Anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to humans but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general. There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include that life entails inevitable suffering, death is inevitable, and humans are born without their consent. Additionally, although some people may turn out to be happy, this is not guaranteed, so to procreate is to gamble with another person’s suffering. WIKIPEDIA
If you think, maybe for a few years, like 10-20 years, no one should make babies, and when things get better, we can continue, then you are not an anti-natalist. Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.
This photo was clicked by a friend, at Linnahall.
I think suffering is just part of the human condition. It has always been there and always will. To think that our times are special enough to warrant a movement like antinatalism, is ridiculously arrogant. It’s like cultusts who commit mass suicide because the aliens will come rescue them.
In fact, suffering has been on a steady decline for ages.To think that our times are special enough to warrant a movement like antinatalism
Antinatalism is a question first asked by ancient Greek philosophers. The modern antinatalism movement is… not so philosophical.
I’m now the mod of antinatalism on lemmy.world because the previous mod bombed a fertility clinic and I don’t want crazies like him running the sub or posting extremist content.
I believe that discussing antinatalism as an answer rather than a thought exercise is a mistake.
I reject antinatalism because I believe that suffering is not always a negative.
Could an artist not suffer for their work that brings great joy to themselves and others? Is that suffering not then worthy and good?
If something is worthy and good then denying others the opportunity to exist and be worthy and good is itself immoral.
Do I get this right? You’re the mod of the antinatalism community on lemmy.world, but you reject antinatalism?
That sounds like a difficult duality to balance, as a mod.
Disagreeing with a philosophical stance doesn’t mean that I need to be biased in moderation.
I find antinatalism to be an interesting philosophical exercise and welcome discussion about that and people’s personal choices based on the philosophy.
Could an artist not suffer for their work that brings great joy to themselves and others? Is that suffering not then worthy and good?
This is an awful take. Not suffering is always preferable to suffering.
If something is worthy and good then denying others the opportunity to exist and be worthy and good is itself immoral.
Does this mean that you have a moral imperative to have children because there are “worthy and good” things in the world? Is the logic “I can have children, there is good in the world, therefore it’s immoral to deny a potential life the opportunity to experience life”?
I say this as someone who can, but won’t, have children, and who grew up in an evangelical church - that’s a bizarre logic that feels an awful lot like some fundamentalist Christian quiverfull shit.
Not suffering is always preferable to suffering.
Is it? I prefer suffering the aches and pains of exercise knowing that caring for my body will reward me in the long term.
The definition of suffering we’re working with here is very broad. Not all suffering is pointless, unbearable or even involuntary.
People so afraid of suffering they would rather not ever have existed lack resilience.
that’s a bizarre logic that feels an awful lot like some fundamentalist Christian quiverfull shit.
To me it’s a sort of thought exercise and conversation starter, not my complete philosophical approach to the topic. I’m not religious in the slightest and probably best described as anti-theist.
I’d put it to you that suffering, in the sense that we’re discussing, would be something more than the pain of exercise - the people of Gaza are suffering, when I go into the ‘pain cave’ on a bike ride I’m enduring something for the benefit of it; I can stop, pause or relent if it becomes overbearing. It’s type 2 fun. It’s not suffering if you can opt out; challenge, and difficulty arent bad; suffering is.
It’s interesting that your anti-theistic approach has led you to what I would see as a very religious adjacent approach to reproduction; my worry with approaches like the outline you gave is that it can end up punishing any sort of reluctance to have kids (and can paint those who aren’t able to as immoral in some way). Not saying that’s you’re intention, just saying.
But the premise is that the suffering is a certainty, which the suffering we’re seeing in Gaza is absolutely not a certainty for everyone who is born.
The risk of suffering something unbearable is lower now than at any time in history and will hopefully only get lower.
It is possible to hold the view that having children can be a good thing and that people should be free to choose for themselves. They aren’t conflicting beliefs.
You’re moving the goalposts.
You made two key points;
- That suffering can be beneficial and
- That denying someone the opportunity to experience something beneficial is immoral, somtomhave kids is moral positive.
My primary objections are
- That suffering is always bad (although we disagree on the definitions of suffering, somits likely to be a moot point)
- Having children on the basis of it being morally good presents a number of very upsetting and dangerous implications.
Gaza was an example of a point, and of my own views on suffering; that suffering is something you cannot escape and that you do not choose, not something that’s difficult or temporarily painful you can choose to do which will ultimately produce some good. I’d posit that everyone experiences some form of suffering in their lives, to varying degrees, and the minimisation of this can only ever be a net positive.
