Most of the arguments against antinatalism are actually arguments against David Benatar’s arguments for antinatalism, and usually not against all of his arguments but mostly against his asymmetry argument. As I have argued in the text addressing Benatar’s asymmetry argument, I agree it is phttp://nonvoluntary-antinatalism.org/critical-review-of-better-never-to-have-been-the-harm-of-coming-into-existence-by-david-benatar-part-2-the-asymmetry-argument/roblematic but for different reasons than the most common criticisms as they are presented by its chttp://nonvoluntary-antinatalism.org/critical-review-of-better-never-to-have-been-the-harm-of-coming-into-existence-by-david-benatar-part-2-the-asymmetry-argument/riticizers.
Less of the criticizers of antinatalism focus on Benatar’s quality of life argument. One of them is David Wassermann, Benatar’s co-author of Debating Procreation, who mainly argues that the chance for a miserable life is very small and therefore doesn’t justify antinatalism. Since I have addressed this claim in the text addressing the book, I’ll not repeat my claims against Wassermann’s claim here. In this text I wish to address a different pro-natalist argument against Benatar’s quality of life argument, which is basically that even if Benatar is right about the quality of life being very low, people are not really hedonistic creatures in the sense of valuing everything in their lives in terms of pain and pleasure. They don’t schematically count welfare points on scales, but are writing autobiographies, and these are meaningful for them even if they are sometimes, or even often, negative in hedonistic terms.
And besides autobiographies people are also writing biographies, meaning they are affecting the lives of others, so their lives are meaningful also because they are meaningful to others.

Autobiographies

Although I find it at least a little bit deeper and more interesting than most of the common arguments against antinatalism, the autobiography perspective is still utterly false.
That is since first of all I agree with Benatar’s reply to the counter claim to his quality of life argument (which he included in the chapter about the quality of life argument in Better Never To Have Been since he anticipated it), which is basically that people’s self-assessments are completely unreliable indicators of life’s quality, mainly due to a number of psychological features which distort their ability to make objective assessments of the actual quality of life, and instead constitute a fallacious positive assessment. The main three mechanisms which Benatar mentions are The Pollyanna Principle, Adaptation, and Comparison with Others. You can read about them in the text about Benatar’s quality of life argument, or of course, in the third chapter of Better Never To Have Been.

Besides the ones Benatar mentions, additional mechanisms which are causing people to find their autobiographies meaningful are the existing bias, life’s addictiveness, and because people view non-existence as a horrible alternative to existence despite that obviously nothing horrible would have happened to them or nothing wonderful would have been deprived of them had they never existed, had they never had an autobiogrcaphy. Yet most people prefer having bad lives than not having them at all, even though they wouldn’t have missed a thing had they never had a life, even though nobody is harmed by a great autobiography that nobody wrote.

In a sense, to suggest that meaning in life should stem from one’s autobiography is an explicit admission of life having absolutely no meaning of its own. Defining life as platform for everyone to compose its own meaning is actually a very good reason not to put a person in this position in the first place since what is the point of throwing someone into a life voided of any meaning? If each person needs to find its own meaning of life by oneself, obviously it wasn’t there before that person existed, and if so, why create that person in the first place? Doesn’t it make much more sense not to create a person whose purpose in life would be to find a purpose to its own existence?

Ironically, stressing and focusing on the issue of the meaning of life, more than anything else, exposes the lack of it. It emphasizes the absurdity of life and the purposelessness of existence.

People’s autobiographies are meaningful to them because they are built to exist, they are built to survive, once they exist they are built to experience, they are even built to be optimistic, they are built to adjust, they are built to think that they are meaningful and that life is meaningful.
But they aren’t and it isn’t. And it wouldn’t be so meaningful that life is meaningless hadn’t it been so bad, had no one suffered during it. But it is very meaningful ethically because everyone suffers, and it is even more so because everyone suffers for no reason but that they were created.

Life is much worse than people tend to think, but even if it wasn’t, each bad moment happening during it is unnecessary. Every pain, every sickness, every fear, every frustration, every regret, every broken-heartedness, every moment of boredom and etc. are all needless. They exist only because the person experiencing them exists. They exist because the parents of that person have forced existence on that person. There is no good reason for that to happen. Every problem could have been easily prevented instead of being difficultly solved, if solved at all. People exist because it was decided for them to exist by other people, not because it is necessary or purposeful in any way.

