I call it argumentative negativism. It could also be called tragic negativism, in the sense that the difference between tragedy and drama is that in drama one of the parties is good and the others are bad (heroes and villains), whereas in tragedy we find good people on both sides. This means that, in tragedies, someone good and fair will inevitably suffer or die. In the domain of arguments, tragedy appears when we know that we are rejecting a perfectly plausible and tenable posture; we reject it not for being bad, but because we prefer to sustain another perspective maybe incompatible with the other. Like in tragedies good people die, in tragic argumentation good lines of arguments are rejected.” (Page 182)

The tragic arguer is aware that:

“there are dozens of circumstances and contextual elements of character, prevailing values, education, influences, simplicity, fertility, life assistance, social or cultural pressures, pure aesthetic taste, laziness, error, etc., which lead us to prefer one philosophical position over others. We are not driven to it only by the pure force of reasoning; and if somebody demands that we justify our presuppositions, new lines of argument will have to be opened.” (Page 185)

Having said that, according to Cabrera, the negative approach doesn’t mean one cannot adherently hold moral positions:

“The negativist view does not prevent us from arguing vehemently and convincingly in favor of some position to which we strongly adhere. We, for instance, may take a position in ethics favorable to pointing out the moral problems of procreation, abortion, the value of human life and correlated objects we can take a very determined stance on these issues and others, putting all kind of objections to optimistic postures concerning human life. But we do this because we decided–for a series of reasons–to take this line of argument and not another, not in order to defend an objective, unique and irrefutable truth, eliminating alternatives. We simply feel ourselves affectively and intellectually very close to this type of position and adopt it. (although this offends our intellectual narcissism: we would have preferred to have chosen our positions based on deep and necessary reasons.)” (Page 186)

But I don’t understand how one is supposed to adherently advocate for moral positions realizing that others may be right from their own standpoints? If they are right then I am wrong trying to convince them. The negative approach says that it is ok to vehemently hold moral positions while it’s supposed to neutralize or at least dramatically weaken any attempt to convince others, because from their own standpoints they might be right.

People can’t adherently advocate for moral positions under the realization that their position is just another one among many other ideas and it might be wrong just as much. It indeed might lead to indifference, as Cabrera suggests, or to a mental state in which argumentation is actually an intellectual mind game, a rhetoric contest, instead of a crucial ethical discussion.
And evidently Cabrera writes that “Discussions do not have to become a matter of life and death.” Only that all ethical discussions are matters of life and death. It is not the only peculiar claim in the book but it is probably one of the strangest as it is coming from the person to whom mortality is of the most central arguments against procreation. How can a discussion about procreation be anything other than a matter of life and death? And obviously you don’t have to include mortality as one of your central reasons for being an antinatalist for it to be a matter of life and death, as it is in the name. Regardless of the mortality issue, creating a new life is by definition a matter of life and death. And the same goes for abortion, ending life, capital punishment, animal rights, racism, feminism, and every other important ethical issue. They all are matters of life and death and that’s how we must treat them in ethical discussions.

Perhaps Cabrera’s cynical approach comes from his position about argumentation’s origin:

“Arguing is part of our mechanism of survival; we need to argue as much as we need to breathe. Argumentation aims to construct a position that is both an expression of our personality and an explanation of some relevant aspect of reality. In this delimitation of my own argumentative space, the animal drive of life makes me want to destroy other positions or show they are wrong and should be replaced by mine. Thereby I fail to see that others are doing the same as I do: expressing themselves as singular beings, constructing their values, trying to point to aspects of reality from different perspectives. The problem is that such constructions are mutually opposed and this fact encourages the idea that one of them has to prevail over the others by eliminating or replacing them.” (Page 190)

In other words, arguments are mostly if not entirely about the arguers and hardly if any about the issues. People do not use arguments simply for the pure desire to “resolve differences of opinion”, but as a form of defining themselves. They choose values to distinguish themselves, and are using argumentation as a form of expressing themselves and creating rapports with other people.

