Every Cradle is a Grave Quotes

“Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Living outside of any story―living without hope for the future, without the belief that one is part of a narrative―is confusing. It's hard to get anything done when nothing has a point. For any not-immediately-pleasurable action (or inaction) I contemplate―getting up in the morning, vacuuming, answering the phone―there is no readily-available answer to the ever-present question in my mind: "why?" At least, there is no long-term "why.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The unfortunate truth, suggested by science and vehemently denied by religion, is that there is no greater story. We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality, or rather worse, because there never was a story. For many of us, our personal stories have run out - and it's extremely difficult to push oneself into a new story once you see that all stories are vanity. It is like the difficulty of staying in a dream once one realizes one is dreaming.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Everyone dies of something. And we can't bury ourselves. This means that for every human being who has ever lived, someone must discover and dispose of the body. It is mistaken to attribute this harm only to suicides. It is part of our humanity that we - suicides and non-suicides alike - must inflict this harm on others. Once we have been given the dubious gift of life, we are destined to burden someone with the disposal of our dead body.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The Cheery and the Damned
Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this "cheery social policy.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Life, perhaps, would be more enjoyable and less miserable if it were not mandatory.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“There are some things that people will pay for even an imaginary chance at having. Youth, love, sex, wealth, and status are so deeply and painfully desired that people are willing to suspend their disbelief for the privilege of imagining that they might be obtainable. The need for social belonging trumps all other needs, and even trumps our own rationality. Being old, fat, poor, or impotent means being in social pain. Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Our evolutionary history ensures that we think in stories. Stories are so central to our thinking that it is hard to think about them. An old fish said to a couple of young fish, "Morning, boys! The water's fine today!" and swam off. One young fish turned to the other young fish and asked, "What's water?”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“If human life were a video game, would anyone choose to play it?”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The things that make life seem meaningful often depend on illusion and selective perception to maintain themselves.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Children, now being very costly to raise, no longer provide a financial benefit to their parents. So children must instead provide meaning to make up for the missing material benefits. Having children is also, for the first time in human experience, genuinely a choice rather than a matter of course or providence. This choice must be justified, as it did not have to be in the past.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The belief that life is meaningful tends to take the form of a strong feeling rather than a reasoned conclusion; indeed, one of the functions of meaning is to shield a person from the harmful effects of reasoning...”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Life is often the same kind of freedom: an unwanted one that makes people worse off than if they didn't have it. The fact that it is the basis for other freedoms does not demonstrate that it is a desirable thing to get.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“We don't even have to harm or kill animals in order to stop Nature from doing her evil deeds. We could simply prevent their reproduction, or even merely cease our current "conservation efforts" that involve breeding animals. Breeding wild animals and releasing them into the wild is doing the ugly work of Genesis all over again-and cruelly claiming that it's "good.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Human morality, some may argue, applies only to human actions - not to the actions of animals. I agree with this. [...] However, morality must certainly apply to human inaction, and especially our inaction in preventing harm, suffering, and awfulness. What is the moral justification for the "hands off " dogma regarding nature? We often interfere with nature for the good of humans and human industry. Why not for the good of individual animals? Bloody Nature is a machine for pushing genes into the future. Does it really "know best"?”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“I think it a valid hypothesis that poverty is actually dreadfully painful -not only physically, but emotionally and socially.
There is only so much pain we can expect a being to endure before his attempts to relieve it through future-damaging means become perfectly understandable and, in fact, rational.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Many people are so miserable that they do not want to enter the future at all. Their whole future projected life is worthless to them. In technical terms, their utility over all future time intervals, appropriately discounted, is less than zero. Also, their current utility (present circumstance) is zero or negative (otherwise they'd stick around a bit longer to pick up extra utility).
• Suicide is one option for such people. But there are two other options, according to Becker & Posner (terminology is mine):
• Take what you have and "bet" it on a chance at something that would make life worth living. If it fails, you can always kill yourself. (Gamble)
• Since there is an element of uncertainty to the future, take what you have and use it to make the present livable so you can postpone suicide. Something to make life worth living might be just around the corner. If not, you can always kill yourself. (Palliate & Wait)”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“It is unfortunate that anyone suffers - people or animals. The prevention of suffering is simply good.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Palliating with drugs or intense experiences that have serious long-term risks and harms suggests that, subjectively, the present is so bad that it's worth trading off quality of life in the future to make the present tolerable. Similarly, making a gamble with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood of very bad consequences suggests that one's present situation is not worth preserving by behaving cautiously. These behaviors, and not just suicide, are evidence that life is not a universally valued commodity.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The behaviors we would most expect from individuals who do not value their lives would be risking their lives in dangerous situations, engaging in gambles whose expected value is negative (such as joining a street gang, buying lottery tickets, and going to law school), and palliating their misery in ways that harm their long-term prospects (as with drugs, alcohol, or casual sex).
These behaviors are in fact widespread, affecting many times more people than suicide.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Children's freedom to roam and to socialize informally has been severely curtailed; their school environment has become more prisonlike, their physical safety protected at the expense of their education, development, and fun. The loss of children's freedom to roam may be regarded as an unfortunate late stage in the sacralization of childrearing.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Not many people commit suicide, but many people act as if their lives are not very valuable to them. They risk actual death or social death by gambling their present circumstances on a small chance of future payoff, in a manner that is not actuarially sound. They choose, with their economic decisions, to believe in a counterfactual world, indicating dissatisfaction with the real world. They palliate present suffering in a manner that harms future prospects. This gamble/palliate behavior [...] indicates that, rather than valuing life as a precious gift, people frequently treat life as having a zero or negative value with their actual actions.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Not many people commit suicide, but many people act as if their lives are not very valuable to them.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The expanding authority of medicine is worrying. There are no checks or balances built into our system to counteract the authority of doctors, and experiments with socialized medicine mean that government is more involved with health care than ever.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The problem is that little of this "company and support" (and reproductive capacity) is morally obligatory. A person may, without committing a moral wrong by modern standards, leave his spouse due to irreconcilable differences or move away from his friends and relatives to pursue a career or refuse to have children. Providing our company is a voluntary act, and we are under no moral obligation to do so. The company and support of a person is best viewed as a privilege, not a right-with the important exception of a person's voluntarily conceived children (there is a moral duty to care for one's children that renders the suicide of a parent of dependent children, rebuttably, wrong”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Removing the sacredness from human life is not a goal that is likely to be achieved, nor even a very desirable one. Our responsibility is to examine our own cognition as best as we are able, including that part of our cognition that perceives and responds to sacredness. By watching ourselves and others as we experience sacredness and its violation under many circumstances, we lay a foundation to be able to judge - and perhaps engineer - sacred objects.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“A moral: be careful whom you accept as an in-group member, as you will almost certainly absorb some of his values.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“A value is an end, as opposed to a means to an end, and offers an end to thinking uncomfortable thoughts that have no answer.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“It gets worse. Those brought back from the brink of death often suffer debilitating injuries that significantly decrease quality of life - below a baseline that was already not worth living.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The person contemplating suicide has more to fear from the hospital than from incarceration. If he survives his suicide attempt or is discovered before he has died, then a progression of paramedics, nurses, doctors, and perhaps even surgeons will attempt to foil his plans by saving his life. [...] A person is not 'free' to do something that he must either get away with in secret or be forcibly prevented from doing it if caught.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide