Why Complicate Antinatalism by Connecting It to Painism?

It seems that the significance of what I did in my previous blog post, where I established a way to be a strict antinatalist and a version of painist at the same time with no logical inconsistency, wasn’t fully grasped by some readers, likely due to my clumsy writing.

Someone in an antinatalist Facebook group left a comment saying something like “existence creates problems, and non-existence doesn’t. Antinatalism is so simple, so why bother complicating it by connecting it to painism?”

I am convinced that antinatalism is correct.

I am also convinced that painism is correct.

But a situation is conceivable where a moral agent has no choice but to violate one of those ethical principles (although it feels highly unlikely).

This is a serious problem, as each principle is almost obviously correct at the level where they operate.

In order to be an antinatalist and a painist at the same time, one of the principles, if not both, needs to be compromised to some extent.

But there really is no room for that with antinatalism.

Compromising it by, for example, permitting creation of a painient under specific conditions, inevitably turns it into something that isn’t even remotely antinatalistic.

So I had to make modifications only to painism in order to remain an antinatalist and a painist.

The question ‘why complicate antinatalism by connecting it to painism?’ is structurally analogous to ‘why complicate antinatalism by connecting it to utilitarianism?’

Someone who identifies as a utilitarian and an antinatalist will have to find an ethical theory that enables them to be both, or come up with one themselves, once they envision a hypothetical scenario where the two principles conflict.

I simply had to do the same with painism, which happens to be an unfamiliar term to many.

The solipsistic nature of painism is particularly pronounced when compared to utilitarianism.

Ryder says on page 27 of his book Painism: A Modern Morality, that one could never experience the pain of others, and to them, only their own pain is real.

Even Ryderian painism, the original form of painism, is so obviously solipsistic in the sense that it accurately captures the nature of consciousness, and that’s precisely the stand-out feature of painism that differentiates it from utilitarianism.

Pushing this solipsistic aspect a bit further to derive a version of painism that supports antinatalist conclusions surely cannot be a stretch.

My clumsy writing may have made the whole thing look complex, but what I actually did was this simple.

Click here if you're interested in solipsistic painism