Natalism is the belief that it's permissible for anyone to have children. A slightly more sophisticated natalism says that it's okay for anyone to have children provided certain obvious conditions have been met. Probably, two people who both have the recessive gene for some terrible disease, like cystic fibrosis, should not have children. Probably, the person who suffers from a debilitating brain disorder or mental illness, like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, or autism, that would make them unfit to parent should not have children. Probably, those who cannot afford a child should not have children.
One version of natalism says that given ideal conditions, parents are obligated to have children. Another version says given ideal conditions and a declining or stagnant birthrate, parents are obligated to have children. Another version says that parents are never obligated to have children, and so, in theory, it's permissible to let the human race die out.
Anti-natalism is the view that it's never, under any circumstances, okay to have children; we are obligated to let the human race die out.
A very obvious argument against anti-natalism is that flourishing is undeniably a good thing, with flourishing being something like:
A human is flourishing when:
1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.
3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.
4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.
5) The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.
6) The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just lower-order happiness.
Basically, flourishing, or eudaimonia, is when a person experiences happiness that is contextualized by a well-structured system that enables happiness to be maximized over time for the most amount of people. Eudaimonia is, in gamer terms, min-maxed happiness – optimal happiness. So 'eudaimonia' is a kind of happiness; or, more generally, a state of being or system in which something like the above criteria have been met.
This is important, because it's obvious that there are all kinds of happiness out there that are not good for us in the long term, or take place within a disturbing context. If someone is very happy playing a video game, but they are playing that game as an escape mechanism because of depression, and time spent playing that video game would be better spent coming up with ways to change the circumstances causing that depression, then that happiness is not instrumentally good; it doesn't take place within a good context. Some kinds of happiness actually prevent eudaimonia, and some kinds of pain are necessary for eudaimonia. That's why a naive utilitarianism of simply maximizing any pleasures over any pains could never work. But utilitarianism needn't be naive. Eudaimonism is a utilitarianism that rejects naive utilitarianism in favor of a wiser goal. Of course, if utilitarianism is defined simply as "maximizing pleasure over pain, whatever that takes", and if what that takes is eudaimonia, then eudaimonism is the corollary of utilitarianism.
Obviously eudaimonia is nearly impossible to achieve, and even then can only last a brief amount of time because humans age and die. Any entropy threatens the system, and entropy grows over time. Just as the human body naturally breaks down, and just as civilizations naturally break down, so too do eudaimonic systems, and that's even if the system is ever able to get up and running in the first place. Most of the time, even when life is going relatively well, it only ever achieves a simulacrum of eudaimonia.
And yet, eudaimonia is so good that even a rough approximation of it is extremely good. A roughly eudaimonic life seems totally worth living, and in fact missing out on the chance to experience eudaimonia seems tragic. And the more rough the approximation is, the easier it is to achieve. So there might be something of a sweet spot between eudaimonia at the unobtainable utopia level and eudaimonia at the practically possible level.
Practicable eudaimonia is so good, and so obtainable, and so worth trying for, that it's hard to fault anyone for having children when they have practicable eudaimonia in mind when having children. (Basically no one has practicable eudaimonia in mind when having children, and certainly not when it comes to accidental pregnancies. But maybe on some unconscious level, something like that is what people have in mind when they try for a child. But they might have something more basic in mind, like social pressure from relatives and societal expectations and/or internal pressure from biology.)
But a problem arises with eudaimonia, and that is the problem of the absurdity of life and existential pain. Even if you achieve eudaimonia, it's no use if each member of the eudaimonic community feels a deep-seated unease, unsatisfaction, unwholeness, incompleteness, emptiness, malaise, ennui, depression, or despair—that existential agony that comes with a recognition that you will one day die, and a recognition of the absurdity of life bringing you about, as if your existence is so important, only to take you out as if your existence is entirely unnecessary. Which is it? If my existence is so unnecessary, then why bring me about in the first place? If my existence is so important, then why take me out at the end? What arbitrary madness is this, that I ought to live for exactly 79 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, 1 day, 13 hours, 12 minutes, and 49 seconds? (Or whatever my numbers end up being.)
And so there is an advanced psychological need that some people have, which is the need to understand their place in the grand scheme of things. If my existence is ultimately pointless, then why go through all the trouble of trying to survive, or of trying to endure a period of my life that contains great suffering, if on the other side all I will find is more pointless existence?
