Thoughts on anti-natalism

This post is just my current thoughts on anti-natalism, arguments for and against. The proposition of anti-natalism is that bringing someone into existence harms the individual who is born, and that it’s always better for the individual to never have been born.

In support of the proposition we have the principle of reducing suffering, in particular the kinds of suffering that isn’t outweighed or cannot be outweighed by positive experiences. That principle is one that I accept, however I am for the time being agnostic about the conclusion that it's always wrong to bring a life into existence.

 

The asymmetry between suffering and pleasure

David Benatar points to an asymmetry between good and bad things, and that we have common intuitions that support this. The asymmetry is that the presence of suffering is bad, and the presence of pleasure is good, for someone who exists. But for someone who doesn't exist, the absence of suffering is good, but the absence of pleasure is not bad. An example he points to that seems compelling is that it's a good thing that there's no wars on Mars, but it's not a tragedy that there's no positive experiences of life on Mars to begin with. If there was suffering we'd think that was a sad thing that ought to stop, but no one mourns the lack of good things in places where there are none to begin with.

It seems to hold true for me at least that the wish to introduce good things is something that operates on individuals that already exist. A way I think of this is that someone might say you should have as low percentage of suffering compared to pleasure as possible, in the universe, and it follows from that to introduce a lot of new beings that have a high degree of pleasure so that the ratio of good to bad things become more in line with your goal. In particular, if you could introduce new pleasure faster than you could decrease current suffering, then this view says that is what you ought to do.

However, I think that the goal to have as much pleasure and as little suffering as possible is not something that should be true of the universe as a statistical matter in that way, but rather a goal to pursue for the beings that already are in existence. If you have a problem of suffering, increasing the total value by bringing in new pleasure somewhere else doesn't solve the original problem you had.

Similarly, if we say we only care about the ones that exist, one might reach a new conclusion here that if we could keep increasing the pleasure of some existing beings without taking care of the suffering of others first, and if you could increase that pleasure faster than you could decrease the suffering of the others, that you ought to do that. However, I think you still should decrease the suffering before you go on and increase the pleasure in other beings that don't suffer, because suffering, at least when it becomes sufficiently bad, is always more bad than pleasure is good. So, if we say that 0 is neutral, -5 is a little suffering but it can be outweighed if there's also a large positive experience, but -50 has crossed the threshold that can be outweighed by positive experiences, then it is more important to get from -50 and back across the threshold towards 0, than it is to get from 0 to positive infinity. Another way to think of it is simply to say that we don't have a problem if someone is happy but could be even more happy, but we do have a problem if someone is quite unhappy. That's not to say that becoming more happy isn't good, but the difference is one of importance.

I currently don't take the epicurean view that pleasure is just the absence of suffering - I don't think that pleasure is like a glass filled with suffering that is now empty.

I can think of two ways to conceptualize pleasure and pain. One (A) where there are two glasses, one with suffering and the other with pleasure, where you can have more or less of both at the same time, and the other way (B) is a sliding scale between suffering and pleasure where there's one feeling rather than two balancing feelings.

A)

B)

 

Whichever of these are correct, given that I accept that you ought to - all else being equal - reduce someone's suffering before increasing someone else's pleasure, this is the first step towards anti-natalism, and this is how it takes me:

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P1) Reducing (or preventing) suffering, if that suffering is sufficiently bad, is more important than increasing (or introducing) pleasure no matter how great that pleasure is.

P2) By introducing a life into the world, you're introducing pleasure but also introducing suffering, some of which is or will be sufficiently bad.

C) Therefore it's more important to prevent a life coming into existence than introducing one.

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P1

This is what I've argued for so far. We should care more about helping the kid who's lost and crying rather than giving another kid a toy that is a million times cooler than the one they already enjoyed, because one is a problem and the other is more like an enhancement of something that was not an issue.

