Optimism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism 

Berlin Wall Monument (west view). The west side of the wall is covered with graffiti that reflects hope and optimism.

Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled with water to the halfway point: an optimist is said to see the glass as half full, while a pessimist sees the glass as half empty.

The term derives from the Latin optimum, meaning "best". Being optimistic, in the typical sense of the word, is defined as expecting the best possible outcome from any given situation. This is usually referred to in psychology as dispositional optimism. It thus reflects a belief that future conditions will work out for the best. For this reason, it is seen as a trait that fosters resilience in the face of stress.

Theories of optimism include dispositional models, and models of explanatory style. Methods to measure optimism have been developed within both theoretical systems, such as various forms of the Life Orientation Test, for the original definition of optimism, or the Attributional Style Questionnaire designed to test optimism in terms of explanatory style.

Variation in optimism and pessimism is somewhat heritable and reflects biological trait systems to some degree. It is also influenced by environmental factors, including family environment, with some suggesting it can be learned. Optimism may also be linked to health.

Psychological optimism

Dispositional optimism

An optimist and a pessimist, Vladimir Makovsky, 1893

Researchers operationalize the term differently depending on their research. As with any trait characteristic, there are several ways to evaluate optimism, such as the Life Orientation Test (LOT). This 8-item scale was developed in 1985 by Michael Scheier and Charles Carver.

Dispositional optimism and pessimism are typically assessed by asking people whether they expect future outcomes to be beneficial or negative (see below). The LOT returns separate optimism and pessimism scores for each individual. Behaviourally, these two scores correlate around r = 0.5. Optimistic scores on this scale predict better outcomes in relationships, higher social status, and reduced loss of well-being following adversity. Health preserving behaviors are associated with optimism while health-damaging behaviors are associated with pessimism.

Some have argued that optimism is the opposite end of a single dimension with pessimism, with any distinction between them reflecting factors such as social desirability. Confirmatory modelling, however, supports a two-dimensional model and the two dimensions predict different outcomes. Genetic modelling confirms this independence, showing that pessimism and optimism are inherited as independent traits, with the typical correlation between them emerging as a result of a general well-being factor and family environment influences. It is suggested that patients with high dispositional optimism appear to have stronger immune system since it buffers it against psychological stressors. Optimists appear to live longer.

Explanatory style

Explanatory style is distinct from dispositional theories of optimism. While related to life-orientation measures of optimism, attributional style theory suggests that dispositional optimism and pessimism are reflections of the ways people explain events, i.e., that attributions cause these dispositions. Here, an optimist would view defeat as temporary, does not apply to other cases, and is not considered their fault. Measures of attributional style distinguish three dimensions among explanations for events: Whether these explanations draw on internal versus external causes; whether the causes are viewed as stable versus unstable; and whether explanations apply globally versus being situationally specific. In addition, the measures distinguish attributions for positive and for negative events.

An optimistic person attributes internal, stable, and global explanations to good things. Pessimistic explanations attribute these traits of stability, globality, and internality to negative events, such as difficulty in relationships. Models of Optimistic and Pessimistic attributions show that attributions themselves are a cognitive style – individuals who tend to focus on the global explanations do so for all types of events, and the styles correlate among each other. In addition to this, individuals vary in how optimistic their attributions are for good events, and on how pessimistic their attributions are for bad events, but these two traits of optimism and pessimism are un-correlated.

There is much debate about the relationship between explanatory style and optimism. Some researchers argue that optimism is simply the lay-term for what researchers know as explanatory style. More commonly, it is found that explanatory style is quite distinct from dispositional optimism, and the two should not be used interchangeably as they are marginally correlated at best. More research is required to "bridge" or further differentiate these concepts.

Origins

Optimistic Personality (modified from)

As with all psychological traits, differences in both dispositional optimism and pessimism and in attributional style are heritable. Both optimism and pessimism are strongly influenced by environmental factors, including family environment. It has been suggested that optimism may be indirectly inherited as a reflection of underlying heritable traits such as intelligence, temperament, and alcoholism. There is evidence from twin studies that show, for instance, that the inherited component of the dispositional optimism is about 25 percent, making this trait a stable personality dimension and a predictor of life outcomes. Its genetic origin, which interacts with environmental influences and other risks, also determines the vulnerability to depression across the lifespan. Many theories assume optimism can be learned, and research supports a modest role of family-environment acting to raise (or lower) optimism and lower (or raise) neuroticism and pessimism.

Work utilising brain imaging and biochemistry suggests that at a biological trait level, optimism and pessimism reflect brain systems specialised for the tasks of processing and incorporating beliefs regarding good and bad information respectively.

Assessment

Life Orientation Test

The Life Orientation Test (LOT) was designed by Scheier and Carver (1985) to assess dispositional optimism – expecting positive or negative outcomes, and is one of the more popular tests of optimism and pessimism. This was also often used in early studies that examine the effects of these dispositions in health-related domains. Scheier and Carver's initial research, which surveyed college students, found that optimistic participants were less likely to show an increase in symptoms like dizziness, muscle soreness, fatigue, blurred vision, and other physical complaints than pessimistic respondents.

There are eight items and four filler items in the test. Four are positive items (e.g. "In uncertain times, I usually expect the best") and four are negative items e.g. "If something can go wrong for me, it will." The LOT has been revised twice—once by the original creators (LOT-R) and also by Chang, Maydeu-Olivares, and D'Zurilla as the Extended Life Orientation Test (ELOT). The Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R: Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994) consists of six items, each scored on a 5-point scale from "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree" and four filler items. Half of the coded items are phrased in an optimistic way while the other half in a pessimistic way. In comparison with its previous iteration, LOT-R offers good internal consistency overtime although there are item overlaps, making the correlation between the LOT and LOT-R extremely high.

Attributional Style Questionnaire

This Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ: Peterson et al. 1982) is based on the explanatory style model of optimism. Subjects read a list of six positive and negative events (e.g. "you have been looking for a job unsuccessfully for some time"), and are asked to record a possible cause for the event. They then rate whether this is internal or external, stable or changeable, and global or local to the event. There are several modified versions of the ASQ including the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire (EASQ), the Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE), and the ASQ designed for testing the optimism of children.

Associations with health

Optimism and health are correlated moderately. Optimism has been shown to explain between 5–10% of the variation in the likelihood of developing some health conditions (correlation coefficients between .20 and .30), notably including cardiovascular disease, stroke, and depression.

