SUMMARY OF THE ETHICAL QUESTION IN JULIO CABRERAS PHILOSOPHY

Julio Cabrera

Introduction.

Julio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brasilia, Brazil, who produced a

vast philosophical work in philosophy of language, ethics and, more recently, philosophy of
cinema. Between his published works we mention: The condemned Logic (So Paulo,
1987) Critique of Affirmative Morals (Barcelona, 1996), Cinema: One hundred years of
philosophy (Barcelona, 1999), Margins of philosophies of language (Brasilia, 2003; re-
edited in 2009), Lexical Inferences and interpretation of nets of predicates (Brasilia,
2007) and Open Logic (Mxico, 2011). Professor Cabreras published works in
philosophy comprises eight volumes, and his unpublished works are contained in more
twelve volumes.

In the strict domain of ethics, Julio Cabrera began his reflections on lack of value of
human life, procreation and suicide in the late eighties, publishing a small programmatic
book called Project for a negative ethics (So Paulo, 1989). His seminal ideas on human
condition and morality shake the basis of usual European ethical theories all of them
founded on the existence of a doubtless basic positive value of human life and the
consequent possibility of an ethical life. Cabreras ideas must lead to a second thought and
a new look on these issues. In a nutshell, his ideas are the following:

1. Human life lacks value in its very terminal structure in basically three dimensions of
suffering: pain, tedium and moral disqualification of human beings in general. This
must discard the usual difference between honesty and dishonesty in moral theories
because, given human condition, it is impossible to live a moral life in the strict
sense.
2. All positive values are intra-wordly creations and inventions of attitudes and
actions; positive values are always reactive (produced against the terminal structure
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of being) and onerous (paying high prices or damaging others projects). This must
deny the usual idea that a human life consists of a mixture of pains and pleasures. In
fact, pleasures are reactive and onerous, intrinsically connected to suffering and
subordinated to them.
3. Consequently, procreation is in any case morally problematic, even the so-called
responsible procreations (and perhaps them specially), because it consists in
providing to others the terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium
and moral disqualification, and the mere possibility of inventing reactive and
onerous positive values to support terminality. This must contest the usual idea that
birth is a gift and procreation the paradigm of an ethical action.
4. A second corollary concerns suicide: beyond the impossibility of suicide in
traditional metaphysical philosophy, and keeping distance from vulgar pessimism
establishing suicide as a sort of necessity, Cabreras negative ethics sustains suicide
as a plausible possibility of human life, no more immoral than human acts in
general (given the general moral disqualification) and with more chances of being a
moral act than many other actions, provided that suicide succeeds in defeating the
powerful inclination to preserve ones own life in any circumstances, which is the
source of non consideration of other peoples interests. All this must defeat the
usual idea of suicide as the worst of human sins.

Much before the publication of David Benatars book Better never to have been, in
2006, professor Cabreras thinking about the issues of lack of value of human life,
procreation and suicide was developed in many books and articles in Portuguese and
Spanish, showing once more that philosophical work written in other languages different
from English simply does not exist for the international community of philosophers; a
cultural situation to be pondered in its profound significance.
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Steps towards Negative Ethics.

1. Throughout the history (of philosophy and of humankind) an intrinsic positive value
has been given to human life. Because human life has this intrinsic positive value,
procreating is good (or more: it is the most sacred and sublime moral value) and
committing suicide is bad (or more: it is the worst, the greatest moral sin).

2. With intrinsic value I mean: whether life has a metaphysical value (as in
Christianity) or it has a practical value (as in Kant); in any case, there is an ultimate
value, which makes human life inviolable. Ethics, in this tradition, is understood as
an activity aiming to determine how-to-live a life guided by that supreme, basic
value, intrinsic to human life.

3. Negative ethics starts with a negative ontology that presents life as having an
intrinsic value, but negative. Therefore, it primarily denies Agnosticism, the idea
that in life there is good and bad things, and that neither a positive nor a negative
value can be derived from human life. Nevertheless, it is the very being of life itself
that is bad, not in the sense of a metaphysical evil, but in the sense of a sensitive and
moral uneasiness.

