CONTENTS:
Pet ownership
Antinatalism - Terminology
Objections and Discussion
>SE questions to the antinatalist
>Misc questions
Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been
>BNTHB quotes
Slogans, Quips and Vents
>Broaching and outreach
>SE questions to the natalist
>Congratulating a conception
>A Father’s Day salutation
Modest aims
Activist mental health
PET OWNERSHIP
· Against breeding generally, see below
If you cannot afford to have a pet neutered, then should you not have a pet?
· Many pedigrees are bred disabled.
· Neutering without consent
· Inherently exploitive and controlling.
The existence of pets as toys seems wrong. But are they/we ever really more than this?
· Unreasonable demand and burden that a pet’s everyday existence must give one meaning in life / unconditional love, while solving one’s boredom.
· Their unmalleable character and behaviours may disappoint expectations
· Carbon footprint.
· Meeting their exercise and company needs with job/lifestyle compatibility
· How can I plan to be a sole guardian ~15 years in advance?
· Is there any way to flexibly share guardianship with soluble commitments to co-guardians or even the pet themself, while honoring my obligations to the pet?
· A pet may want a variety of carers in its lifetime, not just one.
· Rehoming old, small dogs minimises commitment…but it still takes a network of people (or another dog and a big garden) and financial independence to resiliently accommodate a dog’s needs.
PS. Cats are murder machines
Lots of the above applies to human parenthood too.
We are all pets: the pets of our parents.
ANTINATALISM
Terminology
Antinatalism is:
The opposition to the creation of (either human or sentient) life, typically for ethical reasons.
It is concerned with non-violence and compassion.
Some common intuitions motivating antinatalism:
- CONSENT
Life guarantees harm to the child that they don’t consent to.
eg disease, injury, bereavement, heartbreak, depression, loneliness, hunger, thirst
- RISK
A parent risks creating a child’s life that is not worth living.
- INDIRECT HARM
A child, no matter how good, will harm other people, animals, and the environment.
These are global reasons, applying at all places and times.
These are opposed to local reasons, eg opposing procreation because the contemporary state of the world is especially precarious or because one’s tastes and interests are particularly ill-suited to parenthood (desires to be “childfree”).
In procreating, there are also opportunity costs to other philanthropy, eg we could take better care of existing people.
The consent and gamble arguments are labelled the philanthropic reasons while the indirect harm and opportunity cost arguments are the misanthropic reasons.
Pro-mortalism is a separate, related idea advocating for the deaths of all living beings, through either voluntarily or involuntary means, for ethical purposes.
Areas of focus:
• Human procreation
• WAS (Wild animal suffering)
• Animal agriculture
• Artificial sentience
Links:
• An elevator pitch
• https://www.today.com/parents/family/antinatalism-meaning-parents-rcna165537
• https://iep.utm.edu/anti-natalism/
• https://vhemt.org/outreach.htm
• https://stophavingkids.org
• https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral
• https://antinatalisthandbook.org/languages/english
• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antinatalism
• https://www.reddit.com/r/antinatalism/wiki/index/
Objections and Discussion
★Not all harms require consent, for example the “rescue” case.
Hypothetically, if lives were guaranteed to be worth living, then why not start them?
-I acknowledge that hypothetical consent and pure benefit in the rescue and gold manna cases are muddying complications.
Would deniers of retrospective consent bite the bullet and say we shouldnt resuscitate (friend-and-family-less) unconscious people who will stay unconscious and die without a procedure inflicting temporary harm?
Factually though, we are nowhere near being able to guarantee a child a life worth living.
Plus the other arguments for antinatalism would still apply.
★Life is a gift
-Gifts should be refusable if carrying significant risk of involuntary harm.
Factually, there is currently no high chance that a child’s life would be worth living. Also, in appraising their life, people can only appraise it so far, excluding the harms, disease and dying still to come.
★ It is wrong to deprive a potential person of pleasure.
-Even if true in isolation, it doesnt sanction procreation all-things-considered.
And it has limits, as we don’t believe every sperm is sacred or mourn for those who do not exist on Mars.
I acknowledge that some antinatalists seem inconsistent in claiming that there is “no ghost child in the waiting room” that can be harmed by deprivation yet they are held as appropriate subjects of harm by creation nonetheless.
Im tempted to reconcile my rejection of the argument from potential life with my acceptance that creating a life of guaranteed wireheading is “good” (considered in isolation at least) by noting that the latter is a non-obliged good. But obligedness then becomes an ignotum per ignotius.
Is there a commission-omission distinction?
Is it axiomatic that the absence of a benefit is not necessarily a harm?
Benatar says that absent pleasure to the “never-existing” would be “not bad”. This doesn’t sit right with me. I feel sad about the absent pleasure in the scenario…but maybe Im confusing sad and bad?
We do seem able to evaluate conscious experiences against unconsciousness.
For example, eating a great pizza is better than unconsciousness.
I am not an anti-frustrationist because according to this view, a satisfied preference and no preference are equally good. Pleasure from desire-satisfaction may ultimately be transient, but it matters.