In Cabrera’ words:

“being a good arguer powerfully increases our self-esteem, especially through the victories we reach in discussions. The rational conception–the more usual in books of logic, even informal–address humans as if they were in a very comfortable and controlled situation where they can be reasonable and objective, with little sensibility to the frictions and insecurities of existence, to the uneasy and arduous domains where humans have to make their arguments through crucial decisions while trying to build their own value.
In logical studies, in particular, we easily forget that we are human animals, sensible beings with a vulnerable body and urgent needs. Our argumentation practices are not placed in a clean and quiet heaven but in concrete circumstances of hard living. We are forced to be defensive and expansive (and even dangerous in some situations) to others; we cannot be totally objective or neutral, but we need to be partial (or even tendentious) in order to survive, not, say, by hunger or physical pain, but by the need to protect our intellectual productions and to create an intellectual prestige within our very demanding communities; we need good self-esteem and intellectual recombination in the same way we need bread.” (Page 57)

I am not yet cynical enough to think that about all arguments, but I agree that this description is unfortunately mostly true.
And I also agree with the pessimistic premise of the negative approach to argumentation that arguments are never resolved, let alone universally and permanently:

“Two human beings engaging in a discussion about philosophical question are naturally and perforce going to differ in substance and method on almost any topic. What is the point in trying to impose one’s own perspective? I see no reason for trying to destroy the other’s lines of thought, even if regarded as absurd, untenable or dishonest.” (Page 6)

Of course there is a reason for trying to destroy the other’s lines of thought but not because it is absurd, untenable or dishonest, but because the other’s lines of thought might be extremely harmful. What is the point in trying to impose one’s own perspective? The answer is that maybe it would reduce suffering in the world.
But the more interesting and relevant question is not if there is a reason for trying to destroy the other’s lines of thought but is that option reasonable? And the answer in most cases is unfortunately No. And if two human beings engaging in a discussion about a philosophical question are naturally and perforce going to differ on almost any topic what is the point of having it in the first place?

A Psychological Negative Approach to Argumentation

You don’t have to agree with Cabrera’s radical philosophical argument regarding argumentation, but you have to agree with what can be seen as a radical psychological argument regarding argumentation.

“The crucial phenomenon is that, whatever our topic of reasoning, the opponent will have always a reply at hand, and we will have a reply to his/her reply if we are not prevented from counter-arguing by external means (violence, illness or death). Even the most seemingly indefensible stance, which would appear to have been totally impaired and unable to provide a counter-argument–by the accumulation of evidence–can always emerge from the ashes and present a defense.” (Page 18)

That means that even if we’ll be able to construct a much more valid and coherent argument than our opponent (which might construct a poor and incoherent argument), as far as the bottom line goes, it doesn’t matter if Cabrera is right that we don’t convince the other side because s/he is actually right from its own perspective or despite that s/he is wrong, as practically we are failing in convincing others.

I disagree with Cabrera that the reason we fail to convince others is because their arguments are right from their perspective. I think the reason is not their philosophical arguments but their psychological motives. Cabrera criticizes the affirmative approach for treating people as rational beings but it seems that he is making the same mistake. Most people are not convinced by our arguments because they are motivated to sustain their positions which reflect what they desire, not because they see things differently and cannot see them as we do.

It seems that he thinks that different stances can be equal in a metaphysical and logical sense and I think they can’t. But I do think they can be equal in a psychological sense. Meaning, different standpoints can be right or wrong from an objective and logical point of view, but at the same time the very same standpoints can be equally strong from the psychological point of view of each arguer, in the sense that opposite sides can hold different standpoints in an equal strength despite one being philosophically weak and the other philosophically strong. I am not a pluralist when it comes to moral stands but I believe that my opponent may hold its stance in an equal strength to me holding mine, and that we can never resolve our argument as long as the motivations differ.

Even if, like me, you disagree with the negative approach to argumentation on the philosophical level, you must agree that there is certainly much value in its arguments on the psychological level. Even if, like me, you disagree with the philosophical argument that the other side may always be right because it has its own perspective on the issue, clearly the claim that the other side won’t be convinced because it has its own perspective on the issue, is almost always right. I don’t think that it stems from one side holding an argument that is as rational and as valid as the argument of the other side, but from having as strong motivation to keep its arguments as the other side. And strong motivations are stronger than strong arguments, since arguments at least theoretically can be reconstructed, but it is hard to change a motivation, let alone using rational tools. The power of pro-natalism is not argumentative but motivational.
I don’t share the view that it is impossible to defeat arguments, but I do think that it is almost impossible to defeat motivations.

Cabrera argues that just like in the case of ethics:

“the affirmative approach thinks that ethical defects are the product of some internal malice of human beings. The negative approach to ethics holds that it is the external situation in which humans are placed that causes ethical defects. It is not that humans were placed in a good world that they destroyed, but they were placed in an adverse world whose difficulties cannot be morally resolved. The same occurs in logic: the affirmative approach holds that arguments can be perfectly resolved, but that humans obstruct this resolution with their fallacious behavior. The negative approach to logic holds that humans were placed in a situation that cannot be resolved by argument, where any argument they present will have to face endless counter-arguments.” (Page 41)

Cabrera seems to blame the situation and not the people, but it is not as if people yearn for the truth only that the truth doesn’t exist, but that people are not really that into the “truth”. They are into what they are into and if that is opposite to the “truth” then not their desires but the “truth” is compromised for the sake of the desires. When people encounter an inner conflict they usually rearrange the “facts” so they would suit their desires, not the other way around. People are not truth seekers, they are motivated by inner psychological and biological derives.