4. The very being of human life is a terminal structure that starts to end from the
beginning, and that causes uneasiness in the sensitive level, through the phenomena
of pain and boredom, and in the moral level, through the phenomena of moral
disqualification. We are thrown into a body always subjected to disease, in fast
process of aging, decline and final decomposition, in obligatory neighborhood with
others in the same situation, what leaves little space for mutual moral consideration.

5. Positive values do exist, but they are all of the order of the beings (and not of the
order of Being) and they are all of a vindictive character, or reactive to the structural
uneasiness of Being; moreover, they pay high ontological prices (when a value is
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created, new disvalues are also, new conditions of non-consideration to other

people, etc. Positive values are thus, inevitably intra-worldly (or ontic), reactive and
onerous. And powerfully imaginative (almost hallucinatory), in order not to realize
the pitiful nature of our terminal condition (in order to forget we are a declining and
decomposing body).

6. The philosophical ethics have regularly supposed that life is intrinsically valuable,
and that it is possible to live an ethical life guided by this value. Negative ethics
states that life intrinsically causes sensitive and moral uneasiness and that an ethical
life is built with intra-worldly ethical values, reactive and onerous, within the
structural uneasiness, and that an ethical life is possible only inside this existential
framework. Negative ontology (which is a naturalized ontology, to the extent that
the characteristics of being are those of nature) replaces, therefore, the rationalist
affirmative ontology of tradition, in the light of which all European ethical theories
we know were built.

7. Specifically, attending particular ethical theories, humans are unable of being

virtuous (Aristotle), or of observing the categorical imperative (Kant) or of fighting
for the happiness of the majority (Mill), fully and radically; they are always
conditioned; when we face the whole context, we are aware of not being ethical (in
the terms of any of those theories). To avoid having to go into the nuances of each
ethical theory, we understand that all of them demand, at least, the consideration of
other peoples interests, the non-manipulation, and non-damage (we call this FEA,
fundamental ethical articulation). So, to be morally disqualified means violating
FEA.

8. In this level, negative ethics simply shows that, when the usual and current
affirmative categories are seriously taken into consideration, the result shall be that
all human actions are morally disqualified at some point, in some respect, at some
moment or situation of its performance or compliance. This is important because it
is not the case that negative categories lead to these results, but affirmative
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categories, when radicalized, do the job. This suggests that all ethical theories we
know perform an internal differentiation within general moral disqualification,
declaring to be moral some of the disqualified actions, and disqualifying others in a
sort of second order disqualification.

9. But why do we have the strong impression that ethics exists and that we can be
moral agents? When ethics talk about happiness, virtue or duty, when they accept
the difference between good and bad people, they are concealing the structural
disvalue of the being of human life and forgetting the reactive and onerous
character, intra-worldly invented, of positive values. Actually, we are all morally
disqualified; disrespectful people do not constitute a small group of exceptions. All
ethical theories that we know, that we read on our books of philosophy, are second
degree ethics, hiding and concealing, through all sort of mechanisms, the structural
disvalue, the moral disqualification, the situated and partial character of all positive
value. (The usual ethics are built within the framework of a radical ethical
impossibility).

10. The fundamental deforming factor in ethics is the persistent belief that life is
something good, that some people are good because they follow the norms of life,
and other (few, exceptional) are bad for transgressing them; without seeing that
goodness is built inside a fundamental evil, in a concealing and never gratuitous
way (without paying prices). The impossibility of ethics is hidden in everyday life,
and also in the prevailing affirmative philosophical thinking, guided by the ideas of
the value of life and of the exceptional nature of evil.

11. As a corollary of this view of things, procreation can be seen as an act morally
problematic and, in many cases, simply irresponsible, since it consists in putting a
being into existence knowing he is being placed in a terminal, in friction and
corruptible (sensitively and morally) structure, where the positive values will
always be reactive and will pay high ethical and sensitive prices. Even the ontically
responsible procreations are morally problematic, because the most one can give to
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children is the capability of defending themselves against the terminal structure of

being, in a scope of necessary disrespect of others in some degree. Besides giving
them a structural disvalue, this is done in self benefit and in a clear exercise of
manipulation of the other, using him or her as a mean.

