Why Anti-Natalism Fails: A Case for Choosing Humanity

Is it immoral to have children? Many argue that it is. They claim that bringing life into the world almost always leads to suffering, and that the most ethical response is to stop having children altogether, allowing humanity to end. But what if this philosophy designed to eliminate suffering fails to do so, and instead guarantees far more pain?

Anti-natalism is a philosophy most associated with David Benatar, with roots in the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Philipp Mainländer. Its moral imperative for each individual is to stop having children, with the broader implication that by fulfilling this project humanity would eventually cease to exist and a great deal of suffering with it. When confronted with “objective” assertions of life’s inherent value—as are protected under most religious frameworks—the philosophy falls apart. Indeed, anyone who thinks life is sacred will find the proposition absurd.

However, Anti-natalism gets around this by assuming a consequentialist worldview and subscribing to the measuring of pleasure and pain as the appropriate standard of human value (Utilitarianism).

Benetar’s asymmetry argument begins by assigning pain a negative value and pleasure a positive one. It then relies on an emotive sense of morality to treat the absence of pain as a moral good, while treating the absence of pleasure as morally neutral—a null value as it were. The result is an asymmetry where pain is naturally given more moral significance than pleasure. Any act to reduce pain, even at the expense of pleasure, is therefore deemed moral.

The general intuition behind this idea can be expressed more tangibly as follows:

A first premise goes that to bring a child into the world exposes them to both the potential of suffering and of pleasure. Notably, by virtue of life’s hardships, it is likely that suffering or mere subsistence will be the default modes of life—far exceeding the duration of direct and immediate pleasure.

A second premise is that, statistically, people are unlikely to gamble when there is a 1:1 ratio of wins and losses. For example, most will refrain from betting $20 for the potential of earning $20 and this becomes even less appealing as that number increases. Suffering is naturally weighted more heavily than pleasure in a game of equal odds. This is similar to the economic idea known as prospect theory.

If these premises are accepted, they form the following conclusion. The potential of a negative fate is simply too grave a risk.

This can be more emphatically understood through the Bohemian Rhapsody lyric: “I don’t wanna die, but sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.” This not-having-been-born ideal is more or less inextricable from the philosophy; the bliss of non-existence into which it seeks to deliver future generations.

One’s attitude towards the wager of child rearing may appear subjective, even with the example of prospect theory, yet there is also a convincing evolutionary basis to justify it. The clearest example is that, unless starving, predators will not attack so long as they perceive their prey capable of wounding them; even a small wound carries the threat of infection and possibly even fatality. Life’s most reliable survival strategy is to select situations wherein the benefits of gain greatly outweigh the risk of injury or loss.

Now, before I continue, I wish to make it clear that I am not very partial to this doctrine. My struggle, since I was first exposed to it, is that I could not deny its premises, and only my intuition prevented me from accepting its conclusion. Now, I believe I have the words to express my disagreement…

Since we have been corralled into the intellectual realm, it may be prudent to remain here a while. After all, one ought not let a snake lie in their garden once one becomes aware of it. So, let us accept the aforementioned premises and the material worldview that produces them. However, let us also rise above temporal or spatial biases. For it is above all a failure to fathom scope and deep time which compels one to seed the destruction of their own species. I posit that, contrary to the aim of the philosophy, the long term suffering produced by the anti-natalists would be immense. This is primarily due to selective mechanisms in the following domains: evolution and morality. I shall begin with a discussion of the former…

Nature has already created humanity once, and a range of animals already have the pre-configurations of higher intelligence: theory of mind, object permanence and so on. It is not improbable under the scientific model of convergent evolution that somewhere, in the distant future, a species will arise exhibiting similarly expansive and domineering behaviour.

By eliminating humans, the likelihood of this evolutionary process recurring is greatly increased and greatly accelerated, for at present we act as gatekeepers. Societies hold the most savage and wild instincts of the individual at bay and if any creatures were to begin collectivising and attacking us, they would be dealt with before having time to evolve technologically or strategically. This would, of course, result in some immediate suffering, but it should become clear why the alternative would be worse by that metric. Conversely, without humanity, any future species will have plenty of resources, territories, and uninterrupted developmental periods at its disposal.

This is not to make the claim that humans have an innate right over other species to be the inheritors of the planet. Rather, it is to say that our existence is likely staving a great deal of potential suffering. I remind readers that the history of humanity is a violent and brutal one and that the present, though fraught with problems, has at least produced more sophisticated interpersonal conduct and conscientiousness than was seen in the first of our kind.

Any novel species, especially if similarly constituted, will be forced to repeat the same processes of punishment that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault demonstrated were key to social cohesion. A species that will need to squander many lives in order to reach for its ambitions and cultural developments. A species that will suffer plagues and pestilence before it learns the science behind sanitation and medicine.

To destroy our species would throw away our legacy, returning life to a more primitive form which would need to suffer many horrors all over again in order even to contemplate the ethical issues of our present day.

Returning to a more immediate effect, there is the problem of moral selection. Within the anti-natalist framework, the “moral” are those who are willing to forego their desire to have children for “selfless” reasons. Conversely the “immoral” are those who continue to have children. If the issue is not clear: the system intentionally selects its own morality out of the gene pool and allows immorality to remain.

As a philosophy spread through mimesis—which is how Benatar likely intended his project—the problem is clear. Only a state-managed or conspiratorial effort to reduce the population en-masse and without discrimination could solve for this problem. This, of course, brings with it a whole new realm of complications far beyond the scope of this essay.

Now we find ourselves at a more traditional philosophical consideration; re-treading ground, but important ground non-the-less. One of the most systemic objections to anti-natalism is to deny that Utilitarianism is the appropriate framework for human organisation; that a certain confrontation with nature is necessary for the improvement of humanity; that pleasure and pain may be qualitatively different depending on the vitality of a people; and that much of the suffering which is currently experienced is, in fact, caused by value systems which are far too short-sighted. If Utilitarianism is rejected, the anti-natalist philosophy loses a great deal of its staying power.

Finally, by following the anti-natalism framework through to its logical conclusion, we stumble upon a particularly dark idea. Consider again: that a managed population reduction would surely inflict suffering on those who remain, and a complete dissolution would cause the evolutionary process to go unchecked. The only option for a confident execution of anti-natalism in the sphere of human influence—without risk of future suffering—is the complete destruction of Earth.

Only by eliminating all potential of life on Earth can one guarantee a net reduction in suffering over the long term. The alternative is a gamble on nature. For we who do not believe this outcome desirable, the anti-natalist project becomes untenable. Thus, it is possible to turn our attention to productive ends once more…