Creating Life is Bad, Except for Antinatalists, They Should Have Kids

The modern antinatalism movement is incoherent pseudo-philosophical window dressing that steals all of the bad points from negative utilitarianism and none of the good

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The modern antinatalist movement is a social movement predicated mostly on the belief that humans should stop having kids, because life is full of suffering. It’s an unfortunately incoherent philosophy that steals all of the bad parts and none of the good from the philosophically respectable position of Negative Utilitarianism, which believes only suffering has moral weight. This leads to “true” antinatalism, which believes that all conscious beings, not just humans, coming into existence is a morally bad action, which is also a respectable position. Modern antinatalists fail to take their implications seriously, the movement is generally used to complain about how parents suck or working sucks, and it’s mostly held by humans in the wealthiest nation with the most fortunate conscious beings in all of history.

First I’ll explain negative utilitarianism and the reasons I disagree despite respecting the position and the philosophers who argue for it. Then I’m going to explain why modern antinatalism is a pseudo-philosophical perversion of every respectable negative utilitarian principle, and why it probably endorses the opposite course of action from “real” antinatalism. Buckle up.

Negative Utilitarianism

Negative utilitarianism is the belief that coming into existence is always a morally bad action. This is cited from the fact the absence of pain is good, but the absence of pleasure isn’t really bad — an unborn child NOT experiencing happiness isn’t really a tragedy, because no one who exists is deprived from experiencing that happiness, but a born child experiencing pain definitely sucks. This asymmetry is helpfully put into this chart by David Benatar (who is not necessarily a negative utilitarian, but this is the best argument for it)¹:

As for why I’m not a negative utilitarian… I just think it’s pretty clear experiencing happiness is good, and it’s better if a conscious being were to come into existence to experience it². I think the absence of pleasure is bad! If someone stubs their toe then experiences mindblowing orgasms for the next 30 years, that sounds like a sweet deal, sign me up. If I died right now, I would be pretty happy to have existed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to have never been born UNLESS I experience some terrible pain at some point in the future, which while a big deal (

Beetle

talks about s-risks in this post), is indeed still just normal utilitarian math. So while regular utilitarianism, that compares suffering and happiness and prefers maximizing happiness, can handle this Orgasm Guy, negative utilitarianism has to say that even if I drift off into nonexistence forever right now that it would’ve been better to have never been. I disagree! My life is great! Orgasm Guy’s life is great! Us existing is good, not not-bad!

Now there’s some problems with the implications of creating a net good life always being good. There’s a famous thought experiment aptly called The Repugnant Conclusion that it will always be preferable from this perspective to create a huge amount of barely-worth-living lives over, like, one extremely happy guy (because .1 happiness * a billion people > 1,000 happiness * 1 person) but I’m more willing to accept that at some point down the line we might want to create a massive number of net happy lives over the fact that Orgasm Guy’s life actually sucks because of that one time he stubbed his toe, and we shouldn’t bring him into existence to let him experience all those orgasms because of the principle.

Some normal utilitarians try to dodge The Repugnant Conclusion by saying you should only create additional lives if they’re happy “enough,”³ not barely worth living, but I don’t know if this is a great solution. Whatever you choose for the word “enough” is gonna be pretty arbitrary, and now your optimal world is gonna be full of a bunch of people slightly better than what your “enough” bar says. And the only way to decide what “enough” is is by just comparing different possible worlds in the future, and saying “hmmm, is this happy enough to not be called the repugnant conclusion?” This gets rid of all the morally clear sexiness that total utilitarianism gives you. Still, both of of these options seem way better than the idea that creating the happiest guy possible isn’t morally preferable, which I vehemently reject. I stand by Orgasm Guy; it would be bad to not bring him into existence if we could.

By the way, some philosophers might protest that what I’m countering is strong negative utilitarianism, and that weak negative utilitarianism is another real philosophical position — that’s the belief that suffering is bad enough that we should weight it much heavier than pleasure. Which… eh. I’m not convinced that weak negative utilitarianism isn’t just regular old utilitarianism in a trenchcoat. I feel like arguing “suffering is worse than pleasure” is really just saying that you disagree with other utilitarians about how to weight happiness and suffering, and this weighting is something that’s different between all utilitarians and is the kinda the whole ball game. So when they say “my weightings comparing torture and orgasms⁴ are different!” I say… duh⁵.