★If there’s a high likelihood of a net blissful life then procreation is good.
-Some people bite the Omelas bullet. Are they wrong?
What is the magnitude of the population’s alleged Deluded Gladness (self-reported happiness)?
Maybe people are addicted to life in a way that is otherwise bad for them.
Are we suffering mass structural Stockholm syndrome?
Creating life with the likelihood of bliss and access to euthanasia would, albeit unrealistically and hypothetically, seems to be an improvement by blunting the consent and gamble arguments, but other arguments would remain and new contentious issues would be introduced.
Perhaps really Im just a childfree, anarcho-primitivistic, eco-fascistic pessimist.
★We should reject moral generalism (an analysis through abstracting principles and premises); moral particularism is true.
-Radical but plausible imo, particularly for the moral realist.
★Avoiding procreation is overdemanding; a moral impediment is a feature of our lives.
-I acknowledge some things can be overdemanding and it’s unclear where that line lies.
Is it the case that many people, especially younger women, would always have a strong urge to reproduce? How is this modulated by cultural indoctrination?
Perhaps there is also a family-creating instinct for safety in numbers, to breed an army of loyal soldiers.
If a man doesn’t know his female sexual partner’s strength of conviction towards abortion, is sex with common contraception an immoral risk?
Before contraception, would avoidance of sex have been overdemanding?
Is it wrong to have houseplants that promote aphid breeding?
★Advocating Antinatalism is futile
-It’s incremental change; many movements for moral progress are effective on a multi-generational timeframe.
If I were to say “Why should I stop abusing this child? Someone else will just abuse another child in some other place or time.” Yes, maybe another person will do the same wrong action as you somewhere else or in some other time, but this doesn’t justify you doing it now.
Even preventing harm to one person is an enormous good, i.e The Star Thrower lesson “It made a difference for that one”.
Antinatalist advocates may have to work harder because of the selection bias of typically having no biological children with whom they can share their message.
Note that if free will is false, then no one can make a difference and all advocacy is futile.
★ We need more children to solve humanity’s problems.
With an optimistic hat on, maybe a defection strategy of breeding (when others will anyway) is best?
Maybe children of relatively rich thoughtful people more likely to solve world’s problems/engineer paradise?!
-Is this mere Hopium? The answer seems to rest solely on one’s intuitions.
Alternatively, should precarity of social collapse etc prescribe a precautionary principle on breeding?
★ You’ll regret not having kids / Being a parent feels great
-The objector may have had a transformative experience, but it does not rebut the arguments for antinatalism that are independent of idiosyncrasy.
And one could foster or adopt.
To get pleasure reinvigorating one’s adult life with vicarious childhood fun, at the expense of another, is immoral.
Having kids to give yourself validation does not countermand the ethical objections.
Maybe there is something in breeding safety in numbers: an army of loyal soldiers?
★ Having kids is just axiomatically good, taking precedence over other moral principles
-This bites the bullet but I imagine it has high consensus.
★ This campaign is offensive; make your point another way
-Campaigning with some sensitivity matters for various reasons. What are the ethics of yucking someone’s yum?
★Your beliefs and advocacy are just performing self-therapy and adhoc rationalisation, not accessing moral truths.
-This objection assumes the fallaciousness of AN arguments or a conclusion of moral skepticism without argument.
We can accept evangelism is often therapeutic and I acknowledge that the following can motivate antinatalism:
- An iconoclastic streak; youths, as the underdog, make every conversation or action into a trial of strength with their elders
- Parent-hating/blaming; how common is this in AN? Have antinatalists just sublimated the blame from particulars elsewhere in their lives to their parents / the universe?
- Fear of parenthood, Fear of being a bad parent
- Fear of getting a child like me!
- Psychological disgust (general, unspecified),
- Eco-grief, ecoanxiety, post-industrial generations’ disgust, anarchoprimitivism
- Rationalised depression
★You cant blame parents for all the harms antinatalists place at their feet
What of the big picture…the state, the parents’ parents, the elite, their parents, the universe writ large (closer responsible agents ), breed-culture etc.
Could procreation be bad but nonculpable?
Many parents were just following a biological imperative like breathing or eating. They could’ve disowned the child once they regretted the horror of their mistake.
Is the attribution of responsibility to different factors zero-sum?
How do cultural expectations affect the attribution of responsibility?
★ (The Back to the Future) “If your parents didn’t reproduce then you wouldn’t be here sharing this message!”
-So? This objection can be interpreted in at least two ways.
Interpreted as the claim that I should be grateful for my gift of life, I wouldn’t be able to reflect on non-existence!
And if the holocaust hadnt happened then you wouldnt be alive, but you still wish the Holocaust hadnt happened.
A survivor of abuse may go on to use that horrible experience as a tool for empowerment and support other victims of abuse, and find some fulfillment in doing this.
Would that make the initial abuse justified or a good thing? Of course not.
Interpreted as an attempted reductio by contradiction (because I am here to share the message), all this shows is that the parents did reproduce, not that they shouldn’t have.
★ Humankind will be extinct
-Why is that bad? There will be no people to miss other people etc
Alternatively perhaps there should be a precautionary principle against extinction, for pro-biodiversity reasons, or in case of moral error.
There may also be reason to prioritise reducing wild animal suffering over human depopulation.
★By these arguments, you should kill yourself
-The calculus changes once people exist. The considerations for continuing a life are different than for creating one. Suicide can be difficult to action even for people greatly suffering. It can harm those around us.
I wonder how much we could normalise/casualise a child’s commonplace right to die.
Could a parent ever be openminded that the first 18 years are say just a test to see if the kid wants to continue living and no one should just expect that they will?
Would the child’s suicide decision always seriously harm a parent?
If I rehomed a pet and they decided actually nah theyd rather be euthanised than carry on with me, I feel Id always take it significantly personally. Although I suppose kids can move out, so their suicide decision might be more about the world, whereas the pet’s would be more domestic.
I suppose I cant break out of my pro-living/breeding inculcation to imagine anyway.
Maybe a more modest aim: a world where one shouldn’t have kids unless they can accept the kid doesn’t owe them staying alive. Like, parents would swear an oath on…well, not Benatar cos that would be a bit inconsistent…but maybe on a blank piece of paper or Epictetus or something.
And is it any less traumatic for someone when their friend dies from suicide having given open deliberation and dialogue about it?
Im ignorant what the research says.
★ (Omnicide) “By your logic, we should wipe out all forms of life / blow up the planet. That seems axiomatically bad, and if it were the case that it is bad, then your logic would be wrong”
-(A general response)
The considerations for continuing a life are different than for creating one.
-(A pro-mortalist response)
What we call nature is brutal and contains unimaginable amounts of suffering. I wish I could stop at least some of it… (then maybe change the topic?!)
An instantaneous and simultaneous omnicide would be preferable to a slow and staggered one, but in reality deliberate action is required if we want the decline to be peaceful, equitable, and gradual.
What is the minimum possible population for an industrial/pharmaceutical society?
Or perhaps we also need a phased human extinction, to ensure the ongoing mitigation of wild animal (or other forms of) suffering.
What should guide our actions when faced with multiple conflicting and contested principles and moral uncertainty?
(Credit some wording from @LawrenceAnton, Siddharth Dafaria, Nimrod, and Danny Shine)
SE questions to the antinatalist
It’s good to flip some wording in the SE questions to natalists (see later section) and have antinatalists ask these of themselves.
1. How confident are you on a scale of 1–10 that it’s unethical to have children?
2. Are you willing to change your mind?
3. What are the strongest arguments against your position?
4. Can you imagine anything that might change your mind about the ethics of procreating?
5. Should we resuscitate unconscious people who will stay unconscious and die without a procedure inflicting temporary harm?
6. When do harms require consent?
7. Hypothetically, is there a sufficiently high likelihood of a blissful human life where human procreation becomes morally permissible?
Is there a population count for Omelas where it becomes ok?
8. What should determine a person’s line of over-demandingness?
9. If a man doesn’t know his female sexual partner’s strength of conviction towards abortion, is sex with common contraception an immoral risk?
10. Do morally-salient actions need to affect persons that will at some point exist?
11. Are there any experiences better than unconsciousness?
If there are moral facts…
12. …how can we know them?
13. …can ethical evaluations always be reduced to the application of principles?
If ethical evaluations are tastes…
14. …are reasons for ethical evaluations posthoc?
15. …what power if any do principles have to change our evaluations?
16. If a person is comfortable to bite the omelas bullet and also to claim that abstention from procreation is overdemanding, is there any further hope of persuasion?
17. Do we just thank them for expositing their tastes so clearly and get on our way?
Misc questions
• Is any metric comparing pleasure and pain arbitrary?
• Who will you leave any assets to upon your death?
• What is the best data on the rates of persistent regretting having children?
• Does parental regret change with child age?
• How does the rate of pet regret compare to the rate of child regret?
• Should antinatalism only concern sentient organisms?
• Can non-existent persons have a right to come into existence?
Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been
BNTHB continues a discussion with Feinberg etc to solve the non-identity problem and repugnant conclusion with a Theory X.
The non-identity problem is the name given to a set of problems of how to reconcile the person-affecting intuition (~”what is bad must be bad for someone”) with plausible ancillary claims.
This presents it as an inconsistent quartet
This presents it as an inconsistent triad, though the latest revision is less specific
BNTHB presents two arguments for antinatalism:
• The Asymmetry argument
Distinguishes between lives worth continuing and lives worth starting; both are usually conflated under the term “lives worth living”.
Not starting a life dominates starting a life, regardless of the life’s constituents of wellbeing.
• The Deluded gladness arguments
The Asymmetry argument in detail:
What is the nature of the asymmetry?
That there is no reflective symmetry (like a negation operation) between the two rows of the matrix. Calling it the asymmetry argument seems unintuitive to me, although I have no better suggestion (the “Absent pleasure is no disadvantage/undefined as a disadvantage Argument” is a tad verbose)
P57, B says only that it’s “between harm and benefit”.
P30 indicates the asymmetry is between pain and pleasure
B’s asymmetry argument:
B uses (3rd person?) preference intuitions to extend the notion of relative harm to procreative acts and states 4 premises.
At whatever granularity you choose, package up each of the goods (benefits) and package up each of the bads (harms) of a particular life and for each package, consider its row in the matrix.
The matrix squares show premises 1 to 4.
observe the relative advantage 1 vs 3 and 2 vs 4.
3 always has advantage over 1.
Neither 2 nor 4 has advantage over the other, because 4 is “not bad” (so it is no worse than 2)
4 is kindof undefined in value/incommensurable with 2 in terms of advantage/disadvantage.
Therefore, Scenario B dominates (is always either better than or no worse than) Scenario A.
Myths about the Asymmetry argument:
• It’s hedonic aggregation?
• It’s not aggregation — box 4 is value=undefined, not value=0
• It’s not hedonic — “Consider pains and pleasures as exemplars of harms and benefits”
• It’s an equation? No.
Person-affecting morality:
Something can be good or bad only if it is good or bad for some specific (possible) person.
Benatar claims he does use a person-affecting morality:
(p30) “with reference to the (potential) interests of a person who either does or does not exist” because this is with respect to a particular person.
3 *is* good for a specific person; the person just isn’t created. Non-created people are particulars.
Benatar’s characteristic asymmetry explains 4 other asymmetries that are taken as axiomatic.
4 premises explain the 4 asymmetries (the number is a coincidence)
Comments:
1. I think I agree with Harman’s critique that Benatar’s Asymmetry argument, despite trying to extend the concept, ultimately equivocates between impersonal goodness and goodness for a person.
2. I cant reconcile my dislike of the argument from potential with the belief that creating a life of guaranteed wireheading is “good” (considered in isolation at least).
3. Are the “four other asymmetries” independent?
4. Benatar says that absent pleasure would be “not bad”. This doesn’t sit right with me. I feel sad about the absent pleasure in the scenario…but maybe Im confusing sad and bad.
5. We do seem able to compare conscious experiences with unconsciousness (ie dreamless sleep).
6. BNTHB is a bad book for initiates to the AN movement because it’s so technical.
BNTHB quotes
“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
“Any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.”
“However, it is not the case that people are valuable because they add extra happiness. Instead
extra happiness is valuable because it is good for people — because it makes people’s lives go better.”
“My argument will proceed by showing how, given the asymmetry between harm and benefit, it follows that coming into existence is always a harm.”
“To determine the relative advantages and disadvantages of coming into existence and never coming to be, we need to compare (1) with(3), and (2) with(4).”
“the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation”
“The analysis of the cheerful is mistaken for a number of reasons:
1. First, it makes the wrong comparison. If we want to determine whether non-existence is preferable to existence, or vice versa, then we must compare the left- and the right-hand sides of the diagram…Comparing the upper and the lower quadrants on the left does not tell us whether Scenario A is better than Scenario B or vice versa.
2. looking only at (1) and (2), subtracting the former from the latter, is that it seems to ignore the difference, mentioned earlier, between a ‘life worth starting’ and a ‘life worth continuing’.
3. Finally, the quality of a life is not determined simply by subtracting the bad from the good. (see ch3)”
“We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child — pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death.”
p30
“The judgement made in (3) is made with reference to the (potential) interests of a person who either does or does not exist. To this it might be objected that because (3) is part of the scenario under
which this person never exists, (3) cannot say anything about an existing person. This objection would be mistaken because (3) can say something about a counterfactual case in which a person who does actually exist never did exist. Of the pain of an existing person, (3) says that the absence of this pain would have been good even if this could only have been achieved by the absence of the person who now suffers it.
In other words, judged in terms of the interests of a person who now exists, the absence of the pain would have been good even though this person would then not have existed.
Consider next what (3) says of the absent pain of one who never exists — of pain, the absence of which is ensured by not making a potential person actual. Claim (3) says that this absence is good
when judged in terms of the interests of the person who would otherwise have existed. We may not know who that person would have been, but we can still say that whoever that person would
have been, the avoidance of his or her pains is good when judged in terms of his or her potential interests.
If there is any (obviously loose) sense in which the absent pain is good for the person who could have existed but does not exist, this is it. Clearly (3) does not entail the absurd literal claim that there is some actual person for whom the absent pain is good.”
p31
“whoever that person would have been, the avoidance of his or her pains is good when judged in terms of his or her potential interests.”
p35
“support for the asymmetry between (3) and (4) can be found in the asymmetrical judgements about (a) (distant) suffering and (b) uninhabited portions of the earth or the universe. Where-as, at least when we think of them, we rightly are sad for inhabitants of a foreign land whose lives are characterized by suffering, when we hear that some island is unpopulated, we are not similarly
sad for the happy people who, had they existed, would have populated this island. Similarly, nobody really mourns for those who do not exist on Mars, feeling sorry for potential such beings that they cannot enjoy life.²⁸ Yet, if we knew that there were sentient life on Mars but that Martians were suffering, we would regret this for them. The claim here need not (but could) be the strong one
that we would regret their very existence. The fact that we would regret the suffering within their life is sufficient to support the asymmetry I am defending. The point is that we regret suffering but not the absent pleasures of those who could have existed.”
