10 reasons why antinatalists think you shouldn’t have been born
Antinatalism is the philosophical view that it is almost never good for people to reproduce. This position may seem absurd at first glance to many, but antinatalists have put forward arguments that they say prove that being born is almost always a mistake. The writer Emil Cioran said: ‘Not being born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is not accessible to anyone.”
The real world seems to support them. Many countries are approaching or have already passed the point where people are no longer giving birth to enough children to maintain their population. One of the factors may be that people no longer have confidence that their children will have a better life than they do.
But since you were born and are lucky enough to read Listverse, let’s look at why antinatalists think you should never have babies.
Related: Top 10 worst years in human history
10 You did not consent to be born
At some point, usually as a teenager and arguing with your parents, almost everyone utters the immortal phrase, “I never asked to be born!” At first, this just seems like a petulant whine used to argue against doing a chore. But for antinatalists, it’s a real reason why having children is morally wrong.
The truth is that it is not possible for anyone to consent to birth. You literally don’t exist until your parents create you. You cannot be consulted on whether you agree to a life. The topic of consent is a lively topic in many moral debates, because we generally think that it is wrong to force someone to do something against their will. And doing or being is essentially what parents force their children to do when they are born.
So the next time something bad happens to you, remember that you were forced to endure it.[1]
9 Being alive entails suffering
Many pessimistic philosophers have come to the conclusion that existence means suffering. Even the best life we can imagine for a person will involve some degree of suffering. It seems impossible to live a human life without some pain, whether physical or emotional. Even those who think they can help people often have a pessimistic view.
Sigmund Freud said of psychoanalysts who try to reduce the suffering of their patients that “the best we can hope for are insights that bring us an ordinary, everyday, everyday misfortune.” Doctors know that by curing a patient one day, they are only setting him up for another disease at a later date.
Being human means being aware of ourselves so that we not only experience pain when it occurs, but we are also able to look ahead and see the many ways in which we can suffer. Antinatalists would say it is better never to have been born in a form that suffers so much.[2]
8 Bad things are worse than good things are pleasant
Perhaps the best-known antinatalist thinker today is David Benatar. In his book Better never been: the damage of its originsBenatar explains that there is a fundamental asymmetry between the good and the bad things in life.
Benatar argues that pain is bad, which most people agree with, and that pleasure is good. When a person is born, he is able to feel pain (bad) and pleasure (good). But let us consider the case of someone who was never born. They are incapable of feeling any pain (which is good), but also incapable of feeling pleasure (which is neither bad nor good, because it is simply an absence).
According to Benatar’s calculation, this means that the better outcome does not exist because there are no negative sides to non-existence, but there are real dangers to existence. Moreover, pleasures are usually transient, while pain can last for a longer period of time.[3]
7 Parents gamble with your life
When parents decide to have a child, they take the ultimate gamble. They cannot know what their child’s life will be like, no matter how much they hope it will be a good life. It can be so full of suffering that the child finds life unbearable. The child may have terrible physical illnesses that cause him to be in constant pain.
So imagine walking up to someone on the street and tossing a coin. One side of the coin will give them a happy life, while the other side will fill their days with suffering. Most people would refuse to flip the coin and put one’s entire life on a risky gamble. For some antinatalists, this isn’t even a fair bet, as it’s more likely to bring out the pain side of the coin. Yet parents make this bet all the time, often giving little thought to the possible outcomes of their actions in creating a life.[4]
6 We all die eventually
David Benatar has a rather grim view of human existence. “At all stages of human history, life has been filled with enough unpleasantness, enough badness, and of course always ending in death,” he says. It’s hard not to agree with him. Since the beginning of time, approximately 110 billion people have been born. To date, all but 8.1 billion have been killed. As such, being born inevitably leads to death.