12. Another important corollary is that suicide, far from being, in this perspective, the
more horrible moral sin, turns into an act that has better chances of being moral than
many others, to the extent it empties the spaces of struggle against the other; even
though it may also damages, it does so not differently from the rest of human acts;
the suicidal act is as reactive and onerous as the other acts, and maybe less (since it
is about a sort of self-sacrifice, of stopping to defend oneself); and it is, certainly,
the last disrespectful act. After all, we cause more damage staying than we do
leaving. (In every way, from the disvalue of being of human life does not emerge
suicide as a necessity, but merely as possibility: each one of us will have to decide
whether to continue or not struggling against the disvalue of being).

13. Pain, boredom and moral disqualification are permanent and structural motives for
abstaining of procreating and for suicide, independent from ontic motivations.

14. Summarizing: according to affirmative ethics, human life has an intrinsic positive
value; procreation, even if sometimes irresponsible, is in general sublime; and
suicide, even sometimes comprehensible is, in general, abominable. According to
negative ethics, on the contrary, life has a structural negative value; procreation is,
therefore, always irresponsible; and suicide can be not just morally justifiable, but
an act with more chances than many others of being a moral act.
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Comments.

The essential datum of my practical philosophy is the structural disvalue of human life
and its constant concealing in order that life (and ethics) be possible 1 . The disvalue of the
being of human life is what cannot be accepted or assumed, that will be concealed until the
end, because the basic value of human life is seen as what sustains the rest. I believe, on the
contrary, that the negative ethical thinking can open unsuspected spaces for moral actions.
(See further on).

Life continues due to a powerful vital impulse, immoral and irrational. The arguments
do not affect this value, it overruns and pull down all of them. Humans stay alive and
procreating not because life is intrinsically valuable, but because they are compelled to live
even in the worst conditions. It is a mere value of adhesion (with something as a value
of resistance, of competitive nature). Etwas Animalisches.

Philosophers and people in general should understand that what they call value of
human life is not value of human life in its being at all, but that they are already pointing
to the values which we are obliged to create precisely because life, in its being, IS NOT
GOOD. (We do not need to give value to something already valuable). Our defensive or
vindicatory actions try to make life something good (or at least tolerable), and these actions
are confused with the being of life itself, which is so bad that obliges us, precisely, to create
defensive values. Human life is, in any case, a conjunction of structural disvalue and
positive intra-worldly invented values. And the persistent tendency is to take the seconds as
if they were refutations of the first. (I call this the fallacy of the way back). The existence
of positive values is not the refutation of the disvalue of the being of life, but, on the
contrary, its powerful confirmation: the worse are the rigors of being the more intense and
dazzling are valuing intra-worldly inventions.

1
Incidentally, the essential datum of my theoretical philosophy is the Gestalt character of philosophies, that
the pluralism of philosophies is not an anomaly, but the very deployment of philosophy itself; that, therefore,
there is no philosophy that is true while all the others are false except from the perspective of their authors
and sustainers. This of course applies to all kinds of philosophies, including philosophies of ethics.
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My last idea about suicide.

The best would have been not to be born. Not being born is, in a negative ethics, the
absolute good; but it is, precisely, the good that cannot be sought. (Attention: the situation
is more radical than in the case of goods that can be sought but never achieved; not being
born cannot even be sought).

Once being born, what can we do, from the moral point of view? How can we still
be ethical? Well, in a radical sense, in a first degree ethics, it is impossible: we have been
put into a declining body and in spaces of disrespect: in order to live, to be able to continue,
we will need to destroy, to open our paths, to disrespect others. The first thing I should do
is: not procreate. I am not obliged to procreate (although nature and society encourage me
to do so). If I procreate, I do it in wide and free spaces of decision, and in self benefit.

