Based Camp: The Academics Who Want to Eradicate All Life from the Universe (Negative-Utilitarian Anti-Natalism)

Malcolm and Simone steelman the philosophical position of antinatalism and respond to some of its key arguments. They discuss the antinatalist claims that life is mostly suffering, humans adapt to suffering, and preventing potential happiness has no downside. Malcolm proposes thought experiments around time and existence to challenge the antinatalist asymmetry argument. They assert that emotions lack inherent meaning or value from a detached, logical perspective. Simone explains how her intuition clashes with her logic on this issue as a new mother. In the end, they conclude antinatalism lacks internal consistency. But they respect some parts of the antinatalist framework as logically valid, given certain priors.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] in the world , of pronatalism, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it. the most interesting argument I find when I'm looking at an argument and I'm like this is actually a sophisticated argument that makes sense depending on the priors you're coming into the conversation with and depending on your proclivities and your cultural group, that is the David Benatar.

Malcolm: Negative utilitarian

Simone: argument. Well, and what we really respect about it, I would say, is that it is logically consistent. . We're just like, yeah, per your framing, per your values, per what you're optimizing for.

Simone: You are correct in being anti neutralist.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, gorgeous.

Malcolm: Hello. I am excited for today's talk. So in the world , of pronatalism, arguing for higher fertility rates, there are a lot of dumb reasons that people don't like don't agree with it or argue against it.

Malcolm: Some examples are But the environment, well, if you [00:01:00] selectively remove everyone from the population that cares about the environment, that's going to cause much bigger environmental problems down the line.

Malcolm: This is particularly pointed when you consider the fact that if humanity doesn't survive, because many environmentalists will be like, we don't need humans anymore. Look at all the damage they've done. And it's well, you get rid of humans. If you, if you, if you get rid of humans, there is no other species on this planet that can colonize other planets.

Malcolm: And presumably what you're optimizing for is biodiversity, not biostasis, not maintaining the earth exactly as it was when humans first emerged. And if you're optimizing for biodiversity, Intrinsically, whichever species can best seed new biomes on other planets is long term going to increase biodiversity the most because we can develop new biomes that are just as rich as Earth on a thousand different planets, so , you lose the entire biome.

Malcolm: Biology game. If humanity goes extinct right now, it doesn't look like there's going to be enough [00:02:00] time. If humanity goes extinct and you look at the life cycle and how long it took for humans to rise for another intelligent species to rise afterwards and then leave the planet, we're just looking probabilistically.

Before the sun expands and kills all life that we know for sure exists in the universe,

Malcolm: So kind of humans are stuck with this one, even if they are a bit of a shitty species. I'm not going to argue there. But two, you're also going to have the effects of it. Because the way people vote has a heritable component, this has been shown in lots of studies if, if environmentalists specifically don't have kids that's going to cause people to become less environmentalist over time.

Malcolm: And even if you don't believe that any of this has a heritable component, well still culturally, that means the cultural groups that don't care about the environment are going to outcompete you in the long run. And that the only way you can survive is by converting people out of those cultural groups.

Malcolm: Yet long term studies, as we've mentioned many times, if you look at people like Amish... Fewer and fewer people deconvert from the group every year depending on how long a family's been in the Amish community. Because cultures adapt. If another culture is [00:03:00] primarily surviving by taking their members, then they're going to adapt to this over time and eventually become resistant.

Malcolm: That's just how evolution works, and evolution works at the cultural level as well as the... The level of people. People might say, Oh, it's racist. Really? Like in the U. S. right now we are importing people mostly from Latin America and yet collectively, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean are below repopulation rate.

Malcolm: In And this was in 2019 by the UN's own statistics, which famously inflates this stuff. So , we're, we're draining from a evaporating pool. This isn't just a white person problem. In fact, it's not even really a white person problem at all. If you look at prosperous countries, the population groups that are most resistant to fertility collapse are generally white populations.

Malcolm: conservative Christians and conservative Jews. The groups that are most affected by it are generally East Asian and South Asian populations. Or native populations. So small native groups are really affected by it as well. So like in the U. S. you're looking like Native American groups and stuff like that.

Malcolm: So again, . It's more like if [00:04:00] white people did nothing about demographic collapse right now, they would almost certainly Quote, unquote, win in the long run

As such Eve one defines racism as supporting a cause. That promotes white interests. Then it is actually people who are not raising the flag about prenatal ism and population collapsed that are taking the racist position, because covering this up at the problem, disproportionately benefits, white groups.

Simone: So a third argument against pronatalism is that it involves removing women's reproductive rights because many anti abortion groups are also framing themselves as pronatalist and people see, for example, the reversal of Roe v.

Simone: Wade and the removal of options to, to have abortions in many states as, a direct affront to that and because they connect the anti abortion stance with pronatalism, they're basically like, oh, pronatalism, therefore, Thanks. No more female reproductive rights. And they also start to turn to themes like a handmaid's tale and, Oh, you're going to force women to have [00:05:00] kids.

Simone: That's the only way. Which is, is super inaccurate. Really the only thing that you really should be thinking about, if you're concerned about a future in which women's rights and reproductive choice are not supported is, Oh my gosh, how do we make sure that in the future there are people? That exist that support reproductive choice and support feminism.

Simone: And if all feminist groups, and if all groups that support reproductive choice fail to reproduce and pass on their culture, and you can't, you can't really sustainably pass on a culture only by converting people. over generations. It just doesn't work. And we can get into that. You are going to end up without those values supported.

Simone: So basically the future of feminism, the future of reproductive rights depends on pronatalism, or at least some pronatalism within those

Malcolm: groups. More specifically, if it turns out the only way to get people to have kids is to take away their rights, or