P2

A human life undoubtedly, throughout their lifetime, experiences some suffering that you should care more about decreasing or preventing, rather than increasing happiness.

One intuitive objection is that suffering can be instrumentally good for achieving a sense of purpose, meaning and other things that can be expressed as some form of pleasure. But first, if other intuitions that tell us that suffering is more important than pleasure are correct, then given the risk that those intuitions are correct should steer us on the side of caution. Here's a reason that I think highlights this well:

 

Risk and accumulative expected value across generations

Imagine that there is a small risk that introducing a life is very wrong, in virtue of introducing a form of suffering that is more important to prevent than the pleasure that is introduced. Now if you take that risk and have a child, you also now take the risk that this child will have children of their own, and their children again may have children of their own. So you're essentially starting a possible chain reaction of descendants expanding in a tree structure after you, and they're running the same risk each time they're having children. Since the number of children could become exponentially higher, the risk that you're doing something wrong by bringing a child into the world, even when small at first, could become exponentially worse.

So let's say you assign a probability of 10% that having a child is very wrong (let's say a quite negative value of -100), and a high probability (90%) that it's at least permissible and perhaps a little good (let's say a value of 10).

The expected value calculation of that would be: (-100 * 0.1 + 10 * 0.9) =  -1 per child born.

And let's say every child has two children of their own. So for your first child it's -1, so already on the bad side, and then this child has two children, so now it's a total of three new children, so the expected value is -3. Then they have two children, which gives a total of -7. Next generation it's -15, then -31, then -63, then -127, -255, -511, and so on exponentially until the badness is unbearable.

It gets worse when you not only consider that a life may contain suffering beyond that threshold, which can still be instrumentally good, but that if in 9 generations there are 511 children, the chance that some of those children have led horrible lives not worth living at all becomes very large. And if it's true that some things when sufficiently bad can't be outweighed by someone else's positives, how could we take the risk of having children?

 

Should we be indifferent when choosing between non-existence and positive experiences?

What if we can guarantee that the above risks are mitigated and a consistently pleasurable life is ahead? Benatar points to the intuition that there's nothing bad about life not existing some place where there is none to begin with. He thinks this intuition tells us that we should be indifferent towards pleasure existing some place or nothing at all existing there instead. Some people are excited about finding extraterrestrial life, and may well be sad that there is none to be found, but it’s likely not motivated by a desire to have as much pleasure as possible, including on other planets, but by knowing that we’re not alone and discovering how other life has evolved. Another reason he gives for why we should be indifferent is that in the case of an unborn child, there is no one to be deprived of losing out on that pleasure. That the badness of non-pleasure must be explained in terms of deprivation of something good, and that deprivation is a negative experience which requires an existing individual, and therefore no deprivation occurs.

 

Existence Non-existence Life of pleasure Good Neutral Life of suffering Bad Good
I use neutral to mean something we should be indifferent about.

But this gives two questions - is non-existence compared to pleasure actually neutral, despite some of the intuitions that tell me that it is, and if it is neutral, does that mean that pleasure is not better than neutrality?

It seems to me that from the point of view of someone in existence, a neutral state isn't bad, but it could be improved by having pleasure. There isn't a problem with neutrality, but it could become better in a way that doesn't have to be explained in terms of just removing suffering. And so, if pleasure could improve the neutral situation and make it better, then compared to the pleasurable situation, neutrality is worse, but not bad. This gives rise to this sort of table:

	Pleasure	Neutrality	Suffering
Pleasurable situation	Good	Worse	Bad
Unpleasurable situation	Good	Better	Bad

 

I am still unsure of whether this only applies to someone in existence, and if it changes when we include non-existence. If it would change, the table would look like this:

Existence Non-existence Life of pleasure Good Worse (but not bad) Life of suffering Bad Better (but not good)

In order to answer the question, the kind of hypothetical world I’m imagining is one in which there is no suffering, so having a child doesn’t come at the cost of fixing existing problems. Does the world become a better place the more instances of pleasure that inhabits it? Since there is no suffering, there really is no question of whether they should have a child because the world isn’t good ‘enough’. It is, but could it become even better? Is there an end goal on the level of the community, a purpose that the introduction of these beings is instrumentally good for, or is it just better for the value of the totality itself?

