“I do genuinely think that animal life is superior to the vast majority of human life. I'm happy to go into all that stuff another time if people are interested in why, but for me it's just pretty self-explanatory. When you look around this world as a vegan you just think, there are a good lot of humans that don't deserve to live. Meanwhile I don't think there's a single animal who deserves to die.”1
- George Martin, EFAN2 activist, October 2023
Martin's statement brings to mind an intuition I articulated back in December 2021: “I can't shake the impression that efilists and so-called sentiocentric antinatalists are generally more concerned with animals than with people to the extent that caring more about people is perceived as some kind of moral failing and even that people are disposable when it comes to helping animals I can't put my finger on it but there's just something really off about that.”
I'm confident that not only was my intuition correct, but that antinatalism is now being morphed into an animal supremacy movement. Intentionally or not is hard to tell. I think it's a mix of most (all?) people at the forefront of what's labeled AN activism being vegan/efilist and Amanda Sukenick's stated mission to efilize AN from within.
It's impossible to miss the animal supremacy popping up from time to time, often unwittingly. Efilism's founder Gary Mosher readily admits he'd save a kitten over a human baby because babies are maggots. He also isn't shy about saying he'd get off on killing people if he could get away with it. And let's not forget how he justifies his CSAM advocacy by claiming sexually abusing children is the same kind of consent violation suffered by animals farmed for food3.
Lawrence Anton follows in Mosher’s footsteps beefing with people who eat cheese, calling it a failure of ethics because it involves the sexual abuse of animals4. In contrast he’s been stonewalling for over a year since I wrote him an open letter about his support for Sukenick who posts Mosher's CSAM advocacy on her channel. He either doesn’t have the cojones to speak out against Sukenick, or it could just be he's on board with his fellow EFAN activists posting content in support of child sexual abuse.
Anton also believes antinatalists should prioritize wild animal suffering over and above human procreation, going so far as to say human procreation is a necessary evil for the purpose of alleviating wild animal suffering.
The Antinatalist Advocacy (AA) website5 includes a donations page linking charities people can donate to. The 4 categories are Human Procreation, Animal Agriculture, Wild Animal Suffering, and Artificial Sentience. Human Procreation only has one listed charity, Family Empowerment Media, while the others each have three. This gives the impression of a bias against humans in favor of animals.
Anton and his co-founder John Williams discuss this with Anton concluding “(Family Empowerment Media) are the only charity that do prevent births and have been rated effective”. On the face of it AA could say there's only one charity in the human procreation category because it's the only one that meets their vetting criteria. But this dances around the actual problem of having created an unnecessarily narrow category for humans.
The first category only focuses on human procreation while the others go well beyond animal and AI pro/creation. Animal Agriculture is a general vegan/animal rights category, Wild Animal Suffering is self explanatory, and Artificial Sentience is mostly concerned with potential impacts of AI on the sentient biosphere. These three are broad enough to permit for a wide range of concerns meaning AA won't have problems expanding the number of relevant charities. But it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to find vetted charities committed to minimizing or eliminating procreation. Anton and Williams readily acknowledge this but fail to see the solution is simply changing the name of the human category from Human Procreation to Human Suffering. This would align it with the other three categories and would permit for the inclusion of a wider range of acceptable charities. Giving What We Can lists a number of vetted charities covering childhood immunization, vitamin A deficiencies, and malaria, etc. If AA's mission is finding effective ways to mitigate or eliminate sentient suffering it doesn't make sense to exclude these charities by not expanding the first category—unless humans aren't as important as animals.
BUT, expanding the first category would create a new problem for Anton and Williams. It would reveal AA to be antinatalist in name only. AA is anti-sentient-suffering, which is laudable. But anti-sentient-suffering isn't synonymous with or a subset of antinatalism.
Finally, to drive the point home about how AA is biased against humans, I'd bet my 1984 custom Fender P on Anton and Williams remaining enthusiastic about AA if humans were cut from the agenda, but losing interest if the latter 3 categories were dropped.
Antinatalism is fundamentally rooted in pessimism. But this animal supremacist worldview stems from a combination of misanthropy and critical theory oppression narratives framing humans as oppressors and animals the downtrodden underclass:
Anton: In response to “What are you devoted to?”, “Speaking up for non-human animals - they're the most oppressed beings in ever (sic).”
Martin: ““How can veganism not include human rights? It's a social justice movement!” Yes, exactly. Name literally one other social justice movement that makes it about the rights of the oppressor.”
Proponents of this worldview will predictably cite compassion as their motivation. I don’t think so. I reckon it's more likely compassion for animals is being used as a shield to camouflage animosity and resentment towards humans. Add to this a savior complex and the self righteous moral certainty endemic in the EFANosphere, you get a heady concoction of Grade A narcissistic supply.
The research is by no means conclusive but papers so far published all point towards antinatalism type beliefs being associated with dark triad narcissism6. Digging into the weeds of the data it's impossible to ignore how the kinds of beliefs with higher positive associations are the kinds of beliefs prevalent in vegan/efilist/misanthropic circles. These are the people most likely to hold animal supremacist views, and based on what I've seen after being involved in this space for about 10 years, these are the people most motivated to engage in so-called antinatalism activism. So, it isn't surprising to see animal supremacists parading themselves as the public face of antinatalism.
It's one thing to insist humans and animals have equal moral value. But it's something very different to believe animals have more value than humans. Prioritizing animals over humans is a sinister inversion leading to a Bizarro world where eating cheese is more problematic than raping children, and kittens deserve rescuing while humans deserve brutality.
Antinatalism isn't about animal rights, animal suffering, or animal supremacism. And I'm far past the point of giving a fuck about how much this grates the (mostly unread if not illiterate) sentiocentric youtube debate-me-bro animal activist philolsophers—Antinatalism doesn't have anything to do with animals7.
