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 it will die out.
I do not subscribe to the All Life is Suffering idea. Personally enjoy being physically embodied so much. My kids seem glad to exist too. We are the universe looking back at itself, it’s just so wonderful to get any time at all here to experience this.
I would never argue for everyone to have babies, at all. You have your own life, do what you want. But I don’t at all agree with extinction of all life because “suffering”. Yes that is part of life but it’s not all of it, not nearly.
You do not recognize that you are viewing things from a position of tremendous privilege. You need to incorporate that into your understanding. You gambled, and seemingly you won. That’s wonderful. But you cannot extrapolate from that alone.
I do recognize how lucky I am now, to be able to see and hear and read and dance, to be living on a world with such a beautiful sky, with the biological equipment to be able to perceive it! To have no chronic pain but to have occasional crippling migraines that give me perspective on how I don’t have chronic pain.
No idea what gives you the impression I don’t know this? Do you believe all life is suffering?
It’s a natural consequence of negative utilitarianism. But even that aside, I can’t ask any potential offspring for permission so it’s best to leave it alone.
My relationship with antinatalism is very complicated.
First off, I personally will not be procreating, for multiple reasons.
Chief among those is the fact that I live in an ever worsening capitalist, patriarchal, xenophobic hellscape; even socialist countries are a long long way away from anything resembling communism, still require a lot of labor from their citizens in exchange for basic necessities (with good reasons), and patriarchy very much persists there. I have hope that we as a species can overcome this eventually, just as we mostly overcame slavery and achieved some semblance of emancipation for many oppressed minorities.
Another, more permanent reason: despite my relative privileges, my own experience of life has been very mixed, and I perceive there to be more suffering than happiness. Suffering is just a way for our body to push our brain to do something the body needs to survive; human beings have a lot of needs to be met, and as long as there are at least a couple that are not you will suffer (not accounting for things like drugs or other extreme dopamine hits which come with their own set of issues). Another big issue is how our bodies normalize the level of suffering to their environment; this is good because it allows us to get by with very little without going insane, but on the flipside even if you have all the basic needs met, the body is always demanding more via suffering. You can observe this by looking at rich people: even though their needs are met with seeming abundance, they crave to experience more and different pleasures, and suffer in the process of trying to achieve them. While frivolous, I think the suffering they experience is still real and similar to that of our own. I don’t feel any compassion for them (after all, for most of them their wealth was stolen from less fortunate), but it’s a good example.
As such, I personally don’t want to bring a new being into this world, mostly to suffer their way through life.
However, I also know for sure that different people experience life differently. I know that people with much worse material conditions than mine perceive themselves (and thus their life) to be overall happy, despite there being plenty of suffering too. I don’t know whether it’s a genetic or learnt trait of their psychology; in any case, I think those people are more likely to produce offspring who experience a happy life, and wish them the best in doing so. My hope is that they bring up their kids in the right way - both so that they are happy, and also able to eventually overcome all the issues in the third paragraph.
I think it’s a bit of a cunty outlook. I have some sympathy for the childfree brigade, as I understand society can make you feel bad (if you let it) for not having kids. But then again, I wasn’t a dad until I was 38 and never experienced any negativity for that decision. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Essentially I dislike any mindset that judges others for their procreative choices.
One word: bullshit. One name: Siddhartha Gauttama. The guy nailed it about “inevitability” of suffering
And what did he say specifically about human reproduction? Genuinely interested. Buddhists are of course quite over-represented among anti-natalists.
I never checked and actually fear to dig into this matter, given how much time has passed and how people have been twisting everything. But I do recall him having monk go take a shelter in a house of a prostitute, and a bunch of monks learning from prostitutes (definitely did happen in Japan). So no, he definitely didn’t have an issue with sex or procreation
ha ha you have crawled out on a very weak limb with that chain of motivated reasoning. I think I’ll just look into it myself.