People are not the major victims of the state of moral impasse, the creatures who people severely affect, are. Even if the situation would change, for example by developing a super intelligent entity that would function as an external objective authority which would make moral decisions for people instead of them arguing forever, people’s motivations would still prevail. For example, people don’t eat meat because their Gestalt makes them think that this is the right thing to do, evidently, different people from similar Gestalts, reach different conclusions regarding eating animals. People eat animals because they want to, not because they think they ought to. The same goes for procreation. People don’t breed because they think it is the right thing to do, in fact most breed without thinking it over at all. And they do so because they want to and are built and designed for it.
People’s positions are founded on the basis of their desires, not the other way around. Humans rationalize their desires, their desires are not a product of their reason.

I highly disagree with the implication that humans are innocent beings who are forced into a horrible situation, and think that they are horrible beings who are forced into an impossible situation which they made much much worse. However, the bottom line of the case in point is that it is truly a situation that cannot be resolved by argumentation.
People are forced into a situation in which they are asked to make claims about moral issues as if they are objective, nonbiased, non-motivated, weren’t educated and indoctrinated in certain ways, and have no prior information and inclinations – despite that it is impossible.
I don’t exempt people from responsibility as most of them are lazy, ignorant, shallow, and are not willing to make even the tiniest effort to educate themselves or even listen to the other side before making judgments, however, I agree that even if they did, the situation would still be impossible.

Cabrera’s statement in the last quote is an admission of a known in advance failure. And therefore a very good reason to never procreate. Even if you are sure that humans are innocent beings who are forced into a horrible situation, and all the more so if you agree that humans are horrible beings who are forced into an impossible situation which they made much much worse, in any case antinatalism is the self-evident conclusion. People must stop procreating so to avoid the need to determine moral issues which they anyway can’t resolve.
That argument may sound contradictive as seemingly this is a determination in favor of antinatalsim derived from the inability to make an argumentative determination, however, I am not claiming here that we must determine in favor of antinatalsim because it is the right moral stance (although in my view obviously it is), but because we must avoid the need to determine moral issues since it is impossible according to the negative approach, and antinatalsim eventually leads there. From that perspective, antinatalism is merely the mean to avoid the inevitable impasse consequence of trying to determine moral issues, and not a decision in favor of a specific moral stance.

Another aspect of the impossibility of ethics is, as before mentioned, that as opposed to the affirmative approach, in the negative one “arguments can be carried on indefinitely by both parties, not only because participants are strategic, fallacious or acting in bad faith, but because arguments and counter-arguments can always be advanced from each party without reaching a strict argumentative solution.” (Page 42)
If the fact that argumentation is bound for eternal dispute without ever being resolved had no negative effect on anyone in the world, then existence would still be senseless, purposeless, pointless and amoral, but at least not so ethically horrifying as it actually is. The fact that moral discussions are bound for eternal dispute without ever being resolved and they do have a tremendous negative effect on trillions of sentient creatures, is what makes Cabrera’s claims additional reasons to why this world can’t be morally justified.

The idea that there is no real option to conduct philosophical discussions, especially ethical ones, shouldn’t derive to pluralism but to fatalism. The fact that humans are incapable of understanding the world they live in, and are totally incapable of reaching agreed upon moral decisions, has dire consequences that daily affect billions of suffering creatures.

Although I disagree with Cabrera’s philosophical pluralism conclusion, I do agree with most of his claims regarding argumentation from the psychological angle. Therefore I see no point in addressing the general public, trying to convince each person to be an antinatalist. Instead, I am trying to convince antinatalists to forsake the futile attempt of addressing the general public trying to convince each person to be an antinatalist, and focus on ways to make the general public antinatalist regardless of each person’s opinion about antinatalism.

Due to all the reasons Cabrera specifies along the book regarding the pointlessness and impossibility of convincing everyone to accept a certain position no matter how right it is, I am calling antinatalists not to be ‘tragic arguers’ but effective activists. Desert the senseless attempt to change the minds of all people and focus on changing their reproductive parts. We will not prevent procreation by argumentation, but we might do so by non-argumentative means.

