i should have never left the womb

I'm not exactly a negative utilitarian nor a promortalist. I think death is a harm and by extension killing is a harm done.

Yeah that's right: I hate both birth and death. You'd think those are mutually exclusive but no. I hate everything!

Definition of harm by Seana Shiffrin (who is not an antinatalist per se but who wrote that based paper that advanced the case for consent-based argument for antinatalism):

"On my view, harm involves conditions that generate a significant chasm or conflict between one’s will and one’s experience, one’s life more broadly understood, or one’s circumstances. Although harms differ from one another in various ways, all have in common that they render agents or a significant or close aspect of their lived experience like that of an endurer as opposed to that of an active agent, genuinely engaged with her circumstances, who selects, or endorses and identifies with, the main components of her life. Typically, harm involves the imposition of a state or condition that directly or indirectly obstructs, prevents, frustrates, or undoes an agent’s cognizant interaction with her circumstances and her efforts to fashion a life within them that is distinctively and authentically hers—as more than merely that which must be watched, marked, endured or undergone. To be harmed primarily involves the imposition of conditions from which the person undergoing them is reasonably alienated or which are strongly at odds with the conditions she would rationally will; also, harmed states may be ones that preclude her from removing herself from or averting such conditions. On this view, pain counts as a harm because it exerts an insistent, intrusive, and unpleasant presence on one’s consciousness that one must just undergo and endure. Disabilities, injured limbs, and illnesses also qualify as harms. They forcibly impose experiential conditions that are affirmatively contrary to one’s will; also, they impede significantly one’s capacities for active agency and for achieving harmony between the contents of one’s will and either one’s lived experience or one’s life more broadly understood. Death, too, unless rationally willed, seriously interferes with the exercise of agency. By constraining the duration and possible contents of the person’s life, it forces a particular end to the person—making her with respect to that significant aspect of her life merely passive."

I kinda fuck with revised version of negative utilitarianism by Matti Häyry, from his paper Exit Duty Generator, which introduces need-based theory of value instead of hedonistic theory of value:

"Most human beings (and maybe other living beings) are autonomous agents. As such, they have a fundamental need to conduct their lives according to their own will or reason. The frustration of this need is, I posit, as bad as, and independent of, the need not to suffer. This addition has an important corollary. When we abide by it, we are not usually allowed to end agents’ lives against their will or reason even if this would minimize suffering. If continued existence is the individual’s autonomous choice, the individual has a need-based prima facie right to live."

Häyry's ethical framework marries several interlocking dimensions of both negative utilitarianism, and a Kantian-based aversion to manipulation. It contends that though extinction is desired, it must be chosen.

...Which is lovely and all, though, I'm not sure if I agree with Matti Häyry entirely either.

Humans could peacefully go into the good night by voluntary extinction as proposed by Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (“May we live long and die out”). But that would mean abandoning all other animals to the cycle. The most intelligent of animals have the mind of a little child. How could they possibly even conceive an escape? Is it not cruel to leave them behind? What is the virtue in respecting the bodily autonomy of someone who will go on to hurt themselves and violate the bodily autonomy of others, because they don't know any better? Could involuntary extinction, though a harm, be the lesser harm compared to the harm of allowing these horrors to go on?

As written by efilist Amanda Sukenick in her paper The End of Sentience:

"Efilism poses an interesting challenge. If humans die out through antinatalism, should it then be the duty of humanity, as the only beings who could intervene, to end the suffering of the rest of sentient life before we are gone, even if it meant ending those lives? . . . Can consistent, suffering-focused, extinctionist antinatalism remain nonviolent? Or are forceful and deliberate actions to end some or all suffering an inevitability of antinatalism? And what does this mean for the future of antinatalist thought and action?

. . . McCormack’s phrase, “opening the world,” is drawn from her 2020 essay, Embracing Death, Opening the World. For ahumanism, this means freeing the nonhuman animals from the existence of people, but for efilism, the only way to open the world is by closing the door to that world forever, through the cessation of humans, animals, and all else that could ever have the capacity and possibility of feeling.

