What Population Decline Means to Antinatalism

Hello, my fellow painient consciousnesses!

I'm moving fingers on this human body on my Logicoool keyboard today to share with you what I've been thinkng for the last few months or so.

To a painist-antinatalist like me, population decline (*1) seen in places like Japan and South Korea may not seem to be a particularly good thing at first glance, because as Richard D. Ryder says in 'Painism: A Modern Morality,' pain cannot be aggregated across individuals to calculate moral value of things, therefore population decline shouldn't mean reduction of pain in a morally meaningful sense and cannot be seen as anything positive from the perspective of antinatalists, who seek to abolish pain and painience.

Could this intuition be wrong?

Can't we really see the declining population in above-mentioned nations as something positive, like a small victory for antinatalism, or perhaps a sign of progress, at all?

What exactly does population decline mean to antinatalism?

Let's spitball (I learned this word recently and I hate it) some ideas around the topic of population decline and antinatalism.

*1: In this blog post, 'population decline' will only mean decline in human population.

WHY POPULATION DECLINE DOESN'T FEEL POSITIVE

To answer the question of why I've never been able to see population decline in certain places as something positive from the antinatalist perspective, I have to make my position as an antinatalist clear.

My antinatalism comes from a philanthropic viewpoint; that is to say my main motivation to argue against procreation (and creation not through procreation) of painient beings is the pain that the created beings could experience.

I'm not saying I don't find misanthropic arguments for antinatalism valid though.

I just don't see them as my go-to arguments.

Another thing that contributes to my feeling towards population decline is painism.

As alluded to earlier, an action that causes 1 unit of pain to 100 individuals is, in terms of its moral value, equal to one that causes 1 unit of pain to only 1 individual, as the utilitarianistically aggregated total of 100 units of pain caused by the former is not actually experienced by anyone.

Morally speaking, the number of sufferers means nothing.

So these two things, my philanthropic antinatalism and painism, explain why population decline haven't felt like a positive thing to me, as the pain experienced by the maximum-suffering procreatee doesn't necessarily seem to be reduced by population decline.

DECREASE IN THE NUMBER OF WHO?

When evaluating the moral value of something, it's not the number of sufferers (we could call them 'victims') that matters; it's the degree (things like severity and duration) of pain experienced by the maximum sufferer.

When the number of sufferers is reduced compared to what it could be under different conditions, it's likely to be just a result of hard work put in by whoever is trying to achieve the goal that there is no sufferer.

Think of what the police is doing about traffic accidents: they're trying to save someone (singular!), who could otherwise get involved in a traffic accident, from an actual accident.

They're not trying to reduce the number of those who get negatively impacted by accidents, nor should they believe that's what they're aiming for.

The same can be said about us, antinatalists.

Population decline is not our goal; it is the complete absence of creation of painient beings (or beings that can cause pain to others, if you're a misanthropic antinatalist) that we are, and should always be, working towards, in order to save one individual from the harms of coming into existence.

It may have come naturally to me had I been a misanthropic antinatalist, but I've recently come to think that population decline may be something that should be seen as decrease in the number of offenders, after asking myself "if the number of victims doesn't matter, what about that of offenders?"

If the existence of fewer offenders means less pain for the maximum sufferer, then it painistically matters.

But then, this would raise another question -- population decline may indeed be a good thing painistically, but is it good antinatalistically?

You may think "of course it is, less people being created means less future procreators, therefore less victims of birth."

You're right... in that less people should usually mean less procreators, and less victims of birth.

But you see, we've only come back to the original question here: is population decline a good thing, antinatalistically?

That's what we're looking for an answer to.

We will then consider the actual implications of population decline as decrease in the number of offenders, with 'offense' here meaning causing the harm of creating living, supposedly painient, organisms, to see if we can find any satisfying answers to 2 questions: (a) is population decline painistically a good thing, and (b) is population decline antinatalistically a good thing?

HOW THE NUMBER OF OFFENDERS MATTERS (OR NOT)

Should there be less procreators, or should there be more?

I imagine almost every antinatalist would either feel strongly inclined to say "less," or actually says "less."

But is that really the correct answer?

To prove that the less procreators there are the better it is ethically, one needs to find a way for the number of procreators to impact the degree of pain (or we could simply call it the QOL) experienced by the maximum-suffering procreatee.

I originally thought it was impossible.

There are just way too many factors that can play a part in determining the degree of pain experienced by the maximum sufferer, and the number of offenders/procreators is only one of them, so there's no way of knowing whether population decline can actually be something positive or not... but I think that may be the case only when we try to identify the maximum sufferer among painient beings that exist at the same time.

IDENTIFYING MAXIMUM SUFFERER ACROSS DIFFERENT TIMES

Antinatalism is concerned about pain potentially experienced by potentially painient, potentially existent beings.

Given such uniqueness of this view, I guess it's sometimes inevitable, to some degree, for us antinatalists to have to be a bit "creative" with the way we apply moral theories to anti-natal problems.

Here, we shall try identifying the maximum sufferer, but not among those who exist at the same time, but across different times.

Let's think about 3 different worlds.

The first one is World A, where 20 humans exist and the population growth rate is -20%.

The second one is World B, where 20 people exist and the population growth rate is -50%.

The last one is World C, where 20 people exist and the population growth rate is -80%.

Now, we'll determine the chance for a person to experience an extremely painful life as 5%.

