Efilism
Efilism is the philosophical rejection of life. The term “efilism” is based on “life” spelled backward.
Efilism is the creation of Inmendham, an early YouTuber who promoted his beliefs on YouTube and other platforms. Most of his content is in video format. He has a website, with an extensive collection of video and audio, and some written content.
Efilism presupposes the humanist value theory. Its core values are hedonism and altruism. Unlike humanism, however, efilism has an essentially pessimistic view of sentience: that pain predominates. Efilists are also sentientists. They view all sentient beings as worthy of moral concern.
Most efilists have a utilitarian view of morality, in which goodness is maximizing total hedonic utility for all sentient beings. However, some efilists focus exclusively on pain, viewing pleasure as an illusion or as having no moral weight. This view is negative hedonic utilitarianism, in which the sole moral good is the reduction of pain.
Inmendham doesn’t clearly state his value theory. Like humanists, efilists take hedonism and altruism for granted. They also have different ad hoc intuitions in different contexts, and they aren’t aware of the conflicts between those intuitions. They haven’t rationally examined their intuitions and tried to create an explicit theory of value.
For example, most efilists believe in the “consent argument”: that it is unethical to have a child because the child can’t consent to existence. The requirement for consent does not follow from hedonic utilitarianism. It is not a utilitarian principle.
Most efilists also believe that it would be ethical to terminate all life without consent. That is the “red button” thought experiment, in which you have a device that would annihilate all sentient beings, or all life, if you pressed a button. Should you do it? Most efilists would say “yes”.
So, they believe that consent is an ethical requirement for having a child, but not for annihilating all living beings. This is obviously hypocritical.
Although their beliefs are not entirely consistent, efilists have essentially the same implicit value theory as humanism. Most of their rhetoric presupposes hedonism and altruism. However, efilists take the humanist value theory to a radically different conclusion, because they have different beliefs about the nature of life and sentient experience.
Like humanists, efilists are atheists. Unlike most humanists, efilists don’t have a rosy view of nature. They are more realistic about biology. They understand that life is intrinsically selfish and violent. Organisms compete with each other, prey on each other, and parasitize each other. Evolution proceeds by genocide. Most organisms die young, without reproducing. Evolution is not nice to its creations, and its creations are not nice to each other.
So, efilists view life as morally bad, because it is violent, selfish, unfair, etc. It violates their moral value of altruism.
Efilists also have a negative view of sentience. They believe that pain predominates over pleasure.
Inmendham has somewhat conflicted views on the relationship between pleasure and pain. Sometimes, he says that pleasure is an illusion — that it is only the elimination of pain. (He prefers the terms “suffering” or “harm” to “pain”.) Sometimes, he says that there is much more pain than pleasure, or that pleasure is harder to attain, or that pleasure is purchased with the pain of other sentient beings. Those claims are not identical, although they all view sentience as generally negative.
Unfortunately, efilism is not presented as a well-defined philosophical theory by Inmendham. He does not make careful rational arguments. He preaches. Certain beliefs are implicit in his rhetoric, but they have to be extracted from it, and they aren’t entirely consistent. To clearly define efilism, I need to iron out some of the wrinkles.
Setting aside some of the variations and contradictions, efilism makes the following claims about life and sentience:
- Life is evil.
- Sentience is harmful.
Efilists deem life to be bad, both morally and individually. They view life as having net negative hedonic utility. Since they believe in altruism, it follows that it would be morally good to terminate life, or at least all sentient life.
The utopian vision of efilism is a universe devoid of life.
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Efilism poses a profound challenge to the humanist worldview. Is life worth living?
Some humanists would dodge the question by appealing to individual freedom. “Let individuals make their own decisions. If they want to die, give them the option of committing suicide.” There are three problems with that view.
One is that it might be very difficult for a person to commit suicide, even if he truly believed that life was not worth living. After all, we evolved to struggle toward reproduction, not to kill ourselves. The fear of death creates a huge barrier to suicide. Even if a person believed that non-existence was preferable, he might not be able to overcome his intuitive fear of death.
Another problem is that people might be deceiving themselves (and others) into believing that life has positive value. The default cultural assumption is that life is worth living. Culture affects the values and choices of individuals. If the culture has a major deception about life, individual choices could be wrong.
