Nontraditional Ethics and Benatar’s Misanthropy
“Humans may exceed other animals in their sapient capacities, but we also surpass other species in our destructiveness,” writes David Benatar in his misanthropic argument, the third in a series of anti-natalist dialogues intended to argue for the immediate and complete cessation of human procreation. “I shall consider three categories of such harm: harm to other humans, harm to animals, and harm to both humans and animals via harm to the environment.”[i]
The misanthropic argument aims to realize the broader anti-natalist claim on moral grounds – and, to his credit, Benatar does indeed proceed to consider all three categories of harm. He does so, however, in a quite unbalanced manner. A wealth of attention and evidence – including abominable testimonies mostly regarding such themes as rape and violence which may stun even the most callous of readers – certainly substantiates his rendering of reflexive human cruelty, but Benatar devotes very little consideration to non-reflexive human harm.
Understandably, Benatar’s use of these reflexive human cruelties does achieve a fundamental repugnance in their reader and, some might say, offers a sufficient enough account of human wrongdoing on their own to validate Benatar’s entire argument, which proceeds as follows:
- “We have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
- Humans cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.[ii]
- Therefore, we have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing new humans into existence.”[iii]
Whether or not it immediately follows from this potential validation that humankind ought to be done away with is unclear, as is Benatar’s first premise. This paper, however, is more concerned with a marked deficiency in Benatar’s account of non-reflexive harm – namely, his failure to elaborate further on non-reflexive human harm.
A charitable assessment of Benatar’s misanthropic argument might suggest that his exposition on reflexive harm comprehensively accounts for reflexive human harm-doing, but Benatar himself insists that the massive list of harms effected by humans consists of much more than human-human interactions.
A comprehensive account, therefore, should also consider those harms perpetrated against non-human entities, i.e. animals and the environment. Benatar suggests that the latter ought to be included in calculations of human wrongdoing on account of the consequential harms done via the environment to animals and humans, but this paper concerns itself with the environment in virtue of its own existence rather than its utility – and furthermore, Benatar provides little to no consideration detailing these potential violations anyhow. The deficiency is a remarkable one, for it is highly possible that in overlooking these non-reflexive harms Benatar fails to take advantage of a great many opportunities to further substantiate his misanthropic argument.
Most substantial responses to Benatar’s work understandably address these issues of reflexive human harm (as this by far is his most compelling argument to date) with claims attesting to humankind’s comparable capacity for good, with varying justifications and theodicies, or with dissenting responses to his first premise, that position concerning presumptive duty. To Benatar’s account of non-reflexive human harm, few philosophers even bother responding at all.
Those that do, cite as Wasserman does a fundamental disagreement regarding the moral relevance of harm against animals and a subsequent disinclination to engage further with the topic, at least as it pertains to the anti-natalism debate. This lack of response is only one indication of many indicating just how little Benatar’s present inclusion of animals in his misanthropic argument accomplishes. Yet Benatar’s inclusion of the environment into this same argument accomplishes even less, no doubt in part due to a utility-based understanding.
This deficiency becomes more curious when one suspends disbelief and considers the intuitive plausibility of a weak environmental claim to moral considerability, despite its initial impression as fantastic or questionable. Many would initially deny, for instance, that the environment ought to be considered within any given moral framework – but if these same doubtful individuals were to imagine a world optimized to basic human well being yet entirely devoid of the natural presence (let us called this world Paved Earth), then it is likely that they will experience some discomfort at the thought of a Paved Earth. This discomfort may appear inconsequential, but truly indicates a greater common sentiment appreciating the existence of the natural world than one might expect.
This common impulse manifests itself in small ways (art, dedicated communities) but also in greater, more public ways – movements to save certain species from extinction, for instance, and national monuments intended to safeguard wild habitats. These widespread manifestations all contribute to the altogether not so controversial assertion that there remains something inherently valuable about the land in virtue itself, rather than the utility it provides.
It is true that nontraditional ethical structures, particularly those advocating the extension of moral considerably to the environment, have encountered considerable resistance and continue to do so. It is not unlikely, however, that the introduction of certain nontraditional accounts into Benatar’s argument would greatly strengthen his claim. It is a worthwhile exercise, then, to examine a small sampling of these alternative accounts, which vary widely in the strength and stretch of their claims, with the purpose of determining whether or not they ought to be included in the misanthropic – and, indeed, anti-natalist – debates. This paper will seek to examine a small number of varied accounts, all understood in some manner or other as ‘ecoholistic,’ in contrast to a great number of other nontraditional ethical structures.