. . . The convergence of these divergent antinatalist positions underscores the profound complexity of the moral dilemmas confronting the future of antinatalism. Whether the most vulnerable among us should be left to exist or prevented from coming into existence at all is not merely a question of moral preference, so much as one of competing ethical imperatives. . . . In navigating this tension, antinatalists confront a paradox at the heart of their philosophy.

. . . The ostensibly safer course of nonintervention may itself constitute humanities greatest ethical failure, yet active prevention risks its own indelible harms, staining the hands of antinatalists—the very agents most committed to harm reduction—red with blood, when theirs should be the ones most free of it."

Paradoxically, antinatalists / efilists who care about stilling the cries of all their fellow sufferers have an obligation to survive and bring forth new generations of humans to forge and wield the tools of Armageddon until total extinction is confirmed, and after the end of the world, to snuff out creature emergence. This paradox is explored in The Paradox of Sentiocentric Antinatalism: The Obligation of Extinction or the Obligation of Survival? by Masahiro Morioka.

"Antinatalism must be based on persuasion, not coercion. Antinatalists want all people to voluntarily refrain from having children through birth control methods or voluntary sterilization surgery. This is the standard view of today’s antinatalists. Häyry and Sukenick, after proposing their antinatalist codes of conduct, write that “we would be pleased if everyone acted like us in this respect.”

Here, a difficult problem arises. Realistically speaking, no matter how earnestly antinatalists try to persuade, it would be almost impossible to convince everyone in a short period of time not to give birth to their children. Of course, the ideal path for antinatalists would be for all the human beings to suddenly stop procreating, the number of births to become zero, and humanity to disappear gradually from older to younger generations, while carefully managing the shrinking size of society over the course of a century or so. However, scenarios in which this idealistic outcome does not occur must also be taken seriously, given that pronatalist human behavior patterns do not easily vanish overnight. Antinatalists should not turn a blind eye to this reality.

. . . If sentiocentric antinatalists are sincere in their principle, then it is clear that they wish to put an end to the procreation of all sentient creatures on earth. Since nonhuman sentient creatures cannot intentionally or voluntarily stop themselves from procreating, this should be the task of human beings. The best way to accomplish this is to stop it artificially, for example, by using certain drugs or genetic technologies developed for the extinction of such creatures—before the extinction of the human species. Hence, the best solution would be to simultaneously promote both the extinction of the entire human species through pregnancy avoidance and the extinction of all sentient creatures through biotechnologies and then, after confirming the extinction of all nonhuman sentient creatures, to put an end to the reproduction of the remaining human beings. Since it would take time to confirm the extinction of all nonhuman sentient creatures on earth, antinatalists would have to continue living for some time until the confirmation is complete.

If we take the possibility of evolution seriously . . . sentiocentric antinatalists’ strategy should be to destroy all nonsentient creatures using chemical or biological technologies. Of course, destroying all nonsentient creatures would mean losing all trees, all flowers, all plants, all insects, and all jellyfish, and this would cause many antinatalists great pain and suffering on the psychological level: they would never experience four beautiful seasons or natural scenery. However, sentiocentric antinatalists would think that, compared to the enormous pain that sentient creatures have experienced so far—and would experience if they were to be born through evolution in the future—the pain of antinatalists caused by procreation would be significantly less and should be endured with all their strength.

In Phase Three, the obligation of sentiocentric antinatalists is to survive until the extinction of all nonsentient creatures on earth. This is sentiocentric antinatalists’ third obligation to survive. . . . in order to put an end to the emergence of sentient creatures, sentiocentric antinatalists must survive until the extinction of all nonsentient creatures.

. . . In any case, sentiocentric antinatalists must follow the path in which they make it their greatest concern to successfully pass on their mission from generation to generation, and in which they endure the sorrow of the birth of their children caused by their own intentional act of procreation for their ultimate purpose. This is like the path of religious practitioners.

