Against Anti-Natalism

The anti-natalist’s bête noir.

Anti-natalism is the view that that human beings should not have children, because it is unethical to do so. Different reasons can be offered for this startling position, but the position I discuss in this essay specifies that life has negative value for those burdened by it. It is more bad than good, or the bad that there is in life is somehow more significant or weighty than the good.

Better Never to Have Been—published.

Perhaps the best-known anti-natalist, David Benatar, maintains that since life includes suffering and nonexistence does not, and since nonexistence has nothing bad about it—he is much impressed by this “asymmetry,” i.e., that suffering only occurs for life—it follows that nonexistence is preferable to life. But since it is impossible for parents to obtain consent from their future children for their coming into life (this looks like nonsense, as I will explain), we are imposing that pain onto our children without their consent. Anti-natalists can often be found blaming parents for all the suffering that their children ever have.

I will be honest: it is hard for me to take this view seriously. Moreover, I have little taste for pretending to take it seriously. On my view, any more elaborate or precise versions of the foregoing arguments do not make them any more plausible. The arguments are simply awful, and their social consequences strike me as deeply pernicious. Still, a few people reading this might disagree with me: maybe you think anti-natalism needs a hearing; maybe, even, it sounds plausible. If that is your reaction, after reading the previous paragraph, then I suspect it is not because of the excellent quality of the arguments. It is probably because it appeals to your more basic pessimism—perhaps a pathological condition. After all, we are talking about about a view according to which no one should ever have children because life is just that terrible.

In this brief essay, I will try to refute anti-natalism in the sense defined above. It is very possible that my arguments will not address or refute versions of arguments that some people have come up with. But they will, I hope, address some common versions. In any case, bear in mind this just an essay, an attempt, not a carefully-formulated position paper giving my final word on the subject. I might update this if conditions warrant.

Pain, ergo a worthless life?

As I understand it, there are two main parts to the case for anti-natalism. First, there is the part that says that it is morally wrong to foist a life of suffering onto children without their consent. Second, there is the premise that the suffering inherent in human life makes it indeed worthless, or worse than worthless. Both parts seem necessary. If human life were a good thing, then it would not be so objectionable to give life to new people. And simply claiming that human life is worthless does not clinch the case unless you draw the further conclusion that parents are doing wrong by creating worthless life (or life with negative value).

So I will take these two parts separately, beginning with:

The Question of Consent

The very idea that unconceived children have a right to consent whether or not they wish to be born is, of course, strictly nonsense. If something does not exist, it has no rights, no wishes, and no way to assert rights or wishes. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak of “it” at all; the pronoun stands for a posited individual which does not exist yet. Some people (who do very much exist today) point a finger of blame at their own parents: “I had no say in this life; I was not consulted,” they say. The answer is straightforward: “You could not have been consulted, because you did not exist yet.”

My answer leaves anti-natalists unimpressed. They are determined to blame their parents for making the bad choice of birthing them: there seems to be real resentment there. “You did decide to give birth, and the person you gave birth to happened to be me. This was a bad move and I resent it. You took this action, and it resulted in a life, which just happens to be my terrible life.”

This genius sued his parents because they did not get his consent to bring him into the world. Here, he may be indicating the value he places on his life.

If this is to be the line, then it is pointing toward a slightly different argument. After all, the original argument was supposed to be that parents did not obtain consent from their as-yet unconceived children, and parents have no right to consent on their children’s behalf. But that argument really is nonsense. “Ought” implies “can”: if I ought to obtain consent from my future children, then I should be able to obtain consent from them. But as this is a metaphysical impossibility, it is not the case that I ought to obtain consent. At the time, there is no one to obtain consent from.

But if the argument is, instead, that parents make a poor choice generally by bringing a sad new life into this vale of tears, then no mention of (impossible) consent need be made. Then the idea is that the parents are doing something that has bad effects; the anti-natalist has, essentially, a consequentialist argument, i.e., one about the goodness or badness of consequences. People experiencing existential anger at their parents feel personally affronted because they are the recipients of these purportedly bad consequences.

But then the strength of the blame we assign to parents depends on the strength of the argument that life is worthless; on that, see the next section.

Whether he wants to or not.

Even if, contrary to fact, some sense could be made of the notion that parents are making a decision for their children which they have no right to make, we can simply deny the latter: parents decide things for their children all the time, after all. Parents raise children in a particular place, teach them a particular language, send them to a particular school, raise them in a certain religion, punish them for doing wrong and reward them for doing right, and so forth, all without consulting the children. The law recognizes this right. Reasonable people can, of course, disagree about specific cases; parents do not own their children, and they do not have unlimited authority over them. But one particular area of authority rests in the basic right to have children in the first place. The law certainly recognizes procreation as a basic, fundamental human right.

Admittedly, this is just a legal right, however; if to be born is to be harmed, then perhaps a moral right has been violated. That remains to be hashed out in the next section.

I want to make one further point on this head: the argument (again, that we should not have children because doing so does not respect their autonomy) proves too much, as philosophers are wont to say. Consistency on the point has some decidedly unpleasant consequences that could make anti-natalists look like monsters.

Let us agree, just for the sake of argument, that adults should never have children. But life sometimes throws us a curveball: suppose a gal gets knocked up. What is she to do? Well, if she decides to have an abortion, is she not making a decision on behalf of her child, just as much as if she were to bring it to term? It is misplaced to insist on the word “fetus” in this case, by the way: anti-natalists go far beyond pro-lifers, who talk about the rights of unborn persons, to claim that nonexistent persons have rights, or at least the right to consent to come into existence.

Too late.