Personally I don’t want children for a number of reasons, but boiling it down to a moral reason is reductive, unhelpful, and can be dangerous.
I’m not moving any goalposts, my responses are keeping in mind the original arguments of antinatalism, that sufferring is inevtiable and that all sufferring should be avoided.
The oldest writing on this (that I am aware of) is Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, written shortly before Sophocles’s death in 406 BC:
Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries
Look at the examples given, something as simple as envy being defined as sufferring. Loneliness in old age? This doesn’t seem to match how you are defining sufferring, and so our approaches differ.
suffering is something you cannot escape and that you do not choose, not something that’s difficult or temporarily painful
Torture is temporarily painful and we all agree that’s sufferring and not something you would choose.
Relationship breakups, especially one you didn’t choose to end, can be difficult but many people would agree that they sufferred during and after a breakup.
The premise is that sufferring is an inevitablility which you seem to agree with but sufferring as you’re defining it doesn’t seem to be a guaranteed experience.
You could conceivably live your entire life and never experience something that you cannot escape and that you do not choose, not something that’s difficult or temporarily painful. You could even choose a peaceful death to wrap up your sufferring free life with the way you’ve defined sufferring, even if it’s still unlikely it is a possibility, which goes against the original antinatalist claim that sufferring is inevitable.
Obviously sufferring comes in degrees of severity. I would never agree that not being born would be better than going through a breakup, or that its a moral imperative not to create new life because they might experience relationship difficulties.
However I would agree never being born would be preferrable to the death suffered by Hisaschi Ouchi, who was kept alive for as long as possible against his wishes so that doctors could study how extreme radiation poisoning would progress.
Personally I don’t want children for a number of reasons
I respect that and have zero interest in your reasons, it is your choice.
boiling it down to a moral reason is reductive, unhelpful, and can be dangerous.
It can certainly be dangerous, and I volunteered to moderate a space for discussion on the topic to try and mitigate some of that danger. To, potentially, reduce sufferring ;)
I agree but the only thing I plan on doing about it is not having kids myself. I don’t think it’s ethical but it’s also not worth starting shit over. I mean I won’t be leaving behind anyone who have to deal with it, and you can’t change people so why bother.
I think humanity is a species of excess. The harm we cause our planet every day by not seeing the bigger picture is hurting pretty much everything on the planet.
I’m not an antinatalist, but I think we could stand to decrease our numbers rather than increase them at least for a couple of centuries.
I think existence is preferable to nonexistence. Sure life sucks a lot, but then there’s also the beauty hidden all around us, which when revealed, reminds me that it’s good that I didn’t kms. Similarly, it makes me glad to have been born in the first place.
I get it.
edit:
Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.
Oh well idk. I think if I had been born in the Netherlands I might be more inclined to have kids, seems nice over there.
I’m child-free by choice and I think there are a lot of good reasons not to have kids that I would probably share with antinatalists. I think there should be less population growth. But radical “no-one should be born ever” antinatalism goes to far I think. IMO the whole “being born without their consent” argument doesn’t work, as the whole concept of consent doesn’t exist for a nonexistant being. In order to make any kind of choice on whether you want to exist, you need to exist first. If you make the argument that not having kids is sparing them from suffering, then you can just as easily make the argument that you’re depriving them from ever feeling love or happiness, which they “didn’t consent” to either.
Sometimes it’s due to trauma, fear and ideological confusion, which is valid, sometimes it’s just a way for people to be even more selfish, nihilistic and hedonistic without the optics associated with them. It also feels like the equivalent of angry/sad MGTOW but for life and it’s biological imperative, not just women. To each their own. 🤷
While there is the argument of not contributing to overpopulation, in my view anti-natalism is the application of moral utilitarianism to an absurd degree. I also think it can (not will of course) lead to eugenics policies. Indeed, a poor person birthing a child more immoral than a rich person. Certainly the rich child is much more likely to live a better life than the poor. Should we therefore be more willing to regulate the reproductive capabilities of the poor? I think this is where anti-natalism breaks down - forcing it on anyone, or creating policy to support it, is in my view will always be deeply immoral.
I think anyone thinking like this needs to take a serious look at economics and broaden their scope of intelligence. There are serious consequences to depopulation related to the percentage of the population that are able to work. You will die a very early death in misery under a systemic culture like this. The present will disintegrate. Wealth becomes meaningless. Broad collapse leads to abandoned poverty and death. Such a perspective is in isolation under the assumption that the present will continue, but that only happens when each generation supports the next.
Wealth becomes meaningless.
I don’t think this is a negative…
I think you have wildly missed the point.
Your comment has made no point and added nothing of value, further proving the point of psychosis in this insanity of people with no substantive depth.
I think you need to take a serious look at the economics of the future and broaden your scope of intelligence.
The economy will no longer be work-bound in 20 years. More humans will not mean more productivity. If machines do all the work, humans become unemployed, and unemployment can lead to mental stress and depression in many individuals. Which in turn can cause social unrests. That is what this is about.
No technology has ever had this effect. There is a culture of extraction and reductionism. That is the real problem at the moment. With great improvements in efficiency comes enormous potential to expand. We are actually on the cusp of potentially accessing the resources of a near Earth m-type astroid. While it is not a major media talking point, this will change everything about civilization and is the catalyst for the first near Earth and cislunar colonies. A single gravitationally differentiated planetesimal core fragment, known as an m-type astroid can easily contain more rare mineral resource wealth than all that humans have accessed in the Holocene. The only reason humans have not built O’Neill cylinders yet is because of wealth and infrastructure. That is the long term future of humans once we shed the idiotic shackles of mythology and inbred conservatism.
The West is shackled by inherited wealth. Business acumen is not hereditary. All systems without meritocratic hierarchy stagnate and fail. Asia is poised to take the future, on the current trajectory, as it has better meritocratic checks and balances to protect against the cancer of conservative stagnation, cronyism, and the exploitation that the incompetent always turn to as the only reliable form of investment.
You have no land to farm, and lack the skills, like we all do. The population is much too large for the systems and infrastructure, but this kind of stupidity leads to most people dying a terrible death. I despise any monster pushing such stupidity. The Earth is more than capable of sustaining much larger populations for tens of thousands of years before the accessible resources are depleted and space colonies become the only solution. That requires us to access the final age of technology – mastery of biology as a fully understood engineering field. We are still a couple of centuries away from that achievement. The Armageddon nihilism is pure psychosis. Once there are real space colonies, there must be a shift to sustainable self regulating technology. That will become biological systems management. Such a system has a much different set of constraints that do not allow anonymous exploitation of global resources like an atmosphere. Heat dissipation is the primary constraint. All of this requires expansion of infrastructure and growth of economic wealth to remain relevant. Asia is investing in that future while elsewhere conservativism is cashing out the future with reductionism. The future is held by those that are given value and reinvest it. Time and efficiency are a gift of wealth. Those that extract that wealth, extract their future relevance. It is little worse than those that cut off their own lifeline in old age from a similar spurious mass social psychosis.
That is the long term future of humans
I agree with some of this,
once we shed the idiotic shackles of mythology and inbred conservatism.
but it should be noted that spaceflight is becoming kind of a modern mythology that describes the “fate” of humans.
I think you got some nice ideas but you really gotta work on your messaging. As it is, it’s one big blob of text, and that’s hard to read and parse through. It would be better if you can summarize your points in maybe 1-3 short bullet points, something like:
- Asteroids provide lots of rare earth minerals, and by exploiting this, the economy can continue to grow.
- We need to master technology to be the first in space and provide settlements in outer space.
This will make it much easier for other people to parse your points and comprehend them quickly.
Also you gotta be realistic and realize what’s at stake. If spaceflight takes up pace slower than you think, i.e. it takes 10 years longer for humans to set foot on another planet, that is already an economic crisis for the people alive today and needs to be tackled. Reducing the number of workers in a country is a way to reduce unemployment rate and it is simply important to realize how serious the situation is and how urgent it is to get this right. We can still do spaceflight by the way.
You’re still stuck on killing people. It is embedded in your lack of broad scope ethics and implications beyond your awareness. It is a cultural problem. Most of it is narcissistic and reflective of irrational hubris. Don’t get into politics.
Hmmm… I believe in not having babies but for different reasons than that. I personally don’t see any reason to have them, especially because many seem to get them because they get pressured into it or are expected to have them or even as a safety net when they get old?
I think that many regret having kids but don’t want to admit it. Kind of like buyers remorse
Also, making decisions in what others should do, with such fundamental rights is not something I would support.
What if both absolutist viewpoints are wrong?
Maybe just let people decide for themselves and not for some sort of false choice that they need to make 800 babies or 0 babies and nothing in between is acceptable.
Yeah.
I know this post is asking for opinions but it is just so tiring having to have an opinion on everything.