The relationship between optimism and health has also been studied with regards to physical symptoms, coping strategies and negative affect for those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and fibromyalgia.

It has been found that among individuals with these diseases, optimists are not more likely than pessimists to report pain alleviation due to coping strategies, despite differences in psychological well-being between the two groups. A meta-analysis has confirmed the assumption that optimism is related to psychological well-being: "Put simply, optimists emerge from difficult circumstances with less distress than do pessimists." Furthermore, the correlation appears to be attributable to coping style: "That is, optimists seem intent on facing problems head-on, taking active and constructive steps to solve their problems; pessimists are more likely to abandon their effort to attain their goals."

Optimists may respond better to stress: pessimists have shown higher levels of cortisol (the "stress hormone") and trouble regulating cortisol in response to stressors. Another study by Scheier examined the recovery process for a number of patients that had undergone surgery. The study showed that optimism was a strong predictor of the rate of recovery. Optimists achieved faster results in "behavioral milestones" such as sitting in bed, walking around, etc. They also were rated by staff as having a more favorable physical recovery. In a 6-month later follow-up, it was found that optimists were quicker to resume normal activities.

Optimism and well-being

A number of studies have been done on optimism and psychological well-being. One 30 year study undertaken by Lee et al. (2019) assessed the overall optimism and longevity of cohorts of men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study and women from the Nurses’ Health Study. The study found a positive correlation between higher levels of optimism and exceptional longevity, which the study defined as a lifespan exceeding 85 years.

Another study conducted by Aspinwall and Taylor (1990) assessed incoming freshmen on a range of personality factors such as optimism, self-esteem, locus of self-control, etc. It was found that freshmen who scored high on optimism before entering college were reported to have lower levels of psychological distress than their more pessimistic peers, while controlling for the other personality factors. Over time, the more optimistic students were less stressed, less lonely, and less depressed than their pessimistic counterparts. Thus, this study suggests a strong link between optimism and psychological well-being.

In addition low optimism may help explain the association between caregivers' anger and reduced sense of vitality.

A recent meta-analysis of optimism supported past findings that optimism is positively correlated with life satisfaction, happiness, psychological and physical well-being and negatively correlated with depression and anxiety.

Seeking to explain the correlation, researchers find that optimists choose healthier lifestyles. For example, optimists smoke less, are more physically active, consume more fruit, vegetables and whole-grain bread, and are more moderate in alcohol consumption.

Translating association into modifiability

Research to date has demonstrated that optimists are less likely to have certain diseases or develop certain diseases over time. By comparison, research has not yet been able to demonstrate the ability to change an individual's level of optimism through psychological interventions, and thereby alter the course of disease or likelihood for development of disease. Though in that same vein, an article by Mayo Clinic argues steps to change self-talk from negative to positive may shift individuals from a negative to a more positive/optimistic outlook. Strategies claimed to be of value include surrounding oneself with positive people, identifying areas of change, practicing positive self-talk, being open to humor, and following a healthy lifestyle. There is also the notion of "learned optimism" in positive psychology, which holds that joy is a talent that can be cultivated and can be achieved through specific actions such as the challenging negative self talk or overcoming "learned helplessness". However, criticism against positive psychology argues that the field of positive psychology places too much importance on "upbeat thinking, while shunting challenging and difficult experiences to the side."

There are researchers in a study involving twins who found that optimism is largely inherited at birth. Along with the recognition that childhood experiences determine an individual's outlook, such studies demonstrate the genetic basis for optimism reinforces the recognized difficulty in changing or manipulating the direction of an adult's disposition from pessimist to optimist.

Philosophical optimism

One of the earliest forms of philosophical optimism was Socrates' theory of moral intellectualism, which formed part of the thinker's enlightenment model through the process of self-improvement. According to the philosopher, it is possible to attain virtuous life by leading and completing moral perfection that is attained through philosophical self-examination. He maintained that knowledge of moral truth is necessary and sufficient for leading a good life. In his philosophical investigations, Socrates followed a model that did not merely focus on the intellect or reason but a balanced practice that also consider the emotion as an important contributor to the richness of human experience.

Distinct from a disposition to believe that things will work out, there is a philosophical idea that, perhaps in ways that may not be fully comprehended, the present moment is in an optimum state. This view that all of nature - past, present, and future - operates by laws of optimization along the lines of Hamilton's principle in the realm of physics is countered by views such as idealism, realism, and philosophical pessimism. Philosophers often link the concept of optimism with the name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who held that we live in the best of all possible worlds (le meilleur des mondes possibles), or that God created a physical universe that applies the laws of physics. The concept was also reflected in an aspect of Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire's early philosophy, one that was based on Isaac Newton's view that described a divinely ordered human condition. This philosophy would also later emerge in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man.

Leibniz proposed that it was not in God's power to create a perfect world, but among possible worlds, he created the best. In one of his writings, he responded to the Blaise Pascal philosophy of awe and desperation in the face of the infinite by claiming that infinity should be celebrated. While Pascal advocated for making man's rational aspirations more humble, Leibniz was optimistic about the capacity of human reason to further extend itself.

This idea was mocked by Voltaire in his satirical novel Candide as baseless optimism of the sort exemplified by the beliefs of one of its characters Dr. Pangloss, which are the opposite of his fellow traveller Martin's pessimism and emphasis on free will. The optimistic position is also called Panglossianism and became an adjective for excessive, even stupendous, optimism. The phrase "panglossian pessimism" has been used to describe the pessimistic position that, since this is the best of all possible worlds, it is impossible for anything to get any better. Conversely, philosophical pessimism might be associated with an optimistic long-term view because it implies that no change for the worse is possible. Later, Voltaire found it difficult to reconcile Leibniz' optimism with human suffering as demonstrated by the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755 as well as the atrocities committed by the pre-revolutionary France against its people.

Optimalism

Philosophical optimalism, as defined by Nicholas Rescher, holds that this universe exists because it is better than the alternatives. While this philosophy does not exclude the possibility of a deity, it also does not require one, and is compatible with atheism. Rescher explained that the concept can stand on its own feet, arguing that there is no necessity to seeing optimalism realization as divinely instituted because it is a naturalistic theory in principle.