Will the second moral demand be killing myself? Well, committing suicide faces
several problems, technical, practical, juridical, etc. On the contrary of what many people
think and say, committing suicide is a very difficult enterprise. But speaking just about the
moral inconvenient, the first thing to say is that suicide will also violate FEA, as any other
human act does. Therein, the most one can do in the track of a quest for the morality of
suicide will be trying to describe some characteristics of suicide that do not make it more
immoral than many other human acts, or that can make it more moral than other human
acts. My points are as follows:

(a) The thesis of moral disqualification regards suicide not specifically as suicide, but as a
human act whatever. Therefore, initially, there is not a specific moral condemnation of
suicide; suicide is morally disqualified as any other human act (in the sense that any act
causes damages to other people, regardless how well intentioned it may be). The
immorality of suicide is highlighted, in the affirmative contexts, because the radical thesis
of the moral disqualification of every human act was not recognized (due to the ignorance
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of the negative ontology, and because of the metaphysical and rationalistic conception on
the human being).

(b) On the other hand, as it can be observed, the suicidal act does not damage in a peculiar
way: through powerful psychological and biological mechanisms, people tend to accept and
continue living after the death (suicidal or not) of their loved ones. It is true that there are
people who never recover from the suicide of a loved one, but it is also true that there are
people who never recover from the homicide of a loved one (for example, the parents of
little Hlio, in Rio de Janeiro three years ago, dragged over many kilometers by criminals).
There is nothing in suicide that makes it especially traumatizing to all humans. There are
people who feel relieved and accept more when they know that a loved one decided to die,
instead of watching him slowly languish in a natural death.

(c) The thesis that suicide would be an act particularly immoral, the worst of all, is based on
some metaphysical or religious thesis connected to points of reference nowadays in crisis or
abandoned. If the negative ontology is accepted, there is a permanent structural motive to
killing oneself (the negative structure of the being of life), and therefore it is absurd the
question of psychologists and sociologists about the motives of the suicide, as well as the
transformation of suicide into an enigma; in the light of negative ontology, the true
enigma is how human beings can keep living after all. But we still have to find the moral
motives to suicide, because killing oneself just to run away from the negative structure of
being is not, per se, morally justified.

(d) The whole previous text aims to show that suicide, in spite of its presumed morality was
not constituted, neither can it be seen as a particularly immoral human act. Let us now see
how it can be defended, in certain cases, as moral. There is a first aspect of the suicidal act
that seems to clearly put it in the direction of morality: the suicidal manages to overcome
the natural (and social) powerful impulse of staying alive without conditions and in any
circumstance; it seems that all morality has as necessary condition (although not sufficient!)
the capability of overcoming this natural resistance. But of course one can have this
capability without the suicide being moral: for it to be, the overcoming of the natural (and
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social) resistances of staying alive must have a moral motivation. However, the fact that
suicide complies with this necessary condition seems to put it in advantage with regards to
all those human actions of continuing to live at any cost.

(e) My idea of formal suicide (Critique of affirmative morals, 1996) resides in that killing
oneself is morally justified when the negative (terminal) structure of the being of life totally
strangles, or is about to strangle, the possibilities of living a life of moral consideration in
relation to the others. Being human life, in its structure, the search for equilibrium always
unstable - between the terminal structure of being and the intra-worldly invention of values,
it seems to be morally justified the suicide performed when the spaces of this invention
were or are about to be totally closed. This will not prevent suicide from violating FEA (in
a radical sense, no human act is radically justified, unless, maybe, the non-procreating). It
will justify killing oneself only as a last damaging act to FEA, in order to avoid its absolute
violation when a moral life is no more possible at all.

(f) This is what makes me reject every other kind of suicide as being moral, if it is
committed in wide spaces, that is, without being cornered by the terminality of being,
regardless how altruistic its motives may be. Because, since both suicides (the formal as
well as the altruistic) will damage FEA, the only thing that can justify formal suicide is that
it was committed in an extreme case, under risk of not having an ethical life at all; this
justification is out of reach for the altruistic suicidal, to the extent he has spaces (or
freedom) to keep living morally, with all the inconvenients. One should evaluate the
moral onus (the inevitable moral disqualifications) of continuing alive and those of killing
oneself: the balance, in formal suicide, is clearly favorable to killing oneself (because there
are no way outs); however in the case of the altruistic suicide, it is not excluded the
possibility that continuing to live is more moral concerning the others - than the pretense
sacrifice of the martyr (who is full of genealogical inconvenient already captured by
Nietzsche).