Slogans, Quips and Vents
CW: Some reproductive edginess and some inappropriate for outreach
Research antinatalism
Question having kids
Normalise antinatalism
Reproduction is violence
Procreation is violence
Breeding is cruelty
Dont reproduce
It’s okay to not breed
Life is not a gift
Parent regret exists
Many parents regret it
Don’t procreate
Childrearing is (existential) therapy
Normalise adoption
Normalise adoption first
Adopt, dont breed
One is enough
Normalise childfree
Thankyou for not breeding
Your need. Their suffering.
Spread memes, not genes.
Make love, not babies
Stop child abuse
Enough People Already
Birth is bad
Grow trees not humans
If breeding went before an ethics committee it would get rejected
The only kind choice in a cruel world is to stop having kids
Dont gamble with someone else’s life
Life should be an opt in, not an opt out.
The world is a conveyor belt of shit
Life is the most harmful thing in the known universe.
Make the world a better place: don’t procreate.
Humans are overrated pets
The dubious gift of life
There is an unconscionable amount of needless suffering, injustice, and death in the world. Birth serves as the catalyst for it all.
Remove suffering through removing the opportunity for suffering
Having children is always an egoistic action.
Life-enthusiasm is similar to jingo-ism / war-enthusiasm
The great lie: that breeding / the creation of life is inherently good. No-one promises life will be worthwhile or pleasurable.
Just because one can have a baby it doesn’t mean one should
Dear society, quit romanticizing and glamorizing pregnancy and motherhood
Being born is like being kidnapped and thrown into slavery. Wage slavery and unavoidable misery.
Why does nobody talk about the fact that it’s this fucking endless trauma?
Having children is a way to feel power, imposing your will on someone
The wish to reproduce oneself/reproduction is a form of narcissism and megalomania.
Mother nature is not your friend
Youre all members of the voluntary human extinction movement. You just dont know it.
Like, “Silly me I brought new sentient life into this hellscape”
Parental marketing: calling it “the Gift of life” when the only thing they can actually guarantee is death
Natalism: two other people got to decide that one day I’ll die.
A non-existent child doesn’t need love and attention, but the orphans who are currently here desperately do
“My children might cure cancer” said 8 billion people. Still no cure
You can never guarantee your child a life worth living; theres always a risk.
It’s not my place to take that gamble
A child of rich and loving parents can still be depressed
If humans with all their dangers and destruction were a type of dog, breeding them would be quickly banned
All people will either see their parents/guardians die or have their parents/guardians see them die.
Future parents may get to a point in life of boredom or meaninglessness, so they create something dependent on them, to love them unconditionally like a puppy
Person 1: Maybe my child will cure cancer!
Person 2: You solve cancer. Don’t put that pressure on a child.
Person 3: Maybe my child will get cancer.
Person 4: I love my non-existent kids too much to pull them out of the void and bring them into this shitty world. May they forever know nothing but peace and darkness.
My parents wanted a pet, and now I have to go to work every morning.
The egoism of having children — validation of the parent; that they can improve on their own experience. Or if they had a great life, then to share that with someone else too.
Modern diets finance the torture breeding of various animals
“I shan’t condone any creation of life, but thankyou to my parents for mitigating the disaster once it was made”
A baby is just a future corpse.
If sex is an urge to procreate, then hunger is an urge to defecate.
At birth we are cast into a flaming pit of scum forgotten by god.
Before reproducing, ask yourself “How do you want your child to die?”
What is more horrific, genocide or breeding?
Breeding more meat for the existential meat grinder called Life is evil.
Life is simply a series of needs — many of which we are ill-equipped to cater for — that we must meet so that we can keep ill-health at bay.
Why force someone else into a messed up world?
Procreation is creating vulnerable people with insufficient safeguarding (/resources to safeguard them)
Safeguard children; don’t have them / don’t procreate
Procreation is the root cause of all sorts of issues: disease, injury, hunger, thirst, death, heartbreak, bereavement, agony, misery, loneliness, forced labour.
Being a child should be illegal
Antinatalists love kids/people so much they want to prevent their suffering and death
Antinatalism is the most effective and compassionate solution to every human problem
“We have to run around and try and convince people to stop rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and just get them to stop bringing people onto it”
“We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings”
Children are morally and actually disgusting
Humans are the worst pets.
It’s ok not to reproduce
Im not saying your child is likely to be Hitler, but they might have voted for him.
“People go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering; few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
The silent indifference of our empty universe
A life of suffering, never to be satisfied, constantly disappointed.