Psychological optimalism, as defined by the positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, means willingness to accept failure while remaining confident that success will follow, a positive attitude he contrasts with negative perfectionism. Perfectionism can be defined as a persistent compulsive drive toward unattainable goals and valuation based solely in terms of accomplishment. Perfectionists reject the realities and constraints of human ability. They cannot accept failures, delaying any ambitious and productive behavior in fear of failure again. This neuroticism can even lead to clinical depression and low productivity. As an alternative to negative perfectionism, Ben-Shahar suggests the adoption of optimalism. Optimalism allows for failure in pursuit of a goal, and expects that while the trend of activity is towards the positive, it is not necessary to always succeed while striving towards goals. This basis in reality prevents the optimalist from being overwhelmed in the face of failure.

Optimalists accept failures and also learn from them, which encourages further pursuit of achievement. Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar believes that Optimalists and Perfectionists show distinct different motives. Optimalists tend to have more intrinsic, inward desires, with a motivation to learn, while perfectionists are highly motivated by a need to consistently prove themselves worthy.

Optimalism has also been classified into two: product optimalism and process optimalism. The former is described as an outlook that looks to provide the realization of the best possible result while the latter looks for a maximization of the chances of achieving the best possible result. Others classify it either as full-scale, one that implies determinism, or weak determinism, which claims that we have the best laws and initial conditions. Some sources also distinguish the concept from optimism since it does not focus on how things are going well but on how things are going as well as possible.

Antinatalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism 

Antinatalism, or anti-natalism, is a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth. Antinatalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally wrong (some also recognize the procreation of other sentient beings as morally wrong). In scholarly and in literary writings, various ethical foundations have been presented for antinatalism. Some of the earliest surviving formulations of the idea that it would be better not to have been born come from ancient Greece. The term antinatalism is in opposition to the term natalism or pro-natalism, and was used probably for the first time as the name of the position by Théophile de Giraud in his book L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste.

Arguments

In religion

The teaching of the Buddha, among other Four Noble Truths and the beginning of Mahāvagga, is interpreted by Hari Singh Gour as follows:

Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death.

The Marcionites believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, angry demiurge, Yahweh. According to this teaching, people should oppose him, abandon his world, not create people, and trust in the good God of mercy, foreign and distant.

The Encratites observed that birth leads to death. In order to conquer death, people should desist from procreation: "not produce fresh fodder for death".

The Manichaeans, the Bogomils and the Cathars believed that procreation sentences the soul to imprisonment in evil matter. They saw procreation as an instrument of an evil god, demiurge, or of Satan that imprisons the divine element in the matter and thus causes the divine element to suffer.

Theodicy and anthropodicy

Julio Cabrera considers the issue of being a creator in relation to theodicy and argues that just as it is impossible to defend the idea of a good God as creator, it is also impossible to defend the idea of a good man as a creator. In parenthood, the human parent imitates the divine parent, in the sense that education could be understood as a form of pursuit of "salvation", the "right path" for a child. However, a human being could decide that it is better not to suffer at all than to suffer and be offered the later possibility of salvation from suffering. In Cabrera's opinion, evil is associated not with the lack of being, but with the suffering and dying of those that are alive. So, on the contrary, evil is only and obviously associated with being.

Karim Akerma, due to the moral problem of man as creator, introduces anthropodicy, a twin concept for theodicy. He is of the opinion that the less faith in the Almighty Creator-God there is, the more urgent the question of anthropodicy becomes. Akerma thinks that for those who want to lead ethical lives, the causation of suffering requires a justification. Man can no longer shed responsibility for the suffering that occurs by appealing to an imaginary entity that sets moral principles. For Akerma, antinatalism is a consequence of the collapse of theodicy endeavors and the failure of attempts to establish an anthropodicy. According to him, there is no metaphysics nor moral theory that can justify the production of new people, and therefore anthropodicy is indefensible as well as theodicy.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe viewed humans as a biological paradox. According to him, consciousness has become over-evolved in humans, thereby making us incapable of functioning normally like other animals: cognition gives us more than we can carry. Our frailness and insignificance in the cosmos are visible to us. We want to live, and yet because of how we have evolved, we are the only species whose members are conscious that they are destined to die. We are able to analyze the past and the future, both our situation and that of others, as well as to imagine the suffering of billions of people (as well as of other living beings) and feel compassion for their suffering. We yearn for justice and meaning in a world that lacks both. This ensures that the lives of conscious individuals are tragic. We have desires: spiritual needs that reality is unable to satisfy, and our species still exists only because we limit our awareness of what that reality actually entails. Human existence amounts to a tangled network of defense mechanisms, which can be observed both individually and socially, in our everyday behavior patterns. According to Zapffe, humanity should cease this self-deception, and the natural consequence would be its extinction by abstaining from procreation.

Negative ethics

Julio Cabrera proposes a concept of "negative ethics" in opposition to "affirmative" ethics, meaning ethics that affirm being. He describes procreation as manipulation and harm, a unilateral and non-consensual sending of a human being into a painful, dangerous and morally impeding situation.

Cabrera regards procreation as an ontological issue of total manipulation: one's very being is manufactured and used; in contrast to intra-worldly cases where someone is placed in a harmful situation. In the case of procreation, no chance of defense against that act is even available. According to Cabrera: manipulation in procreation is visible primarily in the unilateral and non-consensual nature of the act, which makes procreation per se inevitably asymmetrical; be it a product of forethought, or a product of neglect. It is always connected with the interests (or disinterests) of other humans, not the created human. In addition, Cabrera points out that in his view the manipulation of procreation is not limited to the act of creation itself, but it is continued in the process of raising the child, during which parents gain great power over the child's life, who is shaped according to their preferences and for their satisfaction. He emphasizes that although it is not possible to avoid manipulation in procreation, it is perfectly possible to avoid procreation itself and that then no moral rule is violated.

Cabrera believes that the situation in which one is placed through procreation, human life, is structurally negative in that its constitutive features are inherently adverse. The most prominent of them are, according to Cabrera, the following:

1. The being acquired by a human at birth is decreasing (or "decaying"), in the sense of a being that begins to end since its very emergence, following a single and irreversible direction of deterioration and decline, of which complete consummation can occur at any moment between some minutes and around one hundred years.
2. From the moment they come into being, humans are affected by three kinds of frictions: physical pain (in the form of illnesses, accidents, and natural catastrophes to which they are always exposed); discouragement (in the form of "lacking the will", or the "mood" or the "spirit", to continue to act, from mild taedium vitae to serious forms of depression), and finally, exposure to the aggressions of other humans (from gossip and slander to various forms of discrimination, persecution, and injustice), aggressions that we too can inflict on others, also submitted, like us, to the three kinds of friction.
3. To defend themselves against (a) and (b), human beings are equipped with mechanisms of creation of positive values (ethical, aesthetic, religious, entertaining, recreational, as well as values contained in human realizations of all kinds), which humans must keep constantly active. All positive values that appear within human life are reactive and palliative; they are introduced by the permanent, anxious, and uncertain struggle against the decaying life and its three kinds of friction.

