Every Cradle is a Grave: Part 2

A Response to Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry is an undiscovered gem of the 21st century, who wrote Every Cradle is a Grave. There, she began by saying:

It is very immoral, I will argue, to have babies or to otherwise create aware beings. I will also argue that suicide is not wrong or a product of mental illness, but an ethically privileged, rational response to the badness of life.

Last time, we explored a fraction of the arguments Perry made which show that, at least for a subsection of people, life is genuinely bad. The naive view, espoused by Bryan Caplan, is that life must be wonderful, because so few people choose suicide. But as Perry shows, there are barriers to suicide that prevent people from choosing that option even when they might otherwise wish to: suicide is not easy.

Instead, we can see from the way many people behave in ways that are insensitive to risk, trading away their burdensome existence on the off chance of getting a future worth living for. Although it’s hard to say how many people experience life as a burden, there is some evidence for this number being around 2%.

Last time, I said this is all Perry needs to drive her argument. Now I’ll explain why.

Harm Outweighs Help

Instead of appealing to a moral system like virtue ethics or utilitarianism, Perry relies on is the psychological framework uncovered by psychologists like Johnathan Heidt.¹ Haidt claims there are six moral foundations:

• Care/Harm

• Fairness/Cheating

• Loyalty/Betrayal

• Authority/Subversion

• Sanctity/Degradation, and

• Liberty/Oppression

This framework is definitely not my favorite. It’s already complicated with six foundations, yet virtues like truthfulness, responsibility, and bravery are unrepresented there, and I doubt it’s because they don’t exist as genuine moral drives throughout the human population. Still, it has some basis in empirical science, and because of this it at least provides some grounds to discuss ethics—at least, ethics as understood and experienced by people alive today.

Perry bases the majority of her arguments on the care/harm axis. What Perry argues is that, to the extent that we have an obligation to care for others, we have a much stronger obligation not to harm them. For instance, say you went up to a stranger, punched her in the face, and then handed her $20. Most people would consider this immoral, even if you upped the payment to $100 or $200. Perhaps if the woman agreed to this, it might be all right, but that’s not the scenario, here. The scenario is simple: You found a random woman on the street, punched her in the face, then gave her money.

That most people intuitively believe you would be wrong to do this showcases Perry’s claim that negatives are more morally salient than positives—that causing harm is worse than being nice or generous or friendly or whatever else.

So, apply this principle to human life. If you are going to give someone life, you can’t ask their permission beforehand. The very best you can do is nurture them, guide them, help them, keep them safe, and train them up so that they can live a good life until they someday die.

Yet no matter what you do, creating life dooms that life to death, and death is a harm. Perry supports a person’s choice to commit suicide, precisely because it is a choice. But as with the scenario of the woman above, giving a person life destined to end in death without their consent is a different matter. If she agrees to let you punch her in the face for $20 (or whatever) then this doesn’t seem like nearly as much of a problem, because that’s a choice she can make. But creating any life means that necessarily that life will undergo the inevitable harm of death, and there is no way to ask the person beforehand if they have your permission to do this.

We may add, further, that creating a person who goes on to live happily for a while before going on to die is the most positive outcome to be considered. Many people are created, and then—either because their parents divorce, or die, or lose their minds, or simply abandon their offspring—after being created, no one sees that they live good lives. And indeed, many people are born to loving parents, and still end up with tragic lives due to unforeseeable accidents, or to medical or psychological conditions, or to the ordinary vicissitudes of life. 2% may only be a rough guess for the number of people like this. Maybe it should be 1%, or 0.5%; maybe it should be 5%. But whatever it is, this is the number of people who are harmed not only during their eventual death, but simply by being alive.

The Life and Times of An Adorable Kitten

We’ve been breeding cats. Anyone who’s ever spent a significant amount of time around intact (non-spayed, non-neutered) cats will know this can be a trying experience, but we wanted kittens. And finally mother cat produced a tiny litter of one—I was the one who first discovered the newborn, when her chirping yips awoke me in the night. Mother Cat needed a bit of encouragement with nursing, but eventually they settled down into a little canopied bed my wife made for them with a blanket, and we put our own space heater in their room to keep the little one comfortable.

