I found an article on Twitter which caught my attention, so I'd like to respond to it in this blog post.
Yes I know it's super late but I've been too busy to work on this š
It's an article on a website 'Money Voice'.
I don't know why editors decided this topic should be discussed on this particular website, but I guess this shows how much of awareness antinatalism is gaining these days.
This article doesn't impress me with its structure; Mr. Godo doesn't just list 7 reasons why he thinks antinatalism is wrong but also mumbles a lot of other things.
I'll just list my response to each of these reasons to keep it simple here.
I won't be discussing the way he treats antinatalism as some speciesistic 'anti-human-procreationism' in this article though.
I'll just focus on showing how his reasons don't serve his purpose of refuting anti-human-procreationism.
Note: I have no permission to translate the whole article, so if you're keen to know what exactly he says in the article, please visit the Money Voice website from the link above and get it translated with an auto translator of your choice.
REASON 1: ANTINATALISTS ARE JUST DEPRESSED ESCAPISTS
I find it extremely funny how Mr. Godo brings forward a 'reason' that can't even be called a reason right after saying "in this article I'll explain reasons why antinatalism is wrong".
This 1st reason is literally just what kind of people he believes antinatalists are, and has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimacy of antinatalism.
Is a statement "swindling people is morally wrong" sometimes right and sometimes wrong depending on who states it?
No!
It's always right regardless of who says it.
We can guess why he thought this 'reason' could work as an attempt to refute antinatalism from the fact that all he quoted as an outline of antinatalism comes from the ABEMA Prime show streamed in May.
He probably misunderstood antinatalism as some vague group of thoughts that puts negative value on creating people or people being created.
REASON 2: IT'S UP TO YOU HOW TO DEAL WITH PAIN
REASON 3: SUFFERING AND ANXIETY ARE NECESSARY FEELINGS
What Mr. Godo talks about in reasons 2 and 3 are post-birth stuff.
Antinatalism negates the moral legitimacy of the act of procreation by human beings, and how 'pain' exparienced by existing human beings could lead to 'maturity' doesn't contribute to refutation attempt of antinatalism.
If he were to really try to challenge antinatalism, he needs to show why human beings must be created to be in need of maturity in the first place.
Also I have to point out how much of harm his usage of the word 'pain' is doing, in which he makes no distinction between 'pain' and 'event(s) that cause(s) pain'.
He concludes reason 3 by saying "antinatalists are fundamentally misunderstanding pain" because "pain is not something bad or wrong that should be avoided or detested", but what he should have called "not something bad that should be avoided" is actually events that cause pain, not pain itself.
Pain, which is a certain kind of sensation with sheer and self-evident wrongness (see note below), is always, by definition, something bad that should be avoided.
It's not antinatalists but Mr. Godo who fundamentally misunderstands pain.
Note: Out of everything, only pain has pure wrongness, which enables it to make other things wrong. For example, an event where person A is stabbed with a knife is wrong because of (1) physical/mental pain person A experiences, (2) mental pain person B experiences because B cares about A, and (3) pain that person C experiences because C is A's interested parties and sustains finintial damage due to A's injury or death. If A, B, and C are not sentient and don't experience any pain, this event is nothing wrong.
With that said, let's try rephrasing reasons 2 and 3:
REASON 2: It's up to you how to deal with events that cause pain so that you can control how much pain you experience from them
REASON 3: Pain is necessary for survival and maturity
If anything, reason 2 could be used to defend antinatalism rather than refuting it, and reason 3 has nothing to do with antinatalism.
REASON 4: HUMANKIND EXISTS FOR A REASON
This reason makes no sense.
It proves nothing.
It's too stupid to discuss here and isn't worth my time, so I'll just ignore it.
REASON 5: ANTINATALISTS ARGUE FOR NOT EXISTING WITHOUT THINKING MUCH
Mr. Godo believes we are "not thinking" when we say "Where there's no subject to experience any pleasure or pain, there's no possibility for it to experience pain because it's non-existent".
Who is not thinking here?