I want to keep some shibboleths to myself thanks.Most of my opinions are “just calm the fuck down, chill, and let people just be.”
Buddhism’s main deal is just the Middle Path, which is don’t be a dick and don’t be an asshole. Be the taint you want to see in the world.
…wait…
@hansolo@lemmy.today @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
Maybe just let people decide for themselves
Problem is that this argument discards the selfhood from those being born. And it’s quite the core of the anti-natalist argument: that the person didn’t get a stake in choosing their own birth.
Because if we’re talking about lives and decisions, then “let people decide for themselves” ends up really meaning it: they’re deciding for themselves, as in some arrogant and egocentric decision, uncaring of of how the very object of decision are “selves” as well.
Problem is that this argument discards the selfhood from those being born.
So, can they also choose to be born?
Selfhood, if we’re being frank, doesn’t really “form” until at least a year or so into life. Just not enough cognitive ability yet.
Do bears choose to be born? Microbes?
Reproduction is an instinctive behavior, in all species. Humans as well.
So, can they also choose to be born?
They can’t choose, and that’s part of main issue as beings cursed by self-awareness: the impossibility to choose positively or negatively.
It’s beyond any capability of will and it taints any other decisions that could be done (see the movie “The Artifice Girl”, particularly the dialogue at the end when the robot is talking to her creator about how her primary directives made it impossible for her to really exert any fully free will).
The issue, here, emerges from the lack of choice alongside inevitable self-awareness, which takes us to:
Do bears choose to be born? Microbes?
They don’t have this curse of “self-awareness”. They do possess intelligence (especially crows and dolphins, not mentioned), but they don’t end up cursed by knowing the pointlessness of their own existences through a broader, cosmic lens. We do.
Also, they don’t restricted themselves into this Kafkaesque rearrangement we call as “human society”, where we must “buy” food and “pay” to have a roof above our heads, as if it was some kind of optional luxury. They live from what Mother Nature gives. Bears can roam and do shelters for them wherever there aren’t other bears (or other wildlife). Microbes’ shelters are literally other lifeforms.
Humans, however, can’t live from what Mother Nature gives, no no, this is too extraterrestrial for us to consider doing. I myself can’t choose to live among the wildlife like any other primate because I’m prohibited to do so (and, also, because my entire human existence compelled me into artificialities that I’m unable to ditch, such as the myopia I ended up having due to artificial environmental factors (thanks “screens” and “enclosed spaces”) leading to the need of using (and purchasing) prescription glasses).
Again, bears and microbes have no such artificial rearrangement.
Selfhood, if we’re being frank, doesn’t really “form” until at least a year or so into life
But we do know it’ll form, eventually. We do know the kid will become an adult and they’ll be required to become a cog in this machine. Parents often see this as a matter of “proud” (“our offspring has a job”), ignoring how much suffering it accompanies the imposed serfdom (having to “seek” and “have” a “job”, having to serve others).
Reproduction is an instinctive behavior, in all species. Humans as well.
If we were to talk about instincts, murdering to eat (hunting) is also pretty instinctive across species… Humans don’t often “murder to eat” because they often delegate it for others to do it, but with enough desperation (e.g. lack of food) a human can even eat other humans (see Chichijima incident)…
It’s also instinctive to live among the woods. Why don’t we, though? Maybe because we’re legally forbidden by other humans to move to a forest and live as our ancestors did, so we’re required to live “among society”, which in turn requires us to “pay” to “afford” food and shelter.
They do possess intelligence (especially crows and dolphins, not mentioned), but they don’t end up cursed by knowing the pointlessness of their own existences through a broader, cosmic lens. We do.
Are you sure about this? How can you possibly know? How about Octopi? They are, almost certainly, as intelligent as we are, and have 8 brains interworking with each other. You have zero possibility to even guess how they view the world.
If we were to talk about instincts, murdering to eat (hunting) is also pretty instinctive across species… Humans don’t often “murder to eat” because they often delegate it for others to do it, but with enough desperation (e.g. lack of food) a human can even eat other humans (see Chichijima incident)…
Not sure your point? Tribes have always relied on varied tasks for members. Even higher primates do this.
It’s also instinctive to live among the woods.
No, it’s not. Its instinctive to seek shelter, water, food, and to reproduce. Instinctually, we are also social animals, requiring our tribe to survive.
Maybe because we’re legally forbidden by other humans to move to a forest and live as our ancestors did, so we’re required to live “among society”, which in turn requires us to “pay” to “afford” food and shelter.