For about a month, Yip was a happy addition to our household. The children took turns holding her, and as she grew she started crawling out of her bed and trundling around the room. She loved climbing over our feet, and raced towards the door whenever my wife came to check on them—my wife was Yip’s favorite. It was my wife’s job to set up a Facebook page to find prospective buyers, but she put it off, and put it off.

And then, last Sunday, we found the kitten lying on her side. We checked her over, and her little body was cold to the touch, but we couldn’t find any obvious problems, and set her back in her bed. Occasionally her little yelps would sound when Mother Cat would try to leave, and we hurried her back in, hoping that with her mother’s care, whatever it was that happened might be mended.

A few hours later, she died.

Because this happened while I was writing these posts about Sarah Perry’s ideas, it prompted careful reflection. If we drop an apple off of a building, it will fall to the ground below. We may like to think that what happens after that isn’t our fault, and it’s easy to say its literally out of our hands now. While the apple’s in the air, these arguments may have some semblance of plausibility to them, but the sharp stop at the concrete ground will change all that. By dropping an apple off of the building, we are responsible for the way it ends up on the ground.

Creating new life is a lot like this. We drop our children off of the roof, and while they’re in the air, they’re doing fine. Because they fall for years and years—usually, for longer than we’re in the air ourselves—it’s easy for us to forget the way our own choices were responsible for the way they themselves will end up on the ground. But our pets fall faster than we do, and little Yip hit the ground almost right away.

For us, Perry’s idea that every cradle is a grave is not merely academic. We may think this kitten died because she had a congenital defect, or because her mother wasn’t very good at caring for her, or even because of some neglect on our part. But none of that is true. Even if she had been perfectly healthy, even if her mother had been excellent, even if we had instantly whisked her to the vet and spared no expense on her behalf, all of this would merely postpone the inevitable. This kitten died because she lived, and all living things die.

This kitten died because we made her exist.

The World is an Evil Place

All of this forms what I think many people would regard as a strong argument. But Perry goes further than this.

We may like to think of ourselves as being divorced from the animal kingdom, but we are still animals, and as Perry points out, the suffering of animals in he wild is unimaginable. She gives a couple of examples:

Firstly, she asks us to consider the Eurasian coot, which hatches multiple chicks, feeds them for a while, and then suddenly singles out one, pecking it until it starves to death. Then the mother singles out another of her children, repeating the abuse until only two or three chicks are left. The way Perry uses the word “abuse” gave me pause, here—but what other word should she have used, really? This is child abuse, and it’s very normal in the animal kingdom.

She also mentions pelicans, where a similar process occurs, but this time initiated by the siblings, who fight among themselves until only one chick survives. Pelicans are actually quite tame in this regard; baby shark thrashes around and devours his siblings in the womb. (Perhaps that’s what “doot doo, doo doot do doot” means.)

Perry points out that highly regarded public figures like Sir David Attenborough have an answer for this; Attenborough grants this might be a little bit cruel, but “it’s all for the best—in especially good years, a pelican or a coot can raise an extra chick or two. So torturing baby birds to death serves the purpose of increasing the genetic fitness of the parents by a little bit.”

I think the Attenboroughan attitude is very interesting; he justifies torture in the natural world by appealing to the process of natural selection, like this:

1. The evolutionary process is good. (Premise)

2. The evolutionary process (at least in this instance) requires torture. (Premise)

3. So (at least in this instance), torture is OK. (Conclusion)

Perry reverses the argument; see if her way makes more sense:

1. Torture is always immoral. (Premise)

2. The evolutionary process (at least in this instance) requires torture. (Premise)

3. So, the evolutionary process is immoral. (Conclusion)

They both agree on point 2, but the foundational premise of Attenborough’s argument is exactly the thing that Perry’s conclusion dispels. We can’t have both arguments. If we see the torture of innocent creatures as necessarily blameworthy, then, Mother Nature is worthy of blame:

Most people of our era have a strong, visceral inclination against cruelty to animals, just as we do against cruelty to human children. We judge animal suffering to be bad. Watching a nature documentary, we hope the impala can evade the lion, yet we also hope the lion cubs get fed somehow. But watch what the mind does when considering these two contradictory hopes. Does it come to a coherent resolution of the problem? Or does it just shrug its shoulders and spackle the problem over with some bullshit about the circle of life? Life must go on… end of thought.