I can’t help but be a little torn, but leaning towards asking “Does it fix any problems? Is the lack of maximizing good values a problem if the outcome is still fully on the positive side?”. However, I can’t for the time being fully commit to an answer of whether we should be indifferent, or favour a good existence over non-existence.

 

Is instrumentally good suffering better than non-existence?

This is the next problem to tackle. If we shouldn't be neutral between a good existence and non-existence, what do we do when suffering can in turn lead to pleasures that otherwise wouldn't be there?

Given that we shouldn't be neutral between something that is consistently good and non-existence, what if it's not consistently good, but a life with some considerable amount of bad things that are instrumentally good along the way?

I'm assuming that pleasure is not only the relief from suffering, and that if suffering is instrumentally good, the good is not merely expressed as the removal of suffering, but a pleasure or high that results either from the relief, or from a benefit. That is, a pleasure that in the moment of feeling it, is on the positive side of the sliding scale.

One question comes up: does the pleasure achieved have to outweigh the suffering caused? For instance, we could imagine a scenario where a person who has had a completely neutral life gets tortured for 10 seconds, and then it stops, and as the relief kicks in, for the first time ever they say the words "This feels amazing". In a sense the suffering was instrumental to achieving a good as high as they’ve ever felt, as an effect of the relief, but the pleasure from the relief probably doesn't outweigh torture for 10 seconds. The torture was also as bad as they’ve ever felt, after all.

An anecdote from my own life is when I struggled with nausea and stomach issues for a while, and would sometimes after a tough evening wake up in the middle of the night in an almost euphoric state due to the relief, a pleasure that I have a hard time matching ever since. Another anecdote, whenever I've had a session of crying a lot, the things I may find pleasure in and giggle at are very simple and gives a sense of relief and joy that seems to give pleasure that goes beyond what I usually feel on a normal day. So the suffering that made me cry was instrumental to achieving a higher good - although probably not something I'd wish to repeat just to get that little high afterwards. Especially the nausea situation seems bad enough that a promise of the level of euphoria I had would still not make me wish to go through it again. So in these examples, the balance of suffering and pleasure seems to at least be negative, even if the pleasure at the time was greater than it otherwise would have been. Maybe valuable life lessons and perspectives came from them, but taken in isolation, a neutral experience may be better than a big valley and a small peak. If there was no pleasure taking place from the perspective it gives on life, or the romanticization of being in a rut and eventual progression, running such experiences on repeat would mostly suck.

It seems more clear to me that things like working out can be instrumentally good in a way that it encourages repetition in order to achieve the highs, and I'm not convinced that the suffering during working out is so bad that the reward isn't worth it.

A model to work with could be that if something that requires some suffering to achieve something good inspires repetition, then evidently that is evaluated to be worth it. However one problem when it comes to anti-natalism is if we accept that we should always prioritize preventing or reducing suffering, when sufficiently bad, over increasing pleasure. Is there any reason why that shouldn't apply to instrumentally good suffering that leads to pleasure as well? Even if we could calculate that throughout a life, the suffering valleys would be met with reconciling peaks - if we accept that it’s in principle more important to help someone who’s suffering than to increase someone else’s pleasure, because suffering is a problem, and someone who is content is not a problem, shouldn’t that mean that, all else being equal, it’s also more important to help or prevent one person’s suffering than to help the same person go from a state of indifference to a state of pleasure? Because by letting someone be born, the best we can hope for is that they go from a state of indifference, to a state of pleasure, and the worst would be that they go from a state of indifference to a state of suffering. If it’s more important to prevent the latter, then it’s always more important to refrain from bringing them into existence. Even if the suffering leads to future pleasure. Another problem might be that there is an optimism bias that makes the reward seem like it was worth it and inspires repetition, when it was in fact not. I’ll look at this next.