Cabrera calls the set of these characteristics A–C the "terminality of being". He is of the opinion that a huge number of humans around the world cannot withstand this steep struggle against the terminal structure of their being, which leads to destructive consequences for them and others: suicides, major or minor mental illnesses, or aggressive behavior. He accepts that life may be – thanks to human's own merits and efforts – bearable and even very pleasant (though not for all, due to the phenomenon of moral impediment), but also considers it problematic to bring someone into existence so that they may attempt to make their life pleasant by struggling against the difficult and oppressive situation we place them in by procreating. It seems more reasonable, according to Cabrera, simply not to put them in that situation, since the results of their struggle are always uncertain.

Cabrera believes that in ethics, including affirmative ethics, there is one overarching concept which he calls the "Minimal Ethical Articulation", "MEA" (previously translated into English as "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" and "FEA"): the consideration of other people's interests, not manipulating them and not harming them. Procreation for him is an obvious violation of MEA – someone is manipulated and placed in a harmful situation as a result of that action. In his view, values included in the MEA are widely accepted by affirmative ethics, they are even their basics, and if approached radically, they should lead to the refusal of procreation.

For Cabrera, the worst thing in human life and by extension in procreation is what he calls "moral impediment": the structural impossibility of acting in the world without harming or manipulating someone at some given moment. This impediment does not occur because of an intrinsic "evil" of human nature, but because of the structural situation in which the human being has always been. In this situation, we are cornered by various kinds of pain, space for action is limited, and different interests often conflict with each other. We do not have to have bad intentions to treat others with disregard; we are compelled to do so in order to survive, pursue our projects, and escape from suffering. Cabrera also draws attention to the fact that life is associated with the constant risk of one experiencing strong physical pain, which is common in human life, for example as a result of a serious illness, and maintains that the mere existence of such possibility impedes us morally, as well as that because of it, we can at any time lose, as a result of its occurrence, the possibility of a dignified, moral functioning even to a minimal extent.

Kantian imperative

Julio Cabrera, David Benatar and Karim Akerma all argue that procreation is contrary to Immanuel Kant's practical imperative (according to Kant, a man should never be used as merely a means to an end, but always be treated as an end in himself). They argue that a person can be created for the sake of his parents or other people, but that it is impossible to create someone for his own good; and that therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people. Heiko Puls argues that Kant's considerations regarding parental duties and human procreation, in general, imply arguments for an ethically justified antinatalism. Kant, however, according to Puls, rejects this position in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.

Impossibility of consent

Seana Shiffrin, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner and Asheel Singh argue that procreation is morally problematic because of the impossibility of obtaining consent from the human who will be brought into existence.

Shiffrin lists four factors that in her opinion make the justification for having hypothetical consent to procreation a problem:

1. great harm is not at stake if the action is not taken;
2. if the action is taken, the harms suffered by the created person can be very severe;
3. a person cannot escape the imposed condition without very high cost (suicide is often a physically, emotionally, and morally excruciating option);
4. the hypothetical consent procedure is not based on the values of the person who will bear the imposed condition.

Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner argue that when we want to significantly affect someone by our action and it is not possible to get their consent, then the default should be to not take such action. The exception is, according to them, actions by which we want to prevent greater harm of a person (for example, pushing someone out of the way of a falling piano). However, in their opinion, such actions certainly do not include procreation, because before taking this action a person does not exist.

Asheel Singh emphasizes that one does not have to think that coming into existence is always an overall harm in order to recognize antinatalism as a correct view. In his opinion, it is enough to think that there is no moral right to inflict serious, preventable harms upon others without their consent.

Death as a harm

Marc Larock presents a view which he calls "deprivationalism". According to this view:

• Each person has an interest in acquiring a new satisfied preference.
• Whenever a person is deprived of a new satisfied preference this violates an interest and thus causes harm.

Larock argues that if a person is deprived of an infinite number of new satisfied preferences, they suffer an infinite number of harms and that such deprivation is death to which procreation leads.

All of us are brought into existence, without our consent, and over the course of our lives, we are acquainted with a multitude of goods. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of good each of us will have in our lives. Eventually, each of us will die and we will be permanently cut off from the prospect of any further good. Existence, viewed in this way, seems to be a cruel joke.

Larock believes that it is not correct to neutralize his view by stating that death is also an infinitely great benefit for us, because it protects us from the infinite number of new frustrated preferences. He proposes a thought experiment in which we have two people, Mary and Tom. The first person, Mary, dies at the age of forty years as a result of complications caused by a degenerative disease. Mary would live for some more time, if not for the complications, but she would only experience bad things in her life, not good ones. The second person, Tom, dies at the same age from the same illness, but in his case, the disease is at such a stage of development that his body would no longer be able to function. According to Larock, it is bad when someone, like in the case of Tom, encounters the impossibility of continuing to derive good things from his life; everybody's life leads to such a point if someone lives long enough and our intuitions do not tell us that this is generally good or even neutral. Therefore, we should reject the view that death is also an infinitely great benefit: because we think that Tom has been unlucky. In the case of Mary, our intuitions tell us that her misfortune is not as great as Tom's misfortune. Her misfortune is reduced by the fact that death saved her from the real prospect of experiencing bad things. We do not have the same intuition in Tom's case. No evil or good future was physically possible for him. Larock thinks that while the impossibility of experiencing future good things seems to us to be a harm, the mere lack of a logical possibility of experiencing future bad things does not seem to be a compensatory benefit to us. If so, there would be nothing strange in recognizing that Tom had not suffered any misfortune. But he is a victim of misfortune, just like Mary. However, Mary's misfortune does not seem to be so great because her death prevents great suffering. Larock is of the opinion that most people will see both cases in this way. This conclusion is supposed to lead to the fact that we recognize that there is an asymmetry between the harms and benefits that death brings.