Yeah, thumbs up for your enthusiasm :) When you learn of buddhist monks who helped each other to “release sexual tension”, remember: Gautama did not instruct them to torture themselves into that kind of twisted state
“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”
He didn’t say anything specifically about the ethics of human reproduction. He taught that craving sense pleasures leads to suffering. The monks that followed him were celibate. But he knew few would follow that path. So he taught a simplified code of ethics for householders (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) and assumed that there would always be people who want to make more people. Rebirth was an important part of his doctrine. The volitional actions you perform in life create karma which then, after your death, produces another birth. Escaping the cycle of karma and rebirth by letting go of the concept of self, of the idea of me and mine, was the ultimate goal of his path. And it’s only possible to get there in a human body. So in that sense he was not an anti-natalist.
Hell yeah Linnahall, it’s a cool place been there a few times myself
I don’t think it’s fine to think other people are assholes for having kids but I think it’s completely fine to not want to being a kid into this world
I immediately reject any theories that pretend to “know” what they are talking about. I mean WTF are they talking about here ? We have limited senses to sense this world and limited communication capabilities, that was built on top of our fear of death and suddenly these theories trying to claim they “know it all” and this is the “judgment”. WTF. Get off your high horse.
Nobody knows anything. We ALL are just dumb. World is too big to know.
It’s incredibly stupid, but for those who truly believe in it it’s fine as long as they just use it as a guiding principle in their own lives. But it tends to attract the passionate sort, as any theoretically “anti-suffering” ideology will, so idk, I circle back to it’s stupid.
Does someone need an explainer about why suffering is natural, okay, not inevitable, and certainly not the only thing a being can feel? Or that the world is actually quite nice, but we generate suffering within ourselves?
Well, I don’t know about okay. I’d give it a pretty shit review actually.
I mean if you could explain that, as easily and clearly as you glibly believe, you would have created a new major world religion. A lot of those things are subjective and a lot of them are false.
Anti natalism right now is pro long term human survival.
There are too many humans on Earth. There are two ways to get the human population down to a point where we can sustainably live here. You can either exterminate most the existing humans or prevent new humans from existing in the first place. Which would you choose?
"Oh but that will trigger a demographic crisis when tbere’s too many old people and too few young people!” OK? That’s a temporary problem compared to the very very permanent problem of extinction. Which we’re on track to doing of we keep living like this. And most of the issues of a demographic crisis has to do with recession and pensions, both unique to capitalism. The solution is to get rid of capitalism, not guilt people into having more kids to keep the capitalist machine alive.
Shouldn’t we be asking the unborn this question?
Tell them about this hellhole we live in and most would choose no.
til im not an anti-natalists. I just think people should not have babies. I mean same with letting pets breed needlessly. anywho.
In a society whose official ideology is that “There is No Alternative”, antinatalism is basically a dressed up version of “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
It’s basically just lack of imagination. Doomerist defeatism.
I think you’re misunderstanding anti-natalism if you believe it’s about envisioning the end of the world. It’s not that grand, nor that pessimistic. It was never meant to remedy shitty living conditions. It’s not a tool for embettering society, it’s a philosophical exercise that questions one’s right to create a person and subject them to sentience and suffering.
Imagining non-existence is anything but lacking imagination because it so abstract to our minds. To be anti-natalist, you must first have attempted to imagine that in order to compare it to existence before asking if you feel it is right to subject a human to that.
It’s a philosophical exercise that challenges social conventions about child-rearing. Don’t forget that it’s an excruciating ordeal for women too. There is suffering involved for all parties. Not all kids are born healthy, secure, and provided for.
Ask anyone with disabilities, abusive families, trauma, financial hardship, and generally going though too much shit in life and you’ll find that it was never about a lack of imagination. We suffer because we are able to imagine how things could have been so much better. It is because we can imagine ourselves in a better place that we ask if not being born is necessarily any worse. That isn’t a statement made with just pessimism, it’s made with genuine curiosity towards thinking back what ‘life’ was like before being born, and deciding that it is the greatest gift you can give to your hypothetical children.
You’re contradicting your own argument:
It was never meant to remedy shitty living conditions.
Vs
Ask anyone with disabilities, abusive families, trauma, financial hardship, and generally going though too much shit in life and you’ll find that it was never about a lack of imagination.