Let us suppose the anti-natalist advises her to get an abortion. After all, that baby has not given consent. Very well. But if, before conception, there is a hypothetical person there with a right to consent, surely after conception there is a person there with a right to life. Which right—the right to deny consent to exist, or the right to live—should prevail? The anti-natalist is faced with a dilemma. Either there is a person with rights there, and hence a right to life that must not be violated, or there is not. It will not do to say, “Well, that mother should not have conceived.” Let us suppose she has conceived; that is just a sad fact. This dilemma must not be ignored. Its existence does not imply that anti-natalism is wrong, but it does make it hard to be a consistent anti-natalist, for abortion rights advocates anyway.

The problem is this. If you (i.e., an anti-natalist) think a child has a right to consent, then immediately after conception at least it certainly is capable of having other rights. If, in that case, you conclude that abortion is justifiable, then you are in effect denying that this growing human life has a right to life. One way out of the dilemma is to bite the bullet and find some reason to deny that this person, who has at least one other right, has no right to life. And, come to think of it, the anti-natalist does have a reason ready to hand: if life really is worthless, perhaps we should reconsider the very idea that there is a right to live, at least for the very young.

In that case, the dilemma is not over. Suppose the mother decides to have the baby after all, and now it is one year old. The baby still has not given consent, of course, and the usual human suffering has already started (e.g., colic). By the anti-natalist’s lights, is the mother perpetrating an ongoing harm to her baby, by continuing to support it? It certainly seems she is. After all, if bringing a child into existence harms the child, then surely continuing to care for the child does as well. Should she not, in that case, snuff out this nonconsensual life? Why not?

Possibly an anti-natalist.

The idea fills us with moral horror, of course, or it should. But what resources can the anti-natalist bring to bear to avoid the consequence? From the point of view of a philosopher considering that life is worthless, and that the child has not consented to live, there really is not much difference between a newly conceived child and a one-year-old child. Both are lives that should not have been, according to the anti-natalist. If you could abort a newly-conceived fetus because (despite having other rights) it lacks a right to life, then why would it have gained a right to live by the very tender age of one?

The anti-natalist might say, “But there are other reasons we would not commit infanticide. Obviously we cannot have people going around killing babies.” Yes indeed, well spotted. There are other reasons. But the anti-natalist cannot help himself to those reasons, because they generally presuppose the value of human life, and human life, especially the life of the very young, has no value—remember?

You cannot rest on the comforting practices and beliefs of civilized society as it is now constituted to escape these moral horrors—not without abandoning the premises of your position. If you begin to tell me about the comfort the baby feels in her mother’s arms, or the joy the mother feels in her baby, I will remind you that none of that seemed to matter when you were advocating against birth in the first place. Such maternal joys were, after all, perfectly predictable.

Maybe not actual anti-natalists, but hippies on an island commune.

To bring out this point, I imagine a secret anti-natalist cult—a colony on a desert island, say. Everyone there is an anti-natalist, all planning to die childless. But some of these are young people and, of course, nature will sometimes take its course. The mother (nature intruding, again) opts not to have an abortion, and to the horror of the island cult’s anti-natalists, a child is born.

In such a society, “enlightened” as it is by anti-natalist sentiments, I imagine there would be an immediate demand to kill the child—humanely, of course. After all, that child did not choose to live; its mental capacity is unequal to a dog’s. On what grounds would the anti-natalists—far from the “corrupting” and “unenlightened” influence of broader society—choose to preserve the life of the child? Perhaps a right to life; but most anti-natalists will be fine with abortion, of course, so that theoretical expedient seems unavailable. No one who understands the issues wants the baby to endure a life of suffering. The baby can die peacefully and painlessly—and so, one imagines the anti-natalist cult concluding, in its “enlightened” wisdom, the baby should die.

But then, one wonders why they, themselves, would choose to continue living, but that is another question, to consider below.

The Value of Life

Experiencing intrinsic value.

In another essay I argued that the value of life is intrinsic, i.e., human life itself just is that in virtue of which everything else is evaluated. I am not going to argue this claim much further here, except to point something out: the reason pleasure is good, when it is, is that it is the natural biological response to a life well lived. But sometimes, pleasure is very bad indeed, as when we are motivated to gain pleasure from activities that will kill us (as for example in drug addiction). Similarly, there is a reason suffering is bad, namely, it is the natural biological response to harm to the organism. Sometimes, however, the painfulness of suffering means no such thing. The suffering we endure from exercise is often a sign of a healthy activity. The suffering a rescuer endures from saving lives belies the notion that all suffering is bad: enduring it can be courageous and heroic.

The point is that pleasure and pain are imperfect qua signals of whether life is lived well or not. But ultimately the thing our pleasures and pains—and our bodily and cognitive systems, needs, desires, and in short the operation and flourishing of our entire human nature—aim at is the preservation of our lives and more generally of life wherever it is found. (I add the “more general” point because sometimes, arguably, we have biological urges to preserve someone else’s life, as when a parent risks all to save a child.)

I have gone into a bit of detail about this in order to clarify why, as I will now maintain, the anti-natalists’ notion of the value of human life frequently seems desiccated.

Your future.

“We live only to be faced with an often painful death, and typically after a whole lifetime of suffering,” these pessimists intone. “Suffering is always much more awful than pleasure is pleasant. Pleasure really can be understood as the satisfaction of needs, i.e., the filling of a void. What is the significance of the mere absence of a negative in the face of profound suffering?”

Now, if this line of thinking is supposed to justify the conclusion that it is wrong to have children, it can only be through an intermediate conclusion, because it certainly does not follow immediately. Let us concede that life is a 100% fatal condition, that death is often painful, that suffering is often more intense than pleasure (not always—there are “peak moments,” after all, that some people sometimes say they live for). Now, it seems to me that the needed intermediate conclusion is that life is worthless, or worse than worthless; or, to put it more simply, not living is preferable to living.

Benatar and many anti-natalists are constantly found assuming the truth of this claim, but it strikes me as not just (a) unsupported by the weak premises, but also (b) quite obviously false. Let us consider the latter first.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood

Not Typically a Vale of Tears

Take the latter point first: it seems obviously false to say that not living is preferable to living. Most of the time, most people find life to be worth living, not merely a “vale of tears.” Various surveys of “average happiness” have been conducted around the world, and with few exceptions, on average, people in most countries are more happy than not.

