Yesterday I posted about the pro-mortalists, those who believe that death or non-existence is better than life, because life includes suffering. The view that the fact of suffering negates the goodness of life is becoming more and more commonplace.
In researching that post, I came across something I wrote back in 2019. I wrote about anti-natalism and then moved to the reasons why their basic assumption is faulty. I think it’s worth re-posting today.
Especially notice the end of the piece, introduced by “FURTHER THOUGHTS.” Here I apply the discussion to theodicy, to the arguments that God doesn’t exist (or isn’t good, or isn’t all-powerful) because of all the suffering in the world.
I point out that even if God doesn’t exist, the problem of suffering remains, that there is a secular theodicy that human beings must face up to. Conversely, if suffering doesn’t negate the goodness of existence, as I argue, it doesn’t negate the goodness or the existence of God.
Due to the importance of this issue, I am making this a free post.
From my post The Belief That Being Alive is Always Bad (20 November 20, 2019):
. . . .The even bigger problem with anti-natalism is the notion that any suffering takes away all of the value of life. How can non-existence be better than suffering? Someone who does not exist can neither suffer, nor benefit from not suffering. And how can suffering negate the good in life?
I went to the dentist last week. It hurt. But the rest of that day–in which I spent time with my grandchildren, got some good work done, enjoyed my meals, read a fascinating book, reveled in the beautiful fall colors–was very enjoyable and satisfying. The time in which I was squirming in the dentist’s chair did not take away from any of that. Much less would that painful moment spoil my whole life.
Suffering is not always bad. The dentist who hurt me was not harming me; rather, he was helping me. Loving someone is a good thing, but it nearly always entails suffering, as when we worry about those we care about. Empathy–when we share in someone’s suffering–is good, though feeling it is painful. Suffering is certainly not the worst thing there is, as the anti-natalists make it to be. Pride, greed, selfishness, lying, stealing, hatred–in a word, sins–are immoral, but suffering is not immoral. The anti-natalist mindset, which shrinks from any kind of suffering, repudiates the virtues of courage, fortitude, and compassion. Murder would become a virtuous act, as long as it could be carried out painlessly.
Why is suffering the sole criterion for evaluating life? Instead of saying that a single experience of suffering makes life not worth living, why not say that a single experience of joy does make life worth living?
I recognize that some people whose lives are completely taken over by suffering may feel that it would be better if they were never born. Yes, the Bible sometimes talks that way: Solomon in his moment of pleasure-surfeited despair. Job in his torment. Judas in his damnation. But these texts do not deny the goodness of God’s creation or of His gift of life.
What puzzles me the most about the anti-natalists is their alliance with environmentalists. Surely to oppose reproduction is to oppose nature, as Darwinists would agree. Suffering, in the struggle for survival, is endemic in the natural order. And [David] Benatar accepts the implication of his theory. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” says the Guardian article, “it implies that not only humans but all sentient beings should be spared from life. As Benatar writes toward the end of the book, ‘it would be better if humans (and other species) became extinct.”
If the goal is to turn the earth into a barren planet like Mars, why wouldn’t anti-natalists hope for and work towards an environmental catastrophe that would wipe out not only human beings but all life forms?
Why are so many anti-natalists vegans, as the article reports they are? By their logic, killing animals should be considered a good thing, again, as long as they are slaughtered in a way that minimizes suffering.
Of course, we might believe that the anti-natalists are not serious, that philosophers like Benatar are engaged in a theoretical exercise. But I think anti-natalism may be the defining philosophy of our time, as it descends into decay, nihilism, and despair.
FURTHER THOUGHTS: The belief that the fact of suffering means that life is not worth living strikes me also as a secularized version of theodicy, the theological question of how a loving and all-powerful God can allow suffering. To many people today (though, curiously, not so much in the past), the reality of suffering in the world means that God cannot exist. But as Oswald Bayer has pointed out, if you eliminate God, the problem of suffering remains. How can life, how can existence itself, allow suffering? If suffering renders the existence of God immoral, it also makes life–and the existence of anything–immoral. And that is the conclusion of the anti-natalists.
I would argue the other way. Since the existence of suffering does NOT negate the goodness of life, it does not negate the goodness of God either. What we need today is a way to come to grips with suffering–not try to escape it at any cost or be paralyzed by it–but to recognize it as a part, not the whole, of the human condition and the nature of life. Moreover, as something that, as we try to alleviate suffering for ourselves and others, can actually give meaning to that life, through the evocation of compassion, love, strength, and faith in the Incarnate God who bears our griefs as well as our iniquities (Isaiah 53).
Photo: Surface of Mars, NASA/JPL/Cornell [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons*
[I used this photo in the original post to address the view expressed in a quotation from yesterday’s post: “Antinatalism is a spectrum. Some believe that there should be no sentient life, including animals or even technology with the potential for sentience, like artificial intelligence. Others think it’s just humans that should go extinct.” So is the surface of Mars better (because there is no suffering there) than the surface of Earth, teeming with life (which sometimes suffers)?]
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