Antinatalism
Antinatalism or 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. There is also an axiological asymmetry between good and bad things in life, such that coming into existence is always a harm, which is known as Benatar's asymmetry argument.
Antinatalism as a philosophical concept is to be distinguished from antinatalist policies employed by some countries. In antinatalist population policy, it is not always implied that coming into existence is a universal problem and is an ever-present harm to the one whose existence was started.
There exists a taxonomy that divides the so-called "antiprocreative" thought into four major branches: childfreeness, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, efilism, and antinatalism itself. Only the latter one is philosophical antinatalism per se, meeting the definition of philosophical antinatalism and having no other features on top of that, whereas the first three items can only be deemed antinatalistic in the sense that they oppose the alleged duty to procreate.
Etymology
The term antinatalism was used probably for the first time by Théophile de Giraud in his book L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste. Masahiro Morioka defines antinatalism as "the thought that all human beings or all sentient beings should not be born." In scholarly and literary writings, various ethical arguments have been put forth in defense of antinatalism, probably the most prominent of which is the asymmetry argument, put forward by South African philosopher David Benatar. Robbert Zandbergen makes a distinction between so-called reactionary antinatalism and its more philosophical, originary counterpart. While the former seeks to limit human reproduction locally and/or temporarily, the latter seeks to end it conclusively.History
Antinatalist sentiments have existed for thousands of years. Some of the earliest surviving formulations of the idea that it would be better not to have been born can be found in ancient Greece. One example is from Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus, written shortly before Sophocles's death in 406 BC:From Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, 1846:
Schopenhauer and antinatalism
There is a debate whether Schopenhauer can be considered an early forerunner of antinatalism. Some scholars link Schopenhauer to antinatalism and even to David Benatar explicitly. Schopenhauer makes claims that could support categorizing him as an antinatalist: he says that everyone would not agree to come into existence but would reply "no thank you very much", that "life is a business that does not cover its costs", and that if people were rational they would not have children in his poignant rhetorical question:On the other hand, one can support the opposite claim, that Schopenhauer rejects the antinatalist conclusion. His worldview sees individual human beings as mere appearances, and who do not come into existence upon birth. Similarly, dying also does not lead to annihilation. So, on a fundamental metaphysical level, it's impossible for us to never exist.
The way to reconcile the two positions is to put importance of coming into existence as a specific individual, who leads life full of suffering, instead of focusing on the metaphysical essence. This, however, does not decide the matter as Schopenhauer explicitly rejects any unconditional moral "oughts", which are necessary to convey the antinatalist position that we have a duty not to bring people into existence.
Furthermore, the new future child, Schopenhauer explains, already strives to exist in the world of appearances. And from the perspective of the parents, the moral judgment of an action depends on the mode of willing: if the motive is not malicious nor selfish, then the action cannot be morally wrong.
But in the most important sense, preventing someone from existing as a person prevents them from negating his essence, which is will. Will can only be abolished through a person by getting to know the essence of the world. And this is the only real everlasting redemption. This is also the reason by Schopenhauer rejects suicide as the solution to the condition of life.
So, Schopenhauer presents reasons for two opposing views, each having merit from a different perspective. From the perspective of the individual, it would be good not to bring him into existence to spare him suffering. But from the more fundamental perspective, it's good to allow them to come into being so they can grasp the fundamental truth of the world and attain redemption through annealing the will to life. In this way, he shares the sentiment of antinatalists in their basis but does not follow them to their conclusion.
Arguments
In religion
Buddhism
The teaching of the Buddha, including the Four Noble Truths and the beginning of Mahāvagga, is interpreted by Hari Singh Gour as follows:The issue of Buddhist antinatalism is also raised by Amy Paris Langenberg. She writes, among other things:
Buddhism was understood as antinatalist by Jack Kerouac. Masahiro Morioka argues that ancient Buddhism was both antinatalist and anti-antinatalist:
Christianity and Gnosticism
Church Father John Chrysostom states that spiritual perfection implies virginity:Augustine of Hippo wrote:
Gregory of Nyssa warns that no one should be lured by the argument that procreation is a mechanism that creates children and states that those who refrain from procreation by preserving their virginity "bring about a cancellation of death by preventing it from advancing further because of them, and, by setting themselves up as a kind of boundary stone between life and death, they keep death from going forward". Søren Kierkegaard believed that man enters this world by means of a crime, that their existence is a crime, and procreation is the fall which is the culmination of human egoism. According to him, Christianity exists to block the path of procreation; it is "a salvation but at the same time it is a stopping" that "aims at stopping the whole continuation which leads to the permanence of this world."