The third problem is that we already make the choice of life for other sentient beings. Bringing a child or a farm animal into the world is making the choice of life for that being. A farm animal is not capable of consciously reflecting on the conditions of its existence and choosing life or death. A child might eventually acquire that ability, but only after living for many years. Most adults can’t think philosophically. They just blunder through life without ever asking the question: is life worth living?
Some humanists dodge the question by appealing to ignorance. A humanist might say that he doesn’t know whether a given life is worth living, so the decision to live or not must be a personal choice. He might argue that we can’t sample the subjective experiences of others, so we can never know if their lives are worth living or not. However, that is simply a cop-out. The same argument could be made to reject altruism. If we can’t know what others are experiencing, then we can’t know whether we are being nice to them or not, or how to manage trade-offs between the hedonic welfare of different beings. Thus, there is no point trying to be altruistic.
Efilists and sentientists believe that we can infer the experiences of other sentient beings from their behavior, by analogy to ourselves. We know how we feel, and we know how we act when we feel certain ways. By analogy, we can infer the subjective experiences of others from their actions, and we can base moral choices on those inferences. The humanist would either have to agree that we can infer subjective mental states, or else admit that hedonic altruism is impossible.
As an aside, I reject the claim that we know how we feel. We have direct awareness of our feelings in the moment, but those feelings cannot be stored, and they do not accumulate in any way. So, there is no way to sum or average them over time. We only know the changes in our feelings from moment to moment, and how those changes are related to our actions and circumstances. We don’t know ourselves as well as we tend to assume. But that is an aside.
The humanist might say that most living beings seem to enjoy life, so it is reasonable to infer that life has net hedonic utility. But is it true that most living beings seem to enjoy life?
It is true that most animals try to avoid death, but it doesn’t follow that they enjoy life. Evolution created the motivation mechanism. Animals avoid death because they are motivated to act in ways that lead to reproduction, not because they sum up their subjective experiences, weigh them, and come to the rational conclusion that life is good.
Consider an animal that is shivering in a cave, hiding from predators. It is avoiding death, but does it seem to be enjoying life? The fact that living beings avoid death is not evidence that life is generally pleasant.
Humanism does not establish the goodness of life. It just assumes that life is good. It has no response to the challenge of efilism.
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A subtle contradiction underlies efilism. Efilists are atheists. They don’t believe in the existence of a cosmic deity, or a cosmic raison d’être. But they believe that reducing suffering (by eliminating life or sentience) is a cosmic purpose, which they should work toward. They recognize no constructive purpose for life: there is no cosmic problem that life solves. However, they view the existence of life as a cosmic problem that should be solved.
Efilism has the “ghost of God” in its worldview. Efilists don’t believe in God, but they believe in cosmic good and bad, and cosmic rights and obligations. They believe that sentient experience has value — not just to the experiencer, but cosmically. They also believe that we have a moral duty to minimize pain. So, they believe in cosmic normativity and imperativity.
Without a cosmic subject, there is no cosmic normativity or imperativity. See What is Value? and What is Subjectivity?.
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I reject the assumptions of efilism. I reject hedonism as a theory of individual value. I reject altruism as a theory of moral value. I reject morality altogether.
Life is not evil, because nothing is evil. I agree that life is selfish and violent: a struggle for existence. I understand that biological reality offends the sensibilities of modern man, but that is just an intuitive reaction, not a rational argument against life. I don’t believe that sentience is net negative or net positive hedonically. I believe that pain and pleasure balance out.
Nevertheless, I respect efilism for questioning assumptions that most people take for granted. Most people assume that nature is morally good, and that life is hedonically good. Those assumptions are highly dubious. Life is not a romantic adventure full of joy. Nature is not a loving mother. Efilism raises profound philosophical questions about the purpose and value of life.
But like humanism, efilism rests on unexamined assumptions. Efilists have not questioned their core values of hedonism and altruism. They believe in cosmic normativity and imperativity, despite their atheism.
Efilism is not a rational worldview. It is an ideology that propagates, like all ideologies, by virtue signaling.