Incels and the Problem of Natural Evil
Preamble: This is something I ended up writing as both a therapeutic and intellectual exercise, so I am, disclaimer, not committed to all the claims made in it. I simply wanted to develop and flesh out the implications of the particular trauma-induced brainworm that is the thesis “sex is intrinsically unjust.” I do think some of this remains of interest for me to explore. First, I am very much willing to throw that thesis out. While I did notice its utility in comparing the different political approaches to sex/sexuality, I think this would have been possible anyway if I instead transformed the claim into a psychoanalytic and existential rather than moral one instead. Further, by the end of writing this I felt inspired to perhaps explore further the relationship between sexual hazing, heteronormativity, and the sexual social contract. I also am fascinated by the idea that the secularized “problem of (natural) evil” allows for a very minimalist notion of “inescapable evil” that is primarily existential in character and motivates compassion as a root/core or foundational moral sentiment. The only appropriate constraint on, or condition for, moral thinking and action. In any case, though it may come off otherwise here due to the pessimistic lens, I very much enjoy sex and find connection and intimacy to be unrivaled social goods.
The Secularized Problem of Evil: The Indifferent Distribution of Suffering
The problem of evil is often assumed to be a purely theological one, in the context of Christian monotheism. However, there is a clear secular one if one accepts the concept of “natural evils,” examples of which are that of natural disasters and predator-prey relations. The only way in which a concept of “natural evil” is tenable as a secular one is if evil is identified with suffering, or if evil is understood to be the gap between the execution of abstract, universal prescriptions discovered or constructed by humanity and the arbitration of the contingent, particularities of nature. Now, one might say that this kind of evil does not present a secular problem of evil, as the problem of evil, to be a problem, presumes that the genesis of such natural evil is a benevolent agent without which such natural evils would not exist.
However, there is another version of the problem of evil once it is secularized which comes from the seeming moral indifference of nature: that nature, in its indifference rather than benevolence, could produce organisms that do not have this indifference and therefore can experience such cosmic indifference as suffering. One might say that this still is not really a problem, because it is immediately solved as soon as it has been introduced: this suffering is alleviated by the ability to account for its existence on the basis of cosmic indifference rather than some creative intention. In other words, there is simply no problem to resolve precisely because the moral indifference of nature explains the extant suffering that is disconnected from moral concerns.
However, one must consider that if “natural evil” is simply that which is natural and, despite its moral indifference, that which can be morally judged, then suffering is not simply a sensory response to the physical world but also a product of precisely the abstract cognition involved in moral judgment. That is to say, the very mechanism that allows us to reject and flee from suffering can itself produce a higher-order suffering: the gap between our moral judgment and the moral indifference of nature itself can produce suffering, and can itself be submitted to moral judgment based on that suffering it produces. In other words, the secular problem of evil is not suffering in nature per se, but the fact that the existence of moral thought in an otherwise morally indifferent cosmos must set an organism against its very own conditions of existence because of the fundamental injustice of moral indifference in the face of extant moral agents. The simultaneous necessity of nature for the capacity to morally judge and the evils found in nature given the reality of such moral judgment puts us in a conundrum. This conundrum is something antinatalists are subconsciously cognizant of, as they come to try and assess the moral value of being born at all, that is to say of existing given one exists in that way which makes that existence a moral problem. After all, it is birth the very thing which grants moral thinking relevance for and to that suffering given the indifference of nature.