Cabrera ends his book with the following paragraph:

“Ultimately, maybe argumentation is not the proper field for deciding crucial questions (as, say abortion, the abolition of slavery or the death penalty); argumentation does not occupy, as traditionally said, the place of reason and objectivity, but a new place for human passions and a will to expand, now expressed in rational terms. We may be totally convinced of our point of view (for example, that in abortion we always kill a human being, that the abolition of slavery was not due to ethical reasons but to economic calculation, and that the death penalty offends human dignity). We can sincerely think that our arguments are really stronger than the opposite ones and see them as simply displaying the truth and rejecting error. But the brute fact is, that in front of us there is always the possibility of another arguer having counter-arguments and oppositions to each one of our points, and that we have no neutral space to decide that our strong convictions definitively settle the matter. This may suggest that argumentation is not the ultimate domain to resolve differences, especially when they are strongly controversial; that a domain beyond argumentation should be opened, not eliminating argumentation but going beyond it in a way that is different from merely kicking the board.” (Page 195)

Given that the “game” is pointless and absurd, and that it is not at all a game but a real immense and endless tragedy, kicking the board is exactly what we must do. I totally agree that argumentation is not the proper field for deciding crucial questions and that a domain beyond argumentation should be opened, but not one that is different from merely kicking the board, but one which aims exactly for that – kicking the damn board so hard that no sick game could ever be played again.

References

Cabrera Julio, A Critique of Affirmative Morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of life
(Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions 2014)

Cabrera Julio, Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate
ambridge Scholars Publishing 2019)

 

 

The philosopher Julio Cabrera which I have mentioned and quoted in the text regarding David Benatar’s asymmetry argument, is unfortunately a much less known antinatalist thinker.
This text is mainly based on his outstanding book A Critique of Affirmative Morality.
Despite some challenging and more technical parts (mainly regarding phenomenology which are not crucial for understanding the antinatalist arguments in my view) I highly recommend everyone to read it.
And if you choose not to, I recommend to at least read Cabrera’s 15 Steps Towards Negative Ethics. You can find them at the end of this text.

A Critique of Affirmative Morality

Cabrera’s quite unique antinatalism outlook is derived from an even more unique ethical theory called Negative Ethics. He uses the word negative not only in the sense of value, arguing that life has a negative one since it inevitably contains pain, illness, aging, decay, compromises, frustration, fragility, and death, but also as an opposite to what he calls Affirmative Morality.
Here is a brief explanation in his words:

“The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense – as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.” (p.131)

The various affirmative morality systems suggest various sets of rules for everyday life (“intra-worldly” in Cabrera’s lingo) since according to them existence itself is not even questioned.
Therefore, Cabrera argues that all the affirmative morality systems can offer is what he calls secondary morality. And that is in the more charitable case, in the much less charitable one he thinks that they are partner in crime, since the secondary ethics, by seeking for the “good life”, conceal the need of asking whether it is good to live, and can we be good while living. His answers are no and no. Although he shares the common antinatalist view that life has a negative value, his antinatalism doesn’t stem from the low chance of having a good life, but from the sure chance of harming and manipulating others, and the sure chance of mortality. He removes the element of whether pain and pleasure are in balance overall and argues that it’s the very structure of life itself that is the problem. Hence he thinks that all affirmative morality systems are hypocritical since they ignore and conceal the indispensable violation of the interests of others just by being alive, and of the self by the indispensable fact of mortality.

Mortality

Benatar mentions the harm of death as a reason not to create a new person, but in his case it is a side point that he adds to one of his central arguments. He claims that the fact that people must die is another harm they are forced to endure by coming into existence. For Cabrera death is not a side point or just another antinatalist argument but one of the main ones. When Cabrera talks about death he is not referring to the fact that at some point a person would die (what he calls a “punctual death”), but to the fact that at the point of birth a person starts dying (what he calls a “structural death” or “mortality”). Mortality is not identical to death, but to birth. To be born is to be forced with mortality.

Many people mix the two and say that if death is considered bad, it is because “life” is good. But that claim can be relevant only to punctual death, and not to structural death, since if life is structurally composed of its own elimination it cannot be good. From structural death perspective, if mortality is bad, then the life that inherently carries it must be bad as well. So, saying that life is good and that it’s a shame they must end, is totally ignoring the fact that life and death are intertwined.

