from Hacker News

Value-Null Antinatalism [pdf]

by dusted on 6/17/25, 8:47 PM with 35 comments

  • by palmotea on 6/18/25, 5:50 AM

    If you can cherry-pick your assumptions, you can reason to almost any result.

    Which is a tactic for manipulating people to change their beliefs that I see often: don't argue for your position directly, but focus on more distant propositions that your target isn't as guarded about.

  • by xyzzy9563 on 6/18/25, 1:53 AM

    The people who believe this stuff don't have kids, so they lose out in the Darwinian race, and the people with pro-natalist beliefs continue the human existence and more often pass down those beliefs. So regardless of who thinks they're right, evolution wins in the end.

  • by nuldev on 6/18/25, 9:37 PM

    I don't know man... in general, these arguments seem more like pulling out the rug from a discussion by obfuscating arguments through abstract yet vague claims with some intellectual snobbery to make them feel correct, a trump card argument.

    You win either by slinging undue complexity and forcing others to tap-out of the discussion in an awkward pause, or if a counter argument is made, you claim they do not understand your original argument.

    I feel like the author is really trying hard to justify why they are not having kids. Fine! that is their preference, there is no need to justify it.

  • by ChrisGranger on 6/17/25, 9:13 PM

    I've felt this way for decades and almost invariably get negative push-back when I raise these points. I've stopped worrying about it.

  • by csb6 on 6/18/25, 4:05 AM

    > Every moral duty is owed to a real, identifiable someone. You can’t have a duty to “a possible person” who does not yet exist.

    This doesn’t hold up. It is effectively denying that people will be born in the future, which of course they will be since antinatalism is not universal and fertility rates are above zero. There are valuable things that can be done today that will help those people but not anyone alive today (e.g. preservation of media that is well-known and widely distributed today but may not be in the future when it is more historically valuable).

    It is safe to assume that new people will be born at some point in the future (given current conditions) and will then be “identifiable”, so you have to account for their future existences when making moral decisions with future consequences.

  • by kazinator on 6/18/25, 4:04 AM

    > JC: Intentionally creating a new rights-bearer S is permissible only if it is necessary to discharge a duty owed to S

    That pontification just feels pulled out of thin air.

    Suppose I just need S to take over the family fortune? Also pulled out of thin air.

  • by Heliodex on 6/18/25, 2:58 AM

    Interesting to find one of my closely-held philosophical beliefs on HN. I'd recommend looking at Aponism <https://aponism.org/manifesto> for a set of beliefs that include this + others relating to reduction of suffering, or Negative Utilitarianism for similar ideas built upon the same building blocks.