Strong negative utilitarians, mostly being philosophers, really do believe what they believe. They think the earth and all life should go caput because their philosophy says so, which is a level of internal consistency and honesty that I respect. And there’s something appealing about this, because what I do believe is that most conscious lives on Earth suck! Life in the wild kinda stinks (they don’t have air conditioning and are, like, fighting for their lives every day. My life would suck if I had to do that) and life for factory farmed animals definitely stinks (I would rather not be one of these chickens and live my whole life packed with other chickens till I die at 8-12 weeks old), so I believe that the world really does suck ass, in a detached, hidden-from-me-so-I-don’t-have-to-truly-confront-it kinda way. But where I draw the line is saying that my life stinks because everyone else’s does, and that genuinely amazing lives shouldn’t be lived because suffering is the only vector that really matters.

Antinatalism

So, the modern antinatalist movement. Just the belief itself, off of its original premise “all life should stop being born” is actually more defensible from a philosophical perspective than strong negative utilitarians, because it’s pretty much just a weaker version of negative utilitarianism — even standard utilitarians scared of massive suffering could endorse that “being born is bad.” But wow, the movement on TikTok and Reddit misses the point completely by focusing on humans, climate change, and capitalism, and this refusal to look at the bigger picture or consider the implications of their actions make them terrible philosophers and appear like massive whiners.

The first issue with the antinatalism movement is that it’s human-centric⁶. Remember how I said human lives, with air conditioning, unlimited food, comfort, safety, and shelter are all pretty awesome and specifically worth living compared to the suffering of the rest? Antinatalists specifically talk about how they’re against humans, so they’re only against these lives. They cite human’s impact on global warming, capitalism, and how life is boring and we didn’t evolve for 9-5s as reasons you shouldn’t have kids.

But surely if you’re against the most rich lives in human history, you should be against the most painful animal lives too, and maybe want to return to nature and live in the woods or in a tribe or something? You certainly wouldn’t want all humans to disappear and leave only suffering wild animals, unless you’re religious and don’t believe that animals have souls (not something I expect antinatalists believe, given their demographics!) But no, it seems like it’s all human centric here.

The second issue is the movement doesn’t actually seem to care about plans to reduce the amount of human lives, despite it being the only stated thing they believe. The main plan of antinatalism is encouraging people to not have kids and sneering at people who do, and that’s all they do, but anyone with Google can find that the amount of lives in the west is pretty stagnant and lives in Africa are exploding. So the movement should probably plan to spread propaganda over there. But no, you’ll only find people in the west defending their personal choice to not have kids to their friends with poorly applied philosophical principles.

The third issue is they don’t seem to consider the implications of what they believe, at all. I am 100% not endorsing suicide, but it feels like an important point to talk about if you build your belief system on the phrase “I wish I wasn’t born, because I couldn’t consent to it.” It’s a very icky topic, which is why it’s only indirectly focused on, but it seems like the natural conclusion of a movement built on the lives of high functioning conscious beings sucking is to grapple with the fact that there’s an easy path to nonexistence for anyone who wants one — maybe antinatalists should endorse voluntary euthanasia, like how it’s been legalized in Canada?

Meanwhile, animals aren’t smart enough to escape unending pain if they find themselves the victims of being paralyzed with bugs born in their stomach; it seems like we should deal with that before focusing on how unfulfilling human life with all of society’s conveniences is. Suicide is not an easy option, for sure, because it creates suffering from all the people that care about you, but it certainly IS an option that will cap the amount of necessary suffering, and importantly, animals don’t have the option!⁷ Negative utilitarians can grapple with the whole “kill Earth” thing, because they’re philosophically serious people — this suicide critique is unfair to use against them because they want conscious beings who don’t have the option out to also stop having kids.

