What is Efilism?
The ideology of efilism has come into the media spotlight recently, due to the recent bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs by an efilist.
Usually, people don’t even try to explain a fringe ideology. They just slap some pejorative label on it, and then dismiss it.
For example, I have heard people calling efilism “nihilism”. There are different types of nihilism: epistemological nihilism, value nihilism, moral nihilism, existential nihilism, etc. Efilism is none of these. Efilists are not nihilists about knowledge or truth. They believe that we can acquire knowledge of reality. Efilists are not value nihilists. They believe that it is bad to suffer. Efilists are not moral nihilists. They believe in moral values and obligations, although some dislike the term “moral”. Efilists are not existential nihilists. They believe that life has meaning. So, labeling efilism as “nihilism” is an intellectual cop-out.
Efilism is the belief that life is bad. This is a very broad definition. It encompasses many religious and philosophical views, including Buddhism, Gnostic Christianity, Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, etc. In my opinion, this broad definition is useful. However, “efilism” has a narrower definition in most contexts.
In the narrow sense, efilism is a new pessimistic ideology/philosophy, which emerged on the internet in the last 15 years. Inmendham is one of the main proponents of efilism, and he coined the term. So, I will present his version of efilism, but in a more concise and precise way than he normally does.
Unfortunately, Inmendham does not present efilism as a well-defined philosophical theory. 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.
Efilism arose within the modern, atheistic worldview. It has an essentially scientific view of the cosmos and nature. Unlike Buddhism and Gnostic Christianity, efilism has no supernatural elements: no gods, no soul, no afterlife.
Efilism accepts (without much examination) what I call “the humanist value theory”. This is the implicit value theory of the modern West, which is tacitly accepted by most people. (Few people have an explicit philosophical theory of value.) The humanist value theory has two core assumptions:
Hedonism: Pain is intrinsically bad for the experiencer, pleasure is intrinsically good for the experiencer, and nothing else is intrinsically bad or good.
Altruism: We have an obligation to help others and prevent harm.
The hedonism assumption defines personal value: what is good or bad for the individual. The altruism assumption defines moral value: what is good or bad objectively. Since altruism presupposes help and harm, it requires a definition of personal value. However, efilists will sometimes collapse these assumptions into a single principle that pain is objectively bad and pleasure is objectively good.
To be clear, in this context, “pain” means any negative emotional experience, not just “physical pain” (nociception). It includes the negative aspect of all emotions: hunger, thirst, boredom, lust, etc. Likewise, “pleasure” means any positive emotional experience. When you feel hunger pangs, that is a type of pain, and when you satisfy hunger, you experience pleasure.
Because efilists view sentience as the root of value, they extend the circle of moral concern to all sentient beings. They believe that we have an altruistic moral obligation to all sentient beings, not just humans and some (cute/useful) animals.
Most efilists have a hedonic utilitarian view of morality. They believe that we ought to act in ways that increase net hedonic utility for all sentient beings.
Some efilists have a more restricted (and more explicit) moral theory: negative utilitarianism. This is the view that pain has greater moral weight than pleasure, and thus we should focus our efforts on the prevention of suffering.
Although efilists do not believe in supernatural entities, such as god, the soul or the afterlife, they do have some elements that are non-natural in their worldview: moral values and obligations. Inmendham believes that moral values and obligations are “just logic”. He does not understand that he is assuming the existence of values and obligations that are independent of human minds. This would constitute a different ontological class, since values and obligations are not physical.
To explain efilism, I need to make its background assumptions explicit. Efilists do not make their value theory explicit. They take it for granted. It is part of the frame of their thought and discourse. Like most people, they experience cognitive dissonance if their core framing assumptions are questioned or even made explicit.
To summarize, efilism has a scientific view of reality, a hedonistic theory of personal value, and a hedonic utilitarian theory of moral value.
How does efilism arrive at the conclusion that life is bad and should be destroyed? By rejecting the rosy views of nature and sentience.
Most people have a rosy view of nature. Efilists have a more realistic view. They accept certain implications of the theory of evolution that are ignored by most people. Life is intrinsically violent and selfish. 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.
The biological purpose of life is reproduction. Efilists view this purpose as absurd, because it is “just the replication of a DNA molecule”. Life has no cosmic purpose. It is a cycle that was bootstrapped long ago, and keeps replicating itself and generating new forms of itself.
However, efilists believe that sentience makes life meaningful for sentient beings. Sentience evolved as a mechanism for driving organisms to survive and reproduce. Efilists believe that this created objective value, in the form of pain and pleasure.
Most people have a rosy view of sentience. They believe that life has more happiness than suffering, and that you can have a happy life if you make the right decisions. Efilists reject this rosy view. They claim that sentience is generally (or always) net-negative hedonically.