Older folks are, typically, filled with regrets about mistakes and missed opportunities; but rarely do you hear them regret having lived at all. If they say, “What has it all been for?” it is because they feel they have not been productive enough, or maybe because they have left no family behind. Sometimes it does enter into their calculus that their life was filled with physical and emotional suffering. But few lives are burdened by unremitting suffering. There are, of course, exceptions, i.e., people who are depressed or miserably schizophrenic their whole lives long, or whose bodies were never-ending sources of pain. But the portion of humanity that fits into those categories is small.

How do anti-natalists respond to this? There are two ways to respond. One is to look down upon all those small-minded happy people with contempt. Happy people are living a lie. This strikes me as arrogant and, in any case, unpersuasive. One common reason is for such arrogant pessimism is the observation that we will all obviously die eventually. It is supposed to follow from this that our lives are meaningless and pointless. That has never struck me as being a good argument. It is a stance some anti-natalists take, but, in short, I think there is no way to defend it. After all, the value experienced in a life clearly has a time limit, this is well-known to everyone but the young and foolish, and yet people continue to find meaning in that value. A mother might have only fifty years in which to love a child; but that love is certainly one of the things that gave her life meaning for those fifty years. Why not? Who is the anti-natalist to tell the mother that that love is meaningless just because it has an expiration date?

(There is, of course, more to say on this point, especially for the religious sorts who believe life and love do not necessarily have an expiration date.)

Anti-natalists are glass-half-empty kind of people.

A second type of response has the anti-natalist realistically acknowledge that some people are happy, but the problem is that there is no way for a parent to know, in advance, if a child will end up being one of them. There is massive risk inherent in life—the risk of having a life of misery.

To this I reply that indeed, it is true that life is risky, and that some (I think few) people might justifiably conclude, in their own cases, that it would have been better never to have been born. Given that, it seems parents must be courageous on behalf on their children, so to speak—a concept that I think will be perfectly familiar to parents. There is a kind of existential courage every new parent ought to muster: making the most of a new little life in the face of possible disasters is a very big responsibility. Then, a part of what it means for the child to grow up is to accept the mantle of that existential courage on one’s own behalf. It is cowardly to reject that mantle. When we want to admonish a young person who seems to be cowardly in the face of this existential challenge, the usual thing to say is: “No one said life would be easy.”

Leo anti-natalis

This is not to deny that, sometimes, the challenge is beyond a person’s power. If you have a disease that leaves your body racked with pain, and there is no end in sight, no one will blame you terribly if you declare you want to give up. Fortunately, life is rarely so awful. If you have a typical life, with typical diseases and typical heartbreaks, you are better advised to get up the courage that a typical life requires.

In any event, to argue that parents should not have children because they might have a life of misery is to counsel the opposite: cowardice. And as far as I can see, the mere risk of disaster is by itself an obviously terrible argument in favor of such cowardice.

The Bad in Life Is Not More Profound than the Good

We were discussing the anti-natalists’ key claim that not living is preferable to living. My first response is to point out that this is unpersuasive; indeed it simply seems false (and cowardly). My second response is that the anti-natalist is guilty of a rather obvious non-sequitur. Clearly it does not follow from the ancient platitude that life is a vale of tears (something poets, prophets, and philosophers have told us for millennia) that life is not worth living (a view the same sages rarely endorse). It seems one hardly needs to say more than that. It simply does not follow from the patent and prosy fact that life kind of sucks sometimes that life is not worth living.

The fact that it is such an obvious non-sequitur is probably why David Benatar felt it necessary to bolster that patent and prosy fact with what sounds like a very logical, technical, and irrefutable argument. To wit—living and nonliving are asymmetrical, he correctly points out. Or rather, he is correct just insofar as the former features something decidedly bad (viz., suffering), while the latter has nothing either good or bad in it. Benatar also, curiously, wants to insist that nonliving lacks suffering, and that is good; but I will not admit this feature, because something nonexistent cannot have either good or bad features.

The problem is that the anti-natalist conclusion still does not follow, even given Benatar’s observation about the living-nonliving asymmetry, and for a few different reasons.

First, the asymmetry goes both ways. It is true that whatever is nonliving lacks suffering and other bad things, and that is all very well. But life has value in itself, as I said above, a value nonexistent things cannot have. Which asymmetry should we be more impressed by? The inherent value of life is a belief we have naturally, even despite ourselves; even animals of different species value the life they see in each other—enough, even, to rescue each other.

Even if you did not agree that life is valuable in itself, you must at least admit that life has all sorts of good aspects, and not just some vague unspecified pleasures, but love, truth, and beauty—the list can go on long. What of productivity, virtue, and worship? Only someone with an arid, hedonistic view of the value of life could possibly be intellectually impressed by Benatar’s argument if it is couched only in terms of pleasure. And only a pessimist, or someone with clinical emotional difficulties, could actually be persuaded by it.

After all, we rightly congratulate people for their new babies. We celebrate birthdays. We honor the dead and their lives in funerals. When we do this, we are not saying, “Oh, this person had some pleasure and on balance avoided pain.” The very suggestion is laughable—patently absurd.

Now, Benatar takes pains (so to speak), sometimes, to point out that by “pleasure” and “pain” he really means “anything good” and “anything bad,” and that he is happy to recast his argument in terms of most any value theory. The problem is that the asymmetry he insists on is really obvious only in the hedonistic version of the argument. In other words, we can perhaps agree with him that suffering is more intense and long-lasting than pleasure—i.e., when the goods are pleasures and pains. We cannot agree with him so easily that the bad in life (more generally) is more important or consequential than the good. After all, this is precisely why we undergo such painful sacrifice, sometimes, in our lives: in order to secure things that are more importantly good. Students will rack their brains and stay up many late nights in order to gain knowledge. New parents will go to great trouble for the well-being (not merely the pleasure) of a new baby. A soldier will sacrifice everything in a key battle, or undergo awful torture, for the sake of a cause he regards as much more important than himself, such as freedom. There is something shabby, contemptible, and cowardly in the suggestion that these reasons we have for living and even dying are somehow less important or profound than the the various troubles that life throws at us. Do Benatar and his followers not care about such things? And if not, why not?