I know I’m dissing modern antinatalists pretty hard, and I really do believe that they have no good philosophical backing for an antinatalist movement that doesn’t factor in animals or Africa (some of them are just using it to feel morally superior for not having kids) but behind some antinatalists are people who feel out of touch with society and culture and wish they’d never been born, which is pretty dark and an unfortunate fact about this life — even if you have a lot of stuff, you can still be miserable. I think the worst thing to do when depressed is to dive deep into a philosophy that says all life on Earth is a mistake, and I hope people in this headspace get better.

But my position is indeed that the world sucks, specifically in all the places that the antinatalist movement online doesn’t focus on. I think more humans in western society, and most antinatalists certainly are in that demographic, should be born to experience the fruits of humanity’s labor, because that’s where the freedom and joy is. And I believe we need to grapple with stopping so many suffering animals from being born — and luckily, more humans probably reduce the amount of conscious non-humans! So yes, like the title says, creating most life is bad, except for antinatalists. I hope they have kids.

…

This is all a plea to not take the antinatalism movement seriously, and instead view it for what it is: psuedo-philosophy as window dressing to complain that capitalism sucks, to feel morally superior for not wanting kids, and a vehicle to whine about having to work.

Try to do good effectively and figure out what to prioritize, because you care about the suffering from the world’s least fortunate, instead of wallowing in the fact that life isn’t perfectly amazing for the luckiest conscious beings in history justified by shoddy philosophical reasoning. You don’t have to be an effective altruist like me (though I hope you join!), but either way, certainly don’t be a modern antinatalist, and don’t treat the movement seriously. Fin.

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1. This is obviously an argument for negative utilitarianism, right? Benatar likes to says it’s separate from any philosophy but cmon, this is the only and best argument that shows why only suffering counts and all strong negative utilitarians nowadays cite it. I’m lost on what this argument is doing if not arguing for strong negative utilitarianism

2. This is me rejecting person-affecting axiology, which means I’m working with an impersonal or total utilitarian ideology. Those words don’t add any context at all to the paragraph unless you’re a philosopher, in which case bam, there you go. Big words!

3. Called “satisficing” utilitarianism, which is a very fun word.

4. I posted a note saying there were six of the word “orgasm” in today’s post, and I apologize, because this is in fact the eighth one in the essay. I added more.

5. There’s this certain instinct for weak negative utilitarians to describe the difference between themselves and regular utilitarians as “oh, you weight suffering 1 to 1, but I weight suffering 10 to 1.” I think this literally doesn’t make any sense, because there’s no freeform 1 to 1 suffering vs happiness to compare to, ALL morality is real world comparison based. If regular utilitarians can disagree on how many orgasms equal a stab in the leg, and weak negative utilitarians come in and say “oh, well I weight it differently than you guys too, I deserve my own separate label” I just think they’re regular utilitarians who disagree. Someone tell me a moral decision that would be different between a weak negative utilitarian vs a regular one who just thinks suffering is more bad than others, because I’m pretty sure these two’s preferred worlds (axiology) could be identical — the moment you say “I think X suffering = X pleasure, but I think suffering is ten times worse than pleasure so I’m weighting the equation” you cease to believe X suffering = X pleasure, because you just said you didn’t believe that! Now, maybe it’s useful to call yourself a weak negative utilitarian to SIGNAL yourself as someone who believes suffering is really bad, but I completely reject the idea that this isn’t a subset of utilitarianism. This is actually a relatively controversial belief so someone can tackle and fight me here if they want.

6. I scrolled 100 posts on the subreddit’s top of all time and watched tiktoks and not a single one mentioned anyone but humans not having kids. I’m countering the entirety of the online movement as unserious, not the specific belief here, so I think this is fair — I talked about why I don’t believe in the belief and what I do think in part 1. If there’s an antinatalist movement separate from the philosophers who argue negative utilitarianism that also doesn’t fall victim to the three critiques I state in the article, please do tell me, I couldn’t find any. Also, do not scroll 100 posts on the subreddit, wow. It’s bad.

7. More discussion in the comments, specifically my comment with Silas.