Julio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil. He is a retired professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasília and former head of the department. Previously he taught in Argentina, at the National University of Córdoba, the University of Belgrano and then in Brazil at the Federal University of Santa Maria. He is best known for his works on "negative ethics" and cinema and philosophy. Other areas of philosophy that he deals with are philosophy of language, logic and Latin American philosophy.
Negative ethics In his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality (A reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life), Julio Cabrera presents his theory about the value of human existence. Human life, for Cabrera, is "structurally negative" insofar as there are negative components of life that are inevitable, constitutive and adverse: as prominent among them Cabrera cites loss, scarcity, pain, conflicts, fragility, illness, aging, discouragement and death. According to Cabrera they form the basic structure to human life, which he analyzes through what he calls naturalistic phenomenology, drawing freely from thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Cabrera has called his work an attempt to put together Schopenhauer and Heidegger, introducing a determinant judgement of the value of being into the analysis of Dasein, and putting morality above life, against Nietzsche. Cabrera develops an ethical theory, negative ethics, that is informed by this phenomenological analysis. He argues that there has been an unwarranted prejudice in ethics against non-being, a view he calls "affirmativity". Because affirmative views take being as good, they always view things that threaten this hegemony as bad; particularly things like abstention from procreation or suicide. Cabrera criticizes affirmative ethics for asking how people should live without asking the radical question of whether people should live tout court. He argues that, because of the structural negativity of being, there is a fundamental "moral disqualification" of human beings due to the impossibility of nonharming and nonmanipulating others. Nonharming and nonmanipulating others is called by him the "Minimal Ethical Articulation" ("MEA"; previously translated into English as "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" and "FEA"). The MEA is violated by our structural "moral impediment", by the worldly discomforts – notably pain and discouragement – imposed on us that prevent us from acting ethically. Cabrera argues that an affirmative morality is a self-contradiction because it accepts the MEA and conceives a human existence that precludes the possibility of not-harming or not-manipulating others. Thus he believes that affirmative societies, through their politics, require the common suspension of the MEA to even function. Cabrera's negative ethics is supposed to be a response to the negative structure of being, acutely aware of the morally disqualifying nature of being. Cabrera believes children are usually considered as mere aesthetic objects, are not created for their own sake but for the sake of their parents, and are thrown into a structurally negative life by the act of procreation. Procreation is, Cabrera argues, a harm and a supreme act of manipulation. He believes that the consistent application of normal moral concepts – like duty, virtue or respect – present in most affirmative moralities entails antinatalism. Cabrera also argues that a human being adopting negative ethics should not only abstain from procreation, but also should have a complete willingness for an ethical death, by immediate suspension of all personal projects in benefit of a political fight or an altruistic suicide, when it becomes the least immoral course of action. Cabrera's Critique is one of his most systematic defenses of negative ethics, but he has also explored the same ideas in other works, such as Projeto de Ética Negativa, Ética Negativa: problemas e discussões, Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation, and A moral do começo: sobre a ética do nascimento.
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