The Marcionites, led by the theologian Marcion of Sinope, believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, and angry demiurge, Yahweh. According to this teaching, people should oppose him, abandon his world, not create people, and trust in the good God of mercy, foreign and distant.
The Encratites observed that birth leads to death. In order to conquer death, people should desist from procreation: "not produce fresh fodder for death".
The Manichaeans, the Bogomils, and the Cathars believed that procreation sentences the soul to imprisonment in evil matter. They saw procreation as an instrument of an evil god, demiurge, or of Satan that imprisons the divine element in the matter and thus causes the divine element to suffer.
Shakers believe that sex is the root of all sin. Thus although not strictly antinatalist, they see procreation is a sign of the fallen state of humanity.
Taoism
Robbert Zandbergen compares modern antinatalism to Taoism, stating that they both "view the development of consciousness as an aberration in an otherwise fluid and fluent universe marked by some sense of non-human harmony, stability and tranquility." According to Zandbergen, antinatalism and Taoism view human consciousness as something that cannot be fixed, for example, by returning to a more harmonious way of life, but rather it has to be undone. Humans are tasked with a project of a peaceful, non-violent dismantling of consciousness. From the Taoist perspective, consciousness is purpose-driven, which goes against the spontaneous and unconscious flow of the Tao. Hence, humans have an imperative to return to the Tao. Humans have to do it spontaneously, and it cannot be brought about from "the outside". Zandbergen quotes John S. Major et al. 2010 to make the parallel between Taoism and antinatalism even clearer:Water is a traditional representation of the Tao, as it flows without shape. Ice represents the arrest of the natural flow of the Tao in rigid human consciousness. Taoist sages return to the flow like ice melting to water. But it would have been better if human consciousness never had appeared.
Theodicy and anthropodicy
considers the issue of being a creator in relation to theodicy and argues that just as it is impossible to defend the idea of a good God as creator, it is also impossible to defend the idea of a good man as a creator. In parenthood, the human parent imitates the divine parent in the sense that education could be understood as a form of pursuit of "salvation," the "right path" for a child. However, a human being could decide that it is better not to suffer at all than to suffer and be offered the later possibility of salvation from suffering. In Cabrera's opinion, evil is associated not with the lack of being, but with the suffering and dying of those that are alive. So, on the contrary, evil is only and obviously associated with being.Karim Akerma, due to the moral problem of man as creator, introduces anthropodicy, a twin concept for theodicy. He is of the opinion that the less faith in the Almighty Creator–God there is, the more urgent the question of anthropodicy becomes. Akerma thinks that for those who want to lead ethical lives, the causation of suffering requires a justification. Man can no longer shed responsibility for the suffering that occurs by appealing to an imaginary entity that sets moral principles. For Akerma, antinatalism is a consequence of the collapse of theodicy endeavors and the failure of attempts to establish an anthropodicy. According to him, there is no metaphysics nor moral theory that can justify the production of new people, and therefore, anthropodicy is indefensible as well as theodicy.
Jason Marsh finds no good arguments for what he calls "evil asymmetry"; that the amount and kinds of suffering provide strong arguments that our world is not an act of creation made by a good God, but the same suffering does not affect the morality of the act of procreation.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
viewed humans as a biological paradox. According to him, consciousness has become over-evolved in humans, thereby making us incapable of functioning normally like other animals: cognition gives us more than we can carry. Our frailness and insignificance in the cosmos are visible to us. We want to live, and yet because of how we have evolved, we are the only species whose members are conscious that they are destined to die. We are able to analyze the past and the future, both our situation and that of others, as well as to imagine the suffering of billions of people and feel compassion for their suffering. We yearn for justice and meaning in a world that lacks both. This ensures that the lives of conscious individuals are tragic. We have desires: spiritual needs that reality is unable to satisfy, and our species still exists only because we limit our awareness of what that reality actually entails. Human existence amounts to a tangled network of defense mechanisms, which can be observed both individually and socially in our everyday behavior patterns. According to Zapffe, humanity should cease this self-deception, and the natural consequence would be its extinction by abstaining from procreation.Negative ethics
proposes a concept of "negative ethics" in opposition to "affirmative" ethics, meaning ethics that affirm being. He describes procreation as an act of manipulation and harm — a unilateral and non-consensual sending of a human being into a painful, dangerous, and morally impeding situation.Cabrera regards procreation as an ontological issue of total manipulation: one's very being is manufactured and used; in contrast to intra-worldly cases where someone is placed in a harmful situation. In the case of procreation, no chance of defense against that act is even available. According to Cabrera: manipulation in procreation is visible primarily in the unilateral and non-consensual nature of the act, which makes procreation per se inevitably asymmetrical; be it a product of forethought, or a product of neglect. It is always connected with the interests of other humans, not the created human. In addition, Cabrera points out that in his view the manipulation of procreation is not limited to the act of creation itself, but it is continued in the process of raising the child, during which parents gain great power over the child's life, who is shaped according to their preferences and for their satisfaction. He emphasizes that although it is not possible to avoid manipulation in procreation, it is perfectly possible to avoid procreation itself and that then no moral rule is violated.
