The Unmasking of Misanthropy: Jordan Peterson and David Benatar on Antinatalism

There’s a YouTube audio recording of a debate between psychologist Jordan Peterson and philosopher David Benatar about Benatar’s antinatalist arguments, a debate which I recommend to anyone interested in antinatalism or pessimism. Instead of discussing all their points and counterpoints, I want to focus on a key moment that happens after Peterson had raised numerous interesting objections which Benatar rebutted.

But before I discuss antinatalism itself, I want to applaud the quality of their discussion. If there are inflammatory topics that are bound to tempt interested parties to forget that they have intellectual faculties, antinatalism is among them since it implies that no one ought ever to have been born, considering that harms always outweigh benefits in life. This means that antinatalism invites anyone with children or with nieces or nephews to consider whether those very children would have been better off not coming into the world. Even those adults who have no personal connections to any child would be forced to reflect on their memories of when they were children, and since we’re emotionally attached to ourselves and especially to when we were relatively innocent in our childhood, antinatalism should be profoundly disturbing to everyone who’s not suicidal. Yet Peterson and Benatar maintain philosophical poise, by engaging in a constructive dialogue. Their discussion isn’t dry and academic, which means that the relevant emotions do rise to the surface, although Benatar is especially keen to keep track of which of his points were or weren’t addressed. But instead of resorting to personal attacks or to partisan talking points, they articulate their differences with integrity.

The reason I bring this up is that the quality of their discussion contrasts strikingly with the political infotainment that’s commonplace in the corporate mass media. First of all, the length of Peterson’s and Benatar’s discussion (around ninety minutes) allows the truth to have at least the potential to emerge in the responsible back-and-forth that took place between them, whereas the miniscule airtime devoted to any topic on television news, for example, in any particular “segment” precludes that happy outcome, especially if the subject matter is complex enough to deserve being debated in the first place. What’s important here is that news junkies can get in the habit of thinking there’s no alternative to how CNN or talk radio, for example, deals so treacherously with important topics, and the discussion between Peterson and Benatar, which you’re free to listen to, disproves that presumption for all time. An alternative is possible—not that such philosophical virtues will ever be demanded by mainstream audiences. And not that their discussion of antinatalism is the only worthy dialogue that’s ever occurred, of course. Philosophical dialogues are standard in remote, academic circles and have been since the dawn of Western philosophy. But it’s crucial that non-academics be exposed at least once to civil, worthwhile discourse so that they can compare it with the prattle that passes for serious engagement with ideas in popular media. Once you see the difference for yourself, you can’t help but be alarmed that the corporate sources of information and analysis are systematically dumbing-down their audiences and that we ought to consider the discussions that occur on television, the radio, and increasingly in (short-form) print journalism as mere entertainments, or as infotainments—which are entertainments disguised as real contemplation of issues.

Indeed, even laying philosophy aside, on a purely stylistic level, I was shocked to discover, some years ago when I picked up a newspaper on a train in Liverpool, that the quality of English that’s common in North American mass media is dreadfully poor. The vocabulary and syntactic complexity of the sentences used even to describe the weather in England were obviously more sophisticated than the average level of English you’ll find in sources of North American news. If anything, the childishness of “President” Trump’s diction has exacerbated this deficit, as has the prevalence of SEO algorithms on the internet. For example, the Yoast SEO uses the Flesch reading ease score, which would reduce the level of discourse to that which could easily be digested by teenagers or preteens. The highest scores on the Flesch test are earned by texts which can be read easily by someone between 11 and 15 years old. The lowest scores, which can reduce your text’s visibility to search engines, reflect the need for university-level comprehension. The point of these algorithms, then, is to encourage writers to write at a popular level, by simplifying their ideas and thus by eschewing the sort of rigorous but still passionate examination of issues that Peterson and Benatar engaged in.

Why the Antinatalist should be Misanthropic

I think the most important part of their antinatalism discussion occurs at around the 1:12:30 minute mark, when Peterson lays out the basis of his fundamental objection to antinatalism, which is that antinatalism is “antihuman” and “existentially cowardly.” But the key disagreement that begins to emerge at that precise moment in the conversation is that Peterson gets Benatar to affirm that it would be best if our species ceased to exist—albeit not by some violent cataclysm but by our voluntary decision no longer to produce future generations. (Benatar affirms this also in Chapter Six of Better Never to have Been.) Indeed, at 1:16:26, Benatar says, “I think that it will be good when there are no sentient beings left.” He says he’s not naïve about the influence of antinatalist arguments, which means he doesn’t think it’s realistic to assume he personally will have a hand in the extinction of our species, since most people will ignore or dismiss his pessimistic views. But he affirms that he believes not just that our species will eventually cease to exist, but that that outcome will be good. 