Even those who are living with painful disease, the memories of abuse, or profound personal tragedy usually—with grim determination—admit that it is better for themselves and the rest of the world that they continue to struggle on. To dismiss such brave thinking is shabby. A few supposedly sober and serious philosophers do seem to dismiss it—such trials are a reason never to have children, they say. We more normally attribute such pessimism only to terminally depressed mental patients. Why should we expect there to be any good argument for it? Why should we be surprised when, upon examination, the arguments put forth are terrible?

Beauty, freedom, peace—among the things we live for.

There is a fact known to everyone facing life’s challenges with grim determination: some deeply important values are worth upholding in a full, rich life. Again, we live for family, knowledge, beauty (e.g., music), freedom, security, and much more: Christians add, for the glory of God. These values, which together comprise the value of human life, are incredibly profound and worth living for. They are worth risking pain. Hence no person inspired by any wise, far-seeing vision of the values available to our lives—values that are admittedly limited and all-too-human—can be persuaded by the anti-natalist conclusion.

Is Anti-Natalism a Death Cult in the Making?

So far I have merely been defending the value of new human life against attacks upon it by anti-natalists. Now I wish to take the offensive.

Anti-natalism is difficult to distinguish from terminal depression: its grim assessment of the value of life closely resembles that of a suicidal person. So one really has to wonder: why would a consistent anti-natalist not simply end it all? Death, or at least nonliving, is preferable to life, or so the anti-natalists maintain.

Some anti-natalists might disagree with Benatar.

Benatar’s response is that killing yourself and dying are quite different from never coming into existence in the first place, which is easy to concede. To say that parents should not give birth to children is very different from the claim that you should commit suicide. True, acting on both will result in a person not living. But the difference is that killing yourself happens only after you have lived at least some of a life. Throwing that life away can be an awful thing, Benatar says—and, of course, he is very right about that—in a way that never creating a life is not awful at all.

Benatar is a bit too much impressed with this point, however, because it does not do the work he wants it to do. Before a new life begins, anti-natalists want to say, the suffering and risk to be expected in the new life are so awful that we cannot justify creating it. But if that observation is true, does it somehow change when a new person is born? Surely not. The suffering and risk we can anticipate in the life of a newborn is the same as that in a person who has never been born—or, for that matter, in a person who is 50 years old and facing declining health.

Very well. Benatar’s suggestion must be that killing—whether we mean a baby being killed (out of “mercy”), or a 50-year-old committing suicide—has awful consequences. There are fear and pain associated with the killing itself; grieving; the loss of support to a family, or the loss of future generations if a young person dies.

But if human life is so worthless that we can confidently tell in advance that it is not worth living, then what, really, is the loss once life has begun? If nonliving is better than living, then an enlightened anti-natalist would not fear but welcome death. The pain of dying can be minimized with drugs. Anyone who cared about a person who has died would not grieve but celebrate that another person has left this vale of tears, if they take the anti-natalist assessment of the value of life seriously. And while loss of support to a family is unfortunate, this is bearable; those still remaining usually make do. As to the loss of “future generations,” of course anti-natalists think that is a good thing, not a bad one.

 

The Jonestown Cult—and one way of expressing anti-natalist belief.

Let us return to the island with the secret anti-natalist cult. I speculated that cult would have no trouble with infanticide. But I would go farther to say that there is no reason to think they would not, if consistent anti-natalists, all eventually commit suicide; perhaps it would be a mass suicide, like a real death cult. Why not? Nonliving is preferable to living, and the cult members are already surrounded by like-minded people who will understand and properly celebrate their passing.

If you are an anti-natalist, you might well find this to be an insulting and silly thought experiment. You’ve probably heard it all before. If that is your attitude, you must take your own view more seriously. After all, why should you be able to help yourself to the attitudes of ordinary natalists, and of a society constructed by natalists, in defending an anti-natalist philosophy? What, will you say the reason you abstain from killing yourself is that you are part of a society in which doing so is considered impolite, wrong, and shocking? But that is the view of natalists. Your view is that it would have been better if you had never been born. That means that, if we compare a possible world in which you exist to one in which you don’t exist, the one in which you don’t exist is better. Given that bold assumption, why not assume that a world in which you are dead tomorrow would be better than one in which you stay alive as long as possible?

Is it because you can anticipate that, probably, the rest of your life will be adequately happy? Well, most conscientious new parents may make a similar assumption on behalf of their children, may they not? I just don’t know how you can have it both ways. Either human life is worth living, or it is not.

The anti-natalists’ preferred scenario.

In any event, one thing that anti-natalists can agree on is that humanity should die out. After all, if our lives are worthless and no new humans should be born, then if we followed that principle consistently, humanity would be extinct in about 100 years. Anti-natalists are committed, therefore, to the incredibly ugly and indefensible proposal that mankind as a whole, all our works, everything we have ever produced, fall into oblivion. This might not involve any killing, but it is worse than anything Hitler, Mao, or Stalin ever advocated for.

Let us not forget that it is not exactly a leap from Benatar’s view to the view that we should all be put out of our misery. There are environmentalists and occultists who take exactly that view. They are not Benatar’s “philanthropic” anti-natalists, but “misanthropic” ones; but they share with Benatar the key premise, the radical and dangerous premise, that human life is worthless or worse than worthless, and that it would be better if the human race were to die out entirely.

