Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, and the absurd. Essays on the existentialist tradition and its uneasy relationship with both nihilism and hope.
Suffering-focused ethics asserts a fundamental asymmetry between pain and pleasure, arguing that the moral imperative to alleviate suffering outweighs the goal of promoting happiness.
While Camus and Sartre sought meaning in absurdity, their foundational insights into the anguish and contingency of existence unintentionally bolster the antinatalist argument against procreation.
David Benatar's asymmetry argument posits a fundamental imbalance between pain and pleasure, leading to the startling conclusion that coming into existence is always a net harm. This essay dissects his core claims.
Emil Cioran's aphorisms, particularly in "The Trouble with Being Born," offer a literary and philosophical witness to the core tenets of antinatalism, arguing that birth itself is the primary catastrophe.
Can we harm someone by bringing them into existence? Derek Parfit's non-identity problem challenges a foundational assumption in procreative ethics.
Rising mental distress and alienation in late modernity are not merely societal failings but experiential evidence for the antinatalist claim that suffering is an intrinsic feature of sentient existence.
Theological defenses of procreation falter when confronted by the problem of evil. If a loving God orchestrates existence, then creating new beings guaranteed to suffer becomes an act of divine contradiction.
Suffering-focused ethics posits that the moral weight of preventing or alleviating suffering is greater than that of promoting happiness.
To be is to be condemned to meaninglessness. An existentialist reading of the ethics of birth, from Sartre to Cioran.
This essay examines the profound and often overlooked convergence between the Buddhist analysis of suffering (dukkha) and the ethical conclusions of antinatalism.