Cabrera believes that the situation in which one is placed through procreation, human life is structurally negative in that its constitutive features are inherently adverse. The most prominent of them are, according to Cabrera, the following:
Cabrera calls the set of these characteristics A–C the "terminality of being". He is of the opinion that a huge number of humans around the world cannot withstand this steep struggle against the terminal structure of their being, which leads to destructive consequences for them and others: suicides, major or minor mental illnesses, or aggressive behavior. He accepts that life may be – thanks to human's own merits and efforts – bearable and even very pleasant, but also considers it problematic to bring someone into existence so that they may attempt to make their life pleasant by struggling against the difficult and oppressive situation we place them in by procreating. It seems more reasonable, according to Cabrera, simply not to put them in that situation, since the results of their struggle are always uncertain.
Cabrera believes that in ethics, including affirmative ethics, there is one overarching concept which he calls the "Minimal Ethical Articulation", "MEA" : the consideration of other people's interests, not manipulating them and not harming them. Procreation for him is an obvious violation of MEA – someone is manipulated and placed in a harmful situation as a result of that action. In his view, values included in the MEA are widely accepted by affirmative ethics, they are even their basics, and if approached radically, they should lead to the refusal of procreation.
For Cabrera, the worst thing in human life and by extension in procreation is what he calls "moral impediment": the structural impossibility of acting in the world without harming or manipulating someone at some given moment. This impediment does not occur because of an intrinsic "evil" of human nature, but because of the structural situation in which the human being has always been. In this situation, we are cornered by various kinds of structural discomforts while having to conduct our lives in a limited amount of time and in limited spaces of action, such that different interests often conflict with each other. We do not have to have bad intentions to treat others with disregard; we are compelled to do so in order to survive, pursue our projects, and escape from suffering. Cabrera also draws attention to the fact that life is associated with the constant risk of one experiencing strong physical pain, which is common in human life, for example as a result of a serious illness, and maintains that the mere existence of such possibility impedes us morally, as well as that because of it, we can at any time lose, as a result of its occurrence, the possibility of a dignified, moral functioning even to a minimal extent.
Kantian imperative
Julio Cabrera, David Benatar and Karim Akerma all argue that procreation is contrary to Immanuel Kant's practical imperative. They argue that a person can be created for the sake of their parents or other people, but that it is impossible to create someone for their own good; and that, therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people. Heiko Puls argues that Kant's considerations regarding parental duties and human procreation, in general, imply arguments for an ethically justified antinatalism. Kant, however, according to Puls, rejects this position in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.Impossibility of consent
, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, and Asheel Singh argue that procreation is morally problematic because of the impossibility of obtaining consent from the human who will be brought into existence.Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner argue that when we want to significantly affect someone by our action and it is not possible to get their consent, then the default should be to not take such action. The exception is, according to them, actions by which we want to prevent greater harm of a person. However, in their opinion, such actions certainly do not include procreation, because before taking this action a person does not exist.
Asheel Singh emphasizes that one does not have to think that coming into existence is always an overall harm in order to recognize antinatalism as a correct view. In his opinion, it is enough to think that there is no moral right to inflict serious, preventable harms upon others without their consent. He extends argumentation by Seana Shiffrin, who views procreation as always problematic due to significant harm imposed on children but she denies the inference to the antinatalist conclusion. Singh supports the antinatalist position based on Shiffrin's principle that we can only non-consensually impose significant harm on another person, if it is done for a great benefit to him.
Chip Smith and Max Freiheit argue that procreation is contrary to non-aggression principle of right-wing libertarians, according to which nonconsensual actions should not be taken toward other people.