By contrast, Peterson defends the humanist principle that sentient life is virtually miraculous, or more specifically, as Peterson puts it, that there’s a mode of being which redeems all human life: the heroic struggle against suffering, unfairness, enmity and other harms is a potential form of nobility for everyone which counts as a good life, as one for which the harms don’t outweigh the benefits, since such a person has acquired virtues that enable him or her to transcend the harms. Benatar has two responses to this claim. First, he lays out an analogy according to which even if people who have been wrongly imprisoned learn to deal nobly with their situation, this wouldn’t excuse the person who’s responsible for imprisoning them. Likewise, even if people can become accustomed to life, this doesn’t excuse their parents for having brought them into the world. Second, he says there’s a slippery slope to this talk of heroism, since parents might amputate their child’s leg, for example, to teach the child to overcome that obstacle and to acquire the strength of character to endure future hardships.

I’ll comment briefly on these two counterarguments before turning to the key disagreement. The prison analogy recalls Gnostic theology which says that the material world was created by a lesser deity, called the "demiurge," and that the purpose of this world is to trap and distract us so that we forget our true calling, which is to return to our home in a transcendent realm governed by the supreme god. Notice that the prison metaphor works in Gnosticism, because the Gnostic opposes nature to another reality. Likewise, it makes sense to talk of prison only if there’s another world in which people are free. Otherwise, “prison” is being used as a weasel word. If there’s no realm for life other than nature, it seems specious to compare this world to a prison. I’ll return to this point in a moment. As for the slippery slope argument, it’s dubious because there are more than enough natural hardships without parents introducing others by torturing their child. Peterson points out also that what’s needed isn’t just education, to unveil how the next generation might overcome obstacles, but the realization that the very essence of being a person is defined by the potential for tragic heroism.

But let’s return to the question whether our species ought to be extinguished. Notice that there are two possible motives for Benatar’s antihumanism: love of people or hatred of them—which can be associated respectively with morality or, frankly, with evil. On the one hand, Benatar could say that we deserve better than for our life to be filled primarily with suffering and hardships, that our tragic lot in life is sorrowful because we’re innocent or at least undeserving of this “entrapment.” And this is what Benatar does say. He offers what he calls philanthropic and misanthropic arguments for antinatalism, but the latter don’t imply that he hates humanity. Instead, these arguments differ only with respect to whether the harms caused by bringing a person into the world are done to him or her or whether that person will inflict these harms on others. In either case, having a child is supposed to be wrong because someone will be harmed as a result.

On the other hand, someone could say that humanity ought to end because our nature is hateful. In this case, harms done to people would be irrelevant or even encouraged, and the purpose of antinatalism would be to finish the job that nature has started. Nature tortures us with pains and misfortunes, and our tasks would be to recognize that we’re appalling creatures that deserve to die, and to bring about that end by stopping procreation. A misanthrope might justify this with reference to some higher morality, but typically we’d associate this line of argument with the most absolute villainy. Again, if we’re all abhorrent and deserving not just of death but of suffering, this would excuse all manner of what we call crime or sin, including the schemes of any supervillain imagined in literature or film, from the devil to Darth Vader. By contrast, Benatar rejects Peterson’s argument that the antinatalist is in fact committed to this second, misanthropic form of pessimism. Benatar says he’s in favour of antinatalism, but not of mass suicide or murder, as long as killing someone runs contrary to that person’s interests. That is, Benatar respects our interests, because he takes himself to be adopting the first kind of pessimism, according to which we aren’t hateful creatures, we deserve better than to suffer, and we’re thus too good for this world.

The problem is that there’s no such benevolent form of pessimism; the first kind is incoherent. This can be shown in two ways by working backwards from this kind of pessimism to see if it makes sense. First, let’s take the moral contention that our extinction would be good, because we deserve better than to endure a hard life. If we ought to have been born into a better world, this alternative world must be possible, given Kant’s principle that “ought” implies “can.” It’s wrong to blame a situation that can’t be otherwise. True, we have the choice whether to reproduce, and thus there’s the genuine alternative of a world in which we’re extinct, but this isn’t relevant to making sense of Benatar’s reason for preferring that lifeless world. Benatar wants to say we ought to go extinct because we’re fundamentally good and deserve a better life. If however there’s no heavenly alternative that would count as superior to natural life, this altruistic justification of antinatalism is vacuous. Moreover, the scenario in which our species is extinct isn't better than the scenario in which we're living and procreating, because the two are incommensurable. The former is morally neutral, so if the antinatalist prefers that world to this one, she still can't claim her preference is based on a moral comparison. There would be no suffering or other harms were we all dead, but there would also be no one left to enjoy that fact. This is the same problem with Benatar’s prison analogy. Unless Benatar can specify the morally superior alternative world in which we deserve to live, we shouldn’t pretend that he advocates for our extinction based on humanitarian considerations.

