Category: Anti-Natalism
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Birthdays
People celebrate birthdays. But what's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen. "It befell you." Riders on the storm . . .Into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown. Thus Jim…
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Was St. Paul an Anti-Natalist? (Updated 2024 Version)
I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017): Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist. Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea…
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Wolff on Anti-Natalism
Top o' the Stack. A glimpse into the mind of a leftist activist.
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A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?
Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . .…
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The Childless as Anthropological Danglers
Top o' the Stack. The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers. Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws that relate mental states to physical…
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Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online
Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005 Abstract This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our…
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The View from Mount Zappfe
Substack latest.
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Benatar Defended Against a Scurrilous Attack
In my latest Substack article I defend Benatar's courageous pursuit of the truth, not the results of said pursuit.
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Was Sisyphus a Bachelor?
Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him: The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother. There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with…
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The View from Mount Zappfe: The Absurdity of Human Life and Intellectual Honesty
Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe: Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin…
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Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?
I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017): Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist. Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the…
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Wolff on Anti-Natalism: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist
In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism: I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that…
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The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle and Novák’s Objection
This entry is an addendum to my Prague paper (see link below) in which I deploy a principle I call GOC, a principle that comes under withering fire in the ComBox from Dr. Lukáš Novák. Here is my reformulation of his objection. You will have to consult my Prague paper to see what I mean by…
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Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?
This is the penultimate draft of the paper I will be presenting in Prague at the end of this month at the Benatar conference. Comments are welcome from those who are familiar with this subject. ………………………………………………. IS THE QUALITY OF LIFE OBJECTIVELY EVALUABLE ON NATURALISM? William F. Vallicella Abstract This article examines one of…
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Benatar, Death, and Deprivation
This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102. Recall the Issue If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as…