Cosmic mistake
Robbert Zandbergen claims that life emerges as the result of some cosmic mistake and humans should rectify this situation. One avenue of this rectification is the limiting or conclusion of reproduction.Negative utilitarianism
argues that minimizing suffering has greater moral importance than maximizing happiness.Hermann Vetter agrees with the assumptions of Jan Narveson:
- There is no moral obligation to produce a child even if we could be sure that it will be very happy throughout its life.
- There is a moral obligation not to produce a child if it can be foreseen that it will be unhappy.
Instead, he presents the following decision-theoretic matrix:
| Child will be more or less happy | Child will be more or less unhappy | |
| Produce the child | ||
| Do not produce the child |
Based on this, he concludes that we should not create people:
Karim Akerma argues that utilitarianism requires the least metaphysical assumptions and is, therefore, the most convincing ethical theory. He believes that negative utilitarianism is the right one because the good things in life do not compensate for the bad things; first and foremost, the best things do not compensate for the worst things such as, for example, the experiences of terrible pain, the agonies of the wounded, sick or dying. In his opinion, we also rarely know what to do to make people happy, but we know what to do so that people do not suffer: it is enough that they are not created. What is important for Akerma in ethics is the striving for the fewest suffering people, not striving for the happiest people, which, according to him, takes place at the expense of immeasurable suffering.
Miguel Steiner believes that antinatalism is justified by two converging perspectives:
- personal – no one can predict the fate of their child, but it is known that they are exposed to numerous dangers in the form of terrible suffering and death, usually traumatic,
- demographic – there is a demographic dimension of suffering in connection with which the number of victims of various types of problems increases or decreases depending on the size of the population.
''Walking away from Omelas''
Bruno Contestabile and Sam Woolfe cite the story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this story, the existence of the utopian city of Omelas and the good fortune of its inhabitants depend on the suffering of one child who is tortured in an isolated place and who cannot be helped. The majority accepts this state of affairs and stays in the city, but there are those who do not agree with it, who do not want to participate in it, and thus they "walk away from Omelas". Contestabile and Woolfe draw a parallel here: for Omelas to exist, the child must be tortured, and in the same way, the existence of our world is related to the fact that someone innocent is constantly harmed. According to Contestabile and Woolfe, antinatalists can be seen just as "the ones who walk away from Omelas", who do not accept such a world, and who do not approve of its perpetuation. Contestabile poses the question: is all happiness able to compensate for the extreme suffering of even one person? The question of whether universal harmony is worth the tears of one child tormented to death has already appeared before in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Irina Uriupina writes about it in the context of antinatalism.David Benatar's arguments
Asymmetry between good and bad things
argues that there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure and pain:| Scenario A | Scenario B |
| 4. Absence of pleasure |
Regarding procreation, the argument follows that coming into existence generates both good and bad experiences, pain and pleasure, whereas not coming into existence entails neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain is good, the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.
Suffering experienced by descendants
According to Benatar, by creating a child, we are responsible not only for that child's suffering, but we may also be co-responsible for the suffering of further offspring of this child.Consequences of procreation
Benatar cites statistics showing where the creation of people leads. It is estimated that:- 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 starvation,
- 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 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 female genital mutilation,
- over 80% of newborn American boys have also been subjected to genital mutilation,
- about 815,000 people are thought to have committed suicide in 2000; in 2016, the International Association for Suicide Prevention estimated that someone commits suicide every 40 seconds, or more than 800,000 people per year.
Misanthropy
In addition to the philanthropic arguments, which are based on a concern for the humans who will be brought into existence, Benatar also posits that another path to antinatalism is the misanthropic argument. Benatar states that:Harm to nonhuman animals
David Benatar, Gunter Bleibohm, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, and Patricia MacCormack are attentive to the harm caused to other sentient beings by humans. They would say that billions of nonhuman animals are abused and slaughtered each year by our species for the production of animal products, for experimentation and after the experiments, as a result of the destruction of habitats or other environmental damage and for sadistic pleasure. They tend to agree with animal rights thinkers that the harm we do to them is immoral. They consider the human species the most destructive on the planet, arguing that without new humans, there will be no harm caused to other sentient beings by new humans.Some antinatalists are also vegetarians or vegans for moral reasons, and postulate that such views should complement each other as having a common denominator: not causing harm to other sentient beings. This attitude was already present in Manichaeism and Catharism. The Cathars interpreted the commandment "thou shalt not kill" as relating also to other mammals and birds. It was recommended not to eat their meat, dairy and eggs.