When you look at it like that, isnt having a child a cruel thing to do?
Breeding is the ultimate expression of absurdity
Parents cant help, because the child isnt them
Eugh, the psychological fatigue at continuing to exist in our garbage universe
We should not harm the few for the sake of the many
Man’s greatest good is not to be, not to exist, to be nothing; but second best is to die soon.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” -Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Life is a series of tedious, repetitive tasks that come at a very heavy cost.
Dont reproduce.
Dont reproduce. Spay or neuter your loved ones.
“We fuck.
We die.
We breathe.
We die.
We know we’re going back
To the mud.
But still, we live.”
“If you think these aphorisms can get worse, dont worry cos your life is the worst gift you’ll ever receive”
“And if god forbid you have children yourself, then make sure they think about the ethics of reproduction too”
I feel so bad for anyone birthed into the world
Every life is an unethical experiment
Owning pets is inherently exploitive, and children are just human pets
Life: a fit of lunacy throttling matter
“All our humiliations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. We pay dearly for this cowardice.”
I live in hell because I was expelled from heaven
Everything here is … Hard, and, dull, searing or violent.
Life is violent and unfair
Life is pain and disappointment
Life is exhausting
Raw torture and hopeless tragedy is all there is.
I cant fathom the cruelty and absurdity of creating life with all the expectations of suffering that involves
Is breeding a self-deception? A way of trying to validate your own meaningless life?
Curse the day I was born (-Phantom of the opera)
Curse the day you were born
Procreation is an egregious act of violence
We are the unlucky winners of existence
Procreation today is like selling berths on a sinking ship.
We are the tip of an iceberg; so much antinatalism is behind closed doors because of the social cost to it
Jim Carrey: “It’s completely meaningless”
Life is footnotes to unwantedness and trauma
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance” — Orwell
An unsent joke email to my old office from a few years ago:
“Obviously everyone’s reproductive choices are incredibly personal.
I want to normalise diversity and amplify currently marginalised lifestyles, in a society that too often foregrounds cishet mono repro -normativity.
So here i’ll share something aligned with my values and aims, a little celebratory fanfare in the solitary secular bachelor life. Everything is ultimately arbitrary anyway…Im not having a baby!!!
Please send gifts
X”
Guillotine the breeders!
“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil”
“The Optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The Pessimist fears this is true”
Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child
Party our way into extinction!
Even discounting death itself — no mean feat — there is a wide range of appalling fates that can befall any child that is brought into existence: starvation, rape, abuse, assault, serious mental illness, infectious disease, malignancy, paralysis. These cause vast amounts of suffering before the person dies. Prospective parents impose these risks on the children they create.
The risks of cancer alone are substantial: in the UK 50 per cent of people will develop the disease. If people imposed that sort of risk of that sort of harm on others in non-procreative contexts, they would be very widely condemned. The same standards should be applied to procreation.
Humans also visit other horrors on their fellows, including persecuting, oppressing, beating, branding, maiming, tormenting, torturing, raping, kidnapping, and enslaving.
…Daily life is filled with dishonesty, betrayal, negligence, cruelty, hurtfulness, impatience, exploitation, betrayals of confidence, and breaches of privacy. Even when these do not kill or physically injure, they can cause considerable psychological and other damage. Of such harms, everybody is, to varying degrees, a perpetrator.
…If any other species caused as much damage as humans do, we would think it wrong to breed new members of that species
Disease, injury, hunger, thirst, death, heartbreak, bereavement, agony, misery, loneliness, forced labour.
Throw the baby out with the bath water
It’s not my place to take that gamble / I dont believe it’s our place to take that gamble.
People who are loved, with loving and rich upbringing can still be depressed
“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
“It’s an anti-death cult because the only reason theres death is because there’s birth”
“At Christmas if I were to get you a gift where the only way you were able to get shift of it were to kill yourself and to maintain the gift were to put in serious effort and it was not something that you previously had any interest in receiving, I think that would disqualify it as being described as a gift.”
“[Life] comes with deep commitments…we must nourish our body, we must do exercise, we must [build community].
There’s a lottery involved in having kids.
Life is essentially a horrible experience
Unborn children are none the wiser and deserve to be protected from certain things, like being alive in the first place.
Living was not my choice. It was my mother’s.
Have you ever heard of anything more selfish?
We should stop beings being forced in here.
“Children begin by loving their parents.
After a time they judge them.
Rarely if ever do they forgive them”
The world is terrible
There have been around 20 trillion trillion (trillion 2 times is not a typo) sentient life forms, including trillions of mammals and 10s of billions of humans that have been tortured and violated and raped and molested and degraded and murdered by nature. Nature is more sadistic than every slaughterhouse, mass murderer, animal holocauster, serial rapist, factory farm, concentration camp, psychotic dictator & torturer in history combined, by a margin of “trillions of trillions”, and it’s been happening for 100s of millions of years, on a global scale without 1 day even 1 minute of pause in the action.