Larock summarizes his view as follows:

The existence of every moral patient in our world rests on a crude moral miscalculation. As I see it, non-procreation is the best means of rectifying this mistake.

Negative utilitarianism

Negative utilitarianism argues that minimizing suffering has greater moral importance than maximizing happiness.

Hermann Vetter agrees with the assumptions of Jan Narveson:

1. There is no moral obligation to produce a child even if we could be sure that it will be very happy throughout its life.
2. There is a moral obligation not to produce a child if it can be foreseen that it will be unhappy.

However, he disagrees with the conclusion that Narveson draws:

3. In general – if it can be foreseen neither that the child will be unhappy nor that it will bring disutility upon others – there is no duty to have or not to have a child.

Instead, he presents the following decision-theoretic matrix:

	Child will be more or less happy	Child will be more or less unhappy
Produce the child	No duty fulfilled or violated	Duty violated
Do not produce the child	No duty fulfilled or violated	Duty fulfilled

Based on this, he concludes that we should not create people:

It is seen immediately that the act "do not produce the child" dominates the act "produce the child" because it has equally good consequences as the other act in one case and better consequences in the other. So it is to be preferred to the other act as long as we cannot exclude with certainty the possibility that the child will be more or less unhappy; and we never can. So we have, instead of (3), the far-reaching consequence: (3') In any case, it is morally preferable not to produce a child.

Karim Akerma argues that utilitarianism requires the least metaphysical assumptions and is, therefore, the most convincing ethical theory. He believes that negative utilitarianism is the right one because the good things in life do not compensate for the bad things; first and foremost, the best things do not compensate for the worst things such as, for example, the experiences of terrible pain, the agonies of the wounded, sick or dying. In his opinion, we also rarely know what to do to make people happy, but we know what to do so that people do not suffer: it is enough that they are not created. What is important for Akerma in ethics is the striving for the fewest suffering people (ultimately no one), not striving for the happiest people, which, according to him, takes place at the expense of immeasurable suffering.

Bruno Contestabile cites the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this story, the existence of the utopian city of Omelas and the good fortune of its inhabitants depend on the suffering of one child who is tortured in an isolated place and who cannot be helped. The majority accepts this state of affairs and stays in the city, but there are those who do not agree with it, who do not want to participate in it and thus they "walk away from Omelas". Contestabile draws a parallel here: for Omelas to exist, the child must be tortured, and in the same way, the existence of our world is related to the fact that someone is constantly harmed. According to Contestabile, antinatalists can be seen just as "the ones who walk away from Omelas", who do not accept such a world, and who do not approve of its perpetuation. He poses the question: is all happiness able to compensate for the extreme suffering of even one person?

David Benatar

Asymmetry between pleasure and pain

David Benatar argues that there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure and pain:

1. the presence of pain is bad;
2. the presence of pleasure is good;
3. the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone;
4. the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

Scenario A (X exists)	Scenario B (X never exists)
1. Presence of pain (Bad)	3. Absence of pain (Good)
2. Presence of pleasure (Good)	4. Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

Regarding procreation, the argument follows that coming into existence generates both good and bad experiences, pain and pleasure, whereas not coming into existence entails neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain is good, the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.

Benatar explains the above asymmetry using four other asymmetries that he considers quite plausible:

• We have a moral obligation not to create unhappy people and we have no moral obligation to create happy people. The reason why we think there is a moral obligation not to create unhappy people is that the presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and the absence of the suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). By contrast, the reason we think there is no moral obligation to create happy people is that although their pleasure would be good for them, the absence of pleasure when they do not come into existence will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
• It is strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide to create them, and it is not strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide not to create them. That the child may be happy is not a morally important reason to create them. By contrast, that the child may be unhappy is an important moral reason not to create them. If it were the case that the absence of pleasure is bad even if someone does not exist to experience its absence, then we would have a significant moral reason to create a child and to create as many children as possible. And if it were not the case that the absence of pain is good even if someone does not exist to experience this good, then we would not have a significant moral reason not to create a child.
• Someday we can regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we created them – a person can be unhappy and the presence of their pain would be a bad thing. But we will never feel regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we did not create them – a person will not be deprived of happiness, because he or she will never exist, and the absence of happiness will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
• We feel sadness by the fact that somewhere people come into existence and suffer, and we feel no sadness by the fact that somewhere people did not come into existence in a place where there are happy people. When we know that somewhere people came into existence and suffer, we feel compassion. The fact that on some deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and suffer is good. This is because the absence of pain is good even when there is not someone who is experiencing this good. On the other hand, we do not feel sadness by the fact that on some deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and are not happy. This is because the absence of pleasure is bad only when someone exists to be deprived of this good.

Suffering experienced by descendents

According to Benatar, by creating a child, we are responsible not only for this child's suffering, but we may also be co-responsible for the suffering of further offspring of this child.

Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair's cumulative descendants over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does not lie with the original couple because each new generation faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendants. Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can hardly expect one's descendants to do so.

Consequences of procreation

Benatar cites statistics showing where the creation of people leads. It is estimated that:

• more than fifteen million people are thought to have died from natural disasters in the last 1,000 years,
• approximately 20,000 people die every day from hunger,
• an estimated 840 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition,
• between 541 and 1912, it is estimated that over 102 million people succumbed to plague,
• the 1918 influenza epidemic killed 50 million people,
• nearly 11 million people die every year from infectious diseases,
• malignant neoplasms take more than a further 7 million lives each year,
• approximately 3.5 million people die every year in accidents,
• approximately 56.5 million people died in 2001, that is more than 107 people per minute,
• before the twentieth century over 133 million people were killed in mass killings,
• in the first 88 years of the twentieth century 170 million (and possibly as many as 360 million) people were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners,
• there were 1.6 million conflict-related deaths in the sixteenth century, 6.1 million in the seventeenth century, 7 million in the eighteenth, 19.4 million in the nineteenth, and 109.7 million in the twentieth,
• war-related injuries led to 310,000 deaths in 2000,
• about 40 million children are maltreated each year,
• more than 100 million currently living women and girls have been subjected to genital cutting,
• 815,000 people are thought to have committed suicide in 2000^[50] (currently, it is estimated that someone commits suicide every 40 seconds, more than 800,000 people per year).^[51]

Misanthropy

In addition to the philanthropic arguments, which are based on a concern for the humans who will be brought into existence, Benatar also posits that another path to antinatalism is the misanthropic argument that can be summarized in his opinion as follows:

Another route to anti-natalism is via what I call a "misanthropic" argument. According to this argument, humans are a deeply flawed and destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence.