 

Intuition: If a life at any moment deems itself worth existing, the life was worth starting

A response to all these problems could be that this balance between pleasure and suffering is too speculative, and instead we should simply accept that if someone does have an interest in their life and continuing to live, then that’s evidence enough that their life was worth all the hassle. Which better authority is there than the individual themselves to judge whether their life was worth it?

Next up is a couple of thought experiments to cast some doubt on the idea that an individual can accurately assess the quality of their own life. 

• A cat has been mortally wounded by a car, and is writhing around in pain, with no chance of ever surviving and being happy again. However, their interest in having their health restored and continuing to exist are far greater than their wish to die, it’s just not possible. Now imagine if this suffering went on to last longer than the whole of their existence up until that point, and yet if we were to somehow ask the cat at any point “do you wish to live?”, their answer was “yes, I want to live”, then however irrational and based on misinformation that answer is, it seems the individual does deem their life to be worth living.
• A person is tortured senselessly for decades up until the final years of their life, when a button is pressed and the memory of all the suffering is wiped out and replaced with good memories. It’s clear from that point on that the individual deems their life good and worth continuing, and probably if asked, they’d say their life was worth it, since they don’t remember any of their suffering.

According to David Benatar, we have evolved optimistic biases that in less serious ways than the examples above fool individuals into discounting and underestimating the suffering that has happened in their life. With the above examples, it seems easy to say that while the individuals did deem their life worth living, for whatever reasons, it was probably better if they never had to endure that suffering. If it’s unethical to inflict suffering onto the person in example B, if you could later wipe out their memory and be fully “forgiven”, then if the optimism bias is real, what does that tell us about creating suffering life?

Consider how hard it is for you to remember details about what happened to you even just a week ago - what you ate for breakfast, how you spent your day, what small problems you encountered, let alone the missing time from the first years of your life. How are we supposed to accurately look at the complex stream of experiences that make up our past, and from the comfort of being content in the moment figure out whether past bad experiences were outweighed by the goods? It would require almost superhuman abilities to recall and evaluate your past in such a way.

I don’t think this is entirely settled, but we should at the very least be skeptical about this argument.

 

Reductio ad absurdum: the case for murder

Here’s probably my biggest gripe with this philosophy. David Benatar denies that anti-natalism implies so-called pro-mortalism, the idea that death is better for you. An example he uses is that you might regret going to the movies upon discovering that the movie is bad, but it might still be worth enough to finish watching. Leaving the theater might be a greater harm than sitting it out, when you’re already there, but it would be better if you didn’t go in the first place.

He also suggests that there can be more theories that suggest death is an evil, and anti-natalism doesn’t tell you which of those theories are correct. He takes the view that death is an evil, and that’s precisely one of the good reasons to not come into existence in the first place, so that you never have to come to terms with your own oblivion.

However, I believe that the argument for anti-natalism, however true it may be, does suggest that it is in your best interest to be assassinated unbeknownst to you. This idea is based on the belief that preferences are instrumentally good for achieving pleasures and avoiding suffering, so a hedonistic perspective. Preferences aren’t inherently valuable, if they aren’t good for you.

For instance, a child may want to have candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner - that is their preference. However, as a responsible parent with their best interest in mind, you realize the detriments that would have on their health, and since you know their suffering to be bad for them, it would be wrong to respect their immediate preferences. And because of that, preferences are instrumentally good for achieving a positive outcome, but not the things that matter in themselves. Good guidelines in general, but not the ultimate value when it comes down to it.

Now, if David Benatar is correct that life is not worth starting, then presumably living life would not be in the potential individual’s best interest. Once born, they may prefer to live, in the same way that a child may prefer to eat candy for dinner, but as a responsible anti-natalist, you would recognize that non-existence is better for them.