In Cabrera’s words, taken from the article Negative Ethics:

“A better way is to consider the value of human life structurally, also considering SD [structural death], the mortality of being, and not just PD [punctual death]. If we use this other dimension of death, it could not have any sense to say that “life is good, but dying is bad”, nor the opposite, that “life is bad, and therefore death is good”, given that, structurally seen, death is inside living, inseparable from it; living is internally mortal, mortality has emerged along with the being itself, it is the very being of being. Ultimately, life is identical to SD.
Regretting having to die should be structurally identical to regretting being born, because it is not in our power being born in a non-mortal way.”

Besides structural death, he also talks about structural pain, which is mainly the pain of decay, aging and illness. And just like structural death, these are also inevitable parts of being. Cabrera argues that the suffering relevant to procreation is beyond contingent pains that may or may not be balanced with pleasures, it is the structural pain given at birth, the pain of declining, suffering and dying, which are inescapable and independent of the content of a specific human life.

The Harm to Others

For Cabrera, ethics is fundamentally a matter of otherness, therefore the main ethical question is what one should do with other peoples’ lives. According to him, the basics are not to harm and not to manipulate others (he calls it fundamental ethical articulation or FEA). However, according to Cabrera it is simply impossible:

“once (being) appeared it expands, crawls, covers the greatest area, gets space, invades, offends, disturbs, eliminates. Being seems to successively transgress an ontological law in its mere establishment and an ethical law in its intention to stay forever and to continue in any way. The abandon of non-being stains and disappoints; on the other hand, being disturbs, gets in conflict, expands and makes noise.” (p.34)

The others are not only harmed and limited by the birth of a person, but also harm and limit the newborn because the others are a fundamental part of the limitation and narrowness of one’s existence, who is born without place, and in the places that that person wants to live there are already others.

One cannot avoid getting in conflict with the others because it is impossible to really cease any communication with others. Every action people do affects others. So it is structurally impossible to fulfil the most basic ethical requirements. That’s why Cabrera thinks that life itself is unethical, humans are morally disqualified, and affirmative morality systems, which essentially compromise on these structural harms, are inevitably compelled to use hypocrisy to hide inherent transgression.

By assuming a first degree morality, Cabrera argues that: “facing the other, I in principle can (and maybe ought to) disappear, desisting of the space we both incompatibly intend to occupy. My departure from the world is, therefore, marked by the presence of the other.” (p.82)
But Cabrera is well aware of the impracticability of this claim, since humans have a naturally built-in self-preference feature:

“by simply being, two fundamental things have occurred: (a) we have self-limited ourselves in comparison to the level of pure possibilities, (b) we have radically exposed ourselves to the risk of moral disqualification by constructing ourselves as necessarily in conflict against-the-others in favor to ourselves. But also a third thing occurs: (c) by simply being, we are, inevitably, someone. To be is always to be someone, to be a non-other, the negation of the other in our own being, not by being this or that, but simply because the others are someone who is not me and who I could never be.” (p.91)

The structural violation of others’ interests, resulted from the very existence of a person, is very central in Cabrera’s theory, but he is also concerned with the structural violation of a person’s interests resulted from its own very existence:

“1) Human beings are born as sufferers, by being thrown from the mother’s inward to the limitation of being in its instauration.
2) Human beings are regularly affected, already in mother’s inward and during their whole existence, by the threat of countless diseases. Health condition can be seen as a highly unstable balance.
3) Human beings are affected, in general, by a fundamental fragility, which concerns the constitution of their organs, their brains, etc.
4) Human beings are affected, in general, by the conflict among natural beings, threatened by other natural beings and obliged to threat other natural beings (which constitutes a kind of anti-Spinozian geometrical ontology).” (p.146)

Obsessively optimists often argue that: “After the bad moments, come the good ones”, and that “Tomorrow will be another day”. But Cabrera replies that: “This symmetry of possibilities finishes in the structural level, because tomorrow will absolutely not be another day but the same day as yesterday, and the same as the day before yesterday and the same as always.”

In the article Negative Ethics Cabrera argues that:

“life is bad in the double register of the sensible – for generating suffering – and moral – for generating disregard for others. ‘Moral impediment’ is precisely the phenomenon that an intrinsically mortal being is not in a position to be considered with others, in the sense demanded by the FEA; because he/she is forced to make his/her way in a difficult, short and aggressive life, where others are always in a second place, not for “selfishness” or “evil nature” of humans, but for sheer survival.”

As counter intuitive as it may seem, the above description is rather flattering for humanity. I wish people were harming others only for survival reasons. Reality is unfortunately much crueler. People harm, exploit, torture, humiliate, deprive, attack, ignore, abuse and whatnot, for much less supreme reasons. His argument is true regarding other animals, most don’t harm others if it is not necessary for their survival, but this is far from being the case when it comes to humans. They often harm out of selfish reasons. I agree with Cabrera that humans are compelled to harm others by the very structure of the world. But I disagree that it explains all of humanity’s harms and I extremely disagree that all of it is for sheer survival. Humans are not selfish because they are mortal. They don’t harm others because they have things they need, but because they have things they want.