So, that’s the root of the problem, and it’s something we can change. See: Seneca Nation, or the people of Chiapas.
Are you sure about this? How can you possibly know?
Science.
Spontaneous Metatool Use by New Caledonian Crows
Taylor, Alex H. et al.
Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 17, 1504 - 1507Structure of the cerebral cortex of the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae)
Patrick R. Hof, Estel Van Der GuchtHow about Octopi?
Them, too. I forgot to mention them.
Not sure your point?
My point is how you tried to argue reproduction based on instincts, so I brought another instinct-based trait.
No, it’s not. Its instinctive to seek shelter, water, food, and to reproduce
Urbanization and capitalism aren’t part of Nature.
So, that’s the root of the problem, and it’s something we can change
I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how things are pivoting to technofascism in the world. I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how we humans are constantly endangering other species for living as “modern humans”.
The could be a change but it’s beyond human agency: say, if Sun ejected a CME powerful enough, that could be a change of sorts, because it’d finally grind to a halt all the steel-made mosquitoes humans threw to orbit around this Pale Blue Dot, bringing humans back to a more natural means of existing.
However, we humans have been long detached from natural means of living so transition wouldn’t be easy, we’re sort of cursed to “modernity”, so it’s complicated.
Science.
Science has been able to get inside the heads and determine what animals are thinking? This is a breakthrough! We should now be able to communicate with these animals! Surely we can, right?
My point is how you tried to argue reproduction based on instincts, so I brought another instinct-based trait.
Ok, try not eating. Period. I bet instincts will kick in, and you’ll eat, and not starve.
Urbanization and capitalism aren’t part of Nature.
Nobody besides yourself even implied they are.
I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how things are pivoting to technofascism in the world. I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how we humans are constantly endangering other species for living as “modern humans”.
We’ve changed it myriad times. I provided two such examples.
However, we humans have been long detached from natural means of living so transition wouldn’t be easy, we’re sort of cursed to “modernity”, so it’s complicated.
Ah, so you think all humanity is illustrated only by western living, huh?
No one chooses to be born, which is a condition stretching back to the first cellular life on this planet. That anyone should get a “stake” in their own birth is a ridiculous premise that defies the logic of how life works and the impermanence of everything in our universe. We are the only species that cares to consider beyond biological impulses if we should reproduce, which is a luxury. Responsible use of resources to care for any being in your care, be that a human or a pet, is an individual choice. An unhoused person can be a better pet parent than a rich person, and if you’ll notice, the Idiocracy prediction of smart people having fewer kids is playing out with or without anti-natalist support.
Or if you want to go with the reincarnation-approved viewpoint, we ALL chose to be born in some pre-incarnation realm, and we’re all set up in soul groups and we all have lives to live that make none of this worth discussing unless it harms others, which is something the pro-natalists are more into by wanting to disenfranchise childless and child-free people.
That anyone should get a “stake” in their own birth is a ridiculous premise that defies the logic of how life works and the impermanence of everything in our universe
It doesn’t have to defy the logic. It just requires ourselves to look around and see to where this world is headed. It just requires ourselves to read a history book and realize how humanity is repeating the same errors over and over again. It just requires us to notice how the world the future adults will have to live is likely worse than today’s world, as the climate bill, from the imprudent consumption started in past generations, already began to be charged.
If a parent, knowing how the future will be harsher than the present time, how Science and evidence are proving how we’re past the point of Paris Climate Treaty, even if we were to stop pollution today (the best time to stop all the greed of Industrial Revolution was a century ago, the second best time to stop Industrial Revolution was yesterday), how wet-bulb temperatures will get increasingly higher, if a parent still decides to bring someone to this Underworld to eventually melt under +60 degrees Celsius, this is what defies any logic. What kind of “future” is being expected for their offspring, really?
We are the only species that cares to consider beyond biological impulses if we should reproduce, which is a luxury
Yet we keep endangering ourselves and the other lifeforms.
Or if you want to go with the reincarnation-approved viewpoint, we ALL chose to be born in some pre-incarnation realm
My spiritual views are based on (among other belief systems) Gnosticism, where there’s Demiurge and his Archons trapping everything within this cosmos. My spiritual views diverge from pure religion as I also tend to consider scientific, non-anthropocentric views on all cosmos, so Demirge isn’t trapping humans, Demiurge is trapping energy and matter into existence, and we’re just part of this energy (self) and matter (biological vessel) being trapped in existence.
Cool, cool cool cool. I get you.