. . . if sentiocentric antinatalists stopped procreating and became extinct, there would arise the possibility that on the surface of the lifeless earth’s soil or on the ocean floor, a new life form might begin to evolve from inorganic materials in a manner similar to the birth of life on earth some four billion years ago. If the human species died out, no one could stop this process from happening.

J. W. N. Watkins writes about the possibility of the evolution of life after the instantaneous killing of all creatures on earth, in the context of negative utilitarianism, as follows:

[E]ven if all life were destroyed, in due course living matter might emerge from the slime once more, and the evolutionary process start up again…. So the pain minimizer would need to destroy the very possibility of life. And I like to think that this is something which is in principle beyond human power.

As Watkins points out, it is impossible for humans to destroy the possibility of the emergence of new life forms from the inorganic world. Therefore, antinatalists can only monitor the risk of their emergence and, if they find something dubious, destroy it immediately.

Sentiocentric antinatalists must give birth to children and pass on their mission to them. In the future, the lifespan of an antinatalist might be greatly extended almost to immortality, as Phil Torres argues; but even if that were true, antinatalists would still have to give birth to future generations in case many of them died from unpredictable accidents. This kind of infinite monitoring of the earth and accessible celestial bodies to prevent the emergence of new life forms becomes sentiocentric antinatalists’ fourth obligation to survive. Here is found the final version of the paradox: sentiocentric antinatalists must survive indefinitely in order to prevent the emergence of life. This is the fourth stage of the paradox of antinatalism, which is its complete form.

Readers may wonder if there is not a way to leave the monitoring operations to an automation mechanism supported by artificial intelligence. It may be possible. In this situation, antinatalists would have to be prepared for cases in which major failures or malfunctions suddenly occur in the system; if such a thing happened, antinatalists would have to rush to the center of the control room and repair the entire system.

Now it is clear that antinatalists must do three kinds of monitoring: monitoring the emergence of life forms, monitoring their own technological systems, and monitoring the smooth transfer of their mission to future generations. These are all obligations that antinatalists would have to bear on a lifeless future earth. Monitoring and prevention: this is the work that antinatalists must continue indefinitely.

What would happen if antinatalists disappeared from the earth due to a serious accident? There is a possibility that new life forms could emerge on earth or on other nearby planets and evolve into sentient creatures. There is also the possibility that at the end of a long evolutionary process, an intelligent species like humans could emerge, and there may be antinatalists among this species. If they began to persuade their comrades, a similar process would begin again. This would be an eternal struggle between antinatalism and biological evolution. This suggests that the most fundamental enemy of antinatalism is the power of eros or Werden, which is always trying to revive itself again and again from the world of death and nothingness. This is the endpoint to which our philosophical exploration leads.

Understanding all these things, accepting the obligations of survival, and carrying them out with sincerity thus become the ultimate meaning of life for sentiocentric antinatalists. Even if there is pain caused by a chain of procreation, sentiocentric antinatalists can be compensated by their ultimate meaning of life: that by their sincere devotion to monitoring and prevention through generations, the future possibility of the emergence of enormous pain in the world will be prevented.

Sentiocentric antinatalists would be extremely lonely in Phase Four. The earth’s biological ecosystem would already be extinct, they would not see any traces of life near the earth, and there would be no god anywhere to speak holy words to them. They would have to live their lives torn between their obligation to fulfill their mission and their existential anxiety. This journey would go on indefinitely. However, they would be happy because their ultimate goal would be very clear, and they could find life’s meaning in their endless effort to monitor and prevent the emergence of new life forms in the world.

. . . There is a kind of human dignity in the fact that people can continue to live according to the moral principle they have established, even if that principle causes them great harm that they would rather avoid. There is also sorrow in that as long as people try to eliminate pain from all sentient creatures in a coherent way, they can never escape the pain that is to be imposed on themselves by their very pursuit of such actions.