Antinatalist Claims

Before I address Cabrera’s ethical alternative, I would like to quote some of the antinatalist claims he makes along the book. Not because I think you’ll find the former arguments insufficient to necessarily pave the way for Antinatalism, but because many of them are independently worth reading.
Here are some representative samples taken from his article Negative Ethics:

“To come into being is to be ontologically impoverished, sensibly affected and ethically blocked: to be alive is a fight against everything and everybody, trying all the time to escape from suffering, failure and injustice. This strongly suggests that the true reason for making someone to come into being is never for the person’s own sake, but always for the interest of his/her progenitors, in a clear attitude of manipulation; radical manipulation indeed because, in contrast with usual manipulation of people already alive, manipulation in procreation affects the very being of the person, and not only some of his/her predicates.”

“Procreation is morally problematic in the strict measure that we know perfectly well, before birth, that all these natural and social sufferings will inevitably happen to our sons or daughters, even when we do not know if they will like to study English or live in Brazil or eat chocolates or play chess.”

And some representative samples taken from his book:

“Even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build, etc.” (p.54)

“It would not mitigate anything of our moral procreation onus the fact that we suppose the newborn will have a sufficiently strong structure to bear the non-being of being, in a similar way we undoubtedly would not morally justify the behavior of someone who sent a colleague to a dangerous situation by saying: “I sent him there because I know he is strong and he will manage well”. The “strengths” of the newborn do not relieve in anything the moral responsibility of the procreator. Anyone would answer: “This is irrelevant. Your role in the matter consisted of sending people to a situation you know was difficult and painful and you could avoid it. Your predictions about their reacting manners do not decrease in anything your responsibility.
In the case of procreation, the reasoning could be the same, and in a notorious emphatic way, since in any intra-worldly situation with already existing people in which we send someone to a position known as painful, the other one could always run away from pain to the extent his being is already in the world and he could predict danger and try to avoid being exposed to a disregarding and manipulative maneuver. In the case of the one who is being born, by contrast, this is not possible at all because it is precisely his very being that is being manufactured and used. Concerning birth, therefore, manipulation seems to be total.” (p.54)

“It looks like people are disposed to do all sort of things to avoid their children suffer, anything except… not bringing him or her to the structural pain and to moral disqualification.” (p.56)

“Even though the ontological manipulation of newborn is absolutely inevitable, it is evitable, for sure, to give birth, and that precisely indicates to a morality of abstention, to the extent this form of non-being seems to constitute a feasible way to free someone from structural pain and its consequent moral disqualification.” (p.55)

Non-Affirmative Morality (A short Survival Handbook)

After presenting his negative ethics theory, Cabrera returns to the ethical issue of how we should live. He uses the term survival, since it is not optional to simply live and thereby affirmatively experiencing the world. Instead, he suggests what he calls Negative Minimalism, meaning conducting life which is ontologically minimal, radically responsible, sober, and completely aware that it is only a secondary morality.

“The “survivor” sees himself basically as someone who has systematically refused himself to non-being, from ever structurally viable. He is not simply someone who lives more or less “naturally”, but someone who has not taken risks and survives within this refusing, with all its logical and ethical significance. Therefore, his living is not like most lives, inert and automatic, but a continuing full of sense and questioning. His continuing is something explicit and self-defining, a refusing that fills and characterizes all his effective existence.” (p.151)

Counter intuitively, there is something forcible in negative survival. When the entire system is so structurally harmful and flawed, only the strong can even consider negative survival. There is something violent in minimalism, since it is forsaking the helpless creatures of the world who have no way of defending themselves. If even the few people who care about others and are aware of how structurally violent and immoral this world is, won’t do everything in their power to help them, and instead would lead highly introversive lives, trillions of creatures would continue to be sentenced to life of severe misery.

The only way to justify the harms of our existence is by deep obligation to help others. And even that can’t compensate our victims. But at least it would prevent the victimization of trillions of others.
The best way to deal with a horrible world is not to shake oneself free of it, but to act so everybody is free. Internalizing that existence is so harmful and that lives are structurally immoral shouldn’t derive the ethical conclusion that we ought to negatively minimally survive in this horrible world, but to positively maximally influence it.