(g) The general pattern of moral justification of suicide is as follows: It is morally justified
to stop living in all situations where the intra-worldly creation of values has literally (or
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predictably) been blocked by the advance of the terminality of the being of life in its natural
and social deployments. Of course this pattern does not order every person who is in this
situation to commit suicide; it just says that those ones who do it does not commit an
immoral act (besides the inevitable break of the FEA which affects every human act, in the
sense of harmful consequences for other people); those who do not do it have merit, but
what this person does cannot be ordered. The pattern just states that this person cannot be
morally condemned. This pattern shall morally justify the suicides of Seneca and Walter
Benjamin, committed for motives of social strangling of moral possibilities, and the one of
Arthur Koestler, or Mrio Monicelli, who killed themselves to run away from an incurable
illness. This pattern leaves aside, in principle, a huge amount of suicides without the
support of moral justification (but there may be other kinds of justifications!). For example:
suicides that include homicides, aggressive suicides, revenge suicides, suicides for protest,
performatic suicides, proud suicides, suicides for lack of success (or for excess of
recognition!), suicides for love (Werther), suicides for competition (Russian roulette), and
even the altruistic suicides!

(h) But this is just in principle. The suicidal pattern could be broadened complying with
two conditions: (h.1) Understanding or predictably in the formulation in a very wide way.
That is: the strangling of possibilities may not be literal, but being in a situation leading
inevitably to strangling. This is clear in the case of a person who has been diagnosed with a
degenerative disease and who wants to die before its final consummation; however, a
suicidal for political protest could claim that, in staying alive, sooner or later the strangling
of possibilities would arrive (through ideological censure, political repression, etc). (h.2)
Granting to people a high level of reliability to judge over the strangled character or not of
their possibilities of moral life. (In the extreme case, recognizing to Werther the capability
of saying: Without my loved Carlota, I would not be able to live a moral life. I would
behave badly with everyone out of resentment). If h1 and h2 are accepted, the pattern
could justify many other suicides, or all suicides. I, personally, do not find this reasonable
for the same previous motive: when the strangling is not literal or almost literal, nothing
prevents that continuing to live can be more moral than killing oneself.
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What to do (Outline of a negative living)

If for one motive or another, we do not commit suicide and continue living, which
are still the possibilities of a moral life? Here one must read the Small Survival
Handbook, in the Critique of affirmative morals (1996). There is also a new text included
on volume XX of my Complete Work, which I transcribe herein:

In my way of assuming philosophy, I do not believe we philosophize in order to

find way outs or to send recommendations of life, although this has been a task
currently assumed by Philosophy throughout the times. Western philosophy is already born
as opposition to Sophistic and to Skepticism, that is, as a constructive and edifying task.
Somehow, I betray this traditional vocation of philosophy. Assumed as I assume it, as a
rather irresistible and radical project of elucidation, philosophy could close way outs
instead of opening them, or lead us to desperation instead of hope. Religions and, in its own
way, sciences, are better than philosophy in the task of finding way outs. Thus, what I
develop in negative ethics are intensively lived thoughts, which I feel should be exposed,
shared and discussed.

The very saying herein exhausts the sense of what was said, a sort of pragmatic
demand that overcomes the specific semantic content. As in Psychoanalytic treatment
sometimes there is some necessity of just saying something in order to have said, to make it
registered. (In the same way we travel in order to have traveled). But I myself do not know
very well what to do with those thoughts once they have been exposed. In a certain way,
they are perfectly useless (or inoperative, as I use to say). But I think that, within this
uselessness or ineffectiveness, philosophy really reaches the limit of its own consummation
as a critical and clarifying speech. Nothing has been guaranteed about if philosophy itself
could remain untouched during this dangerous task, or if philosophy would be one of its
own victims.

