On diminishing well-being and compensating ill-being

Many pronatalists consider the suffering in the world as amounts of ill-being that can be compensated for by certain amounts of well-being.

While it will be difficult to defend this view it looks like any well-being can easily be diminshed or even nullified.

On compensation

Antinatalist
There’ll be no suffering if you stop procreating.

Pronatalist
I readily admit there’s a lot of suffering out there. But then the suffering, pain and fear that people do experience is compensated for by the good things in life they do also experience.

Antinatalist
Well, obviously it’s people like you – the defenders of procreation – who find themselves forced to resort to the logics of compensation. It’s you who have to defend your position since you want to change the ethical state of the world by adding more sentient beings. The supreme position is the antinatalists’ position as they don’t want to add sentient beings to the world whose ill-being or well-being we’d have to discuss. This suggests a certain weakness of the pronatalists’ stance.

Emblems of Ethics

Zygotes and early embryos appear to be the emblems of contemporary ethics. As non-sentient and  normally invisible entities they have become telling symbols. While normally invisible zygotes and early embryos are made visible everywhere, normally visible old and sick people are made invisible. But it is them who would deserve to be in the focus of contemporary ethics as they are sentient and, in many cases, suffering.

Newborns are another Emblem of Ethics. In a telling manner Hans Jonas declares the newborn to be the most pitiful being being. According to him newborns do exude a direct ethical appeal which allegedly bridges the hiatus between what there is and what we are to do. Tellingly the same thinker is of the opinion that old people should clear the way for new arrivals.

Systematic and symbolic negligance of the end of life suggests a dimension of unethics within the realm of ethics. At the same time this unjustified negligence serves as a clandestine pronatal device.