Yet most people will tell you they love nature, because it looks pretty and seems beautiful.
…Life is without question the most harmful function in the known universe.
“More than fifteen million people are thought to have died from natural disasters in the last 1,000 years,
approximately 20,000 people die every day from hunger,
an estimated 840 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition,
between 541 and 1912, it is estimated that over 102 million people succumbed to plague,
the 1918 influenza epidemic killed 50 million people,
nearly 11 million people die every year from infectious diseases,
malignant neoplasms take more than a further 7 million lives each year,
approximately 3.5 million people die every year in accidents,
approximately 56.5 million people died in 2001, that is more than 107 people per minute,
before the twentieth century over 133 million people were killed in mass killings,
in the first 88 years of the twentieth century 170 million (and possibly as many as 360 million) people were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners,
there were 1.6 million conflict-related deaths in the sixteenth century, 6.1 million in the seventeenth century, 7 million in the eighteenth, 19.4 million in the nineteenth, and 109.7 million in the twentieth,
war-related injuries led to 310,000 deaths in 2000,
about 40 million children are maltreated each year,
more than 100 million currently living women and girls have been subjected to genital mutilation,
over 80% of newborn American boys have also been subjected to genital mutilation,[74]
815,000 people are thought to have committed suicide in 2000;[6]: 88–92 in 2016, the International Association for Suicide Prevention estimated that someone commits suicide every 40 seconds, more than 800,000 people per year.[75]”
==
Nimrod:
“Do you think all the miserable people had parents who didnt give them love?”
Torturing and murdering 150billion animals/yr
There wont be wars, misogyny, racism, rape, there wont be humans around to miss it
Im trying to do good because theres alot of suffering in the world
It’s a terribly conformist world
“His parents didnt want him to be bad, they didnt say lets have a child and we’ll have a serial rapist.
No they said lets raise him, love him, and we’ll have a lovely child, and they got a fucking monster! Because you cant control it!”
Youre stepping over the bodies of 6 million people and said I grew from it
To say it’s therefore good the disaster happened is a different ball game
The fact that disaster happened to you
Happened near you to you or affected you
And that you try to grow from it is great
…otherwise we will sink, we will suffer and we will not make the world better.
…To say disasters are good because we grow from them is psychotic.
I wouldnt go out to talk to people if I werent an optimist
Educate, teach to adopt. Don’t put someone in harm’s way.
Why do you have to create a new person?
Broaching and outreach
Some nascent and ill-informed thoughts…
How to broach one’s own controversial views with strangers, friends, or family?
With colleagues, it might be best to conform.
When is something wrong enough that one evangelises?
Wrong in quality or magnitude?
“Have you thought about the ethics of creating life / having kids / procreation?”
“When you think about having children, do you think about the ethics of it, asking if it’s the right thing to do?”
“How should you think about the ethics of creating a life?”
“Do you want biological kids?”
“SHK wants to inspire and provoke critical thinking about reproductive choices and is against forcing individuals to do anything either way.”
“Im involved in activism for having smaller families or no children”
“I have some views about having children and Im choosing not to have children myself.
We can talk about it some other time if you like”
“I believe in a more childfree society at this point in human history.
Giving attention and resources to existing people.
We can do more good by not having children”
“We promote positive, practical, ethical solutions — encouraging smaller families, inspiring people to reduce excessive consumption and helping us all to live within our planet’s natural limits.
We believe everyone should have the freedom and ability to choose a smaller family.
We support human rights, women’s empowerment and global justice.”
“I just don’t feel comfortable creating a life guaranteed to suffer that doesn’t give its consent, that has a risk of a life not worth living, and that will harm other humans, animals, and the environment in an already overpopulated and precarious world”
Procreation
/creating (new) life
/reproduction
/breeding
seems / is…
ethically questionable / dubious
/unethical
/irresponsible
/morally bad
/immoral
/wrong
/bad
Or phrase as “It seems/is XYZ to reproduce etc”
“I view creating sentient life as bad
…because we cause the harms in the child’s life
to be experienced that would not otherwise have been”
There are enough people on the planet already; there are existing kids that need parents and mentorship. Even the most saintly humans cause harm to other humans, animals, and the environment.
It also doesn’t seem right that parents gamble that a child will have a life worth living, which sadly isn’t always the case.
Kids don’t get to consent to the harms, death and disease life will throw at them.
And society seems especially precarious when looking at the state of the world, eg the doomsday clock and climate warnings
“But obviously I know that most people — myself included — are brought up to believe its a good thing to create more humans.
But I think society will make great moral progress waking up to this falsehood.”
It’s important to think carefully about these reasons.
/ think carefully about these reasons.
“If you have children yourself, then please make them think about the ethics of reproduction too”
Palatable adjacent issues:
Feminism/women’s liberation
• 2.7M women have unmet contraception need (citation?)
• stop mandatory motherhood;
• reduce social pressure;
• give people choice;
• Childfree
Environmentalism
• Birth Strike
• Global ecological footprint 1.4 earths (citation?)