While it sounds nice to say that the point of life is to drink and be merry, and to make some friends along the way, for some people it's impossible to be happy because existential pain gets in the way. These people need existential completion, or a deep-seated peace with themselves and their place in the world, and with the fact that they will die someday. This deep peace, and lack of existential pain, is ataraxia.
Not everyone experiences this need for existential completion. For all I know, it might be a tiny minority that do. Or, it may be that everyone experiences it on some level, with some more conscious of it than most. It's hard for me to believe that everyone is totally cool with the fact that they are going to die one day. It's hard for me to believe that the absurdity of life doesn't affect everyone at least to some degree, some slight discomfort in the background, like a kind of existential chronic pain.
Maybe everyone has, to reference The Matrix, a splinter in their mind, driving them mad, and maybe it's exactly this madness that manifests itself as depression, coping mechanisms, addictions, mental illness, and the sorts of insane behaviors humans get up to, including the scramble for success, ego, legacy, and anything to achieve the faintest glimmer of immortality.
Eudaimonia is not worth it if in the end we cannot remove the splinter from our minds. Eudaimonia is not worth it without ataraxia. If you achieve all the success anyone could ever want, and yet still feel a gnawing, aching hole in your heart, a deep sadness over the nature of reality itself, and a crippling terror at thought of the endless void that awaits, like how feel when you peer over a height and your legs give out and you slump to the ground, then what does that success really mean, in the end? Is it not worthless?
How terrifying is the thought that even in utopia, we would not be happy, and everything would not be alright? Even if we somehow achieve eudaimonia, it still might not make life worth living.
So you see the connection to anti-natalism: if our inevitable fate is one of deep dissatisfaction, a splinter in our minds, driving us mad, then having children is not right. And that's a best case scenario.
I suppose a best case scenario would be to achieve eudaimonia without feeling existential pain, but it's hard for me to imagine a species intelligent enough to achieve eudaimonia without being intelligent enough to experience existential pain. (This assumes that it is in fact intelligence, and not stupidity, that leads to existential pain. But do smarter people feel despair more deeply, or more often? That's an empirical question for which I have no data.)
If eudaimonia requires the satisfying of advanced psychological needs, which include ataraxia, then true eudaimonia includes ataraxia. And if eudaimonia without ataraxia is empty, then it's really the ataraxia, moreso than the eudaimonia, that is the highest goal of life.
Though, it may be that, at least for some people, ataraxia, or the closest thing to it that a particular individual can achieve, can only be achieved through eudaimonia, or the closest thing to it that that particular individual can achieve. This would be because this particular person's reasoning goes like this: There's no reason to worry about death when you have done your best to maximize flourishing while you are lucky enough to be alive, and, because I have done so by achieving eudaimonia, I need not worry about death.
Then, it's some kind of achievement, perhaps the greatest achievement you could imagine yourself achieving, that grants ataraxia. But while eudaimonia will be that achievement for some people, it won't be for others. And so it may be that eudaimonia is largely an incidental achievement made on the way to the highest achievement of all, ataraxia. In fact, it seems likely that this would be the case, because it's likely that eudaimonia, or practicable eudaimonia, is needed to fulfill the potential of community members, and it's probably the case that ataraxia requires for the individual to fulfill their potential and reach a kind of self-actualization.
Bringing this back to the natalism / anti-natalism debate, while the opportunity for practicable eudaimonia gives, it seems to me, a strong argument in favor of natalism, the difficulty of achieving ataraxia gives, it seems to me, a strong argument against natalism.
By having children, you are setting them up to experience existential agony, to experience that splinter in their mind, driving them mad.
You place upon them this enormous pressure to alleviate the pain of this splinter, which can only be done by achieving ataraxia, which might be impossible to achieve in most circumstances.
So the Argument from Eudaimonia for natalism is not a good argument, unless you can show that ataraxia is not that difficult to achieve, or show that ataraxia is not needed for life to be worth living.
You could also argue that having children is an essential part of eudaimonia, and perhaps in some cases in achieving ataraxia. Insofar as you cannot fault someone for trying to achieve eudaimonia and/or ataraxia, and insofar as having children is necessary for that for a particular person, then you cannot fault that person for having children.
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