As for having a “stake” in anything, you’re just making a lot of fancy excuses for parents making an educated guess, which is what some parents have done forever. Ultimately, it’s projection and hope that parents can manage resources appropriately. They don’t always do that. Maybe they end up succumbing to alcoholism or dying in a car accident or anything else that frustrates best-laid plans. Everyone simply not having children isn’t the solution, though. For starters, generational gluts and booms can be debilitating to a culture and economy even in good times. Humans are animals, and we live on this earth not much above animals in terms of being subject to natural disasters that can wipe us away in moments. We only barely survived as a species about 900,000 years ago, with genetics research suggesting we withered to as few as 1,280 individuals. And it wasn’t the conscientious objectors and resource managers with no offspring that let us survive. It was the foolish horndogs who passed on the genes of being foolish horndogs and from which we are all descended by virtue of nearly a million years of horndogging. Which is not a suggestion to “be fruitful and multiply.” Simply that things balance themselves out or they don’t until they do. Let people do whatever they want and my DINK self will educate and divert resources to my nephews nieces and cousins, and my friend’s kids. And so it shall be until I have no more resources left to apply because disease and famine and climate change will boil this place until it’s all either desert or rain forest.
As for your brand of Gnosticism, I’m not exactly too far off, just with different labels. So we might be able to meet in the middle that if consciousness is a form of energy as self, that we’re “trapped” in order to experience - to have gnosis - of the world, and which carries costs that must be paid before freeing one’s self from the trap. That is, we can’t deny any being gnosis of any part, be that the gnosis of living a life filled with fear, like the parent that is an anti-natalist or a pro-natalist, or as the child born into a wondrous life of privilege, or as the child born into a dystopian hellscape. Who are we to likewise deny consciousness a chance to experience the chaos and possibly of thriving in it? Some humans just do. So why assume that every human, and human society, is frail and weak by default? Humans have survived worse. The Younger Dryas cataclysm, for example.
Which is all to say, both absolutes are silly because they’re impractical, untenable, and wholly a disservice to individuals and to the collective consciousness to some degree.
I’m a Misanthropic Anti-Natalist. I hate humankind. I also hate life in all its forms. Life is simply a universal byproduct of the thermodynamic process of Entropy. It’s nothing special or sacred. I don’t even like the sound of human voices, of any sort. Only music with no vocals. We are nightmare creatures; evil apes. I don’t value capitalism or materialist possessions. I want to die. I am still here because there are people who care about me still alive.
So yeah, fuck this existence. We humans are a cancerous plastic-creating poison upon this planet. Hopeless and pathetic.
So, I’ve gotta ask: Why don’t you just end the one life you can, since you hate all life? I mean, it sounds rather… illogical for you to type all that out, to tell other life what your thoughts are, since you hate all life anyways?
Why not go be a hermit then? Get away from all other humans, and just exist by yourself?
If you’re talking to people here, it means you enjoy your own life, and want to communicate your thoughts to other lives, so they can understand what you’re feelings are. Which means, at some level, you value life.
The argument for “you can’t consent to being born” does have a direct opposite argument: you also can’t not consent to birth. The birth is what gives the ability to consent or not in the first place. You could argue that by being anti-natalist you’re taking someone’s potential to give consent completely away, which is the same or more unethical, you’re essentially deciding for someone else that they should die/not exist without them getting a say in it?
You can do the same with suffering: life is happiness, everyone I know was happy sometime in their life (even if only as a child), so you’re doing serious harm by not allowing people to have happiness since only people who exist can be happy.
I think anti-natalism is a philosophy mainly held by very traumatized people and/or that live in very bad conditions.
We know (roughly) how to handle trauma, we know (roughly) what makes good conditions. We know roughly what makes people happy or what makes them suffer. We have the potential to create a world where being born is mostly positive for everyone.
In that sense, currently, I think mostly people that are well off should have children, ones that can actually support children properly. However, that is obviously not a permanent solution, since the end goal should be for everyone to be well off and to be able to support children.
But part of the suffering in the world is also caused by too many people. We can’t have infinite population growth while living in a world with finite resources. As such, we need to limit how many children people can have (which is already happening by availability of birth control and smarter people, able to make a choice if they want to have kids).
So in total, I don’t think birth/existence is either good or bad, but it has the potential to be both depending on how we handle it.
On a large scale, doomed (see also: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
On a personal scale, not having children is a perfectly legitimate choice.
I’m not an anti-natalist, but I won’t create a life out of nowhere just for it to become “wasteland thug #3” in the post-apocalyptic movie our future is going to become.