This claim is based on a number of different arguments. Efilists will appeal to intuition, by simply itemizing all the types of suffering that one might experience in life, and then contrasting that with the “trivial” pleasures of life. This argument involves rhetoric that emphasizes pain and deemphasizes pleasure. Efilists will also argue that sentience is intrinsically net-negative. Inmendham is not very clear in his views on this. Sometimes, he claims that all sentience is pain, and that pleasure is just the reduction of pain. Sometimes, he seems to believe that sentience can be positive, but it is mostly negative due to the nature of life (there are more ways to be harmed than to benefit, life has more losers than winners, etc.). Efilists do not have an explicit theory of sentience, but their argument that life is hedonically net-negative has considerable intuitive appeal.
Although efilism is essentially utilitarian, efilists sometimes make deontological arguments, such as the consent argument, which claims that having a child is unethical, because it imposes life (and thus suffering) without consent. This argument is not consistent with the implicit value theory of efilism. However, many efilists use the consent argument without recognizing the inconsistency.
Setting aside a few wrinkles, we can state the core efilist argument as follows:
The experience of pain is bad for the experiencer. (Hedonism assumption)
We have a moral obligation to help others and prevent harm. (Altruism assumption)
This moral obligation applies not just to humans, but to all sentient beings. (Sentientism)
We should try to increase net hedonic utility for all sentient beings. (Hedonic utilitarianism)
Sentience is hedonically net-negative. Most sentient beings experience more pain than pleasure. (Rejection of the rosy view of sentience)
Life has no redeeming purpose that makes suffering worthwhile. (Rejection of the rosy view of life)
Thus, we have a moral obligation to end sentience, or at least try to reduce it.
Ideally, we should destroy the biosphere, to eliminate all life and prevent sentience from reemerging.
Efilist arguments depend heavily on rhetoric and appeals to intuition. However, there is a logical structure to the argument. Even if efilists don’t clearly make their case, they raise important challenges to the rosy views of nature and sentience. Efilism is not just crazy or nihilistic. If you have the humanist value theory (as most people do), it is very easy to be persuaded that life is bad by the standards of that theory.
I am not an efilist. I reject the humanist value theory, so I do not find efilist arguments compelling. However, I agree with efilism in rejecting the rosy views of nature and sentience. (I don’t believe that sentience is hedonically net-negative. I believe that it is net-zero. But that’s too big a topic to address here.)
Most people who argue against efilism share its implicit value theory. They usually try to defend the rosy view of sentience. However, they rarely make good rational arguments.
Most opponents of efilism don’t even bother to make arguments. They just dismiss it as crazy and dangerous.
Efilism has been linked to the mass murder committed by Adam Lanza, who was a fan of Inmendham. See The Ghost of Adam Lanza. More recently, efilism was linked to an act of terrorism.
A few things need to be said here. First, any ideology can inspire (or be used to justify) terrorism. Most efilists, including Inmendham, reject terrorism as counter-productive. After all, they have an entire biosphere to fry. However, it’s true that pro-mortalism (the belief that it is ethically good to end life) is a natural implication of efilism. It would not surprise me if there are more terrorist acts committed in the name of efilism. Murder-suicide fits into the efilist worldview very neatly.
Efilism is part of a cluster of related positions. Obviously, it is related to antinatalism, which is the belief that procreation is unethical. Most efilists are antinatalists, although antinatalism is not strictly implied by efilism. Efilism is a subset of sentientism, since it extends moral concern to all sentient beings. Most efilists are vegans in diet, but most vegans are not efilists. Ethical veganism has a rosy view of nature. Efilism is tangentially related to the human extinction movement, but efilism is not anti-human per se — it is anti-life. Like most vegans, human extinctionists have a rosy view of nature. Efilism is somewhat related to the views of David Pearce, who wants to redesign nature to reduce animal suffering. He rejects the rosy view of nature, but he believes that we can fix it with technology. Finally, efilism is closely related to eulavism (the ideology of Adam Lanza), which in turn is related to Buddhism (via the rejection of desire as the root of suffering).
As a modern, scientific version of pessimism, efilism fills a niche in the ecosystem of ideas. I expect it to increase in popularity as we go deeper into the 21st century. It has an intuitive appeal to many people, and it propagates easily on the internet. It fits into the zeitgeist, not as a dominant position, but as a strong counterpoint to humanism.
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Very good summary. I'm not an efilist or a vegan, but I am an anti-natalist who used to be a white nationalist. You should read my essay An Indictment of Life.
Nobody could explain efilism more clearly than you. Thank you!