The fact that people who are living horrible lives still positively value their autobiography, is not an indication that life is not that horrible, but exactly the opposite. It goes to show how deeply trapped humans are in the life mechanism. People are victims not only of their biology but also of their psychology. They would adapt and adjust themselves and their expectations according to how bad the lives they are forced to endure are. Low expectation, adaptation ability, and the fact that everyone else’s lives is not much better, can’t justify bad situations which shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
But an even sadder fact is that humans are not really looking for justifications to procreate. Most just do. They don’t even really need mechanisms to sooth their worries about the future of their children, because as inevitable as it is that bad things would happen to their children, it rarely crosses their minds. Unfortunately people are apathetic to the fate of others, even when it comes to their future children, and definitely when it comes to the rest of the victims of procreation.

And that brings me to another reason why the autobiography claim is false.
People might truly not value their lives merely in hedonistic terms, but they also don’t value them according to autobiographies and biographies they are writing. Most people don’t think in terms of meaning let alone writing a meaningful autobiography, but they just exist. The autobiography criticism is way too flattering for the vast majority of people. It presents them as if they are the writers of their own story while they are actually more like the ball in a pinball game. They are not in control of their own lives but are bounced from one occurrence to another. People are not calculated thinkers but are reckless pawns.

In fact, most people are still thinking in terms of fictional cosmic meaning. Most are not even beyond that phase so how can one counter argue antinatalism by claiming that people’s autobiographies are positive when most people don’t even consider them as the source and root of their meaning in life but rely upon fictional cosmic meaning such as divinity, reincarnation, predestination and etc., or the continuation of the family line, the species, or whatever non autobiographical motive. Most people don’t actively try to fill their lives with meaning in a cosmically meaningless existence by trying to write meaningful autobiographies, but passively depend upon fictional external sources to do that for them (mainly because existence is cosmically meaningless).

If in order to counter Benatar’s quality of life argument it is required to ascribe inventive traits to people, such as them all being philosophers and existentialists, it says more about antinatalism’s critics and the defenders of life than on antinatalists and the critics of life.

A Ponzi Scheme

And even if it was the case that all people are sort of philosophers and existentialists invested in making their autobiographies meaningful, no one creates new people so they can write meaningful autobiographies and biographies. People create new persons to serve their own purposes such as to save their decaying relationships, to continue the family line, to please their parents, to ease their boredom, to hush their biological impulses, to boast their ego, to create an immortality illusion, to feel normal, to make them look normal to others, to ease their loneliness, to be loved even if that love is temporary and conditioned and a result of imprinting and not of free choice and objective assessments, to feel powerful because someone is totally depended on them, to feel needed and important, to fill their empty and pointless lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. So if anything, people are creating new people so their own autobiographies and biographies would seem meaningful to themselves.
And that is a kind of a Ponzi scheme. People are creating new people so their lives would become meaningful, and the created people’s lives would be meaningful as a result of the creation of more people and etc. Every generation’s lives are meaningful because of its relation with the former and next generation. But there is no meaningfulness validation, let alone an ethical justification, for this pyramid scheme coercion. The pyramid has no rational ground except the scheme operating it. Existing people function as biographies validation for former existing people and they will validate themselves by creating new people. But there is no external validation or meaning for this scheme. It is meaningful only because it exists, if it disappears, automatically so would its meaning. There is no external meaningful reason for it to exist, no external necessity, no importance but its own internal dynamics which produce internal meaning only. It is a self-justifying system.
Basically it is people telling the people they are creating: ‘You have to exist because I exist. Because I was forced into this purposeless existence, you must be too. You will fill my purposeless existence with a pseudo purpose, and later you will force others into a purposeless existence and fill your purposeless existence with a pseudo one as well, and so on’.