Benatar can point to the logical possibility of life in immaterial Heaven, as that spiritual realm is depicted in religions, but if those religious scenarios turn out to be incoherent, which they are, we’re back where we started. For example, the notion of “immaterial or spiritual life” makes no sense, since any substantive notion of life is defined in biological terms; if you take away the brain, you’ll have no way of sustaining the notion of the leftover, ghostly life. Plus, properly speaking, “the heavens” refers only to what we now know as outer space. If Benatar were to hope for a transhuman utopia made possible by technological advances, he would be furthering his opponent’s case against antinatalism, since if we ourselves can produce the world which ought to be, the pessimist would have to explain why we should opt for extinction rather than for contributing to social progress for the benefit of future generations. If that future world is unrealistic and so harms will always outweigh benefits, no matter what progress we make, we don’t yet have an alternative to make sense of the possibility that we ought to have been born in a better world. If there’s no such better world, there’s no sense in saying that the reason why we should be condemned for recreating sentient life is that such life deserves better. And if we don’t deserve better, not because we’re atrocious creatures but because there’s no other place for us to be but a domain in which harms tend to outweigh benefits, this moral formulation of antinatalism collapses.

The second way of showing this should clarify matters. Here we switch to considering the antinatalist’s psychological motives. Benatar wants to say that the reason he thinks our extinction will be good is that he loves people and is thus distressed by all the harms we suffer. Note the similarity between this distinction and the Christian one between loving the sinner and hating the sin. The latter distinction has only superficial legitimacy because of the Christian’s dualist (and thus empty) view of the relation between mind and body. If the self is immaterial or otherwise separate from the person’s natural form, it might make sense to feel differently about what the inner person is and about what her body does. But if we think naturalistically about our identity, we lose the chance for that reasoning since we become nothing more than our bodies and our bodies are intrinsically “sinful,” that is, corrupt, fallible, and liable to go astray. For example, our very self, being material rather than substantially divorced from the earthly plane, would be identified with having, in part, an animal appetite which drives us to steal or to hurt others to obtain food if we find ourselves starving. Likewise, our brain enables us to think in abstract and moral terms, but also often confines us to reflexes and to snap judgments which err on the side of caution and which thus tend to be responsible for harms. Naturalism therefore disposes of the pretense that you can love the sinner but hate the sin, because the sinner turns out to be just a flawed animal which can't help but sin.

For similar reasons, there doesn’t seem any way of cashing out the distinction between approving of people and feeling only sorrow for our tragic condition. Assuming the kind of naturalism which you’ll find in Benatar’s book, The Human Predicament, and which in any case is rationally obligatory, we can’t fully transcend that tragic condition. We are natural creatures confined to nature. (In Chapter Three, for example, Benatar rejects theism as a source of cosmic meaning of life, he argues for atheism, and he points out that an alleged discontinuity between humans and the evolved animal species begs the question in theism’s favour.) If the antinatalist claims to recommend human extinction on account of her admiration for people, which compels her to condemn the world’s treatment of us, we must ask what exactly she admires, there being no immaterial, unnatural, hidden core of anyone. What is it that she thinks is so unfairly treated in this rough-and-tumble world? If we’re ferocious animals that disguise our will to dominate and indeed to be the only species left standing; if we pretend to be civil, for example, by leaving the hunting to others, to avoid having to see how millions of wild animals are killed for our sustenance, we can hardly take our nobility for granted. Yet Benatar wants us to believe that he thinks we ought to go extinct, not because we deserve to die due to our horrific nature, but because we’re superior to this world and thus belong elsewhere—even though he would grant there’s nowhere else for us to be. If nature horrifies the antinatalist, because nature is responsible for our tragic predicament, for torturing all sentient creatures and inflicting us with more harms than benefits, and yet we’re just natural creatures ourselves, the pessimist is at a loss as to how to justify this dualistic basis for antinatalism, this distinction between the goodness of what we are and the badness of what happens to us. (As I point out elsewhere, the YouTube pessimist Inmendham’s worldview is similarly unsustainable, although his "efilist" philosophy is darker and more pessimistic than Benatar's. Still, he talks inconsistently about the "preciousness" of life and thus the obligation to avoid pain in the animal kingdom. If all life and the whole universe stink, our obligation should be to seek out pain, not to avoid it, to torture ourselves for having a poisoned nature.)