What Perry is pointing out here is the way life, by definition, according to its most fundamental, innermost essence, is immorality. The Eurasian coot could be defined as “a creature which perpetuates itself through the process of child abuse.” The shark could be defined as “a cannibal and fratricide.” Nature could be defined then as “the architect of child abuse, cannibalism, and fratricide.”

One thing that stuck out for me in Perry’s book is the way she refers to evolution as our alien creator. I think this is very revealing. To her, the natural world is something vast and awful on a scale beyond comprehension. The mind shies away from the awful reality of biological life; by Perry’s account, we are unable to come to a coherent resolution to the hunger, terror, and pain which permeates the evolutionary process. But this is all seen through the impersonal frame of science, and Perry doesn’t want us to simply regard the subject with a cool, objective detachment. So she asks us, for a moment, to shift our frame of thought from a scientific one into a religious one, where the problem becomes even more stark. She gives us this excerpt from Genesis:

“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:21, emphasis added.)

Perry argues that there is no way any of this could be regarded as good. If we have to regard life as something created on purpose by a conscious, thinking being, we would recoil from such a Creator in horror.

And her argument could even be much, much stronger. Common male housecats stimulate their mates to ovulate by biting their necks and piercing them with barbs, and numerous species, such as Harpactea sadistica, reproduce through a process called traumatic insemination. The Xenomorph from Alien may seem a nightmarish aberration which crawls forth from a mephitic womb that could only be produced by blasphemous cycles of monstrous evolution; a creature whose very existence depends upon its ability to impregnate living beings with its abhorrent offspring, but well educated readers will know it’s hardly unusual—it was based on the common parasitoid wasp.

Though she doesn’t dwell on it for long, this is the bedrock of her argument. Underlying everything else—her argument that many people wish they had never been born, that suicide can be rational, that creating life may offer the possibility for joy, but only with the necessary harm of death—underlying all of this is the lurking feeling that life by its very essence is horrible. Evolution does not want us to be happy, to feel joy, to love, to imagine. Insofar as it can be said to want anything, it simply wants us to spread our genes. It does not care how.

How Can These Challenges Be Answered?

By now I hope you can appreciate why I think Sarah Perry has a position that deserves to be addressed. It isn’t just “Please legalize suicide,” or “let’s all have fewer kids.” Throughout history, people have been troubled by the nature of life on Earth. The Cathari believed that the God of the Old Testament locked our spirits into a fleshly, worldly prison when He created the world, and that Jesus Christ was a savior who came to liberate us all. They renounced the flesh, and urged their adherents to avoid bearing children.

But condemnation of life on Earth is much older than this; the Buddhists have been saying something similar for over two millennia. And Perry fits cleanly within this tradition, as the modern equivalent of Prince Siddhartha, telling everyone in the modern world what they must realize, if they look directly at it without flinching: Life is suffering. But her solution isn’t to seek the nothingness of Nirvana; the Buddha lived in a time when people believed that they would return to the world through a spiritual process of reincarnation, for which Nirvana was the only escape. For Perry, living in the modern day, there’s no need to escape the cycles of reincarnation—or rather, for her, the cycle of reincarnation is a biological one, which can only be broken by a principled refusal to force incarnation upon others.

This is her admonition to us at the top of her discontinued blog: “Enjoy each other and don’t create new life.”

And yet, I did anyway, and I’m encouraging my children to do likewise.

After seeing how much I respect Perry’s argument, one may naturally ask me—How? Why?

My answer will come not primarily in a rejection or refutation of what Perry has said. Though I can see mistakes or hasty conclusions there, I don’t think the problem can truly be solved by rejecting Perry’s ideas, but rather in a refinement and extension of her understanding. I insist that there is a clear and compelling solution to her problem, but it can only be found by moving forward, through her understanding and beyond. This will take more time and space than I have now, but I will give an answer next week. Until then, take care, and let me know what you think of Perry’s work in the comments below.

1. Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., & Mooijman, M. (2018). Moral foundations theory. Atlas of moral psychology, 211.