Is death bad? For antinatalists, to be dead is to no longer exist, and non-existence means the absence of pain. Being dead may not be a bad thing, but the process of dying is almost always a horrible experience. Most people would like to die only once in their lives. Dying can bring terrible pain from an accident, being felled by a long illness, or the slow and drawn-out erosion of our faculties due to old age.[5]
5 Religions suggest that non-existence is better
We tend to think of religions as life-affirming and full of joy. However, many texts from world religions do not make it clear at all that being born is a good thing.
The book of Ecclesiastes (2:22-23) in the Bible does not paint a rosy view of human life. “For what profit shall a man have from all his labor and torment of spirit wherewith he is tormented under the sun? All his days are full of sorrow and misery, even at night he rests not in his thoughts: and is not this vanity?’ In the Gospel of Luke (23:29)says Jesus on the cross to the mourning women around him, “For behold, the days are coming when they will say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the paps that have not suckled.”
Perhaps among religious figures Buddha has the best claim to antinatalism. The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that existence is suffering. In a Buddhist sutra, the Buddha is asked how humans come to be. The Buddha responds by saying, “I do not praise the production of a new existence even a little; nor do I praise the production of a new existence, even for a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering. Even a little bit, for example [bit of] vomit stinks. In the same way, the production of a new existence suffers, even if only a little, even for a moment.”[6]
4 Suicide is painful
For antinatalists, being born is a mistake, so wouldn’t it be best to end your existence as quickly as possible? However, for most philosophers who believe in antinatalism, suicide is not the solution.
David Benatar has written a response in an article to refute his critics, entitled ‘Still Better Never to Have Been’. “First, it is possible to think that the creation of existence is a serious harm, and that death is (usually) a serious harm. Some people might even think that its occurrence constitutes a serious harm, in part because the harm of death is then unavoidable.”
Suicide is harmful to both the person who dies and the suffering of those left behind. So once you are born, there is no easy way out of the condition you have found yourself in.[7]
3 Existing is worse than not existing
There have always been philosophers and thinkers who thought there was something deeply wrong with life. The ancient Greek writer Sophocles waxed poetic about the matter.
“Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, the best thing; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is by far the best thing, that he should return with utmost speed from whence he came. For if he has seen youth pass by, with its easy gaiety, what hard torment is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles and murders. Last of all is his fate: old age, which is blamed, weak, cheerless and friendless, where all misery dwells among misery.’
Epicurus also thought that non-existence was not harmful to humans. “Death means nothing to us. If we exist, death does not exist; and if death exists, we do not exist. All sensations and consciousness end with death, and therefore at death there is neither pleasure nor pain.”[8]
2 People are pretty terrible for the world
Almost everyone admits that human civilization has done terrible things to the environment. Humans have driven species to extinction. Humans have destroyed the habitats of countless organisms. People have little compulsion to destroy the planet, as long as there is some profit in the bargain. The climate crisis caused by human activity means that species not yet harmed by humanity will soon be affected, wherever they are.
In his book Inner experience, the French intellectual Georges Bataille wrote: “Nature that gave birth to man was a dying mother: she gave existence to the one whose coming into the world was her own death sentence.” This is essentially what ecological antinatalists believe. It is better not to bring more people into the world, because they will only harm the world.[9]
1 People are pretty terrible to each other
Some arguments from antinatalist philosophers paint a very unflattering picture of humanity. These are the misanthropic arguments, and they point out that people do terrible things to other people.
Benatar looked at people with an emotionless look when he came up with these arguments. “Another route to anti-natalism is through what I call a ‘misanthropic’ argument. According to this argument, humans are a deeply flawed and destructive species responsible for the suffering and death of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species, we would quickly recommend that no new members of that species be created.”
What is human history but a record of wars, dictators, repression, genocides and slavery? I’m sure most people can think of one or two world leaders who would have made the world a better place if they had never been born. But there’s no need to think on such a grand scale. In our own lives, most of the bad things that happen to us come about because of the actions of other people. If this is true, the moral calculus becomes simple: if a person is not born, he or she cannot harm anyone else.[10]