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
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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”.
- 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.
- 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).
- Pain, boredom and moral disqualification are permanent and structural motives for abstaining of procreating and for suicide, independent from specific motivations.
- 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.
- 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)
I think your efforts are phenomenal. Keep sharing the message of Efilism Antinatalism