Human procreation is ANs sole concern. I understand this puts the kibosh on how much social media attention you can generate, and I understand it means you can't bleat on about kittens and baby elephants. I don't care. Because I also understand what's downstream from people saying, "Animal life is superior to the vast majority of human life... there are a good lot of humans that don't deserve to live. Meanwhile I don't think there's a single animal who deserves to die.".
Keep that shit far the very fuck away from me.
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EFAN means efilist-antinatalist as opposed to AN which means antinatalist, or more specifically not-efilist-antinatalist. It's way past time for EFANs and ANs to be definitively separated as the two groups consist of people with different, if not opposing, mindsets and motivations (Gary Mosher agrees). Treating them as a single cohort makes it impossible to fully analyze and comprehend dynamics within the broader ANosphere (another proprietary tchotchke created as shorthand for "the online antinatalism commooonity").
http://efilism.com/ds/dp188.html From 32m (Not https, only http)
I reject concepts such as rape and consent being used in relation to animals because the terms exclude animals by definition. I get the impression vegans/efilists use these words to circumvent the intellect and trigger emotional rather than reasoned responses. It’s a contemptible kind of covert manipulation. Why can't they make the same points about animal suffering using terms such as semen collection and insemination instead? Also, what about the reason for insemination? Let's say a species is on the verge of extinction and scientists collect male semen to inseminate females with. Would that be regarded as rape or does rape only happen when it involves farming animals?
AA's landing page shows pictures of a bear and lambs. Not a human in sight. Strange, given human procreation is antinatalism's core.
No, Benatar did not say AN includes animals. He said the arguments underlying his pessimistic evaluation that coming into existence is always a harm apply to animals (pg2 BNTHB). Antinatalism ≠ pessimism, cf https://stevegodfrey.substack.com/p/the-error-of-evaluative-statements .
So if aliens crash landed on earth that looked exactly like humans, but had green skin, and had sufficiently different genetics to fall outside the taxonomic classification, and procreated like crazy you would not have any moral opinion on it because "Anti-natalism is only for humans" and "humans" here means having sufficient genetics/DNA to be classified under the homo-sapien taxonomy.. Will you backpeddle and contradict yourself and say "well no those beings ARE included" Maybe dont make this claim if everytime the counterfactual shows up you get caught in a contradiction, retract it and backpeddle?
Oh yeah, and "rape" "consent" "murder" terminology doesnt apply to these alien creatures, simply because they have a different species classification on paper. Interesting moral & linguistic framework ... Either bite the bullet of this criteria or stop embarrassing yourself here. I doubt you will do either, you may hypothetical dodge even though the example is logically and physically possible. Many of us dont defend animals or animal rights because we love animals or hate humans, we just have a modicum of abstract thought and thinking about logical entailment and if denying certain groups of individuals rights because of X reason, it logically follows that you must do so in other contexts. If you were imaginative, you'd have realized these obvious redictio's . And if you try to say AN only applies to humans because "moral agency" , do 40iq profoundly mentally damaged humans have "agency" ? if no, does that mean you have no moral preference against their actions either? For me it does not matter if someone has "agency" for me to have a moral preference or attach "oughts" to their actions. Morality isn't just about "blame". It is about what should or should not happen.
What I think youre doing here is aking to saying
"The words "Rape", "murder", "consent" only applies to Gingers -- By Definition"
Sure? if thats the way one chooses to use the word, its trivially true. So what? anyone can do that. Why would I use that definition , I find it silly. Are you a linguistic realist? Do you think words have concrete objective meaning in some platonic realm or something?
"Anti-natalism only applies to gingers, and if you think otherwise, fuck you!"
then, we can press why it only applies to gingers, suppose they give some arbitrary reason like "Gingers have freckles" but when shown another creature that isnt a ginger, but has freckles they now contradict themselves or backpeddle and update their criteria.
And ok, Someone could have that criteria. As long as they are consistent with accepting what such a criteria actually means, I cant say theyre logically wrong or contradictory. But being logically consistent isn't always admirable.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
And one last thing "Anti-natalism" doesnt mean ANYTHING (per my usage) except:
"A general dispreference and attitude categorically against reproduction/starting a new life"
It doesn't entail human supremacy, or animal supremacy, or android supremacy, or aliens. Those are all tangential bits and byproducts of individuals and their extended applied ethics. You in particular happen to be anthropocentric and human supremacist, big deal. I've shown what kind of bullets you have to bite to stay there, up to you if thats where you want to plant your flag. I think it has silly conclusions. Id prefer if people stopped trying to make "anti-natalism" some kind of homogenized identity. It is a trivial feature of someones applied ethics, for some reason or another they have just arrived at a dispreference against reproducing. Its not this grand statement or ideology or necessarily entail anthropocentrism or anything else. There is no "correct anti-natalism" stance.
A significant reason animals crop up in the "AN communities" is because many Anti-natalists are Utilitarians, and theyve realized since all they care about is utility, it makes no sense to care about the vehicle the utility comes in (animal, human, sentient android, aliens , etc) Thus, naturally this makes them arrive at non-anthroprocentric views.
Maybe you should start railing against Utilitarianism if you dont like this byproduct? this post just seems misguided. it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with hating humans or cuddling animals. I am not a Utilitarian, so thats not the case for me.
I just want a coherent framework to protect basic Human rights (and generally sentient rights) and Carnism cannot protect human rights to a degree that satisfies me. Every property that seems exclusive to humans per their protection, ends up easily suspect to hilarious absurd conclusions. So, Ironically, I defend animal rights because I want to protect human rights, second order to actually caring about animals.
Anti-natalism is a different topic altogether, I also just have a deontoic principle against bringing new life consciousness existence for various unrelated reasons.