In an article called 10 actually good things that happened in 2023, published in VOX on the occasion of the end of the year, it is argued that despite 2023 being a hard year, 10 news stories can function as a reminder that a better future is possible.

However, reviewing these 10 supposedly actually good things reveals that maybe except for one, they are all actually things that are good in the sense of stopping something bad, not good in themselves.

Many pro-natalists are trying to counter-argue antinatalism by saying that there are many good things in life, but most if not all fail to point at something which is good in itself and not something that eases or solves something bad. And although the article is not at all about procreation, more or less the same goes for the list of supposedly actually good things that happened in 2023 that it mentions.

Don’t get me wrong, the things the article covers are very positive, some are amazingly positive, but they are so because they are solving, or at least mitigating, bad things.
The first thing in their list, for example, is that ‘the economy started undoing 40 years of rising inequality’, which is of course very very positive, but I don’t think that something should be considered as an ‘actually good thing’ if it is actually starting to fix something very bad that should have never happened in the first place. It is very good that, hopefully, the U.S economy is finally starting to deal with wage inequality between poor and wealthy workers, but this inequality should have never happened in the first place. And of course (as mentioned clearly in the article) inequality still remains, and probably will keep remaining, a defining feature of the American economy.

Another example is that psychedelic-assisted therapy seeks FDA approval. But like the case of wage inequality between poor and wealthy, this is an example of a very positive thing because it tackles a very bad thing (mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, and anxiety) and like the case of wage inequality it is an example of something that should have happened much earlier, and probably only due to the conservative fear of psychedelic substances, it didn’t.

An example given in this article which is much closer to home is decriminalization of abortions in Latin America. Clearly a case of something terrible – criminalization of women’s rights over their own bodies – starting to be fixed (and unfortunately while backsliding in other places such as the U.S), is not an actually good thing, but something that it is absolutely outrages that had ever happened in the first place.

Three additional examples of things that it is absolutely outrages that had ever happened in the first place, are: the Supreme Court in USA upheld America’s strongest animal welfare law which is California’s Proposition 12 – a law requiring that much of the eggs, pigs meat and veal sold in the state come from animals given more space on factory farms; the US Department of Agriculture gave final approval for a “cell-cultivated” chicken meat; and that Europe is phasing out the practice of “male chick culling”.
But there should have never been factory farming in the first place. Starting to slightly and slowly improve the worst thing that humans have ever done is actually not a good thing. It doesn’t make the world a good place but a little bit less terrible.
As the article says: “Each year, the global egg industry hatches 6.5 billion male chicks, but because they can’t lay eggs and they don’t grow big or fast enough to be efficiently raised for meat, they’re economically useless to the industry. So they’re killed hours after hatching, and in horrifying ways: ground up or burned alive, gassed with carbon dioxide, or suffocated in trash bags.” And none of that should have ever happened. Humans should have never consumed chicken’s eggs, let alone creating an industrial breed of chickens who lay so many eggs, and cage them in some of the worst facilities ever invented, and humans should have never created a different type of chickens bred to grow bigger and faster at the expense of their own health and welfare. Slightly reducing an atrocity that should have never happened in the first place should not be considered something good.
All these examples can be considered as something good only in a world which is so terribly bad. And if the world is so terribly bad, improving some of its atrocities is far from being sufficient.

And lastly, the article mentions important developments in treatments and vaccines that happened in 2023. But this is something good only if it is necessary that there would be diseases, but it is not. There are diseases, and pain and suffering and any other bad thing in this world, only because people are creating more people, and more other sentient beings, to whom bad things happen. But it is not necessary to create new sentient beings, therefore this suffering is unnecessary. And causing unnecessary suffering is wrong.

It is argued in the article that “when the world is mired in horrible things, it’s important to imagine a better future; without hope, new solutions wouldn’t be possible”, a sort of claim often being used by many pro-natalists to supposedly counter antinatalism, a claim which I have already addressed in another post. Therefore I’ll not repeat all the points I made there, but will make do with the one which is most relevant to the article covering good things that happened in 2023. Even if it was true that it is better in the present than it was in the past, better doesn’t necessarily mean good. Something can be better than something else yet be terrible in itself. The fact that things could have been worse, or if it is true that they have been worse, doesn’t mean that now they are good. If at all true, all this claim can stand for is that it is better in the present than it was, and that it is better in the present than it could have been, but not by any means that it is good in the present. And even if it was true that it is better in the present than it was in the past, there is absolutely no guarantee that it would be better in the future. It also might be a lot worse. And it already is a living hell.

At this moment, there is a war going on somewhere, a nation is crying out for independence in another place, somewhere else there is a political repression, not far from there an ethnical repression, right next to it religious repression, and riots against corruption are being violently hushed by the authorities everywhere. Human history is an endless battle over things that should have been absolutely basic a long time ago and they are absolutely far from being so in the present, so why would they be in the future? If the present is not significantly better than the past why assume that the future will be?

If humanity has yet to succeed solving basic issues among itself, and when many of them become even worse, and new ones emerge, what is the basis for the assumption that the future is going to be better? On what grounds do they assume that present violent conflicts would be solved in the future, and more importantly that new ones won’t constantly emerge?
Was there any reduction in the scope of weapon manufacture in recent years? In arms trade? In developing more lethal and destructive weapons? Did people stop fighting over territories? Over resources? Over religious differences? Did humanity become wiser and more educated and realized that it is totally insane to fight over the “right way” to worship a fictional entity? Did humanity become wiser and more educated and realized that profits are way less important than welfare? Did humanity become wiser and more educated regarding how to raise happy people? Did humanity become wiser and more educated and figured out the purpose of the whole thing? Can it provide a reasonable answer to the so fundamental self-evident and primary question – what is the meaning of life?

And lastly, even if it was true that the present is better than the past and that the future would be better than the present, what for? To what purpose? There is no aim to achieve in the future, there is no important goal to accomplish, and no one who is waiting to exist in the future, so what logical explanation let alone ethical justification is there to sacrifice generations upon generations of humans, and many more of nonhumans, so maybe a tiny fraction of all the sentient creatures who would be forced to be created theretofore would live in a supposedly better world? That is morally reprehensible in every possible respect.