I hope this makes it clear why I view anti-natalism as a thoroughly evil philosophy, and I mean this quite literally. There are not many philosophical views one can say that about. But it should not be surprising if anti-natalism earns the label. After all, it is opposed to the very thing that gives life its value—the preservation and development human life itself—and it literally displays profound contempt for human lives individually and for the entire human race. That fits the very definition of “evil” that I formulated last week, before writing this essay: “Evil is contempt for the humanity, the human life, of others.”

If you prefer this end result, we’re going to have some words.

 


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65 responses to “Against Anti-Natalism”

  1. BR

    –(“We antinatalists are monsters ? Will your son be YOUR monster if some day he will become antinatalist?” )

    “Heh. Let’s hope not. They have far too much sense for that. He also won’t become a murderer or a pedophile, I hope.”

    Oops, playing roulette with other’s lives…
    Let’s hope he doesn’t become a murderer, because after you have done your bit of bringing him up in a certain way, the rest is in the hands of hope, the dice…
    Let’s hope he doesn’t become anti-natalist, because after you have tried to brainwash him, the rest is out of your hands, depending on how the roulette spins.
    Let’s hope he won’t be one of a minority who suffers unbearably, because no matter what you do to make sure to prevent it, you can’t prevent it, it is up to the roulette once more. You were willing to gamble with your son’s life, his happiness and suffering. You have no qualms with it, you don’t care enough. Parents typically claim that they would do ANYTHING to protect their children, but that is a lie.

    1. John

      As an antinatalist, even to me, it seems that the position is not entirely consistent; on the other hand, I haven’t thought about it very much. So essentially, a disclaimer: my views on this topic are still very fluid.

      It’s very easy to make flawed arguments on this topic which is heavily tied to non-existence, which barely makes sense anyways. I’ve tried to be as clear as possible below.

      You raised some good points in this essay, but you also raised some very poor ones. I’m not going to bother to list all of them, but here are two:

      1) You correctly said “ought” implies “can”, and we can’t get consent from people who don’t exist. Well, that’s the reason for the antinatalist belief! If you don’t get consent for something, obviously don’t do it. But if you can’t get consent, then you still don’t do it!

      Furthermore, the difficulty of comparing this to “real-world” scenarios is that procreation is the only action (known to us so far) which results in the creation of a new, sentient individual. Yes, you cannot cause harm to something that doesn’t exist, but you can bring something into existence and then cause harm to it. It’s very easy to line up false parallels like this.

      2) Similarly, parents are allowed to consent for their children once they are alive because we assume they will act to minimise harm. If my parent told me not to run in the road, it’s because they didn’t want me to be hurt.

      But the antinatalist view is that this is making the best of a bad situation. The better situation would have been to never be in a place where you can be harmed at all.

      In other words, overriding parental consent becomes a good thing only once you have an existing child. They are two different paradigms. No good doctor gives chemotherapy to healthy people (intentionally). Chemotherapy is “only” good once a patient has cancer (and especially, a cancer which responds to chemo). What is very good in one case is not at all applicable for any other case.

      Finally, a more general point. As an antinatalist, I don’t want to die because a fear of death is biologically instilled within me. Note carefully: a fear of death that could only have come into existence if I did. The difference between failing to exist and actively dying is one that, again, is changed by the fact that I am sentient. The two cases are not comparable.

      I personally don’t believe that people should stop having children—again, not least because I think the antinatalism position is not entirely consistent. But I don’t think there can be any firm rejection of antinatalism. I am pretty sure that it is not falsifiable.

  2. Mark

    I don’t want to discuss whether was you wrote is right or not. I just would like to ask you why we people should be having kids expect for personal desire?

    Antinatalism may be wrong but what’s the point of carrying on the human race?There’s no “mission” for us as far as we know

  3. Matt

    “It is true that life is risky, and that some (I think few) people might justifiably conclude, in their own cases, that it would have been better never to have been born.”

    You said it. Life is risky. There are people who regret being alive, people who commit suicide, people overwhelmed by misery. They are there. And they wouldn’t be if not for procreation. With procreation, there is the risk: misery, pain, suffering, you name it. The risk which you so ignorantly brush off with an arrogant opinion that children should “man up”. At that point, your essay is just a very long version of the “git gud” saying and it is hard to resist the urge to just ignore it.

    You say the idea of “lack of consent” is ridiculous/silly, I agree. Of course. The consent cannot be acquired from the unborn. Why are we even sharing such obvious facts? The more important matter here is whether it’s ethical to impose life in the given situation. Life which, as you said, is risky.

    And some will do their best to conquer all the problems which might come with the obtained life, succeed or fail, but there will also be those who give up, and you understand that. Again, your words (“no one will blame you terribly if you declare you want to give up”). Let me just leave the “blame” part without a comment, even if I am burning to say a few words…

    It seems you are aware of all the gambling involved in procreation. You are aware of the risk. And you think it is worth taking. All right. This is your opinion. This, however: “We live for family, knowledge, beauty (e.g., music), freedom, security, and much more. […] They are worth risking pain.” – “we live for x”, you say? “WE”? Really? Isn’t it, like, a basic error in writing? You can’t say for others without consulting them. You can’t say what is universally worth living for and what isn’t, because it will be different for everyone. Unless, of course, you want to be considered a stuck-up person who thinks they know everything about everything and everyone. Spoiler alert: you don’t.

    And this! I saved it for the end! “Fortunately, life is rarely so awful.” The cherry on the cake! The tip of the iceberg! Because, hey, why care about those who suffer if they are the minority? Those people should just grow up and face the existential challenge! Why? Because Jerry says so! Forget about something like one’s own will and opinion, Jerry says life is worth all the bad consequences, so it is, and we should impose it… sorry, GIFT it to others! Over a few dead bodies, but whatever – just a few, right?!

