Load-Bearing

Anti-natalism, negative utilitarianism, EFILism, and their branches are almost airtight as systems once their overlapping arguments are allowed to complement one another. To undo their conclusions, once unified, you essentially have to deconstruct cause and effect — time and motion themselves.

For example: even if you deny the claim that suffering is inherently valuable — that it carries some objective, mind-independent disvalue rather than being a projection of human judgment — the argument still stands on mechanistic grounds. Suffering is inherently repulsive; it operates as a deterrent shaped by evolutionary processes. We become hungry and restless after sitting still too long — the mechanism is a tool that moves us from state A to state B, ultimately in service of survival and reproduction.

Navigating psychological pain — health anxiety, say — the same function holds: the greater pain (the mental apprehension of illness) overrides the lesser (physical discomfort) in pursuit — even a failed pursuit — of a net reduction in suffering. That is precisely the calculus that has conferred biological advantage up to this point.

Grant that, and experiential states resolve into bio-mechanical forces that move us — pleasure being merely the transitional relief of a greater pain rather than any intrinsic positive. From there, the case writes itself: no one, seeing the system for what it is, would opt into the zero-sum framework EFILism describes.

The only viable deconstruction of this argumentation would be something like an “Alogical Isness” approach — but that same move would dismantle every other argument relying on the mechanistic functions of known physics.

My conclusion: these load-bearing arguments form a house, and the house cannot be collapsed without sacrificing the very assumptions — implicit and explicit — on which any objector is themselves standing.