. . . even without such inner acceptance and affirmation, they can accomplish their indefinite survival and pursue their ultimate obligation, but accomplishing it with inner acceptance and affirmation will add supererogatory value and beauty to their accomplishment and make it more consistent, praiseworthy, and meaningful. In this supererogatory part, sentiocentric antinatalism is similar to rigorous stoicism, which is very difficult to accomplish, but would be very praiseworthy if it could be realized. This shows that the essence of sentiocentric antinatalism is highly religious, which can be considered in line with ancient asceticism. I believe that research from the perspective of philosophy of religion will be most fruitful in exploring the central core of sentiocentric antinatalism, even though almost no sentiocentric antinatalist would consider themselves to be religious.

Readers may think that if sentiocentric antinatalism inevitably contains a serious paradox, it should be abolished, but I do not think so. I believe that sentiocentric antinatalism can be established as a philosophical, stoic, and ascetic movement that contains an insoluble paradox at its core."

This paper is fucking insane and bittersweet holy shiiiiiiiit.

But could the children of the end - last souls of the Earth quiet without songbirds, stilled in time without seasons - follow the footsteps of their mothers and fathers? Could they carry on with a paradox curled up deep in their very being? Could they weep and keep the tears of rest of creation unwept, until the Sun gives them final deliverance?

Or would they grow up to become betrayers and midwives to new creations and their creature sorrows?

I fear they would betray us.

Sukenick references Benatar:

"'What hubris. […] You look at the human track record, and we have got no reason to think that we are the great mitigators of suffering in the world.' For Benatar and perhaps for others, it is not only that the suggestion is paternalistic, hubristic, and potentially violent, but also that the proposal of action is not in line with philosophical pessimism—efilism is optimistic, while antinatalism is more accurately and academically pessimistic."

…Efilism is too optimistic...lmao. The goal of total extinction sort of assumes that if people had such magnificent technology, they would use it to cease suffering. Everything I've seen makes me think that people would do something stupid instead. Like create virtual realities populated by simulacrum children with artificial sentience. Or seed silent planets, and contaminate their crystalline surface with disease, hunger and death. Imagine Bob creating a billion children with a push of a button, for shits and giggles. Good grief! Godlike technology in the hands of an ape opens up the gate to infinite horrors. As long as animal kingdom stays grounded to Earth, their suffering remains at least theoretically limited. Would humans know such mercy?

In conclusion, bringing about extinction is like trying to kill a hydra. Nasty business! There is no escape. I'm just philosophically wanking on the internet for my own amusement, and hopefully to the amusement of my crazy moots. No one ever listens to me (shaking my head). The Earth will continue spinning and these violations will go on and on ad infinitum. The Sun will explode sooner than the average person learns to care about anything more than the things that orbit the immediate vicinity of their navel. My only hope is that the Sun explodes sooner than people get the brilliant idea to wake up the sleeping celestial bodies into fear and trembling.

"I’m not a bad person, but if one day I had the means to blow up the whole universe and myself with it, well, that day I would be a criminal."

No, seriously, can someone tell me what is the point of all this?

People cry about the declining insect populations and how sad it is that they don't hear thousands of flies exploding to death against their car windshields anymore.

Why do they cry? What is so sad about extinction?

Is extinction sad for the animals? Certainly not. I doubt bug angels are weeping in bug purgatory that they never got to be splattered.

Did you know spiders inject their prey with enzymes that break down the tissues and then slurp up the dissolved innards? Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be a bug? To be digested alive? Have you ever even given it a thought?

Do bugs suffer? Of course they do. The very notion that they have no subjective experience of pain, because they have different brain structures from us, is suspect because - as stated by Asher A. Soryl, Andrew J. Moore, Philip J. Seddon & Mike R. King - accepting that sentience is an evolved trait resulting from the same selective pressures that drive the evolution of other trait within an organism, it is not clear that multiple configurations of neurons could not perform the same functions in relation to mental states in other animals. Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) state: The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those found in vertebrates. Exclusion of invertebrates with central nervous systems from bioethics and science policy is not justified by the current state of the evidence. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. Invertebrate brains comprise upwards of 99% of the brains that exist on Earth. Cognitive theorists have begun to appreciate the intellectual rewards of studying invertebrate cognition and sentience. It is time that ethicists and policy makers do the same. According to Asher Soryl - Ph.D candidate researching the proposed discipline Welfare Biology at the University of Otago Bioethics Centre - even if we assume that there is only a 0.01 likelihood that terrestrial arthropods have a mental welfare, and if they do, that their moral standing is only 0.01 compared to the full moral standing of a regular mammal or bird the case for considering terrestrial arthropods is upwards of ten thousand times more than the case for considering mammals and birds. Snoozing on the pressing questions regarding their welfare is a recipe for moral catastrophe.