The conclusion of negative ethics should be negative existence. If there is no option for ethical existence there should be no procreation.
Being aware of the secondary ethics is a secondary solution. Moral people mustn’t make do with their private minimal existence, while others are suffering. We must make sure that no one is suffering. Or at least no one of the ones we can help. And these are all the creatures who suffer at the tyrant hands of the human race. It is not enough to claim that non-existence is better than existence, we must act so there would be no procreation. Therefore what moral people should aspire for is not a negative survival but a positive end of procreation of the uncomparably cruelest species ever.

Like Benatar Cabrera isn’t deterred by the idea of human extinction:

“Faced the allegation that, if this was universalized mankind would be extinguished, we shall answer that what we are trying to elucidate here is the ultimate ground of an ethical responsible life, not the conditions of indefinite keeping alive, not even in terms of the species as a whole. So perhaps survival at any cost may be incompatible – why not? – to the exercising of morality.” (p.161)

However, disappointedly he doesn’t present it as a legitimate negative ethics option:

“Of course, the extinction of humankind is not, by force, part of a program of negative survival; but certainly, survival at any cost could never be either.” (p.161)

But thinking that something is morally right should commit and impel us to act in its direction, not to survive in spite of it. Extinction should be part of a program of negative ethics. Suggesting to live minimally trying to prevent causing harms to others, is not enough, because it doesn’t prevent others from causing harms. I agree with Cabrera’s description of life on almost every point, but I disagree with his conclusion. In light of everything he wrote all along the book, the conclusion can’t be that people, who are already from the most privileged species on earth, and all the more so people who can permit themselves with deep reflections over philosophical issues, would seclude themselves and live with minimum intervention with the lives of others. A much more reasonable and ethical conclusion should be to maximally intervene in the lives of others, at least when it comes to procreation.
I call everyone who cares about others’ suffering, who understands the principles of negative ethics and antinatalism, not to concentrate on their own little lives while entrusting the fate of other suffering creatures in the hands of pro-natalists, but act so there would be no procreation anymore. The solution is not minimalism but maximalism. With minimalism you might reach personal tranquility and a sense of moral purity, but with maximalism we might bring trillions of sentient creatures to tranquility. Minimalism may sound better but is actually egocentric, maximalism may sound bad but is actually the most empathic and ethical option.