Isn't it Mr. Godo who has his self-other boundary vague enough to believe he is successfully refuting antinatalism only by bringing forward his own examples, such as "I feel myself keep maturing by overcoming obstacles", "I can enjoy it when I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid foreseen pain or suffering", and "I find great importance and contentment in setting goals and finding ways to achieve them, and that's how I live my life"?
Maybe he finds it troublesome to even think about how different people have different lives. (This is meant to be funny in the original text in Japanese! Mr. Godo concludes this chapter by saying "Maybe antinatalists finds it troublesome to even think about such things", which may not be the exact sentence you see when you translate the article)
As I said about reasons 2 and 3, if someone were to refute antinatalism, they need to prove that human beings need to be created without their consent and be forced to need such things as maturity or resolving problems.
REASON 6: YES, HAVING KIDS IS A SELFISH ACT, BUT NOT HAVING KIDS IS ALSO SELFISH
Mr. Godo says that having bio;ogical children is "something natural for human beings as animals, and denying it means you have to negate the existence of every other species".
Haha, he's right!
Any sentient beings should not procreate, and creation of any new species of sentient beings should be prevented.
He's aware of animals (potentially) being sentient and experiencing pain, saying "stray cats suffer by fighting each other and getting hurt", and still tries to justify this reality with his personal opinion as a human being (no, he's not even a cat), "I can feel life is precious when I see those cats still trying to survive despite all the suffering", which is never a sufficient reason to justify procreation of cats leading to their descendants' painful experiences.
His view on happiness/unhappiness is also improper.
Antinatalists ask people "are you even thinking about possibilities of your children living an unhappy life?", but we can only know if our life has been a good one or not until the day we die.
Is he serious?
Does he think antinatalists only address happiness/unhappiness as an evaluation of a whole life from the beginning to the end when we mention unhappiness in life?
When you are getting bullied at school, you may be having a tough, unhappy time. But if you go through it, mature, and enjoy a happy ending to your life, then the time you were bullied has become something that shaped you to arrive at where you are, and you can appreciate that. In this case, the events you found negative at the time has proved to be 'a necessary evil', 'a challenge you had to overcome to achieve happiness'.
Why does he not find this unhappiness "at the time" wrong?
I mean, he does call it unhappiness, which shows he must be aware of its wrongness.
How could he be so sure that the possibility of happiness achieved thanks to those unhappy events can justify the wrongness?
And most importantly, why doesn't it seem to bother him at all that the one who has to go through and justify these unhappy events is an individual consciousness yet to be created, not Mr. Godo himself?
This really is the same mentality as fixing your friend's eyelids shut with instant glue while they're sleeping just because you eventually liked it when someone else did it to you.
He says "I don't want to be selfish enough to take away from my child the joy of carving a way through life" to explain why he thinks not procreating is as selfish as procreating.
But if we are taking something away from children by not creating them, we are in a serious trouble.
Oh my goodness, this infinite number of children we are neglecting to create right now must be fuming!
Well, that's surely not the case.
We can choose not to procreate for the benefit (or, more accurately, for the absence of harm) of our children, but we can't choose to procreate for the same reason.
Unborn children literally don't exist until their birth, so they can't gain any profit by being born or suffer a loss by not being born.
Not procreating is not selfish at all.
REASON 7: DEMOCRACY ALLOWS US TO CHOOSE HOW TO LIVE
Mr. Godo says "antinatalism should be just a personal principle and it shouldn't be imposed upon others" and "antinatalists seem even more suspicious because they try to pressurize others into not procreating, despite the fact that procreation is a personal choice".
I'm sure you find it tiring to encounter another person claiming "it's a personal choice, stay out of my business!" if you're an antinatalist.
We argue that procreation is not a personal choice, so if Mr. Godo were to refute us, he cannot bring forward this argument which depends on a precondition that procreation is a personal choice.
It's petitio principii!
He could maybe understand why his 'imposition argument' is invalid if we try applying the same logic to things such as slavery, racism, sexism, or assault; let's try sexism.
"Anti-sexism is wrong. Discriminating women (or men) is a personal choice and democracy allows it. If you don't like to discriminate the ones we do, then feel free not to do it. Just don't impose what you think is right on us."
Mr. Godo has written another article after receiving a lot of response to the original article.
This, too, is a rather depressing one to read, but if you're interested the link is below.
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