The idea of referring to procreation as a “Ponzi Scheme” is not originally mine. In the book Debating Procreation Benatar brilliantly uses it with reference to the pro-natalist claim of the harm to the last generation – if antinatalism is endorsed by the general public, the final people of the last generation would suffer when they are aged because there would be no younger people to provide them with everything they need.
After pointing at this claim as being a pro-natalist excuse given the vast amount of procreation that is currently taking place, and after suggesting that to avoid the suffering of the last people a mechanism for phased extinction must be developed, Benatar argues that this claim is a Ponzi scheme:

“The reason why it cannot be a more enduring “solution” is that continued procreation in order to save existing people from harm is a giant procreative Ponzi scheme. Each generation has to procreate in order to save itself from the fate of the final generation, thereby creating a new generation that must procreate in order to spare itself the same fate. Like all Ponzi schemes, it cannot end well. It merely delays the inevitable. However, unlike other Ponzi schemes, the procreative one also causes vast amounts of suffering before the bubble bursts or the pyramid crumbles”. (p. 129)

My attempt here is to broaden the Ponzi scheme analogy to other aspects of procreation as well. I think that Benatar’s use is better and more accurate than the one I am making, yet, since filling the empty and pointless lives with a sense of meaning and purpose is a very common motivation in procreation, it is important to make that reference as well.

Biographies

The most important aspect of the pro-natalist claim which is in the center of this text, regards to people’s biographies.
Basically the claim is that since people have meaningful relations with others, their lives are meaningful. But supporters of this claim tend to mention only the positive aspects of people’s effect on others and therefore claim that their biographies are justification for their existence. However, the negative aspects of people’s effect on others are far more important, and they are far more prevalent. People have a tremendous effect on far more creatures than the ones within their family circle and their friends circle, and that effect is devastative, exploitive, and extremely harmful.

It is very hard to accurately assess the harms caused by each person since it depends on various factors such as location, socioeconomic status, consumption habits, life expectancy, livelihood, diet and etc., however, regardless of any circumstances, harming numerous others is inevitable. And the most immediate and prominent harm is caused by what people eat. And every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the ones with the highest price – animal based foods. Therefore most people’s relations with others are of the most abusive and exploitative kind. Most people biographies include choosing that more fish would suffocate to death by being violently sucked out of water, that more chickens would be cramped into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, that more calves would be separated from their mothers, and more cow mothers would be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, it is choosing more pigs who suffer from chronic pain, more lame sheep, more beaten goats, more turkeys who can barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, more ducks who are forced to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, more rabbits imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, more geese being aggressively plucked, more male chicks being gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs nor meat, more snakes being skinned alive, and more crocodiles and alligators being hammered to death and often also skinned alive to be worn, and more mice, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, and monkeys being experimented on.

Since the absolutely vast majority of people are not even vegans, and insist on choosing the most harmful option for them to feed themselves, their biographies are filled with torturing others.
But the fact is that every person’s biography is filled with harming others, even the ones who don’t directly consume others. Unfortunately the vegan option is not harmless. It is impossible to eat without harming someone, somewhere along the line. Every food item is in one way or another a product of dispossessing, plundering, habitat destructing, poisoning, trampling, starving, dehydrating, air polluting, water polluting, climate alteration, land alteration, water waste, oil drilling, and etc.
And obviously it’s not just food. People’s biographies are also full of various harms to numerous others by the consumption of other goods such as clothes, soaps, toys, shoes, cosmetic, cars, soda cans, washing powder, electricity appliances, mobile phones, dish-washing detergents, make ups, anything made of plastic and etc. For more information please read the article The Harm to Others.

The point is that every action people make affects others, and the vast majority of these effects are negative. It is even theoretically impossible to fulfil the most basic ethical requirement – do no harm. Most aspects of peoples’ relations with others are harmful and exploitative, where is all that when biographies are presented as justification for creating more people?

Peoples’ autobiographies are extremely biased and unreliable. They lack any external meaning and their inner meaning would vanish into thin air had they never existed. None of it has any meaning of its own.
People’s biographies on the other hand are very meaningful. It would be very meaningful to all of people’s victims had they never had biographies. All of them are stained with other creatures’ pain, fear, blood, exploitation, and suffering. People’s biographies are not justifications for procreation but a very good reason why people must never ever procreate, and why we must make sure that it would truly never happen.