Comparing Hiroshima and Antinatalism

Many years ago, the US government dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The ethics of this is controversial with some saying it is murder of many innocent lives. Others claim that the dropping of the bomb forced the Japanese government to surrender thereby stopping the war early and preventing more lives from being killed.

Regardless of whether the dropping of the atom bomb is justified or not, there are interesting similarities and differences to antinatalism.

When a human (or life in general) is born, it causes suffering to others. To life is to cause suffering. We only need to look at eg meat eating. When a human eats meat, it imposes suffering on an animal. However, there is more. When a human drives a car, it causes pollution, which causes global warming and therefore imposes suffering on future generations. Not only does life cause suffering but life can experience suffering. More life means more suffering.

Similar to the logic of stopping the Japanese government from continuing the war and therefore causing more suffering, antinatalism stops life from existing therefore preventing more humans from being born and causing more suffering.

There are important differences between Hiroshima and antinatalism. Antinatalism is painless. When you do not procreate, your child does not suffer because it never exists. It is impossible to suffer if you don't exist. However, when an atom bomb is dropped on people, there is suffering. Those at the centre of the blast may be incinerated instantly and their pain may not be great, but the radioactivity causes illness and deformities even in babies. There are many pictures of Japanese babies being born deformed in the aftermath of Hiroshima.

To justify Hiroshima is to justify murder as a preventative tool to end suffering whereas antinatalism achieves the same outcome but is painless.

Furthmore, the Japanese people and the Japanese government are separate entities. To punish the Japanese people for the actions of the Japanese government is ethically analogous to raping a serial killer's daughter and threatening to kill her if the serial killer does not stop murdering others. The daughter and serial killer are two different individuals even though they belong to the same family and threat of harm on one influences the behaviour of another. If Hiroshima is ethically justified then it logically follows that rape and death threats of a child is justified if it influences another person to not cause more suffering.

As mentioned before, antinatalism has the same positive outcome but none of the negative effects. If the serial killer is never born, he cannot murder others

Subprime Crisis and Japanese Banking Crisis

I am starting to worry that the Subprime Crisis in America may play out similarly to the Japanese Banking Crisis. In Japan, property prices and stock prices were rising rapidly until about 1990 when both crashed. The Nikkei 225 has not recovered to this day, as you can see on the graph above, which I obtained from Wikipedia. What this teaches is that the future is uncertain and that stock markets don't necessarily go up in the long run. One could argue that in the future the Japanese stock market will recover, but 18 years of stagnation for me is sufficient evidence to disprove the assertion that stock markets always go up in the long run. It reminds me of what economist John Maynard Keynes said: "In the long run we are all dead."

Some argue that in America the S&P500 always goes up in the long run and historical data proves this. Indeed it does, but before 1990 we could say the same thing about the Nikkei 225. Who is to say that the credit crunch in America now won't produce the same stagnation for the next 10 to 20 years that we saw in Japan?

The Subprime Crisis and the Japanese Banking Crisis were both similar in that they were triggered by a stock market and property market bubble that popped and resulting in a drying up of liquidity as banks refused to lend. The response of regulators in both Japan and the US were similar in that they both tried to restore liquidity by lowering interest rates. Regardless of the regulators' intentions to prop up the banks, most were too scared to lend.