Appendix – Steps Towards Negative Ethics

1. Throughout the history (of philosophy and of humankind) an intrinsic positive value has been given to human life. Because human life has this intrinsic positive value, procreating is good (or more: it is the most sacred and sublime moral value) and committing suicide is bad (or more: it is the worst, the greatest moral sin).
2. With intrinsic value I mean: whether life has a metaphysical value (as in Christianity) or it has a practical value (as in Kant’s ethics); in any case, there is a basic value, which makes human life inviolable. Ethics, in this tradition, is understood as an activity aiming to determine how-to-live a life ultimately guided by that supreme, basic value, intrinsic to human life.
3. Negative ethics starts with a negative ontology that presents life as having an intrinsic value, but negative. Therefore, it primarily denies Agnosticism, the idea that in life there is good and bad things, and that neither a positive nor a negative value can be derived. Nevertheless, it is the very being of life that is bad, not in the sense of a metaphysical evil, but in the sense of a sensitive and moral uneasiness.
4. The very being of human life is a terminal structure that starts to end from the beginning, and that causes uneasiness in the sensitive level, through the phenomena of pain and boredom, and in the moral level, through the phenomena of moral disqualification. We are thrown into a body always subjected to disease, in fast process of aging, decline and final decomposition, in obligatory neighborhood with others in the same situation, what leaves little space for mutual moral consideration.
5. Positive values do exist, but they are all of the order of beings (and not of the order of Being) and they are all of a vindictive character, or reactive to the structural uneasiness of Being; moreover, they pay high ontological prices (when a value is created, new disvalues are also, new conditions for non-consideration to other people). Positive values are thus, inevitably intra-worldly, reactive and onerous.
6. Ethical theories have regularly supposed that it is possible to live an ethical life. Negative ethics states that an ethical life is possible only in the level of intra-worldly ethical values, reactive and onerous, within the structural uneasiness. Negative ontology (which is a naturalized ontology, to the extent that the characteristics of being are basically those of nature) replaces, therefore, the rationalist affirmative ontology of tradition, in the light of which all European ethical theories we know were built.
7. Specifically, attending particular ethical theories, humans are unable of being virtuous (Aristotle), or of observing the categorical imperative (Kant) or of fighting for the happiness of the majority (Mill); when we face the whole context, we are aware of not being ethical in the terms of any of those theories. To avoid having to go into the nuances of each ethical theory, we can understand that all of them demand, at least, the consideration of other people’s interests, the non-manipulation and the non-damage (we call this FEA, fundamental ethical articulation). Negative ethics shows that people regularly violate FEA, what is called moral disqualification.
8. In this level, negative ethics simply shows that, when the usual and current affirmative categories are seriously taken into consideration, the result is that all human actions are morally disqualified at some point, in some respect, at some moment or situation of its performance or compliance. This is important because it is not the case that “negative” categories lead to these results, but affirmative ones, when radicalized, do the job. This suggests that all European ethical theories we know perform an internal differentiation within general moral disqualification, declaring to be “moral” some disqualified actions, and disqualifying others in a sort of second order disqualification.
9. But why do we have the strong impression that ethics exists and that we can be moral agents? When ethics talk about happiness, virtue or duty, when they accept the difference between good and bad people, they are concealing the structural disvalue of the being of human life as such, forgetting the intra-wordly, reactive and onerous character of positive values. Actually, we are all morally disqualified; disrespectful people do not constitute a small group of exceptions. All ethical theories that we know are “second degree ethics”, concealing, through all sort of mechanisms, the structural disvalue of human life, the moral disqualification and the situated and partial character of all positive value. (The usual ethics are built within the framework of a radical ethical impossibility).
10. The fundamental deforming factor in ethics is the persistent belief that life is something good, that some people are good because they follow the norm of life, and other (few, exceptional) are bad for transgressing it; without seeing that goodness is built inside a fundamental evil, in a concealing and never gratuitous way (paying prices). The impossibility of ethics is hidden in everyday life, and also in the prevailing affirmative philosophical thinking, guided by the ideas of the positive value of life and of the exceptional nature of “evil”.
11. As a corollary of this new view of things, procreation can be seen as an act morally problematic and, in many cases, simply irresponsible, since it consists in putting a being into existence knowing he or she will be placed in a terminal situation (in a terminal body), in constant friction and corruptible (sensitively and morally) structure, where the positive values will always be reactive and will pay high ethical and sensitive prices. Even the ontically responsible procreations are morally problematic, because the most one can offer to children is the capability of defending themselves against the terminal structure of being, in a scope of necessary disrespect of others in some degree. Besides giving them a structural disvalue, this is done in self benefit and in a clear exercise of manipulation of the other, using him or her as a means.
12. Another important corollary is that suicide, far from being, in this perspective, the more horrible moral sin, it turns into an act that has better chances of being moral than many others, to the extent it empties the spaces of struggle against other people. Even though it may also damages, it does so not differently than the rest of human acts; the suicidal act is as reactive and onerous as the other acts, and maybe less (since it is about a sort of self-sacrifice, of stopping to defend oneself with no restrictions); and it is, certainly, the last disrespectful act. After all, we can cause more damage staying than we do leaving. (In any case from the sole disvalue of being of human life does not emerge suicide as a necessity, but merely as a possibility: each one of us will have to decide whether to continue or not struggling against the disvalue of being until our final defeat).
13. Pain, boredom and moral disqualification are permanent and structural motives for abstaining of procreating and for suicide, independent from specific motivations.
14. The disvalue of the very being of human life is what cannot be accepted or assumed; something that will be currently concealed until the end, because the basic value of human life is seen as what sustains all the rest. Life continues due to a powerful vital impulse, immoral and irrational. The arguments do not affect this value; it overruns all arguments, even the better ones. Humans stay alive and procreating not because life is intrinsically valuable, but because they are compelled to live even in the worst conditions. It is a mere “value of adhesion” (with something as a “value of resistance”, of competitive nature). Etwas Animalisches.
15. Philosophers and people in general should understand that what they call “value of human life” is not value of human life in its being, but they are pointing to the values which humans are compelled to create precisely because life, in its being, is not good. (We do not need to give value to something already valuable). Our defensive and vindicatory actions try to make life something good (or at least tolerable), and these actions are confused with the being of life itself. Human life is, in any case, a conjunction of structural disvalue and positive intra-worldly invented values. And the persistent tendency is to take the seconds as if they were refutations of the first. (I call this the “fallacy of the way back”). But the existence of positive values is not the refutation of the disvalue of the being of life, but, on the contrary, its powerful confirmation: the worse are the rigors of being the more intense and dazzling are valuing intra-worldly inventions.” (p.236-240)

References

Cabrera Julio, A Critique of Affirmative Morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of life
(Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions 2014)

Cabrera Julio, Negative-Ethics 2011
https://philosopherjuliocabrera.blogspot.com/2011/05/negative-ethics.html

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)