Harm to non-human animals

David Benatar, Gunter Bleibohm, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, and Patricia MacCormack are attentive to the harm caused to other sentient beings by humans. They would say that billions of non-human animals are abused and slaughtered each year by our species for the production of animal products, for experimentation and after the experiments (when they are no longer needed), as a result of the destruction of habitats or other environmental damage and for sadistic pleasure. They tend to agree with animal rights thinkers that the harm we do to them is immoral. They consider the human species the most destructive on the planet, arguing that without new humans, there will be no harm caused to other sentient beings by new humans.

Some antinatalists are also vegetarians or vegans for moral reasons, and postulate that such views should complement each other as having a common denominator: not causing harm to other sentient beings. This attitude was already present in Manichaeism and Catharism.

Environmental impact

Volunteers of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement argue that human activity is the primary cause of environmental degradation, and therefore refraining from reproduction is "the humanitarian alternative to human disasters". Others, in the United States and other developed countries, are similarly concerned about contributing to climate change and other environmental problems by having biological children.

Realism

Some antinatalists believe that most people do not evaluate reality accurately, which affects the desire to have children.

Peter Wessel Zapffe identifies four repressive mechanisms we use, consciously or not, to restrict our consciousness of life and the world:

• isolation – an arbitrary dismissal from our consciousness and the consciousness of others about all negative thoughts and feelings associated with the unpleasant facts of our existence. In daily life, this manifests as a tacit agreement to remain silent on certain subjects – especially around children, to prevent instilling in them a fear of the world and what awaits them in life, before they will be able to learn other mechanisms.
• anchoring – the creation and use of personal values to ensure our attachment to reality, such as parents, home, the street, school, God, the church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future, accumulation of material goods or authority, etc. This can be characterized as creating a defensive structure, "a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness", and defending the structure against threats.
• distraction – shifting focus to new impressions to flee from circumstances and ideas we consider harmful or unpleasant.
• sublimation – refocusing the tragic parts of life into something creative or valuable, usually through an aesthetic confrontation for the purpose of catharsis. We focus on the imaginary, dramatic, heroic, lyric or comic aspects of life, to allow ourselves and others an escape from their true impact.

According to Zapffe, depressive disorders are often "messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought". Some studies seem to confirm this, it is said about the phenomenon of depressive realism, and Colin Feltham writes about antinatalism as one of its possible consequences.

David Benatar citing numerous studies lists three phenomena described by psychologists, which, according to him, are responsible for making our self-assessments about the quality of our lives unreliable:

• Tendency towards optimism (or Pollyanna principle) – we have a positively distorted picture of our lives in the past, present and future.
• Adaptation (or accommodation, habituation) – we adapt to negative situations and adjust our expectations accordingly.
• Comparison – for our self-assessments about the quality of our lives, more important than how our lives go is how they go in comparison with the lives of others. One of the effects of this is that negative aspects of life that affect everyone are not taken into account when assessing our own well-being. We are also more likely to compare ourselves with those who are worse off than those who are better off.

Benatar concludes:

The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives. Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected.

Thomas Ligotti draws attention to the similarity between Zapffe's philosophy and terror management theory. Terror management theory argues that humans are equipped with unique cognitive abilities beyond what is necessary for survival, which includes symbolic thinking, extensive self-consciousness and perception of themselves as temporal beings aware of the finitude of their existence. The desire to live alongside our awareness of the inevitability of death triggers terror in us. Opposition to this fear is among our primary motivations. To escape it, we build defensive structures around ourselves to ensure our symbolic or literal immortality, to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe, and to focus on protecting ourselves from immediate external threats.

Practical implications

Abortion

Antinatalism can lead to a particular position on the morality of abortion.

According to David Benatar, one comes into existence in the morally relevant sense when consciousness arises, when a fetus becomes sentient, and up until that time an abortion is moral, whereas continued pregnancy would be immoral. Benatar refers to EEG brain studies and studies on the pain perception of the fetus, which states that fetal consciousness arises no earlier than between twenty-eight and thirty weeks of pregnancy, before which it is incapable of feeling pain. Contrary to that, the latest report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists showed that the fetus gains consciousness no earlier than week twenty-four of the pregnancy. Some assumptions of this report regarding sentience of the fetus after the second trimester were criticized. In a similar way argues Karim Akerma. He distinguishes between organisms that do not have mental properties and living beings that have mental properties. According to his view, which he calls the mentalistic view, a living being begins to exist when an organism (or another entity) produces a simple form of consciousness for the first time.

Julio Cabrera believes that the moral problem of abortion is totally different from the problem of abstention of procreation because in the case of abortion, there is no longer a non-being, but an already existing being – the most helpless and defenseless of the parties involved, that someday will have the autonomy to decide, and we cannot decide for them. From the point of view of Cabrera's negative ethics, abortion is immoral for similar reasons as procreation. For Cabrera, the exception in which abortion is morally justified is cases of irreversible illness of the foetus (or some serious "social illnesses" like American conquest or Nazism), according to him in such cases we are clearly thinking about the unborn, and not simply of our own interests. In addition, Cabrera believes that under certain circumstances, it is legitimate and comprehensible to commit unethical actions, for example, abortion is legitimate and comprehensible when the mother's life is at risk.

Adoption

Herman Vetter, Théophile de Giraud, Travis N. Rieder, Tina Rulli, Karim Akerma and Julio Cabrera argue that presently rather than engaging in the morally problematic act of procreation, one could do good by adopting already existing children. De Giraud emphasizes that, across the world, there are millions of existing children who need care.

Famine relief

Stuart Rachels and David Benatar argue that presently, in a situation where a huge number of people live in poverty, we should cease procreation and divert these resources, that would have been used to raise our own children, to the poor.

Non-human animals

Some antinatalists recognize the procreation of non-human sentient animals as morally bad, and some view sterilization as morally good in their case. Karim Akerma defines antinatalism, that includes non-human sentient animals, as universal antinatalism and he assumes such a position himself:

By sterilising animals, we can free them from being slaves to their instincts and from bringing more and more captive animals into the cycle of being born, contracting parasites, ageing, falling ill and dying; eating and being eaten.

David Benatar emphasizes that his asymmetry applies to all sentient beings, and mentions that humans play a role in deciding how many animals there will be: humans breed many species of animals.