From the beginning, I believe it is important to say all this about human condition,
to oppose to the usual policy of concealment, disguise and not-saying, as much as to
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provoke reactions, to make the listeners search for new and creative solutions. Thus,
beyond its practical implementation, I see a value in simply think and say these thoughts,
because they are contrary to the usual lines and directions and create a healthy and
challenging perplexity. Sometimes, when I expose my ideas, I do not want you to do
nothing at all. In principle, I do not recommend anything; I just describe what seems to me
should be taken into account when deciding how we are going to face all that. What we
will do with the delicate equilibrium between the terminal structure of being and the intra-
worldly invention of values shall be a singular decision in each case. If I would recommend
something, it would be: do not keep pretending that our life is a wonderful gift that does
not have any structure, something that is resolved just in harmless ontic strategies.

Someone could demand more. If there is indeed a negative ethics that is not just
another demolition of morality, but a morality itself even in a negative scope, something
should be said about what to do with such thoughts on a form of life (to use the fleeting
wittgensteinian notion). Well, there is something that might have already got evident: from
the negative point of view, speaking about a form of life can be the same as speaking
about a form of death (a category not treated by Wittgenstein nor by anyone, except by
Freud, who is strictly not a philosopher); and if there is something as good life, it might
be the same as good death. That is, in a negative ethics, there is no good life that death
destroys (because there is not the usual separation between life and death), but, in any case,
a good death that consumes a life from ever terminal. There is not, in negative ethics, the
affirmative ideal of a good life that we usually find in the available ethical literature. In
the sense presented here, there cannot be anything as a good life (and how could it
exist?). The question consists in asking ourselves if we really need something like this and,
in case we need it, ask if we count on the means to reach it.

From what has been presented so far, it seems we can only have a life that escapes,
with a certain success, from the unbearable suffering, and this would already be enough (in
fact, it would be enough to 70% of mankind in the world: get them rid of the unbearable
suffering; any happiness would be for them a luxury). Escaping from unbearable
suffering means having good relations with death, instead of the bargain and simulation we
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currently have. Of course, death is the radical avoidance of suffering; in fact, death was, to
many people, the only available way of avoiding suffering, and this must say something
important about the value of human life. (It does not seem good a life in which, much
frequently, death is the only way of running away from the unbearable suffering). Thus,
thanatizing life would be a first movement of any negative ethics, which means giving up
any project of a good life that does not include the thanatos elements in its reflection.

So it is not possible, in negative ethics, to ask about how to live without asking
about how to die. This is the first step. So far, the affirmative values have instilled us the
idea that there is a life independent from death, that people want to live and continue to
live, and that ethics has to give us tools and subventions for that. However, there is no
life in that sense, because life is initially terminal; so ethics in negative vein does not
have to teach us how to live moving us away from death (and how could it?), but to learn
how to live terminally, how to live dying. Negative ethics is a thanatos ethics, and if we
do not like this and prefer to forget death and dive into the noise of the so called life, it is
even worse; this bet will not go much far; mortality erodes each moment of life, whether
we want it or not, and it is better to face it in the most number of moments possible.

Our lives are structurally this, a lived dying in which we should improve ourselves.
In a certain way, any bet for life without death will be, from ever, fated to failure. Negative
ethics bets for death with life and, therein, it cannot lose, because it follows the very
direction of things.

I think all people have already realized, even pre-reflexively, that there is basically
death, terminality; and they try to die in the best possible way (smoking, consuming all sort
of things, buying DVDs, traveling around the world, committing suicide or studying
Heidegger). All strategies and actions that we usually connect to life are, as a matter of
fact, thanatos strategies and actions, manners to take forward the mortality of our being,
since full life (which was our first option), has showed to be impossible. (It is as our first
option had been life, the very life, without pain, without suffering, without attrition,
without friction, without wastage, without destruction, without moral disqualification, etc;
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but this door has been closed on our faces; therefore, now we want to die in the best way
possible, through an investment from all those negativities, through a compromise that does
not hurt us too much).

