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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antinatalism | 7/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:33:05.426199+00:00 | kb-cron |
Isolation: an arbitrary dismissal from the consciousness of an individual and the consciousness of others about all negative thoughts and feelings associated with the unpleasant facts of human existence. In daily life, this manifests as a tacit agreement to remain silent on certain subjects – especially around children, to prevent instilling in them a fear of the world and what awaits them in life, before they will be able to learn other mechanisms. Anchoring: the creation and use of personal values to ensure attachment to reality, such as parents, home, the street, school, God, the church, the state, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future, accumulation of material goods or authority, etc. This can be characterized as creating a defensive structure, "a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness", and defending the structure against threats. Distraction: shifting focus to new impressions to flee from circumstances and ideas humans consider harmful or unpleasant. Sublimation: refocusing the tragic parts of life into something creative or valuable, usually through an aesthetic confrontation for the purpose of catharsis. This is typically seen as a focus on the imaginary, dramatic, heroic, lyric or comic aspects of life, to allow for an escape from their true impact. According to Zapffe, depressive disorders are often "messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought". Some studies seem to confirm this: it is said about the phenomenon of depressive realism, and both Colin Feltham and John Pollard write about antinatalism as one of its possible consequences. David Benatar, citing numerous studies, lists three phenomena described by psychologists, which, according to him, are responsible for making personal self-assessments about the quality of one's life unreliable:
Tendency towards optimism (or Pollyanna principle) – Humans have a positively distorted picture of their lives in the past, present and future. Adaptation (or accommodation, or habituation) – Humans adapt to negative situations and adjust their expectations accordingly. Comparison – for one's self-assessments about the quality of their life, more important than how their life goes is how it goes in comparison with the lives of others. One of the effects of this is that negative aspects of life that affect everyone are not taken into account when assessing their own well-being. Humans are also more likely to compare themselves with those who are worse off than those who are better off. Benatar concludes:
The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives. Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected. Thomas Ligotti draws attention to the similarity between Zapffe's philosophy and terror management theory. Terror management theory argues that humans are equipped with unique cognitive abilities beyond what is necessary for survival, which includes symbolic thinking, extensive self-consciousness and perception of themselves as temporal beings aware of the finitude of their existence. The desire to live alongside the awareness of the inevitability of death triggers terror in humans. Opposition to this fear is among humans' primary motivations. To escape it, humans build defensive structures around themselves to ensure their symbolic or literal immortality, to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe, and to focus on protecting themselves from immediate external threats.
=== Abortion === Antinatalism can lead to a particular position on the morality of abortion. According to David Benatar, one comes into existence in the morally relevant sense when consciousness arises, when a fetus becomes sentient, and up until that time an abortion is moral, whereas continued pregnancy would be immoral. Benatar refers to EEG brain studies and studies on the pain perception of the fetus, which states that fetal consciousness arises no earlier than between twenty-eight and thirty weeks of pregnancy, before which it is incapable of feeling pain. A 2010 report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also showed that a fetus could not gain consciousness prior to week twenty-four of the pregnancy, and apparently never does at any point in utero, stating that "there appeared to be no clear benefit in considering the need for fetal analgesia prior to termination of pregnancy, even after 24 weeks". Some assumptions of this report regarding sentience of the fetus after the second trimester were criticized. In a similar way argues Karim Akerma. He distinguishes between organisms that do not have mental properties and living beings that have mental properties. According to his view, which he calls the mentalistic view, a living being begins to exist when an organism (or another entity) produces a simple form of consciousness for the first time. Julio Cabrera believes that the moral problem of abortion is totally different from the problem of abstention of procreation because in the case of abortion, there is no longer a non-being, but an already existing being – the most helpless and defenseless of the parties involved, that someday might have the autonomy to decide, and we cannot decide for them. From the point of view of Cabrera's negative ethics, abortion is immoral for similar reasons as procreation. For Cabrera, the exception in which abortion is morally justified is cases of irreversible illness of the fetus (or some serious "social illnesses" like American conquest or Nazism), according to him in such cases we are clearly thinking about the unborn, and not simply of our own interests. In addition, Cabrera believes that under certain circumstances, it is legitimate and comprehensible to commit unethical actions, for example, abortion is legitimate and comprehensible when the mother's life is at risk or when pregnancy is the result of rape – in such situations it is necessary to be sensitive without assuming a rigid principalism.