And it's not just bugs; It's the rodents and the fowl and the fish and the amphibians and the reptiles. The overwhelming majority of the animals of the overwhelming majority of species appear to have significant suffering but little (or no) happiness in their lives. They live painful lives and die painful deaths. Atlantic cod can lay from a few thousand to several million eggs. It entails that each time these animals reproduce, 6337.7529 years consisting of nothing but suffering is experienced. If this continues over an average human lifespan, the number of years of pure suffering generated would be 380,265.174. All this for a very specific species in a very specific area. And the rest of animal kind ain't much better. All animals reproduce in excess of the carrying capacity of their environments. Even the 'luckiest one', let's say, a wildebeest - who wasn't spawn camped by a cackle of hyenas while still inside the amniotic sac - doesn't have much to celebrate. Did you know predators often start to eat their prey from genital and anal regions? Like yea he got eaten alive balls first (maybe don't click this one), but at least he got to like. eat grass. yippee.

It's a fucking Ragnarök out there.

Life is mostly dying. Torturous dying. Why should such lives be lived? They should not. If a human baby would know such a short and painful life, we would abort the thing before they draw their first breath. Flush the slink down the toilet and say "it is only merciful". I'm telling you all, the whole animal kingdom is deserving of mercy. Why should anyone be condemned to live a life of absurd torment? Because it's the life they are expected to have? But what justification is there in thinking, that the life a creature is expected to have is therefore good by default? Could it not be, that a creature kind has been cursed with life that is wholly wretched? Nature is nothing but a mechanism that pushes genes into the future; there is no reason to believe that the lives a blind and mindless mechanism produces are automatically worth living.

People claim that reducing wild animal suffering is not possible, but plausible estimate is that the average person on Earth prevents ~1.4 * 10^7 insect-years by their environmental impact each year. So we already have. By accident.

Is nature good? If a system isn't good for those who live within it, then who is it good for? Who are you fighting for?

Yes no shit we need nature to maintain mankind. But doesn't it seem absurd to anyone, that quintillion sentient creatures should live in perpetual cloning-shredding-machine, for the sake of these ridiculous apes, who good portion of the time, use those natural resources only to spread further misery amongst themselves? There are approximately 1.4 billion insects for every person on Earth. And the average human lumbering about isn't even all that happy. I wake up 6:30 and prepare myself for servitude for our bourgeois overlords. I take a shower and wash away the sweat and bacterial gunk culminated all over my decaying body, thinking thoughts that lead to nowhere. And when I brush my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and see pair of dead eyes staring, how could I seriously think that my vapid existence is worth all the torture it takes to maintain it? How could anyone? I already talked about how life itself is the Omelas, except way worse; billions of children tortured to death in filth and in darkness for every fuckass Bob.

Is anyone else disturbed by this? No? Just me? Ok.

What is the solution? IS there a solution?

Tumblrinas out here hallucinating the revolution is happening soon - that people will overthrow capitalism and establish some solarpunk hippie commune where people live "in harmony with nature" aww! Reblogging some shit like "maybe a system where for some thrive, many have to suffer is a bad system". What do you girlies think nature IS? Mother nature is a cruel bitch that feeds itself by cannibalizing its weakest babies. I can't stand this pseudo-spiritual hippie wankerism. If even the best world people can come up with (already propaganda by the Big Cheery) only benefits 0.0000001% of it's inhabitants, then a better world is not possible.