Magnus Vinding argues that the lives of wild animals in their natural environment are generally very bad. He draws attention to phenomena such as dying before adulthood, starvation, disease, parasitism, infanticide, predation and being eaten alive. He cites research on what animal life looks like in the wild. One of eight male lion cubs survives into adulthood. Others die as a result of starvation, disease and often fall victims to the teeth and claws of other lions. Attaining adulthood is much rarer for fish. Only one in a hundred male chinook salmon survives into adulthood. Vinding is of the opinion that if human lives and the survival of human children looked like this, current human values would disallow procreation; however, this is not possible when it comes to non-human animals, who are guided by instinct. He takes the view that even if one does not agree that procreation is always morally bad, one should recognize procreation in wildlife as morally bad and something that ought to be prevented (at least in theory, not necessarily in practice). He maintains that non-intervention cannot be defended if we reject speciesism and that we should reject the unjustifiable dogma stating that what is happening in nature is what should be happening in nature.

We cannot allow ourselves to spuriously rationalize away the suffering that takes place in nature, and to forget the victims of the horrors of nature merely because that reality does not fit into our convenient moral theories, theories that ultimately just serve to make us feel consistent and good about ourselves in the face of an incomprehensibly bad reality.

The Population Bomb

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb 

 

The Population Bomb

Author	Paul R. Ehrlich
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Population
Publisher	Sierra Club/Ballantine Books
Publication date	1968
Pages	201
ISBN	1-56849-587-0

The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968. It predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience.

The book has been criticized since its publication for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the book despite its flaws stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."

General description of the book

Graph of human population from 10,000 BC to 2017 AD. It shows the extremely rapid growth in the world population since the eighteenth century.

The Population Bomb was written at the suggestion of David Brower, the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books following various public appearances Ehrlich had made regarding population issues and their relation to the environment. Although the Ehrlichs collaborated on the book, the publisher insisted that a single author be credited, and also asked to change their preferred title: Population, Resources, and Environment. The title Population Bomb was taken (with permission) from General William H. Draper, founder of the Population Crisis Committee and a pamphlet issued in 1954 by the Hugh Moore Fund. The Ehrlichs regret the choice of title, which they admit was a perfect choice from a marketing perspective, but think that "it led Paul to be miscategorized as solely focused on human numbers, despite our interest in all the factors affecting the human trajectory."

Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Much of the book is spent describing the state of the environment and the food security situation, which is described as increasingly dire. Ehrlich argues that as the existing population was not being fed adequately, and as it was growing rapidly, it was unreasonable to expect sufficient improvements in food production to feed everyone. He further argued that the growing population placed escalating strains on all aspects of the natural world. "What needs to be done?" he wrote, "We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production." Ehrlich described a number of "ideas on how these goals might be reached." He believed that the United States should take a leading role in population control, both because it was already consuming much more than the rest of the world, and therefore had a moral duty to reduce its impact, and because the US would have to lead international efforts due to its prominence in the world. In order to avoid charges of hypocrisy or racism it would have to take the lead in population reduction efforts. Ehrlich floats the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, he rejects the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area." He suggests a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden at increasing rates for more children, as well as luxury taxes on childcare goods. He suggests incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children, as well as a variety of other monetary incentives. He proposes a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment." The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment (because families often continue to have children until a male is born. Ehrlich suggested that if they could choose a male child this would reduce the birthrate). Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and sex education should be expanded.

After explaining the domestic policies the US should pursue, he discusses foreign policy. He advocates a system of "triage," such as that suggested by William and Paul Paddock in Famine 1975!. Under this system countries would be divided into categories based on their abilities to feed themselves going forward. Countries with sufficient programmes in place to limit population growth, and the ability to become self-sufficient in the future would continue to receive food aid. Countries, for example India, which were "so far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self-sufficiency" would have their food aid eliminated. Ehrlich argued that this was the only realistic strategy in the long-term. Ehrlich applauds the Paddocks' "courage and foresight" in proposing such a solution. Ehrlich further discusses the need to set up public education programs and agricultural development schemes in developing countries. He argues that the scheme would likely have to be implemented outside the framework of the United Nations due to the necessity selecting the targeted regions and countries, and suggests that within countries certain regions should be prioritized to the extent that cooperative separatist movements should be encouraged if they are an improvement over the existing authority. He mentions his support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.

In the rest of the book Ehrlich discusses things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies he suggests, which he believed were not politically possible in 1968. At the end of the book he discusses the possibility that his forecasts may be wrong, which he felt he must acknowledge as a scientist. However, he believes that regardless of coming catastrophes, his prescriptions would only benefit humanity, and would be the right course of action in any case.

The book sold over two million copies, raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues, and influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy. For the 14 years prior the book's appearance, the world population had been growing at accelerating rates, but immediately after the book's publication, the world population growth rate began a continuing downward trend, from its 1968 peak of 2.09% to 1.09% in 2018.

Context

In 1948, two widely read books were published that would inspire a "neo-Malthusian" debate on population and the environment: Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. These inspired works such as the original Population Bomb pamphlet by Hugh Everett Moore in 1954, as well as some of the original societies concerned with population and environmental matters. D.B. Luten has said that although the book is often seen as a seminal work in the field, the Population Bomb is actually best understood as "climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s.” Ehrlich has said that he traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he was attending university in the early 1950s. For Ehrlich, these writers provided “a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist."

Criticisms

Restatement of Malthusian theory

The Population Bomb has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich observed that since about 1930 the population of the world had doubled within a single generation, from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion, and was on track to do so again. He assumed that available resources on the other hand, and in particular food, were nearly at their limits. Some critics compare Ehrlich unfavorably to Malthus, saying that although Thomas Malthus did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster within the next decade or two. In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely (although some mitigation was possible), and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus, such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.

Ehrlich was certainly not unique in his neo-Malthusian predictions, and there was a widespread belief in the 1960s and 70s that increasingly catastrophic famines were on their way.

Predictions

The Ehrlichs made a number of specific predictions that did not come to pass, for which they have received criticism. They have acknowledged that some predictions were incorrect. However, they maintain that their general argument remains intact, that their predictions were merely illustrative, that their and others' warnings caused preventive action, or that many of their predictions may yet come true (see Ehrlich's response below). Still other commentators have criticized the Ehrlichs' perceived inability to acknowledge mistakes, evasiveness, and refusal to alter their arguments in the face of contrary evidence. In 2015 Ehrlich told Retro Report, "I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today."