A negative life is inserted inside this general and shared thanatos, but has some
particularities that should be mentioned. The negative human being has a greater familiarity
with the terminality of being; he neither conceals it nor embellishes it, he thinks about it
very frequently or almost always, and has full conscience about what is pre-reflexive for
the majority, that is, all we do is terminal and can be destroyed at any moment. Negative
life, in this sense, is melancholic and distanced (but never distracted or relaxed), not much
worse than most lives and much better than them in many ways, a life with neither hope
nor much intense feelings, neither of deception nor even enthusiasm. And, above all,
without the irritating daily pretending that everything is fine and that we are great,
while we sweep our miseries under the carpet. Therefore, it is usually a life without great
crisis or great depressions (by the way, depression is the fatal fate of any affirmative
life); negative lives are anguished lives, poetic and anxious, and almost always very active
lives.

In the Critique, I have already written that a negative life shall emerge, basically,
on four ideas: (a) Full conscience about the structural disvalue of human life, assuming all
the consequences of it; (b) Structural refuse to procreation (a negative philosopher with
children is even more absurd than an affirmative one without them); (c) Structural refuse to
heterocide (not killing anybody in spite of the frequent temptation to violence); (d)
Permanent and relaxed disposition for suicide as a possibility.

Why does this negative life constitute an Ethos? (it could be a negative life but
not an ethical negative life). The guiding idea of the affirmative ethics was that an ethics
could just emerge from an intrinsic value of the human being, from considering the human
being as valuable in himself, as having a dignity, etc. The idea of the negative ethics is
that morality could emerge from the conscience about the greatest and most fathomless
misery, and not from a positive value; that trying to find a fundamental positive value leads
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to all the usual perplexities of the affirmative moral theory (for example, to kill in order to
preserve life, and so on). What is ethically important is the application of the FEA, the
consideration for the interests of others together with your own; that is, inviolability of
human life. Actually, in a negative thinking as the one exposed herein, blaming or
penalizing the other for the negativity of being, for the impossibility of living a non-
terminal life, is more one epistemological (and rather stupid) mistake than a strict moral
fault. The other has nothing to do with what happens to me; there is something structural
that cannot be lived by human beings in general, that tricks us and turns us ones against the
others.

So there is a motive not strictly moral, but epistemic, to maintain an interest in the
observance of the FEA: the others cannot be blamed for the terminality of being, to which
all of us are submitted. The moral disqualification and suffering are our negative
patrimony, which we see ourselves obliged to administrate against each other, as part of the
deep disvalue of our lives. So, from the moral point of view, the question is about trying to
establish a profound connection between the disvalue of being and the inviolability of the
other, given the failure of building this inviolability on affirmative values through strong
mechanisms of concealment of the terminal structure of human life, without any thanatos
investment.

Our world is the current attack of thanatos against the walls of concealment, against
the affirmative refusal of all negotiation with death. People and populations appear as
guilty of a great absence, as those ones who must be killed in order the being be possible.
All ontological catastrophe is transferred to the intra-world, the guilty identified and the
mechanisms restorative of the Order put in action. The denial of the ontological difference
and the forgetting of the mortal-being of being point out to the environment where the
affirmative life develops in its usual aggressive way, heterocide, anti-suicide and
procreative. Affirmativity advances inexorably, procreating and killing without mercy,
producing and annihilating life, making its everyday ontological revolution; convinced that
terminality is the evil fruit of some sneaky intra-worldly plot.
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Our world full of injustice, suffering, war and intolerance is not, as people think, a
fruit of the forces of thanatos, of the impulses of death, but, on the contrary, it is a result of
a fundamental refuse to thanatos, of a lack of familiarity with what constitutes us as living
things. If we do not know clearly what can be a negative ethics, we know at least that it
might certainly modify the usual concealing mechanisms of the current affirmative ethos.
From (a) to (d) above are, all of them, non-concealing attitudes that, in our world guided by
affirmative categories, shall depress or despair.

