JULIO CABRERA: FROM PORTUGUESE AND SPANISH TO ENGLISH

In 1989, I published a short book in Portuguese, “Project of Negative Ethics”, in whose first chapter I presented the ethical problem of the immorality of procreation. (An English translation of this chapter is available in: misantropiaemelancolia.wordpress.com). This shows that the first antinatalist ideas, in a modern sense, had already appeared in south-America in the late 1980s. It was true that I did not use the term "antinatalism" and that my presentation was not entirely argumentative. However in 1996 I published in Barcelona the "Critique of Affirmative Morality" in Spanish, including many of my ideas about value of life, procreation and suicide in a more argumentative way. (An English version of this book, not a very good one, is available in: https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/17430). The Spanish second edition of this book (2014) includes a chapter discussing with Benatar, particularly his famous asymmetry. 

Scholars and philosophers did not know my philosophical work until recently, especially for two factual reasons: (1) The fact that my books were written in Portuguese and Spanish, two languages not recognized as universal philosophical languages ​​(especially Portuguese). (In 2018, I wrote and posted on my English page (filosofojuliocabrera.blogspot.com) a text about the tyranny of the English language within philosophy (Why what is not written in English does not exist? Language as ontological policy: the case of South-American antinatalism). (2) The fact that I live and work in Brazil, a country that does not encourage authorial philosophical work. Brazilian universities only stimulate good comments, exegesis and interpretations of European philosophers discouraging original thinking, considering it arrogant. (The first initiative to translate my books into English came from other countries, not from the Brazilian community in which I worked).

For these two factual reasons, it was natural that my books were not known in the English-speaking world (although antinatalists such as Thomas Ligotti and Karim Akerma read some of my works in Spanish and knew part of my thinking in the area of negative ethics).

In 2011 I wrote a detailed and complex article criticizing Benatar's famous asymmetry through a rather sophisticated argument: "Quality of Human Life and Non-existence (Some criticisms on David Benatar's formal and material positions)." Redbioetica Review, UNESCO, 2011). In 2017, Cambridge Scholars Publishing agreed to publish my book “Discomfort and Moral Impediment”, which contained much of my ethical thinking, among other things my long antinatalist argument and my original anti-abortion argument within an antinatalist environment. The book appeared at the beginning of 2019.

On the other hand, a group of readers of my work had the initiative to elaborate an entry "Julio Cabrera" in Wikipedia in three languages ​​(Portuguese, English and Polish). In addition, the English version of my web page was updated and I posted a conference on procreation offered in Brasilia with English subtitles, which was widely attended in a few days. (See: “Radical Bioethics”. Channel “Insurgência Negativa e Cinema Vazio”, June 27, 2018). From all these facts, no one could continue to be unaware of my presence in the intellectual world that discussed these matters, which I had been thinking about for decades.