In The Population Bomb's opening lines the authors state that nothing can prevent famines in which hundreds of millions of people will die during the 1970s (amended to 1970s and 1980s in later editions), and that there would be "a substantial increase in the world death rate." Although many lives could be saved through dramatic action, it was already too late to prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate. However, in reality the global death rate has continued to decline substantially since then, from 13/1000 in 1965–74 to 10/1000 from 1985–1990. Meanwhile, the population of the world has more than doubled, while calories consumed/person have increased 24%. The UN does not keep official death-by-hunger statistics so it is hard to measure whether the "hundreds of millions of deaths" number is correct. Ehrlich himself suggested in 2009 that between 200-300 million had died of hunger since 1968. However, that is measured over 40 years rather than the ten to twenty foreseen in the book, so it can be seen as significantly fewer than predicted.

Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. And while a 2010 UN report stated that 925 million of the world's population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger, it also notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.

Ehrlich writes: "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed, as the food situation in India suddenly improved.

As of 2010, India had almost 1.2 billion people, having nearly tripled its population from around 400 million in 1960, with a total fertility rate in 2008 of 2.6. While the absolute numbers of malnourished children in India is high, the rates of malnutrition and poverty in India have declined from approximately 90% at the time of India's independence (1947), to less than 40% on 2010 (see Malnutrition in India). Ehrlich's prediction about famines did not come to pass, although food security is still an issue in India. However, most epidemiologists, public health physicians and demographers identify corruption as the chief cause of malnutrition, not "overpopulation". As Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen noted, India frequently had famines during British colonial rule. However, since India became a democracy, there have been no recorded famines.

Journalist Dan Gardner has criticized Ehrlich both for his overconfident predictions and his refusal to acknowledge his errors. "In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s … the only flat-out mistake Ehrlich acknowledges is missing the destruction of the rain forests, which happens to be a point that supports and strengthens his world view—and is therefore, in cognitive dissonance terms, not a mistake at all. Beyond that, he was by his account, off a little here and there, but only because the information he got from others was wrong. Basically, he was right across the board."

Jonathan Last called it "one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published".

Persistence of trends

Economist Julian Simon and medical statistician Hans Rosling pointed out that the failed prediction of 70s famines were based exclusively on the assumption that exponential population growth will continue indefinitely and no technological or social progress will be made. In The Ultimate Resource Simon argued that resources, such as metals, which Ehrlichs extensively discuss in their books as examples of non-sustainable resources, are valued exclusively for the function they provide, and technological progress frequently replaces these: for example, copper was largely replaced by fiber optic in communications, and carbon fiber replaced a wide range of alloys and steel in construction (see Simon-Ehrlich wager and The Ultimate Resource). Simon also argued that technological progress tends to happen in large steps rather than linear growth, as happened with the Green revolution. Hans Rosling in Factfulness demonstrated that fertility rate has significantly decreased worldwide and, more importantly, high fertility is a natural response to high mortality in low-income countries and once they enter higher income group, fertility drops quickly (see Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think). According to environmental Stewart Brand, himself a student and friend of Ehrlich, the assumption made by the latter and by authors of The Limits to Growth has been "proven wrong since 1963" when the demographic trends worldwide have visibly changed.

Showmanship

One frequent criticism of The Population Bomb is that it focused on spectacle and exaggeration at the expense of accuracy. Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer remark that "at the time of writing The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich should have been more cautious and revised their tone and rhetoric, in light of the undeniable and already apparent errors and shortcomings of Osborn and Vogt’s analyses." Charles Rubin has written that it was precisely because Ehrlich was largely unoriginal and wrote in a clear emotionally gripping style that it became so popular. He quotes a review from Natural History noting that Ehrlich does not try to "convince intellectually by mind dulling statistics," but rather roars "like an Old Testament Prophet." Gardner says, "as much as the events and culture of the era, Paul Ehrlich's style explain the enormous audience he attracted." Indeed, an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson helped to propel the success of the book, as well as Ehrlich's celebrity.

Desrochers and Hoffbauer go on to conclude that it seems hard to deny that using an alarmist tone and emotional appeal were the main lessons that the present generation of environmentalists learned from Ehrlich's success.

Social and political coercion

On the political left the book received criticism that it was focusing on "the wrong problem", and that the real issue was one of distribution of resources rather than of overpopulation. Marxists worried that Ehrlich's work could be used to justify genocide and imperial control, as well as oppression of minorities and disadvantaged groups or even a return to eugenics.

Eco-socialist Barry Commoner argued that the Ehrlichs were too focused on overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that their proposed solutions were politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall disproportionately on the poor. He argued that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Commoner engaged in a fierce debate with Ehrlich on an environmental United Nations convention in Stockholm:

A feud about how to deal with overpopulation surfaced in Stockholm, between Ehrlich and his nemesis, Barry Commoner, whose popular book, The Closing Circle (1971), directly criticized Ehrlich’s population-bomb thesis. Both were on panels in Stockholm, with Commoner slyly planting invidious questions aimed at Ehrlich among various Third World participants in the conference, and Ehrlich yelling back. Commoner’s argument was that population policies weren’t needed, because what was called “the demographic transition” would take care of everything—all you had to do was help poor people get less poor, and they would have fewer children. Ehrlich insisted that the situation was way too serious for that approach, and it wouldn’t work anyway: You needed harsh government programs to drive down the birthrate. The alternative was overwhelming famines and massive damage to the environment.

— Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 2010

Ehrlich's response

In a 2004 Grist Magazine interview, Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time The Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them correct.

In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Ehrlich responded:

Anne and I have always followed UN population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau -- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion -- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!

In another retrospective article published in 2009, Ehrlich said, in response to criticism that many of his predictions had not come to pass:

the biggest tactical error in The Bomb was the use of scenarios, stories designed to help one think about the future. Although we clearly stated that they were not predictions and that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,’ (p. 72)—their failure to occur is often cited as a failure of prediction. In honesty, the scenarios were way off, especially in their timing (we underestimated the resilience of the world system). But they did deal with future issues that people in 1968 should have been thinking about – famines, plagues, water shortages, armed international interventions by the United States, and nuclear winter (e.g., Ehrlich et al. 1983, Toon et al. 2007)—all events that have occurred or now still threaten