Remember the math class where you had multiple dice to roll, and you calculated the chance of one or more dice rolling X or higher -- we're essentially doing the same here, only with actual people's well-being at stake! 😜

In World A, the 2nd generation has 16 people (20*0.8), the 3rd 13, the 4th 10 and so on, meaning 68 people in total are created, which means that the chance of at least one person having an extremely painful life is (1 - 0.95^68), which is approximately 97%.

In World B, 21 people are created, meaning that the chance is (1 - 0.95^21), which is approximately 66%.

In World C, 5 people are created, meaning that the chance is (1 - 0.95^5), which is approximately 23%.

We can see there's a higher chance of an extremely painful life being experienced by someone in a world with a higher birth rate.

If we try it with different numbers of people or different chance of one person experiencing an extremely painful life, we'll still find the same correlation between the number of created people and the chance of an extremely painful life being experienced by one or more persons.

We can confidently conclude that less people being created means a better chance of the maximum-suffering procreatee experiencing less severe pain... at least in principle.

Even though we only consider the pain experienced by created human beings in this thought experiment, I think we have a good reason to see population decline as a morally positive thing -- not antinatalistically, but painistically.

FROM ACTIVIST PERSPECTIVE: FOR HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN

Does fewer human beings, therefore fewer procreators, mean less pain for the maximum-suffering human being?

Not necessarily, but likely yes, as we saw in the thought experiment above.

There's another way to look at people -- that is as potential procreators that we, antinatalists, need to convince of antinatalism.

In our fight for total absence of creation of painient beings, having to convince fewer people should mean easier work for us, and therefore earlier achievement of our goal.

When I say 'painient beings,' of course I mean human and non-human animals.

The math we did earlier can also be applied to a thought experiment to consider the moral implications of population decline to veganism (which I define as non-speciesistically practiced antinatalism), just by replacing 'procreators' with 'payers for animal products' and 'created human beings' with 'animals created and tortured by payers,' allowing us to conclude that it's likely for the maximum-suffering victim of animal agriculture to experience less severe pain if there are less payers, meaning population decline is also good for non-human animals, painistically.

HOW DOES ANTINATALISM DO GOOD?

We have only managed to conclude that population decline is painistically good but not necessarily antinatalistically.

So is it good, antinatalistically?

To answer this question, we need to understand how exactly antinatalism does good, and how it seems to do no good to a pure Ryderian-painist (if such a person exists).

When someone puts antinatalism into practice and refrains from procreating, there's something significant going on here: the absence of an entire world.

You, dear reader of my blog, are not really a human being.

You are a consciousness, a.k.a. the content of your perceptions.

In other words, you're a self-conscious ball of information.

You're not a human being, but a consciousness seemingly happening on a human body.

I say 'seemingly,' because there's no way of knowing if you're actually (what the hell does 'actually' even mean here? 🙄) happening on a human body, as you can only percept the world on the side of the outside world indirectly via perceptions of your alleged human body.

When you look closely at what you really are doing when experiencing anything, you should notice that those perceptions are you.

What you call 'the world' is you.

You are the world, really.

With this in mind, let's take a look at what happens when we do or do not procreate.

When we procreate, we create a world by creating a consciousness who percepts the content of that world; when we don't procreate, the consciousness doesn't start existing, and its world doesn't exist.

In a world, there's only one painient being -- the one who experiences the world, also known as the world itself.

This independence of individual consciousnesses (and individual worlds) happens to be the key to understanding and being convinced of painism, which denies the possibility of aggregating pain across multiple individuals.

To put it simply, antinatalism prevents the start of existence of the only painient being in a world, while painism is concerned of distribution of pain among multiple painient beings in a world (notice how the word 'world' means a different thing each time it's used in this sentence).

These 2 moral codes operate on different levels, so it's no wonder something obviously good painistically isn't as obviously good antinatalistically.

RYDERIAN PAINISM AND HOZMIAN PAINISM

The game of painism, more specifically Ryderian painism, where players (moral agents) seek to prioritize the reduction of pain experienced by the maximum sufferer, is something to be played only reluctantly by those who are unfortunately created, because the self-evident badness of pain, which bases Ryderian-painism, also concludes that no painient being must be created.

I don't know if it's just me, but I think there's no need to build and maintain the barrier between these two anymore, because clearly, antinatalism is what should set Rule 0 in the realm of the pure form of painism (*2) (refer to Ryder's 2001 book Painism: A Modern Morality, in which he uses a structure of rule list to make his arguments in an easy way to understand).

*2: Pure, in a historical sense that Ryderian painism was made public relatively earlier by Ryder, but I'd say the version of painism I'm about to propose is absolutely pure enough as a moral code.

I propose Hozmian painism, which is essentially the fusion of antinatalism and Ryderian painism, both of which can co-exist and are based on one same thing: the self-evident badness of pain.

CONCLUSION: MORAL VALUE OF POPULATION DECLINE

Population decline is, Ryderian-painistically, a good thing.

Is it good, antinatalistically?

Kind of yes, from the activists' perspective, only because it could make their work easier.

But in principle, population decline has nothing to do with antinatalism, because the declining population still keeps creating victims (population decline creating no victim is 'extinction'), while the way antinatalism does good is by not creating a victim (again, singular).

When victims are unfortunately created, that's when Ryderian painism makes its dramatic entrance and saves the day, not antinatalism.

But again, I've concluded that population decline is antinatalistically good from the activists' perspective, so I guess I can let myself join the party of those who enjoy the sight of Japanese government losing its mind.

That's it from me today!

See you in the next blog post.

Until then, don't procreate, stay vegan, and have a good life!

Bye!