VHEMT Is Worse Than Humancentric Natalism

Originally published on November 30, 2014. Modified on August 29, 2016.

Recent figures released by the World Wildlife Fund have validated a hunch I've long harboured; wildlife is depopulating at an exponential rate. While most of us were well aware that the number of animals in the natural habitat had been dwindling in some capacity, hardly anyone foresaw that the total amount of sentience on earth in 2014 would be sliced in half to the total amount that existed forty years ago. And yet here we are.

[Edit: On further inspection, 50% appears to be something of a stretch. See Brian Tomasik's speculative but detailed breakdown for a fairly lower figure, cautiously keeping species and individual organisms within species separate.]

This is quite the bombshell for preservationists. What's more, according to the findings, it is unambiguously clear that human impact played a pivotal role in the quickened diminution. While human activity isn’t the sole culprit behind every bit of non-human sentience that’s been halved over the last four decades, it does apply to the overwhelming majority it.

Utilitarian Infighting: The Eight Levels

Originally posted on 2014-09-28. Last substantive revision on 2018-01-17.

The inspiration for this post is the dismal state of utilitarian-themed discourse that I spot every so often in my YouTube subscription feed. Scattered insertion of this unspecific 'utilitarianism' type of stuff has to go. Pronto.

To get an idea of some basic oversights, here are the three cornerstones of disputation within utilitarian ethics, in chronological order:

Total Utilitarianism vs. Average Utilitarianism

Positive Utilitarianism vs. Negative Utilitarianism

Classical Utilitarianism vs. Preference Utilitarianism

The oft-neglected implications of these internal frictions are as follows:

When someone says they're a 'Utilitarian' they've only revealed 25% of where they stand insofar as the multi-layered disputation is concerned.

When someone says they're a 'Classical Utilitarian' they've only revealed 50% of where they stand insofar as the multi-layered disputation is concerned.

When someone says they're a 'Classical Negative Utilitarian' they've still only revealed 75% of where they stand insofar as the multi-layered disputation is concerned.

I can go on with the labels’ intersections, but I'm sure you've gotten the gist of it by now. The patterns limn how unavailing all blanket invocations of 'utilitarianism' can be and have been for centuries. To say that the full scope of utilitarianism is scarcely ever taken into account –– even among professed utilitarians –– would be an understatement.

[2015-03-23: Turns out there are additional levels that I made no mention of here. Lesser known levels. If you're interested in what they're about, see the FAQ] 

The Unexplored Case Against Adultism

Originally published on May 7, 2014. Last updated on September 8, 2017.


Many readers are likely to stumble across this because they already oppose Adultism and presumably search for fresh content tackling it. If you are one of those, odds are that your proposed remedies to this overlooked malady never target the initiation of biological parenthood. A common theme I've noticed with critics of adultism is the tacit belief that good and bad parenthoods are a thing, in a categorical sense, and that the main driving force behind generically bad parenting (or stewarding) is the substandard levels of respect adults show for the personhood of non-adults. Aside from this, opposition to adultism for these critics is not to be confused with anything that remotely resembles an opposition to biological parenthood itself. The anti-adultist aims to improve parenthood, not to question it on a foundational level.

I on the other hand believe that any solution to adultism that relies on nonjudgmental overviews of parenthood is no solution at all. All such solutions are supplementary at best and nickel-and-dime tweaks at worst. Patchwork. I settled on this view some time ago, after coming to the conclusion that there are no finely grained good and bad parents. There are only more/less imperfect parents. Now that I am well acquainted with a topic as niche as adultism/anti-adultism, I'll try to merge some of what anti-adultists are after with some of what I'm after.

Inmendham’s Alphabet Of Evaluational Transgressions

[Update 2017-04-30: There are a few things in this post I no longer endorse. Some of the issues I'm spotting on this latest reread are stylistic. Others are plainly substantive, like my treatment of emotional suffering as categorically distinct from physical suffering, such that physical suffering always wins first rank in the moral prioritization realm. In 2013 and early 2014, I really did mean always whenever I wrote "always". This is subject to numerous reductio ad absurdum based counters, which are so obvious one shouldn't feel the need to single one out. Oddly enough, my attempts to free welfarist theories from all such reductios were precisely what motivated the emotional/physical categorization in the first place. I now accept that there is no avoiding of reductios, at least not in moral philosophy. I might be nitpicking, but that's just how it rolls with me. For updated criticisms of all things Inmendham, see this blog's post-2013 posts. I'm only keeping this post up because I (largely) share Inmendham's belief that wiping out content that was once available for public consumption is intellectually uncouth. As such, let the record stand.]