The connection between structural disvalue and inviolability of human life was
already exposed in the Critique. The traditional mistake was to think that something not
valuable cannot be respected; that if something does not have value, we can destroy it
without problems. But if I myself have no value (in the sense of having a disvalue), if the
very subject of potentially disrespectful actions lacks the same value which the one he
could disrespect also lacks, then we are all in the same situation, we have the same value,
that is, none, and, therefore, we should not hurt the autonomy of the other, nor have any
prerogative that allows us to harm him or her. We have indeed an inviolability based on the
form of the world itself, a structural-negative inviolability. The idea of radical sensitive and
moral disqualification of human life and the idea of radical inviolability amongst humans,
far from being contradictory, lead naturally towards one another. We just have to renounce
the idea (narcissistic?) that we have a positive value which would connect us all. We all
share the same misery, the same ontological humiliation, and that is why we are
untouchable to each other.

What the idea of inviolability needs is a notion of equality among all humans; this
equality tried currently to be found in affirmative terrain with no success, simply because
there is not such an affirmative equality (after the fall of religious frameworks); but in the
negative vein, the idea of equality is rapidly found: what makes us equal is the non-being
we have to be, the death we have to live, the lack that we can interrupt at any time, our
terminality gained in birth, which makes us build these affirmative and reactive values that
so profoundly separates us from each other. Instead of exploring the negative elements that
bind us, humankind has taken the affirmative path, which emphasizes the intra-worldly
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values, which separates us and puts us in permanent war. Because there is no positive value
able to connect all humans and that is not subjected to endless controversies. Just in the
level of the mortal-being of being we will be all connected, we value exactly the same, that
is, nothing! It is the investment of this nothing what lacks in our current forms of
affirmative ethical life. (Critique, p. 198).

So this is an extensional ethical principle. As the empty set of the classical set
theory is unique (there are not many empty sets), although they can be intensionally
different (the set of the films of Hitchcock performed by John Wayne and the set of poems
of Rimbaud written after 1990 are intensionally different), similarly, the negativity of
human life is the same for everyone, all humans belong to the same negativity, although
each one of us lives it in a particular way (that is, each one of us has a particular manner of
being our fundamental non-being).

My negative inviolability is not, after all, a problem of mine, but a problem of the
other, to whom I am the other who he or she would have to preserve. But there cannot be,
in negative ethics, a self-preserving movement emanated from myself (Critique, p. 170). In
a negative ethics, life itself is protected just by the negative ethics of the other, and not by
mine. Being so little what we can expect from the others (not because they are bad, but
because they are as cornered by terminality as me), it is good to increment the profound
conscience about the constant availability for dying, and for dying well; and, specially, and
despite the strong temptation for fatherhood, to spare others from having to assume a
negative ethics.

Concluding words

Aristotle, Kant and Mill presented three types of ethical theory that do not focus the
human condition in its most radical situation; they all make the moral articulations in the
surface of human life; negative ethics can be seen as a thought-experiment showing how
things go if we really apply ethical categories of consideration of others interests and non-
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manipulation to the extreme of rigor; in so doing, we can see, among other things, how
procreation is morally problematic and suicide morally plausible.

Nietzsche aimed a radical criticism against morality in the name of Life. He was not an
optimistic, but a negative philosopher conceding and stressing the problematic character of
existence. Nietzsche sustained his attack against morality in the affirmation of Life with all
its terrors. But if Nietzsche rejected ethics from Life, I reject life from Ethics. Nietzsche
asked himself: what would be the consequences of radically rejecting ethics; my own
question is: what would be the consequences of radically accepting ethics. War and
violence could be the consequences of Nietzschean option; non-procreation and suicide can
be the consequences of negative ethics.

Nietzsche merit consists in having shown rather clearly the consequences of

accepting Life as a supreme value, something that is not usually seen. My own merit (if
there is any) would be to show the consequences of accepting Ethics as a supreme value,
what is not usually seen either. The rest of non-radical work in ethics - like Habermas or
Apels or MacIntyres or Dussels or Rawls - oscillates between these two extremes of
radical ethical thought.