Environmental impact
Volunteers of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the Church of Euthanasia, Stop Having Kids, and Patricia MacCormack argue that human activity is the primary cause of environmental degradation, and therefore refraining from procreation and allowing for eventual human extinction is the best alternative for the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants to flourish. According to the group Stop Having Kids: "The end of humans is the end of the human world, not the end of the world at large."Adoption, helping humans and other animals
Herman Vetter, Théophile de Giraud, Travis N. Rieder, Tina Rulli, Karim Akerma and Julio Cabrera argue that presently rather than engaging in the morally problematic act of procreation, one could do good by adopting already existing children. De Giraud emphasizes that, across the world, there are millions of existing children who need care. Stuart Rachels and David Benatar argue that presently, in a situation where a huge number of people live in poverty, we should cease procreation and divert these resources, that would have been used to raise our own children, to the poor. Patricia MacCormack points out that resignation from procreation and striving for human extinction can make it possible to care for humans and other animals: those who are already here.Antinatalism and other philosophical topics
Realism
Some antinatalists believe that most people do not evaluate reality accurately, which affects the desire to have children.Peter Wessel Zapffe identifies four repressive mechanisms humans use, consciously or not, to restrict their consciousness of life and the world:
- Isolation: an arbitrary dismissal from the consciousness of an individual and the consciousness of others about all negative thoughts and feelings associated with the unpleasant facts of human existence. In daily life, this manifests as a tacit agreement to remain silent on certain subjects especially around children, to prevent instilling in them a fear of the world and what awaits them in life, before they will be able to learn other mechanisms.
- Anchoring: the creation and use of personal values to ensure attachment to reality, such as parents, home, the street, school, God, the church, the state, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future, accumulation of material goods or authority, etc. This can be characterized as creating a defensive structure, "a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness", and defending the structure against threats.
- Distraction: shifting focus to new impressions to flee from circumstances and ideas humans consider harmful or unpleasant.
- Sublimation: refocusing the tragic parts of life into something creative or valuable, usually through an aesthetic confrontation for the purpose of catharsis. This is typically seen as a focus on the imaginary, dramatic, heroic, lyric or comic aspects of life, to allow for an escape from their true impact.
David Benatar, citing numerous studies, lists three phenomena described by psychologists, which, according to him, are responsible for making personal self-assessments about the quality of one’s life unreliable:
- Tendency towards optimism – Humans have a positively distorted picture of their lives in the past, present and future.
- Adaptation (or accommodation, or habituation) – Humans adapt to negative situations and adjust their expectations accordingly.
- Comparison – for one’s self-assessments about the quality of their life, more important than how their life goes is how it goes in comparison with the lives of others. One of the effects of this is that negative aspects of life that affect everyone are not taken into account when assessing their own well-being. Humans are also more likely to compare themselves with those who are worse off than those who are better off.
Thomas Ligotti draws attention to the similarity between Zapffe's philosophy and terror management theory. Terror management theory argues that humans are equipped with unique cognitive abilities beyond what is necessary for survival, which includes symbolic thinking, extensive self-consciousness and perception of themselves as temporal beings aware of the finitude of their existence. The desire to live alongside the awareness of the inevitability of death triggers terror in humans. Opposition to this fear is among humans' primary motivations. To escape it, humans build defensive structures around themselves to ensure their symbolic or literal immortality, to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe, and to focus on protecting themselves from immediate external threats.
Abortion
Antinatalism can lead to a particular position on the morality of abortion.According to David Benatar, one comes into existence in the morally relevant sense when consciousness arises, when a fetus becomes sentient, and up until that time an abortion is moral, whereas continued pregnancy would be immoral. Benatar refers to EEG brain studies and studies on the pain perception of the fetus, which states that fetal consciousness arises no earlier than between twenty-eight and thirty weeks of pregnancy, before which it is incapable of feeling pain. A 2010 report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also showed that a fetus could not gain consciousness prior to week twenty-four of the pregnancy, and apparently never does at any point in utero, stating that "there appeared to be no clear benefit in considering the need for fetal analgesia prior to termination of pregnancy, even after 24 weeks". Some assumptions of this report regarding sentience of the fetus after the second trimester were criticized. In a similar way argues Karim Akerma. He distinguishes between organisms that do not have mental properties and living beings that have mental properties. According to his view, which he calls the mentalistic view, a living being begins to exist when an organism produces a simple form of consciousness for the first time.