As noted, one commonly held assertion among various environment-oriented nontraditional ethical structures is the very simple (and yet highly controversial) assertion that the environment merits moral consideration, not simply in virtue of its instrumental value for animals or humans but simply in virtue of itself. The concept, when dismantled and reapplied to humankind, appears intuitive – almost none would deny that individual persons possess value not simply in the services they may perform to others but intrinsically, in and of themselves. It is the extension of this idea to the environment which so many find unpalatable, then, and not the idea itself – yet our ethical paradigms, as Aldo Leopold notes, exist under constantly evolution.
Leopold’s own ethical account offers what may perhaps be the most compelling nontraditional account to date. In his A Sand County Almanac, for instance, the academic and conservationist prescribes a “land ethic” – emerging from the principles of ecological conscience and biotic symbiosis – which champions an understanding of the relation between humankind and the environment as one of competition and collaboration rather than one of conquest or commodification.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” Leopold writes, “It is wrong when it tends otherwise”.[iv] Crucially, Leopold’s “land ethic” aims to build upon rather than replace existing ethical systems – which, Leopold notes, exist essentially as a manifested cooperative and symbiotic mechanism, and have historically all agreed on the single premise that, “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.”[v]
The Land Ethic, then, becomes only one more paradigm shift amongst many, a simple expansion of contemporary ethical schematics – one predicated upon biotic right and intrinsic value. Leopold asks his reader simply to consider the land as an energy circuit, whereby its constituents share and collaborate, with three accompanying premises:
- “That land is not merely soil.
- That the native plants and animals [keep] the energy circuit open; others may or may not.
- That man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen.”[vi]
Importantly, Leopold makes no great cosmological or mythical arguments relating to the land, nor claims to land-sentience as skeptics of the view might expect. Rather, Leopold makes justified note of ethical evolution. In illustration, he alludes to Odysseus’ homecoming at Ithaca, a land not at all devoid of ethical thought, and the great hero’s entirely unquestioned decision to hang several of his slaves from a single tree.
The point, one that could be made about countless other moments, is this: that ethical criteria and structures are always changing, and that we ought to understand by now the historical role of the conqueror as self-defeating.[vii] Posited in this manner, with great calm and reasonableness (as opposed to Thoreau’s “something feverish”), Leopold’s Land Ethic appears far from outlandish.[viii] Importantly, Leopold’s theories are not so much misanthropic as simple resistant traditionally anthropocentric thought. Leopold’s ethical prescriptions, however, vary greatly from different iterations of the same basic principle – others of which posit stronger misanthropic claims.
The ethical postulations offered by philosopher and self-declared ‘inhumanist’ Robinson Jeffers, for instance, contribute to a much greater misanthropic impression. On account of Jeffers’ eco-poetry often featuring such themes as a deep faith in the unchanging nature of humankind as violent and destructive, Jeffers is often misunderstood and [held up] as an uncompromising misanthropist. There is, however, an interpretive task at play – and the Jeffers-inspired view offered by this account places his beliefs solidly into more ambiguous territory. Jeffers’ is certainly a breed of misanthropy, though of a different variety than Benatar’s.
In his poem Be Angry at the Sun, wherein Jeffers grappled with the horrors of World War II, he wrote: “Be angry at the sun for setting/ If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,/ They are all bound on the wheel…”[ix] To the same point, he noted Marcus Aurelius’ words: “No one is surprised when a fig-tree brings forth figs.”[x] His point is this: that it is truly part of the unchanging human nature to engage in senseless cruelty and destruction. In this sense, Jeffers’ poetry could be stoic to an almost cruel extent, indifferent to the sufferings of mankind; often, he was regarded as heartless and worse. But both his misanthropy and his ecological principles are often deeply misunderstood.