One might conclude then that the most rational thing to do, is to start assassinating people, as painlessly as possible, because their continued existence is not in their best interest, and their preferences are only instrumentally valuable.

Benatar might object that your life may in fact be worth continuing until it gets bad enough that living is no longer desirable. However, that seems to go against the asymmetry that suggests that even minor suffering paired with an otherwise pleasurable life is worse than non-existence, because he thinks we should be indifferent between non-existence and a paradise.

I want to explore some parallels that I think highlight the issue even more. Imagine that a person is in a coma, and hypothetically there is for the time being no internal experience. However when the time comes, you have the option to 

    A) Bring them out of coma. 

    B) Unplug them and painlessly kill them.

If A is anything like bringing existence into the world, then I think we have a problem. What is the relevant difference between introducing a new life into the world, and introducing a life after coma into the world?

One response may be that a non-existent individual has no preference to live, and thus doesn’t need to be respected, but a comatose person does have that preference. However, if I’m correct that preferences are only instrumentally good, and it’s the case for both the baby and the comatose person that life isn’t as good for them as non-existence, then this seems doubtful at least. And even if we were convinced in this scenario that preferences mattered, I think there are some reductio ad absurdums to cast more doubt upon this. Let’s look at just a few.

I might say, an unconscious person doesn’t really “have preferences” if there is no conscious desire to hold them present. One response is that preferences are there before being unconscious, and are always restored after, and this is evidence that the preferences reside on the inside even through the unconscious state. However, does that mean that the preferences should be respected because there is some physical aspect of the brain that holds them and allows for them to be experienced again when conscious? Should we respect the preferences of someone who’s dead, because the physical part that holds the preferences is still intact, aside from their life and consciousness? What if we could somehow revive someone who died 200 years ago, if we found their dead brain to still possess this quality? Was anything that violated their previously held interests a violation of them in the next 200 years after their death? It seems to me that for something to be a violation, someone must experience the sensation of violation, and in this case reviving the 200 year dead person is what caused them to have those preferences violated when learning about it.

Another possibility is that preferences do disappear when unconscious, but the mental configuration allows them to come back once conscious - which would mean that they have no preferences when unconscious. So what about the future preferences that they will have? Well, why should we value preferences that will exist in the future? A newly fertilized egg will have preferences if not aborted, even if it’s not conscious. Even a sperm-cell will have preferences, if not denied the opportunity to fertilize an egg. Imagine a potato plant that is sown and harvested when the potato is ripe, with no chance it’s sentient. But there’s something special about it, that if you wait 80 years without harvesting it, it will suddenly develop sentience and preferences, given that you keep watering it without harvesting it. But before that it’s equivalent to a tasty rock.

Here are some additional possible responses to the equivalence between bringing someone out of a coma and bringing a baby into existence - perhaps going through birth, and the early years of life is an evil that is not worth it, however a grown-up person who is comatose may have passed that stage, and is now worth living for much longer. But, what if bringing them out of coma involved a birthlike experience? What if they would have a couple of years of rehabilitation coupled with baby-like experiences until they returned to their former glory? Is it then wrong to bring them out of coma?

Perhaps it’s to do with the amount of suffering? A person being born has their whole life ahead of them filled with various amounts of suffering, and since this is much greater than the life of a grown-up who doesn’t have that much suffering left, it’s wrong to bring the baby into existence, but not wrong to resume the life of the comatose person. Well, what if the comatose person had an exceptionally long life expectancy? What if it was a three year old in coma?

What if it harms relatives and friends to kill the comatose person? Sure, but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s someone who lived their life in isolation or who has lost their friends and relatives, and who no one would notice is dead? Besides, how much weight should we give to other people for holding a person hostage in their life, if it’s in their best interests to be dead?