    Last comment. You have your own approach to life, like we all. I repeat, like we all. By stating collective opinions without consulting others and therefore treating your views as universal, you are being egoistic and intolerant in regard to other people. This is offensive for me. This, clearly, according to the comments, is offensive for others. Even still, if you ask me, you can say whatever you want about giving birth, but if you actually do that, you will always be imposing your beliefs on others, risking a potential great misery of another being. It is a fact. Not a belief. Your kid might not share your beliefs, might not want to live. They might suffer. And it could have been avoided if you just simply used protection. If you don’t do that, you are unethical and selfish, doing as you please with the life of another because you want to and can.

    1. Jeremy

      Brilliantly written and very well put.

      My applaud.

  4. jp

    The very idea that unconceived children have a right to consent whether or not they wish to be born is, of course, strictly nonsense. If something does not exist, it has no rights, no wishes, and no way to assert rights or wishes. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak of “it” at all; the pronoun stands for a posited individual which does not exist yet. Some people (who do very much exist today) point a finger of blame at their own parents: “I had no say in this life; I was not consulted,” they say. The answer is straightforward: “You could not have been consulted, because you did not exist yet.”

    SO basicly this boils down to the claim that you don’t think the unborn are worthy have having moral consideration before you have them. Would it be okay for a person with a sever genetic illness to have kids? Or a couple on a Dark eldar slave ship? The dark Eldar being a race of aliens from the scifi franchise warhammer 40k with a culture built around the capturing of slaves for ritualistic torture.

    In any event, to argue that parents should not have children because they might have a life of misery is to counsel the opposite: cowardice. And as far as I can see, the mere risk of disaster is by itself an obviously terrible argument in favor of such cowardice.

    Here’s a scenerio imagine you have a button when you press it will magically and randomly change a person life circumstances it could turn them into Job without the happy ending or it could give them a million dollars for example . Would it okay for you to press the button? Would it be cowardice to suggest it would be immoral to press said button?

    1. The point is very basic and no one, including you, has yet responded to it: you can’t say “X has rights,” or any other properties for that matter, until X exists. In order for X to have rights of any sort, it must exist.

      Would it be OK for a person with a severe (so spelled) genetic illness to have kids? Depends on the illness, probably, but in some cases, I’d agree that the answer is no. But to explain this case you don’t need to posit the logical absurdity of a nonexistent person having rights. Nonexistent things have no properties at all. For example, if Jane had a certain extremely painful condition that makes every single person who ever has it to desire to kill themselves, then she could simply say, “Having any child would inevitably doom that child, regardless of whatever else would be true about that child, to a life of extreme and unavoidable pain.”

      Good thing we can’t make make such an argument about normal people. If we could, then indeed maybe I too would be an anti-natalist. Fortunately, life ain’t that bad for most of us.

      Your magic button scenario (so spelled) is silly and unedifying to discuss. If you think otherwise, you’ll have to explain why.

  5. jp

    Anti-natalists are committed, therefore, to the incredibly ugly and indefensible proposal that mankind as a whole, all our works, everything we have ever produced, fall into oblivion

    Why would this be a bad thing?

    1. Why wouldn’t it be? The burden is really on you. And there are no good arguments for anti-natalism (or for evilism…yes, yes, I know it’s called “efilism” but I think it’s more appropriately called evilism).

      Everything that is of value, indeed all grounds we have of determining things to be “good” or “bad” things, would be cast into the oblivion you wish. Deeply evil thought. You’re a monster.

      1. jp

        I would say human extinction would be good or neutral at worst if done by sterilization or voluntary means. There would be a net reduction in suffering. And all the lack of music art and culture would be meaning less has nobody would be there to miss such things or grieve there absence.

        Also your definition is horseshit. It precludes the concept of animal abuse it also misrepresents how evil is done in many case. Pedophiles do not have competent for children but are often driven by a twisted sense of love for children. This does not make it right though has the ill effects have been proven without a doubt. And many of the evil men of history though what they were doing was the best, The communist really thought what they were doing was for the best interests of humanity.
        Also most noticeably in your defention it would be impossible to do evil against non human entities so imagine we discovered a planet full of aliens has smart has us. Would it be okay to kill them for sport? I mean they are not human and evil is malice towards humanity. Or imagine if the Gray Aliens are real and are abducting people. Lets say they define evil has contempt for there own race. And then reason since human are not included they could not do evil towards us. How does your theory of evil escape this flaws?

        A better definition would be the creation of unnecessary suffering. But that would support antinatalism so we cannot have that.

    2. jp

      The magic button scenario is basically what having kids is. when you put somebody into this world they have large probabilities of suffering and causing suffering. So your putting a person into this world and pushing that button your gambling with there wellbeing. How is this hard to understand? The only difference between the two scenarios you pushing the button and birthing a kid is mechanism and the age of the victim the principlev and the morality is the same.

      1. Your facile arguments are not hard to understand. The problem is that they are fallacious. The logical form of your argument is an analogy; you’re comparing the decision whether to have a child to be a decision to press this button, ignoring all the vast differences between the cases, then asserting that the cases are exactly the same, and then (laughably) insinuating that I do not understand the argument. The problem is that I understand it all too well, and you don’t understand the logical demerits of the argument.

        If you want to make the argument, you would have to explain why the cases are relevantly similar, and it is in doing so that you would basically be forced to explain why the chances of life-ruining disaster are simply too high. Well, good luck with that.

        1. jp

          i explained.
          When you push the button your forcing them to face the possibility of great harm. your gambling with there well being.

          When you have a child you impose exactly the same risks pushing the button poses unto them instead, They have a great chance suffering and your the one forcing that risk on it.

          Having a kid is like gambling with somebody else money. This is exactly what your doing and I see your just using sophistry to avoid the conclusion

        2. I’ve already repeatedly responded to this nonsense, and I am not going to post any further variants on the theme from you unless you actually present new argumentation.

          Having a child is nothing like pushing a button that forces an already-existent person to face a significant possibility of great harm. The cases are obviously very different, and you need to explain how they’re relevantly similar if you want to make a new, interesting, non-question-begging argument.