Jeffers did believe, as Benatar, that humans are capable of extreme cruelty and destruction – but he located humankind, as Leopold did, as one more inevitable constituent of natural truth. In his poem Calm and Full the Ocean, he wrote, “Even the P-38’s and the Flying Fortresses are as natural as horse-flies.”[xi] His meaning was twofold. Human nature is flawed, or as flawed as anything can be in a world devoid of design; but human nature is still precisely nature. As such, humanity held value for Jeffers in the same manner that a leaf might have held value.
Jeffers’ misanthropy was misunderstood in much the same manner. He was a self-declared ‘worshipper of the not-man’ and deeply opposed to anthropocentric beliefs, but his environmental beliefs and conservationist leanings never advocated the nonexistence of humankind so much as the replacement of humankind to its rightful place as an ultimately insignificant collection of biomechanisms in a much wider world.
In Jeffers’ own words, his worldview was “based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe…the attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again…”[xii]
In fact, as one delves deeper, Jeffers’ views begin to sound more and more compatible with Leopold: “I believe that the universe is one being…all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole”.[xiii]
In this sense, Jeffers’ inhumanism leads more to a deep ecologist perspective than a misanthropist one. Yet his views, like Benatar, resist humankind’s tendency towards self-aggrandizement and call for the ultimate acceptance of a world without humans. And, like Benatar and many others, Jeffers did believe that the rapid growth of human populations would lead inextricably to much death and suffering before their end, which he saw as inevitable.
However, unlike many, he did not much care about the inevitable consequences of this destruction, which he saw only as one more occurrence in a great and indifferent cosmic cycle; his focus was instead on the present, on the deep ecology between humans and the environment, and on the uncomplicated, meaningless beauty of natural spaces in virtue of their simply being.[xiv]
To be certain, Jeffers’ view seems to place few constraints on human behavior and at times retreats to aesthetic theory – but often, Jeffers’ notion of beauty or aesthetic perfection emerged from an appreciation of the environment as removed from the tarnishing human influence.
Finally, like Benatar, Jeffers’ suggestion is this: simply that a world without humankind would not be such a bad place. “We used to be individuals, not populations,” he wrote in one of his last poems, Birth and Death, “Perhaps we are now preparing for the great slaughter. No reason to be alarmed; stone-dead is dead;/ Breeding like rabbits we hasten to meet the day…”[xv]
Upon examination, it is clear that those ethical theories offered by Leopold and Jeffers are not so different as originally supposed. This is not to say, however, that there exist no nontraditional, non-anthropocentric ethical structures which do entail a much stronger misanthropic position. Self-declared ‘eco-warrior’ and founder of the Earth First! movement Dave Foreman, for instance, once declared gratitude and support for the AIDS epidemic on the grounds that the human presence needs mitigation.
A far less controversial near-contemporary of Leopold and Jeffers, John Muir, also adhered to a stronger misanthropic sentiment. In his satirical article titled Anthropocentrism, he writes, “The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.”[xvi] Muir continues even to suggest the potential of a sentience attributed to the environment, beyond the human capacity to understand: “But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?”[xvii]
He ends his satire with a polemic suggestion which seems to be in direct agreement with Benatar, writing, “But more than aught else mankind requires burning, as being in great part wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt and purify us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the tophetization of the erratic genus Homo were a consummation devoutly to be prayed for.”[xviii]
Here, “tophetization” refers to Tophet – an ancient site of child sacrifice. Thus it may be rightly understood that Muir, like Benatar, believed in a cessation of human procreation on misanthropic grounds – if not to extinction, then at least to a more balanced existence. It is clear, then, that different degrees of misanthropic sentiment accompany the many varied manifestations of non-anthropocentric nontraditional ethical thought.
The views posited by Jeffers’, Leopold, and Muir are only a selection of iterations indicative of a much broader and more diverse environmental ethic – one which seeks to extend the limits of moral considerability to include ‘the land,’ not in virtue of any utility it may provide but in virtue of its intrinsic value and membership to a biotic civic of which we are all citizens.
While Leopold’s Land Ethic champions the symbiotic relationships present in nature (of which humankind is an integral component) and demands from humankind not so much a cessation of procreation as a more respectful and reasonable relationship with the land, Jeffers’ poetry and philosophical beliefs prescribe a theory of ‘inhumanism’ which at once acknowledges the destructive and cruel nature of humankind, the inherent value of humankind as an inevitable product and part of the natural order, and the appeal of a world without humankind.