I’ll leave that up to you. However, I will present a syllogism for this argument:

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P1) If bringing someone into existence harms them, their non-existence is preferable to their existence (Benatar’s anti-natalism argument) (P⇒Q)

P2) If non-existence is preferable to existence, unconsciousness is preferable to consciousness (Q⇒R)

P3) If unconsciousness is preferable to consciousness, making an unconscious person conscious harms them, and (painlessly) making a conscious person unconscious helps them. (R⇒S∧T)

C) If Benatar’s anti-natalism argument is true, then killing someone painlessly helps them. (∴P=>T)

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I think the best answer to the question may be that even if the argument is true, it would lead to a lot of suffering if people started finding out that people were assassinated or killed during coma, and they’d start fearing for their life. It can also harm the mentality of the killer and cause them to start doing things that are actually bad. This should steer us away from condoning murder. However, I still think at the very least this conclusion is very counter-intuitive, as perhaps should be expected from my evolutionary past, and once fully appreciated would not only be limited to someone in a coma, but anyone who doesn’t register the process of dying at all. It does however only rely on the premise that we should be indifferent between pleasure and non-existence - which might be a reason to reject it, or to bite the bullet and say that it is in fact better for the person who was assassinated.

 

Children cannot consent to be born - are they therefore wronged when introduced to life?

This question invokes consent, and has a certain intuitive merit. Big decisions in life are usually thought of as wrong to decide for someone else, without their consent. You must marry this person, go to this school and have this profession are some examples. Other things that we think of as requiring consent is for example having sex, where lack of consent likely will lead to a very traumatic experience. The common denominator is that it restricts people’s freedom and causes harm.

Being born locks you into a life where opting out would be a severely bad experience, and as such also restricts your freedom. However, is it bad if the one who’s born ends up enjoying it?

When comparing it to the other alternatives, it seems like doing things without consent even if the person in question ends up thanking you for it is lucky at best.

One response to this may be that we don’t rely on consent for a lot of things we do for our children, for instance when they refuse to do what is in their best interest, such as going to the doctor, eating healthy, getting enough sleep and so on. So perhaps if living is in someone’s best interest, their lack of consent can be overridden?

Of course, a non-existent person doesn’t really have any best interests, but can this still tell us if it’s fine to bring someone into existence without consent? What about the fact that a non-existent person can’t even revoke consent?

However, not all consent is explicitly revoked and granted. A lack of no doesn’t always mean yes. For instance having sex with someone would be wrong unless consent is explicitly granted, and the same goes for any example with big consequences for someone’s life. Perhaps things that can have big impacts on someone’s life all have default non-consent. And things that are unlikely to be intrusive, such as giving someone a gift, talking to them (vibrations forcefully enter their earways) or lightly touching certain neutral zones like the shoulders may not require consent. An example where there is a big life decision for someone, such as when euthanizing a suffering dog, I still think the default non-consent remains, but that respecting someone’s consent sometimes must be overridden by the best understanding of their own best interest.

It seems clear to me at least that someone who’s suffering to the point where they regret coming into existence actually can rightfully feel that their default non-consent was violated. A possible analogy may be that someone who was in a coma and later learned that someone had done certain unspeakable acts also rightfully can feel that their default non-consent was violated. It doesn’t matter at that point that they weren’t in a state where they could not consent, as is also the case for a non-existent person.

I want to make it clear that I don’t think consent is intrinsically important, such as pleasure and suffering. Consent is to me still an instrumentally valuable tool. The person who was in a coma would never have truly been violated if there was no one in existence who experienced any form of violation. The act, however, was still wrong because of a host of risks and likely negative effects. I think these risks are at least significant in the case of having a child as well. The risk of serious harms to which the child could not consent, and when experiencing the harms later, they can rightfully condemn the act of bringing them into existence.

It may be that people are so biased towards their own existence that they will never reach the point of condemnation of their own birth, even when facing considerable amounts of suffering. One thought experiment could be to imagine you could slip a Stockholm Syndrome Capsule© into someone’s drink such that they would suffer the same, whatever you did to them, but they would never condemn you for it, and would even sympathize with you.