That’s why this moment in Peterson’s and Benatar’s discussion is so important, because Benatar’s admission that he thinks it would be best for humans to go extinct forces him to cast that extinction as some kind of blessing even though his pessimistic, naturalistic philosophy renders that uplifting appraisal nonsensical. Of course, he must maintain that our species ought to go extinct, since the extinction would obviously follow from the universal practice of antinatalism, and he defends antinatalism on moral grounds. Benatar is therefore caught between a rock and a hard place, between issuing halfhearted compliments to our innocence which supposedly renders us worthy of better treatment than the kind we suffer on earth, and being committed to the darker form of pessimism, to that which entails not just antinatalism but what we might call aggressive antihumanism. To avoid being lumped in with the supervillains who would torture and kill people indiscriminately in addition to attempting to discontinue our species by recommending the end of procreation, Benatar must maintain that he operates from an altruistic viewpoint, from one which would spare potential generations from actual harm. Unfortunately, Benatar’s pessimistic form of naturalism won’t sustain that more socially acceptable formulation.

Naturalism for Tragic Heroes, not Closeted Supervillains

This isn’t to say that all versions of naturalism entail the dark sort of pessimism or aggressive antihumanism. Contrary, for example, to crude reductionism, nature is evidently so creative that some sentient creatures have evolved the ability to create virtually unnatural worlds. This shift from the living-dead flow of physical regularities, to the injection of meaning and value into artificial domains according to a vision of what ought to be holds out the possibility of progress, which underlies Peterson’s humanistic response to antinatalism. The reason antinatalism is cowardly is that while many of the myths about progress in history obfuscate dark truths, there have clearly been some advances in the sense of social revolutions that either alter the harm-benefit ratio or at least inure a noble order of enlightened individuals to their tragic fate so that they may even welcome injustices to test their mettle. Even if there will be no techno-utopia or heaven on earth, we can choose to give up, with the antinatalist, or to strive to alter our perspective so that we can see the opportunities afforded by life’s unfairness. Because we’re anomalous natural creatures that have some degrees of sentience, intelligence, and self-control, we can work to improve matters or at least to adjust our expectations.

Thus, escaping misanthropy by recognizing that nature isn’t monolithic, that there are natural orders because the universe is a living-dead monstrosity that destroys to create new patterns, simultaneously provides the ground for rejecting antinatalism. If there are multiple natural orders, which can be scientifically explained only by a patchwork of limited models, progress towards a more ideal state is possible, in which case we must choose whether to give up or to carry on the tragic struggle against the unfairness that’s intrinsic to wild places. As Peterson points out, being likely influenced by Nietzsche, this choice is an act of faith, not a rational calculation. Benatar admits that he’s not certain about antinatalist arguments, but he insists that harms will likely always outweigh benefits, because of what he considers the strength of his handful of arguments about how these things work. For example, he says there’s chronic pain but no such thing as chronic pleasure; pain can be long-lasting, but pleasure is transient. This is likely because of what I said above, that we’re animals and so our internal systems err on the side of caution to protect our genes. It’s more important that our warning mechanisms should malfunction or provide us with redundant signals than that our pleasure center should misfire, because a little pleasure goes a long way with us, whereas our curiosity inclines us to ignore warnings against harm. In any case, if these are only evolutionary mechanisms, there’s no reason why they should be metaphysically necessary. Genetic engineering might rewire our brain so that we no longer have to behave as though we hadn’t drastically altered the wilderness to suit our preferences, as though we were commonplace slaves of evolution rather than godlike reshapers of our biosphere.     

The point is that antinatalism makes more sense when supported by antihuman pessimism, by a worldview that doesn’t just deny the likelihood of human-made progress, but that condemns us all as part of monstrous nature. The misanthropic pessimist shouldn’t hide behind a pretense of humanitarianism, as though the goal of ending procreation were conceived out of love rather than contempt for us. But of course this misanthrope would be condemned outright and perhaps even locked up as a threat, so obviously the antihuman basis of antinatalism must be disguised if this insidious idea is to have a chance of being taken seriously by folks who love themselves and who believe in their potential to improve the world.