• Ecological destabilisation;
• Climate refugees
• Smaller families save the planet
Population Matters covers both areas
The 2019 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, from over 11,000 scientists of 153 countries, declared that the climate emergency requires “bold and drastic transformations” regarding population policies.
“If we all want to live comfortably on this planet, we need to keep the population under control.”
Common rebuttals to deploy during outreach:
A life worth continuing is separate concept from a life not worth creating
Just because you get pleasure from something it doesnt make it ethical
Non-procreation isn’t a good thing in and of itself, it is a neutral non-action — it is just not actively contributing to or causing more problems.
“At Christmas [if I were to] get you a gift where the only way you were able to get [rid] of it were [for you] to kill yourself and to keep the gift [meant putting in] serious effort and it was not something that you previously had any interest in receiving, [then] I think that would disqualify it as being described as a gift.”
We cant turn back time for ourselves, but we can prevent future repetition of unethical acts.
One day we will have a last generation. Human beings are not going to go on forever anyway.
SE questions to the natalist
1. What are the ethical issues with procreation?
2. How confident are you on a scale of 1–10 that it’s ethical to have children?
3. Are you willing to change your mind?
4. How convinced are you on a scale of 1–10 by each of the AN arguments?
5. Can you imagine what would make you regret having children?
6. Can you imagine anything that might change your mind about the ethics of having children? Not at a personal level, but in a more universal or moral sense.
7. Is there any state of the world where you wouldnt have children? What does that look like?
Congratulating a conception
Is to congratulate a pregnancy to condone it?
A neutral reply to an announcement of pregnancy:
“Oh, have you/they always wanted to have children?”
“Ah, when is the birth expected?”
“Wow!
How do you feel about it?
I occasionally worry that the world is a hostile place that only guarantees suffering (or maybe thats just too much time in <one’s industry>?!)
I dont see many signs that the outlook for humans on the planet is staying the same or getting better, but lets hope thats wrong.
Will you still have some time for <your hobbies>?!
Have you/they always wanted kids? I just think about the suffering, death, and disease guaranteed and the war and environmental apocalypse coming
“Let’s hope theirs is a life worth living”
“I wonder what this cursed world has in store for them.”
Bringing a new life into the world is against my beliefs but Im sure youll be a great parent.
“Welcome to the world, little person / young gal / chap!
Sorry about the bad things and the state it’s in.
Well, Im sure youll fix it. Good luck!”
We’re all the pets of our parents I suppose
We’re all pets: the pets of our parents
“Owning pets is inherently exploitive”
“Enjoy this pleasure! Because it’s inherently transient and the amount of suffering in the world is beyond all decent contemplation.”
“Another sophisticated pipe!”
“The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.”
“At birth we are cast into a flaming pit of scum forgotten by god.
The grave digger puts on the forceps. The air is full of our cries.
Yet some receive time to grow old.”
“I feel so bad for anyone birthed into the world”
“Welcome to the cascade of trauma!”
I wish your own parents had cautioned against following convention and having kids
Before contraception and child human rights came along, human children were abandoned at pretty shocking rates
Welcome to this world of suffering.
Let me be their childminder and I’ll caution them against having kids
On average, how many years does it take to regret having kids?
A Father’s Day salutation
Thankyou for the frequency of alleles
Modulo some meiosis and mutation
But those things dont in any way diminish your agency.
Because agency is already fictitious.
We are the passenger, causal law the driver.
From one speck of cosmic residue staring at the abyss to another, I just wanted you to know:
Because of you I am who I am.
Which is a horrible thing to say
Sorry, I take it back
Anyway, what Im trying to say is thankyou for the unpleasant interruption to an otherwise peaceful nonexistence.
My essence — perhaps an arbitrary collection of fungible molecules but probably an immortal soul performing a miracle with every thought — is grateful to be a part of a universe so evil, ugly, cruel and capricious that I can call it home.
While other hairless hominids doomed to die may ubiquitously believe in their own exceptionalism, Im confident that you — and I by self-congratulating proximity — are above-average by some intangible and arbitrary metric.
Here’s a touching poem by Larkin to mark this fleeting, special day:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Modest aims:
1. Spread reflection
Noone should procreate undiligently / without considering the ethical issues
2. Normalise AN views
• Stay moderate and palatable; imagine that a person traumatised by infertility sees your outreach signs.
• Should outreach be sensitive to mothers with postpartum depression?
• Don’t volunteer views about forced extinction, benevolent world explosion, or sterilisation
Activist mental health:
How can we best limit the anger and sadness of the issues from consuming us? How to talk to others about them?
Eco-grief, ecoanxiety, collapse awareness, hyperactive policing of moral infringements.
Consider the mental harm/effects of being “Collapse aware” and how to talk to others about it.
Should we cultivate some forgiveness?
Is it unrealistic to expect parents to be saints?
Everyone is a product of circumstance. And their generation had no antinatalism outreach to inform them.
See also:
Disagreement and Inquiry > Outreach