          Most life does not have a preponderance of “great suffering.” Even if most lives have at least some great suffering (such as grief or serious illness), on balance, most do not have a great deal. This is all, of course, not to mention the more substantive and interesting issues regarding different theories regarding the use and even benefits of suffering, and about the meaningfulness of lives in spite of great suffering—all issues that, I get the sense, you aren’t mature enough to grasp.

  6. Christina Law

    WOW, I didnt know you are the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry. I wouldn’t have survived college without wiki, thank you and thank luck the universe smashed some atoms together that lead to your existence, lol. I suspect a lot of antinatalist “suffering” are reduced by your contribution.

    With that said, I don’t agree with the “logical” conclusion of antinatalism, though I wouldn’t brush it off as some crazy death cult ideology, because it has some good points worth adopting, minus the pro-mortalism conclusion (Ex: that people shouldn’t have children willy nilly regardless of risks and some lives can be too terrible to continue). After all, AN claims its conclusion is a result of immense empathy for the pain of others and not contempt for life itself.

    Simply put, the core argument of AN is “Life has non zero chance of pain/suffering, therefore we shouldn’t exist.” This simplistic yet absolute certainty of IS = Ought doesn’t even sound half complete for me, a more sound argument should be “Life has non zero chance of pain/suffering, lets discuss what this means and what is the most rational way forward.”

    You were also correct to point out that pain/suffering is not the be all and end all of human existence or any conscious existence, granted its one of the most significant part of life but not the only definable aspect of life, surely not to be avoided at any cost including extinction, as many philosophies would argue. AN often ignore the very fact that pleasure cannot exist without pain or at least some level of discomfort/dissatisfaction, it is both a psychological and biological balance of conscious minds as we know it, a balance that cant exist without the other, rather than saying all pain/suffering are bad and avoiding them is the only purpose of life, we should ask a simple yet salient question:

    “What is the purpose of life?”.

    Surely not to end itself to avoid all pain, lol. We could argue about this purpose and some would say its to define our own purpose based on our understanding of reality as we go along, fair enough. AN in my opinion, is a philosophy in progress that may lead to a very different conclusion if their supporters are willing to take the time and effort to examine its conclusion with more rigor. (perhaps by steelmanning its counter argument)

    1. I’m sorry, Christina, but where do I know you from?

      Oh, maybe you just mean “I didn’t know there was another founder of Wikipedia.”

      Sounds like we’re more or less on the same page with regard to AN.

      1. Christina Law

        No apology required, you dont know me, I found your blog from researching antinatalism, sorry for the confusion.

        I was surprised because I didn’t know you are the co-founder of wiki, a fact I stumbled upon in one of your replies to critics of this blog post.

        I thought antinatalism is an obscure yet enduring philosophical “work in progress” among youths and depressed nihilists but has captured the minds of many due to its recent coverage by various media, just surprised it caught the attention of a wiki co-founder. Your critique could definitely put some counterweight on its argument, hopefully it would steer people away from its depressing and potentially harmful conclusion. Thank you.

  7. Jeremy

    > Good thing we can’t make make such an argument about normal people. If we could, then indeed maybe I too would be an anti-natalist. Fortunately, life ain’t that bad for most of us.

    Interesting of someone who has written a long argument against antinatalism to be saying things like that and speak of human lives in such cold terms.

    You seem to think that because assumedly most people won’t go on to become quadraplegics, blind, maimed, scarred for life, raped, abused, or desperately poor, everything is fine and we should keep reproducing.

    It is very arrogant, mean and oddly ironic of you to be claiming human life has an inherent value and yet think of people as merely units in absolute majority or minority. The fact a hundred people lead comfortable lives while only one is being tortured to death due to injustice doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy, nor any less painful for those suffering. Does it matter for families that lost their loved ones due to violence if the murderer killed a thousand people or just their family member? Does pain stop being pain just because only person is feeling it?

    If you are thankful you never had to undergo anything that could make life a traumatizing experience for you, great. It is easy to call others “coward” and tell them to man up when you never had to be in their shoes, feeling what they feel.

    Couple that with the fact that such fine-sounding things as “freedom, beauty, family, love” don’t give people back their ability to walk or see. They don’t put food on their tables. They don’t magically heal you of your illnesses. You, however your experience of life has been, do sound to be unacquainted with the reality that outside of a few more fortunate countries, the bulk of the world in places like Latin America and India still lives in less than ideal conditions, in the very 21st century, in places rife with abject poverty, exploitation of vulnerable individuals, ignorance, superstition and people whose will to live on is very similar to that of noxious parasites and predators: just so they can keep this world a shitty place for others, whose existence consists of stealing, robbing, destroying, killing, whose mind is so animalized that they don’t give any second thoughts to anything other than eating, sleeping and copulating, much like beasts. Animals don’t want to die, but it is not from any moral resolve. It is instinct, the same instinct that compels them to keep seeking those three things just mentioned, and not “beauty, freedom”.

    Instead of telling hurting people to “man up”, “face it”, are you moving a finger to make their lives more bearable? To change their view of life? Or are you the typical human being? Selfish, egotistical, envious, evil-minded, without natural affection, backbiting, who speaks as if he knew better?

    > Even those who are living with painful disease, the memories of abuse, or profound personal tragedy usually—with grim determination—admit that it is better for themselves and the rest of the world that they continue to struggle on.

    Are you aware that there is no tangible gain to such things? That there is nothing to be gained from perpetuating this cycle other than dainty impressions?

    You have a very optimistic view of mankind. Maybe you were lucky enough to only ever be surrounded by select good people.

    Let’s stop pretending there is no inherent evil in humanity and start reading more on how so many criminals got away with their acts, how so much innocent blood has been shed since time immemorial, how there is no lasting comfort nor repair to certain losses.