I think the risk does play an important part. If the need for consent is usually invoked when there are considerable risks of making someone unhappy, then I think if making someone unhappy is very unlikely, that consent isn’t the tool for the job. It’s just that I do think there is a considerable risk involved when making a child.

I don’t think consent is a shutdown case for pro-natalism, but I think it is a significant point of consideration.

 

Other reasons to prefer not having children

While we’ve discussed some possible ways that life can not be in someone’s own best interest, there can be other extrinsic reasons why having a child is wrong. I will list some of them here, but they are a little less puzzling and so I won’t spend much time with them. 

• If most lives do more harm to others than good, most lives should remain unborn.
• If there are children in existence already, having a child of your own displaces them into a life of suffering on behalf of your own kid, and helping those who already suffer is more important than bringing new joy into the world. If you can realistically adopt, then adoption seems much better than having your own kid. If it turns out to be too difficult to adopt, are you justified in having a kid? Perhaps we should try to change policies so that adopting kids is in fact easier and more viable than having kids of your own.
• Parents may not be happier than non-parents. However, I don’t know if the satisfaction from a sense of “meaning” can be well-measured, and I don’t have a big confidence in the studies that have been done, so I’m agnostic about whether it makes you happier on average.
  

 

A reason why having (some) children might be the lesser evil

If anti-natalism as presented by Benatar was true, then it seems we should eventually make ourselves extinct. However, what about all the senseless suffering in nature? Perhaps we need humans around to create a blissful heaven on earth through technology. One response might be that in doing so we are instrumentalizing the suffering of others to serve as a pawn in a game that even is doubtful to succeed. However true that may be, the suffering in nature that exists and will exist vastly outcompetes any human project so far, and no balanced ecosystems on earth will be anything like a paradise. I lend some significant credence to the idea that one day David Pearce may get his way, and we might just be able to abolish suffering altogether. Though there are other great risks, such as space colonization and spreading nature there, and consequently perpetuating senseless suffering on a vastly greater scale. In addition there is the possibility that we’ll create suffering artificial intelligence, and simulations with populations that even exceed our own. However, I’m at least willing to consider that the possibility of a blissful future may be likely enough that some amount of pro-natalism could be justified. Perhaps though we should already optimize new life for well-being as well as we can, through gene manipulation.

 

Conclusion

There are some compelling reasons to not have children, and it’s probably true that some harms cannot be outweighed by good things, even if the individuals themselves believe they are. However, some harms may be outweighed by good experiences - so Benatar is, to my current understanding, wrong in saying that we should be indifferent between never starting a life and a purely blissful life with no amount of suffering.

If however he is right, then continued existence harms an individual as long as they will have any further suffering in their life, however small it is. And therefore painlessly murdering someone would help that individual. There are still other reasons to not prefer murder, because of the downstream effects of such an action, but for the victim it would be the most compassionate choice.

Consent may be an issue, as there is a considerable risk that you cause significant suffering to someone by bringing them into existence. It shouldn’t matter that they cannot revoke consent, as we shouldn’t accept that for existing people who cannot revoke consent.

Among other considerations to have and not have children, I favour the ones that prefer adoption over having children, given that lots of people practically still will have kids and they are in need of help. I’m not sure that I was wronged by being born, but I don’t think my parents had a philosophically sound case for it either. I think the risk of causing a lot of harm in the world is generally too great to allow for having children, which includes the fact that your children may suffer some regrettable harms, and that they might cause an exponentially expanding tree of future children, many of which may suffer in ways that cannot be justified. It could be prevented by not having children.

It’s possible that some level of pro-natalism is required in order to in the future solve important global issues beyond humanity, such as suffering in the wild, but developing technology also comes with significant risks of increasing suffering by many orders of magnitude.