This is a contradiction. You are literally picking the antinatalist option because of shitty living conditions.
And of course, the lack of imagination is not whether you can imagine things being better but whether you can imagine things becoming better starting from where we are here and now.
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We suffer because we are able to imagine how things could have been so much better. It is because we can imagine ourselves in a better place
If you can imagine such a place, steelman your argument then, try making it without a premise of shitty living conditions. Pick a convivial world, and make an antinatalist argument from that world. Does it still stand?
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Finally, the argument that says nonexistence might be better is literally vacuous: False implies True. Nonexistence therefore is trivially whatever you want it to be, but not In any meaningful sense.
You are misinterpreting a crucial point. It’s not about remedying your own shitty living conditions, it’s about not creating one for others.
I don’t know how to state this more simply, but anti-natalism isn’t centered around improving the quality of life for yourself, it’s about not giving the opportunity to suffer for others.
It doesn’t change absolutely anything in my argument, it remains exactly the same. Antinatalism absconds not only the responsibility to improve the world but even the possibility of a better world existing in the future, it assumes à priori that existence is and will remain insufferable.
Nothing about anti-natalism rejects the possibility of improving the world.
To iterate a Buddhist belief, suffering is an inevitable part of existing. The point of anti-natalism is to avoid causing more people to suffer than necessary.
We are no where near the threat of extinction if most of us stop having children. The world is beyond overpopulated and there is no ecologically sound reason to have more kids.
Think of why we sterilize cats and dogs. It’s not because we are absolving ourselves the responsibility of improving their lives, it’s because we do not want them to create more just to suffer on the streets.
Anti-natalism is a response to natalism, a popularly held religious belief that one should have as many children as possible. It’s about rejecting social and cultural pressures to have kids on people who don’t want to.
The world is beyond overpopulated and there is no ecologically sound reason to have more kids.
This is just wrong. There are more than enough resources to go around. More homes than homeless, more food production than food insecure, more clothes than anyone could ever wear in a lifetime; things like transportation, energy, and production could be greatly optimized via collectivisation; and so on. The problem is endless profit-seeking and exploitation, not overpopulation.
The people that have access to these resources, many of which are extracted from the global south, consume way more than their fair share because of the infinite growth drive of capitalism. There is never “enough”, regardless of population; because to stagnate or to shrink is to fail under capitalism. Overconsumption is a problem that could be solved, quite comfortably I might add, if we were enabled collectively to put our minds to it.
You would do more to lessen suffering, by having kids and raising them to fight for that world; because that world is in fact possible; than to prevent their personal suffering by simply not bringing them into existence. Assuming anti-natalism is the only thing stopping you from having kids, of course; not everyone wants or needs to reproduce and I completely agree with destigmatizing that decision, but at least be honest that you just personally don’t want to be a parent. Don’t introduce new stigma for people that do want to be parents.
I take issue with this universal suffering idea. Sounds eugenics-ey. Cause it’s reasonably predictable which children will struggle more than others simply based on material conditions of their parents. It’s less of a “gamble”, for certain people who, often enough, just so happen to be directly responsible for some amount of suffering in the world. Even if I grant you that suffering is universal even in the most optimal conditions, it’s not like someone with optimal means is questioning the ethics of becoming a parent. And if they are, it’s most probably in the hyper-natalist, “populating the world with my superior spawn” direction like the musks of the world. Doesn’t anti-natalism kinda indirectly suggest leaving the world in those kinds of hands?
Also, humans are not cats and dogs and any ideology that leads you to make this comparison, especially w/r to population control and euthanasia, should be rejected just on the face of it. Point blank period.
There’s a certain degree of arrogance in thinking that you are contributing to a greater cause by potentially birthing and raising the next Einstein.
On paper, we may have enough resources to sustain the world population. In practice, we are no where nearly socially and politically progressive enough yet to support said population. Social progress doesn’t happen overnight. Birthing the next Nobel prize winner doesn’t instantly resolve climate change or end world hunger.
Of every person born, there will be far more people putting strain on a system that isn’t able to adequately distribute resources to those who need it. Most people make for dog shit parents.
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.