    Some people chose to break that cycle by not reproducing, and that’s fine. Imposing their views on others is wrong since each of one of us should ideally choose how we will deal with our own choices, and if some don’t want to continue this, that’s fine. There is a risk to every child being born about how their life will turn out. Erring on the side of prevention by not having kids is not cowardice. It is prudence.

    1. Well, I’m not going to reply point-by-point to this wall of text. I have decreasing patience for anti-natalism, which is both, to my mind, intellectually bankrupt and morally pernicious.

      You seem to think that because assumedly most people won’t go on to become quadraplegics, blind, maimed, scarred for life, raped, abused, or desperately poor, everything is fine and we should keep reproducing.

      Yes, of course that’s what I think, because I am not insane. And I challenge you to produce any remotely interesting, let alone compelling, arguments that we should not—I mean arguments that do not trade on rather dull-witted insults like “very arrogant, mean and oddly ironic.” Nothing I said in the slightest bit suggests that I “think of people as merely units in absolute majority or minority.” But you want to dispose of the human race because some of us are in chronic pain! You present nothing approaching an interesting argument that the best solution to human pain is to end the human race. That is a simple, unconscionably evil point of view, and if you can’t do any better in defending it than repeating things already soundly refuted in the original essay, I won’t be posting any future comments of yours.

      You are a coward to insist that all of us die out because some have lived in pain. Of course this is a cowardly and contemptible and very small point of view. How many of those suffering people were so insane as to have wished death on the entire human race?

      You pretend to represent people with hard lives in third world countries and impoverished and crime-ridden circumstances, and I cannot heap enough contempt on that notion. Do you think they would want all humanity wiped out? That is your idea of mercy, I guess—the mercy of lifelessness. They at least value their lives, as do I. You apparently do not. Yes, the point is that there are things (love, beauty, truth, and many indeed, unironically, fine things) that give our lives value and meaning, regardless of where we live; only a person to whom life is utterly meaningless could think that the mere presence of pain is enough reason to think life is worthless.

      Instead of telling hurting people to “man up”, “face it”, are you moving a finger to make their lives more bearable?

      Yes. I’ve devoted my life to giving knowledge free to the world. Are you, hypocrite? Or do you merely propose to play God and destroy all human life? Oh, well done!

      To change their view of life? Or are you the typical human being? Selfish, egotistical, envious, evil-minded, without natural affection, backbiting, who speaks as if he knew better?

      LOL. I feel like I’m debating with a demon. The sort of things you say are just the sorts of thing Satan might say to accuse God, or any fan of creation. They indicate an unbalanced and disturbed mind, not deep insight into the human condition.

      > Even those who are living with painful disease, the memories of abuse, or profound personal tragedy usually—with grim determination—admit that it is better for themselves and the rest of the world that they continue to struggle on.

      Are you aware that there is no tangible gain to such things? That there is nothing to be gained from perpetuating this cycle other than dainty impressions?

      Do you even listen to yourself? “Dainty impressions”? I do not call love, virtue, beauty, and worship of the Almighty to be mere mere “dainty impressions.” They are precisely the reasons we do live. Gee thee behind me, Satan! LOL

      You have a very optimistic view of mankind. Maybe you were lucky enough to only ever be surrounded by select good people.

      Nonsense. I know no perfect people here on earth, and all of us are subject to both natural and moral evil. We are redeemed through the natural grace of love (and the rest), or in other words, the positive reasons to live that I (any sane person) might give. We might also discuss another kind of redemption but going into that it is not strictly necessary in order to respond to you, and I’m not about to start casting more valuable pearls.

      Let’s stop pretending there is no inherent evil in humanity and start reading more on how so many criminals got away with their acts, how so much innocent blood has been shed since time immemorial, how there is no lasting comfort nor repair to certain losses.

      You are changing your argument from natural to moral evils. I agree that we are all far from perfect. This too is no reason to snuff out all of human life. If you think it is, explain why you think so. But again—if, in rebutting your position, you bore me with more transparently awful arguments, I just won’t post your crap.

      Some people chose to break that cycle by not reproducing, and that’s fine. Imposing their views on others is wrong since each of one of us should ideally choose how we will deal with our own choices, and if some don’t want to continue this, that’s fine. There is a risk to every child being born about how their life will turn out. Erring on the side of prevention by not having kids is not cowardice. It is prudence.

      Anyone who thinks as you do is poor parental material, so I agree that you should not reproduce, not until you have learned more of the preciousness of life.

      You need Jesus. Badly.

  8. Basically your entire argument is a slippery slope fallacy.

    Furthermore we know full well a non existing being can’t consent. That’s just more reason not to bring it into existence in the first place. Just like how it’s wrong to have sex with heavily drunk people. Because they physically cannot consent.

    Besides, theres so many more important reasons to not bring new life into the world.

    – overpopulation
    – pollution increasing with every new human born
    – waste increasing
    – wild habitats being bulldozed over to build new houses, warehouses etc for the ever increasing population
    – climate change meaning the children nowadays will have little hope in the future due to damage from climate change
    – being born with a debilitating illness
    – dwindling natural resources

    And many more reasons.

    1. If you think my entire argument is a slippery slope fallacy, you don’t understand my argument.

  9. Shone

    This is such a stunning pile of nonsense, the fallacies are just too many. All you did here is actually demonstrate a very childish naive illogical view of life. As the absence of response from you to some antinatalists here who clearly pointed to some of these fallacies, and as your clear arrogance and hostility show, it’s pointless to argue with you on this subject. You are clearly an illogical person and no pile of logical arguments can get you out of this pile of wishful thinking.

    1. In my experience, anti-natalists couldn’t argue themselves out of a wet paper bag. Point to a single argument (no, not a whole undifferentiated hour-long video or a wall-of-text rant) in reply to this blog post that I did not respond to.

      Not a single anti-natalist has so much as demonstrated that he even understood my arguments, let alone answered them.

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