This will be an overdue continuation of the squabble from earlier this year between the discrete value economics promoted by Inmendham et al versus what I'll coin here as 'Freelance Ethics'. The last time I made an effort to cover some of this, I received a juicy dead-end for my troubles. Hopefully the itemized structure of this post will assist me in communicating rebuttals in a more lucid manner compared to the bloated posts from seven months ago.

Additionally, let this serve as a manifesto highlighting other areas where seeing eye to eye with Inmendham is managed only by paying no mind to internal consistency, while offering my own heterodox theories on a shiny platter for readers to adopt and/or scrutinize. One thing motivating me here is Inmendham’s ongoing challenge to have someone (anyone) present a cogent counterargument to any of his stated beliefs. He’s been griping about his inability to get a properly structured, well-organized debate format off the ground due to a lack of interest. This is true. No critic is ardent enough to put in the necessary time/effort to undermine Inmendham’s formulation of Intrinsic Value in a way that might resonate with him, so I’ll jump in and be an accommodating host by alphabetizing the entire ordeal. Each contentious issue gets its own letter. By assigning letters to individual points which are bound to continue causing friction, no item of contention will be swept under the rug. Inmendham can easily reference each section of our now abecedarian dispute outlined below (assuming he wishes to argue further, which I’m sure he will). Oh the excitement.

Note: Jump-links for the below are pending due to ongoing formatting issues

 

The Contents:

Inmendham Glossary (beginners only)

Preamble 

A. Establishing Premises

B. Central tensions between 'Justice Maximization' and 'Harm Minimization' 

C. "Sentience creates value" 

D. "That’s just your psychology"  

E. The Orphanage Proposal 

F. Extinction: The Pseudo-Goal 

G. Assisted Suicide vs. Unsolicited Mercy Killings

H. 'The Golden Rule' Is Awfully Rusty

I. "They can’t handle the truth”

J. "Why don't people lament the absence of life on other planets?"

K. “Zero-Sum Game” as a Post-Natal Proposition

L. “You can’t win” vs. Crude Literalism

M. 'Moral Nihilism' and 'Defeatism' are disjointed 

N. Non-Rational =/= Irrational

O. Non-impositions?  

P. Approved Impositions

Q. AntiNatalism and Atheism are not ideological cousins

R. Hedonism

S. Tactical Insults vs. Knee-Jerk Insults

T. Open Hostility Towards Doubt

U. Unquenchable Reinforcement Of Belief (including $1000 challenge) 

V. Style, Substance, and VloggerDome 

Summation

AntiNatalism And Dissection

Seeing as this post delves into the (defamation-magnetized) area of Natalism vs. AntiNatalism, I’ll just mention right off the bat that disingenuous remarks alluding to anti-natal driven genocide, cultism, eugenics, crypto-fascism, death-worship, hedonism, cowardice, emotional frailty, depression-blurring-perspective, “mommy didn’t love them enough” and so on will be ignored in the interest of sidestepping all too familiar time-sinks. This is intended to put proponents of AntiNatalism on the immediate defensive. The diversion works only when discussants and onlookers ignore how the brisk aggressor never earned possession of offense. Guilty of redundancy enablement are fellow objectors to Natalism who still see purpose in explaining themselves, as mere messengers, to the dullards eagerly regurgitating such charges.

I typically wouldn’t even mind this, but the long-refuted character assassination ploys –– coupled with philosophy/psychology entanglement –– are being milked for all they're worth. Spirited counterpoints of this sort have, for me, been impossible to sit through for a long time now, yet they still manage to find new ways in which to get more egregious by the week; over four years later. Any gasbag that chimes in with their 2 cents by evaluating the psychology and personal life of the messenger lambasting Natalism unapologetically seems to attract enough bait-bitters who'll fruitlessly engage –– as if the accusations dished out against the lazily posited "Quintessential AntiNatalist" are worthy of being debunked, on account of some ingenuous misunderstanding on the part of the gasbag.

Such noise hardly differs from any other armchair psychoanalyses permeating the internet. The difference here is that far more DNAtheists seem to uprate the efforts of the pseudo analyses as long as the objective is the maligning of AntiNatalists' credibility. Public dissenters of Natalism who bother with this tripe or accept sketchy aphorisms about the "Archetypal AntiNatalist" emissary carry a share of the blame for AntiNatalism's current lack of intrigue and the formulaic, painfully cyclical debates so pervasive on YouTube.

At some point you have to put your foot down and quit humoring perennial straw. If it hasn’t gone away the first 500 times it's been refuted, it's unlikely to go away once you refute it for the 501st time. Or the 5001st time. Of course, I’m unable to confirm that the psychology of every dissenter of Natalism is impervious to the psychobabble charges regularly levied by Natalists and their sympathisers, but since none of it applies to my cogent understanding of what the AN position entails, this factor suffices as the disqualifier of any such hullabaloo. The more overblown the charge, the less apposite.