Julio Cabrera believes that the moral problem of abortion is totally different from the problem of abstention of procreation because in the case of abortion, there is no longer a non-being, but an already existing being – the most helpless and defenseless of the parties involved, that someday might have the autonomy to decide, and we cannot decide for them. From the point of view of Cabrera's negative ethics, abortion is immoral for similar reasons as procreation. For Cabrera, the exception in which abortion is morally justified is cases of irreversible illness of the fetus, according to him in such cases we are clearly thinking about the unborn, and not simply of our own interests. In addition, Cabrera believes that under certain circumstances, it is legitimate and comprehensible to commit unethical actions, for example, abortion is legitimate and comprehensible when the mother's life is at risk or when pregnancy is the result of rape – in such situations it is necessary to be sensitive without assuming a rigid principalism.
Procreation of non-human animals
Some antinatalists view the breeding of animals as morally bad, and some view sterilization as morally good in their case. Karim Akerma defines antinatalism, that includes animals, as universal antinatalism and he assumes such a position himself:David Benatar emphasizes that his argumentation applies to all sentient beings and mentions that humans play a role in deciding how many animals there will be: humans breed other species of animals and are able to sterilize other species of animals. He says it would be better if all species of sentient beings became extinct. In particular, he is explicit in judging the breeding of animals as morally bad:
Magnus Vinding argues that the lives of wild animals suffering in their natural environment are generally very bad. He draws attention to phenomena such as dying before adulthood, starvation, disease, parasitism, infanticide, predation and being eaten alive. He cites research on what animal life looks like in the wild. One of eight male lion cubs survives into adulthood. Others die as a result of starvation, disease and often fall victims to the teeth and claws of other lions. Attaining adulthood is much rarer for fish. Only one in a hundred male chinook salmon survives into adulthood. Vinding is of the opinion that if human lives and the survival of human children looked like this, current human values would disallow procreation; however, this is not possible when it comes to animals, who are guided by instinct. He takes the view that even if one does not agree that procreation is always morally bad, one should recognize procreation in wildlife as morally bad and something that ought to be prevented. He maintains that non-intervention cannot be defended if we reject speciesism and that we should reject the unjustifiable dogma stating that what is happening in nature is what should be happening in nature.
Similar arguments to that of Vinding are made by Ludwig Raal, who is in favor of a more practical approach. He argues for introducing non-violent population control through immunocontraception. This would sustain the ecosystem and human population, and allow people to perform helpful interventions in nature.
Creation of artificial intelligence
, Sander Beckers, and Bartłomiej Chomański argue against trying to create artificial intelligence as this could significantly increase the amount of suffering in the universe. David Benatar also says that his argumentation for not bringing others into existence is applicable to all sentient beings, including conscious machines.Promortalism
Promortalism or pro-mortalism is the philosophical value judgment that death is always better than life. Pro-mortalism is related to negative utilitarianism.A common motivation for pro-mortalism is to prevent the perceived future suffering of oneself and/or other sentient beings. Promortalism positively values death, whereas antinatalism negatively values birth, so both value judgments are distinct from each other.
Antinatalism is generally supportive of abortion rights and anti-pro-life, while pro-mortalism and efilism are plainly anti-life.
Antinatalists and promortalists generally agree that if one accepts that life is suffering and no other premises are assumed, then antinatalism and promortalism are both implied. As an analogy, if one believes that smoking causes harm, then not only should people not start smoking, but they should also stop if they already smoke.
Similarly, Jiwoon Hwang argued that the hedonistic interpretation of Benatar's asymmetry argument of harms and benefits entails promortalism — the view that it is always preferable to cease to exist than to continue to live.
Hwang argues that the absence of pleasure is not bad in the following cases: for the one who never exists, for the one who exists, and for the one who ceased to exist.
By "bad", we mean that it is not worse than the presence of pleasure for the one who exists.
This is consistent with Benatar's statement that the presence of pleasure for the existing person is not an advantage over the absence of pleasure for the never existing and vice versa.
However, emeritius professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town has argued that if one accepts antinatalism, many arguments and premises besides antinatalism would be necessary in order for antinatalism to imply promortalism.
Hence, antinatalism does not imply pro-mortalism by itself.
It is possible to simultaneously support antinatalism and oppose promortalism.
For example, an antinatalist who is also a rights theorist would support antinatalism while opposing murder on the basis that people have a right not to be killed or murdered.
An antinatalist could also oppose promortalism by believing that it is worse for anyone to die earlier than they need to, or simply because it is troubling to kill people.
An antinatalist can believe that while life is not worth starting, life can be worth continuing. The promortalist Jiwoon Hwang asserted:
Hwang later died by suicide.
The antinatalist and promortalist communities sympathisized with his choice while mourning his death as a loss.