The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
Antinatalism, Suffering, and the Ethics of Existence
- Several comments connect “astronomical suffering” to terrestrial antinatalism, especially Benatar’s claim that bringing sentient beings into existence is always harm.
- Critics argue that if an ethical system concludes ordinary human procreation is immoral, that may indicate a flaw in the ethical premises, not in procreation.
- Others respond that ethics precisely exists to correct intuition; disliking a conclusion is not an argument against its correctness.
Absence of Good vs Presence of Bad
- One line of argument:
- Absence of good is not bad if no one exists to miss it.
- Presence of bad is bad.
- Therefore, not creating a person cannot harm them, while creating them exposes them to harm.
- Opponents say this artificially privileges avoiding bad over creating good, and denies any intrinsic value to conscious existence or to increasing total good experiences.
- The resulting asymmetry leads to unintuitive implications (e.g., painless instant killing of a happy person might be judged “better” than allowing minor suffering), which many see as a reductio of the view.
Foundations and Scope of Ethics
- One camp sees ethics as “practical philosophy” about how an existing person should live; they argue it’s incoherent to treat existence itself as immoral when all value presupposes existence.
- Others note that whether existence is “intrinsically good” or bad can’t be demonstrated logically; both sides ultimately rest on basic value judgments or axioms.
Cosmic Morality and Uncertainty
- Some question whether suffering is “bad” in any cosmic sense; maybe spreading suffering (or life) doesn’t matter at all.
- A counter-position invokes a Pascal-style move: if there is any chance it matters morally on a cosmic scale, we should behave as if it does.
Self-Extinguishing Ideas and Natural Selection
- Anti-natalism is described as self-extinguishing: those who adopt it will not reproduce, so the meme tends to die out.
- There’s debate over whether evolutionary success (ideas that propagate, like natalism) implies moral superiority; some embrace this link, others reject it.