DRMacIver's Notebook
Book Review: Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry
Book Review: Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry
Conent warning: Suicide. No, seriously. There’s a lot of discussion of suicide in this post.
I’m not a huge fan of this book. I want to say “It would be better for this book not have born”, but that’s mostly for the burn rather than because I actually feel that way. I thought it was an interesting read, but I also disagree with it pretty heavily, and think it has mostly failed in its goal.
This is particularly surprising because I would have expected to be a sympathetic audience. Roughly the two main causes of the book are antinatalism (the idea that it is immoral to have children) and the right to suicide. My prior moral positions (which are essentially unchanged) on these issues are:
- Antinatalism is a bit like vegetarianism for me - I have some sympathies with the arguments, don’t think it’s an unreasonable position to hold, and can imagine how a reasonable person who had different weightings and priorities to me would come to this conclusion. I ultimately do not share the position but respect the beliefs of people who hold it (unlike vegetarianism this might change if I thought it was in danger of becoming widespread, but it’s not). I’m also personally planning never to have children, but I don’t consider my reasons for that to be generalisable.
- I’m entirely on board with the right to suicide. I think there are some complex practical considerations around its implementation, and I think some of them make it worth putting mild limits on that right, but I’m a big believer in the right to self-determination and I don’t think there’s a coherent moral basis for forcing someone who wants to die to keep living.
On top of that I am at least somewhat familiar with Sarah Perry as a writer and while I don’t agree with many of her positions was still vaguely positively inclined towards her.
Given all of the above, I found the book quite disappointing. It is a decent counter to some of the arguments against antinatalism and suicide rights, but I do not feel that it makes a strong case for either. The case made for suicide rights is, I think, stronger than the case for antinatalism, but it was also the one I least felt needed the case made for it.
My principle objections to the actual content:
- I found the empirical claims a bit weak and cherry-picked in places. Nothing that I could point to and say “that’s definitely wrong”, but I would want to heavily fact check before making any practical decisions on the back of this. This is particularly true given that she makes a lot of claims that are, while not necessarily outright wrong, at least… slightly political red flags.
- You can’t use Moral Foundations Theory that way and expect to reach valid conclusions. Moral Foundations Theory is a useful descriptive tool, albeit an empirically suspect one, but it’s simply not valid as a tool for exhaustive enumeration of all of the reasons why something might be ethically justified.
- “People aren’t rational economic actors but lets pretend that they are and see what falls out of their behaviour.” isn’t any better a look when not done by an economist.
But my real objections are to the omissions. I felt there were a lot of unexamined assumptions, and the entire thing read like a cost-benefit analysis without the benefit analysis part. This is partly because Perry doesn’t agree that it’s valid to make a cost-benefit analysis here, but I think she’s manifestly wrong in that regard and hasn’t made more than a sketch of an argument as to why that position should be taken seriously.
I did find the book an interesting read, and there are a few important take homes from it for me - e.g. the section on suicide contagion has definitely weakened some of my beliefs in the actual mechanics and practicalities around suicide reporting, and the discussion around how you count the benefits to as yet non-existent people clarified some of my understanding of the debate - but ultimately I ended up if anything less sympathetic to the antinatalist position than I started out.
I’m unsure where this book will end up. On my shelves for now, and we’ll see if I want to revisit it. I might lend or give it to friends who are interested in the arguments, but I wouldn’t want to pass it on to strangers.