In contrast, Muir’s ethics call for a ‘tophetization’ of the human race on the misanthropic grounds that the race is ‘in great part wicked’ and deleterious to the environment, which he considers sacred and clean. Importantly, all three theories call for a drastic change in the present condition of humankind’s relationship with the environment – though the extent and strength of the claims vary significantly from thinker to thinker.
Each theory yields different implications for Benatar’s misanthropic argument. Leopold’s theories, for instance, take issue not with the human presence as a rule but rather only to the extent that the relationship between the human presence and the environment is at present unbalanced. His obligation is to the land ‘as such’ – though this includes humankind to the extent that it may exist as a cooperative and respectful biotic citizenship.
While Leopold may support temporally limited misanthropic and anti-natalist claims – perhaps those which advocate a more temporary mitigation of the human presence – he is, at the end of the day, not an anti-natalist in Benatar’s sense. In a sense, Leopold might be understood as an optimistic misanthrope, dedicated only to the weakest and temporally restricted anti-natalist claims.
Jeffers, meanwhile, owes more to the misanthropic and anti-natalist causes. His views’ attention to the importance of an evolution in human interaction with the land and the environment as meriting ethical value, in addition to the posited impracticality and untruth of self-aggrandizement, do substantiate greatly both more limited anti-natalist claims and more limited misanthropic claims – though not Benatar’s less compromising claims.
Despite this, Jeffers’ views certainly don’t substantiate either strong misanthropic or anti-natalist claims – since, despite the understanding of the environment as meriting ethical value, it is also understood that humankind, however cruel and destructive, emerges solidly from the natural world. And, furthermore, Jeffers’ views deal more with Benatar’s first misanthropic premise concerning presumptive duty rather than his second, concerning ‘vast amounts’ of pain and suffering – for it is clear that while Jeffers finds the human condition lamentable, he sees no worth or duty in attempting to change it.
Importantly, neither Jeffers’ theories nor Leopold’s make calls for the complete end of human activity and therefore an immediate cessation of human procreation. Rather they, like many varieties of ecoholism and deep ecology, call instead for a modified nature of interaction with the land, and actually posit the presence of humankind as one more integral (if not central) constituent of a greater collective natural order which ought to be preserved and respected.
Muir’s theories alone offer a compelling bid for inclusion in Benatar’s misanthropic addition to his greater anti-natalist argument. Where Jeffers and Leopold advocated balance, Muir makes it clear that the human presence exists as a scourge on the natural world. Jeffers and Leopold would both be likely to advocate limited human interference; Muir would be far more likely to advocate a complete lack thereof, as with Yellowstone, where he desired as little human presence as possible.
As noted, then, the call for an extension of ethical structures to the environment does not fit seamlessly into Benatar’s broader arguments (as illustrated by the analyses of Jeffers and Leopold). There does exist, however, limited potential for a specific variety of new environmental thought. In this sense, Muir’s nontraditional, non-anthropocentric ethical theory would certainly find a useful home in Benatar’s misanthropic argument – and serve to substantiate his greater claims there regarding the harms effected by humankind, not only on other humans and animals but now, also, on the environment in virtue of itself.
[i] Benatar, pp. 85.
[ii] Here it becomes necessary to note that Benatar’s second premise entails a crucial ambiguity; does he refer to an on-balance harm effected by the presence of humanity, or a net harm? That is to say, he never distinguishes between the net effect of the human presence (allowing that the race may effect some ‘good’ in addition to some ‘bad’) and the simple consideration of only the ‘bad’. The difference yields two very different conclusions. For the sake of this paper and the plausibility of Benatar’s argument, we may assume that his utilization of ‘vast’ marks an implicit premise; that we have a (presumptive) duty to avoid a net negative presence. The flaw lies with Benatar’s presentation rather than his logic.
[iii] Benatar, pp. 79.
[iv] Leopold, “The Sand County Almanac,” pp. 189.
[v] Leopold, pp. 171.
[vi] Leopold, pp. 189.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Bartee, pp. 75.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Bartee, p. 74.
[xii] Bartee, pp. 93.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Bartee, pp. 102.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Muir, pp. 19.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
Teatum Crowe 