Asklemmy

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 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.

Basically Malthusian eco-fascism. Nobody should be forced to have kids, having kids is a huge commitment that should be reserved for those who want kids, but the "humans are the virus" crowd just play into reactionary hands and cede all control to those directly responsible for the worst excess.

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.

On a large scale, doomed (see also: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

On a personal scale, not having children is a perfectly legitimate choice.

Theoretical weakness:

Anti-natalism is a deeply pessimistic take on the possibilities of the human experience. Where, once, people looked to push the boundaries of humanity's knowledge and experience (e.g. psychedelic drugs, space exploration, art movements, radical politics), this movement sees the scale as so heavily tipped towards suffering that the bit of joy and wonder we experience is not even worth it. Its calculus looks to me to be similar to Effective Altruism, because it measures all the suffering to come for the unborn as a greater infinity than all the good they will experience. It simply offers a different conclusion: instead of putting those at the top of the hierarchies in our world in charge reducing/ending suffering (a solution I supply disagree with), AN instead just wants life to end because reducing suffering enough can't be done.

To me, this leaves no room for the possibility of changing the human experience for the better. If we're just trying to do some accounting as to whether it's worth having kids on a societal scale, couldn't we make it worth it? Instead of extinction, why not try radically different ways of organizing society to get rid of the hierarchies that create most of our suffering? One lesson i take from the history i've been around for is that the status quo only lasts for so long.

Finally, the idea of unborn people not having consented to birth is odd. They do not exist, so they have no desires, needs, or ability to consent. We can equally say they don't "consent" to non-existence and are stuck there until they are born. When life first came into existence in the universe, was consent involved?

Practical weakness:

If this movement ever goes beyond a purely voluntary movement, to the point of enacting policy or attempting to prevent births in any way, it will become monstrous very quickly. Every such program will face resistance and, without an anti-carceral component to the movement, will have governments (or roving mobs) criminalizing birth, sterilizing people, and destroying the infrastructure of child care. At their most extreme, "anti-natalist" movements could advocate for the murder of every single person on earth, because that would be the surest way of preventing birth. All of these things would multiply the suffering of everyone, but would be "justifiable" in their eyes because it would "prevent the suffering" of innumerable people to be born in the future. Would global nuclear war achieve their goal?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 it will die out.

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 don't want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don't think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it's how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can't have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don't think "humans are a virus" is correct because it's a pejorative and I don't think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of "bad" rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the "virus" is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don't feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are "body stuff", mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same "level" of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don't care for the "antinatalist" label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don't mind what other people choose to believe. It's none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don't have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I'm not. They won't engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I'm suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I'm leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don't bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

It depends heavily. If youre choosing not to have kids because you think youre unable to provide a decent quality of life, or because you just dont feel the urge, or because you're having too much fun looking after #1 then cool.

I accidentally stumbled into r/antinatalism once though, and their reasoning seems to be "too scared to kill myself. Life is suffering. Fuck your cumpet." Which, you know, its hard to argue against but its not a reason that sits well with me.

While certainly don't appreciate being born (and correct about life = suffering no gꝏd outweighing it in my case) , dœsn't mean procreation inherently unethical (although true peops often have children for selfish reasons)

Tꝏk lꝏk at antinatalist subreddit some years ago (curiosity) , felt more like contempt for (women|children) disguised as philosophical stance . "Breeder" used lots there :

• Implies women's primary functions producing children (cannot be any thing other) , reduces women to their capacity for pregnancy
• Implies all women "chuse" to have kids
• Derogatory word toward black women during slavery , where they were forced to have children that would later be sold into said slavery

Also don't think demanding every one stop having children dœs anything to reduce inherent suffering that comes with being living organism

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.

Our ecosystem has a tendency to keep over reproduction in check. For all species.

If the load becomes too high, resources become scarce, and reproductive rates fall.

For example, there's a reason why birthrates are falling right now, for humans. And why deadly diseases are becoming more common.

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.

life entails inevitable suffering, death is inevitable, and humans are born without their consent

Doesn't that apply to all living beings? Wouldn't that mean that the morally correct thing to do is to prevent all organisms from procreating, as it inevitably leads to more suffering?

It's a very complex issue.

On one have. Having children or not is a deep freedom that feels wrong to constraint, one way or the other. I don't think messing around with "how many lids" should anyone have is good.

But on the other hand, I reason that resources are not limitless, and human footprint on the environment will be bigger the more humans there are. So O do think that the world would be a nicer place if there was less humans around. Less pollution, less worrying about ending up resources, more available land for each human, less over-crowdled everything.

But I won't be the one saying anyone to control their biological functions like that. At most I just wish more people realized of this and would voluntarily try to find a stable number of humans on earth that would be an order of magnitude less than we have now.

So yeah, in general I don't agree with anti-natalism as presented.

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'm an amoralist antinatalist. I think having children is fucked up on many levels, but I wouldn't try to argue it's inherently immoral

I think the future is bleak and procreation at this point is selfish. I'm not one to prescribe what other people can do, but even if I still could I would never have a child.

I see the whole thing as what happens when people fail to move beyond teenage angst. Having children or not is a a very big, very personal choice. And I fully respect someone who chooses not to, whether their reasons are personal, economic, religious or whatever. You do you. Turning that outward to the argument that humans are horrible, life is suffering and no one should ever have children is taking that sort of thing to the point of hypocritical religious zealotry. No, you didn't get to consent to being born. Until you were born, you didn't have the capacity. But, once you are an adult you have your full faculties and can make choices for yourself. If you really feel that existence is that horrible, there's a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge. Except, these folks never actually follow through. They want the attention that suicide brings, without that whole dying bit.

So ya, I fully understand that someone may choose not to have children. There are many valid reasons for making that choice. The whole argument that life is so terrible that we should work to off ourselves as a species, isn't valid. It's a cry for attention and the folks feeling that way should seek professional help.

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.

You can look at this through the buddhist worldview:

After you die, you are going to be reborn in the world that you helped create. This could be a smile on another person's face or a project you helped realize. Especially, also children are a large part of what you helped create, so in a certain sense, a part of you is going to be reborn into them.

Then, the question is, if you could be born again in the year 2030, would you choose to? Would you think such a life is worthwhile?

Answering such a question might give you a hint of what your children would want, if they could be asked.