Children: To Have or Have Not? A Philosophical Look Into Antinatalism

I hate kids. I hope I never have kids. My hatred for children is so intense that only a few months ago, I was voted  “most likely to name their child Gilgamesh out of spite.” However, my distaste for children goes further than my dislike for their blameless stupidity and high maintenance. I pity them for merely existing. I pity us all for existing – for never having chosen to be born.

I consider myself an "Antinatalist," someone who has a negative view on procreation. Life has such great capacity to be so horrible, so agonizing, that humans should refrain from having children out of compassion. I argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally wrong. 

The term “Antinatalism” was coined by South African philosopher, academic, and author, David Benatar, who is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In a 2006 book titled Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, Benatar stated that “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”

For many, this bold assertion prompts questioning of Benatar’s reasoning, or perhaps lack thereof. What would cause someone to be completely against procreation, if it is not some childhood trauma or misplaced hatred against humans? If you are one of the many who would love to ask Benatar what horrible experiences in his life might have caused him to hold such cynical beliefs, you are unfortunately out of luck. Benatar is a private person by nature; he has no pictures of himself on the internet, and any lectures online found on YouTube are screen recordings of PowerPoints. The closest thing one might get to a picture of Benatar is an abstract, pixelated photo taken from the back of a lecture hall of a man in a baseball cap, in a video titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?” Benatar further avoids answering any personal questions in interviews, which he is rarely willing to conduct. However, Benatar’s anonymity is intentional: it prevents readers from psychoanalyzing him and attributing his beliefs to sadness or trauma, or creating a false narrative about his life. His readers are unable to discredit his Antinatalist arguments based on his personal experiences, which forces critics to attempt to disprove his theories head on.

In an interview with Joshua Rothman, Benatar stated that people often ask him if he has children. “I don’t see why that’s relevant,” he responded. “If I do, I’m a hypocrite—but my arguments could still be right”. Clearly, people see Benatar as a person who must be distressed. Being against life, which is commonly regarded as a beautiful, good thing, must come from some place of hurt. However, the assumption that unhappiness and Antinatalism are correlated is false. Benatar’s concerns on the ethics of procreation are not unfounded, indeed, the belief is growing in popularity due to an increasingly unstable political, economic, and environmental climate. In response to an awareness of a world with an evermore unstable future, we are all forced to question the ethics of having, or wanting, kids. Taboos of the subject simply stem from society's view on procreation as normal and ethical, and consequently, to be against the concept itself is seen as abnormal.

There are three main Antinatalist arguments: the asymmetry argument, the consent argument, and misanthropic arguments: The first argument, also established by Benatar, is one I personally adopt. The asymmetry argument says that it is wrong to procreate because of life’s asymmetry between pleasure and pain. Absence of pain is good, even if no one experiences that good, whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad, unless someone is deprived of it. Nonexistent beings cannot be deprived of good things, as deprivation is a state requiring existence, but they can be spared bad things, which, even if they cannot appreciate being spared, is desirable. It can then be concluded that life is always worse than non-existence, and so it is always immoral to impose it on a child. 

The second main argument against procreation focuses on the ethics of birth in regards to consent; children cannot consent to being born. This is often compared with forcing someone to play Russian Roulette without their consent; in life, when having a child, you have no way of knowing if they will have a life filled with pain or happiness. Is it morally permissible to choose to take that chance on behalf of someone else? Arguably, no matter how unlikely the chance is that the person one births into this world without their consent might live a horrible life, to take the chance at all is immoral.

Finally, misanthropic arguments for Antinatalism appeal to the harm that individuals who are brought into existence will cause. These include the harms that humans inflict upon each other, other animals, and the environment. It takes only a glance outside the window to see how destructive human beings can be to the earth. 

Some might respond, what if an individual grows up to inflict goodness onto others, what if they have a good life? What if they grow up to cure cancer, or be the happiest person in the world? Are you not depriving a child of that chance, and in doing so, is that not just as ethically wrong? Misanthropes and Asymmetrists alike would respond that such an argument is against the whole point. It is the risk of pain at all, in any sense, which is immoral.

The common knee-jerk response to arguments like these is, “If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” Is that not the whole point of the Antinatalists' augment – that nonliving is to be preferred over living? The conclusion seems obvious; end your life if you are so against living. However, the problem is not as simple as that; death, which is inherent to the problem of life, is itself another problem. Benatar devotes forty-three-pages in Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence to the assertion that death only exacerbates the Antinatalist’s dilemma.“Life is bad, but so is death … of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.” Benatar asserts that it must be better to not force children to enter the predicament at all in the first place. 

One of the main issues I find with Antinatalistic philosophy is how it is often framed outside of a societal context. Benatar does not question the implications of what it means to hold such a belief, and how the burden of large societal issues is entirely put onto people who want to have kids. This is problematic, as the Antinatalists belief is inherently systemic. Indeed, Antinatalism is only a belief because the institution makes life laborious for the people; very few have the privilege to have any control over the institution itself. The counterargument here is that the onus of morality lies not on the person taking the chance to have a child, but on the ones who made making the chance a bad thing at all. One might compare this to large corporations making the general, innocent populace feel as if they are at fault for global warming due to overuse of plastic straws or not turning off the lights enough, as if any of such major issues are the responsibility or fault of the regular person. 

So why is the proper response to Antinatalistic arguments not to strive to make the world a better place? Benatar argues that “the possible creation of a better world in the future hardly justifies the suffering of people in the present.” Benatar believes that at any rate, a dramatically improved world is impossible – it’ll never happen. The lessons never seem to get learnt. “Unpleasantness and suffering are too deeply written into the structure of sentient life to be eliminated … it’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.”

Either way, why would one want to have kids? Whether the blame is on you, me, or corporations, for the world being the way that it is, infringing pain onto an unconsenting person does not seem acceptable.

Despite what I might think is the right thing for humans to do out of compassion, realistically, I don’t see Antinatalism as something that could ever be widely adopted. At the most basic, I believe that it goes against too many biological instincts; no species would ever willingly go extinct. Furthermore, I question if Antinatalism should really be embraced; I have doubts about the belief truly being executed worldwide, as it seems extreme, on top of it being a logistical nightmare. Nevertheless, the philosophy is its own source of reassurance for me. There isn’t much I feel that I can do about huge systemic problems. The madness of this world is out of my, or your, control. However, I can still decide to not have a child, which is potentially an immense amount of suffering avoided. 

You’re really quite welcome, Gilgamesh. I might just be doing you a favour.