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The following post is dedicated to a book called Debating Procreation. The book is divided into two parts. The first one is written by David Benatar, in which he presents 3 arguments for antinatalism. The second part is written by David Wasserman who criticizes Benatar’s arguments and presents a pronatalism argument.

The name of the book is a bit misleading since it is not really a debate but rather two independent monologues. There is no Q&A section or even methodical replies by each side to the other’s arguments. However, Benatar’s half is highly recommended. Obviously it is hard to overcome the primacy of Better Never To Have Been, but in my view this text is much better and for several reasons: the problematic Asymmetry Argument gets less attention (but is still the first argument he displays), the Quality of Life Argument is presented here in an improved form (mostly since there is a greater emphasis on the risk aspect), and most importantly, after being totally absent in Benatar’s previous works, he finally included the harm to others as part of his antinatalism argument. The harm to others, in my view, is the most important antinatalism argument, so I was very pleased to see Benatar successfully and thoroughly construct it.

Unfortunately, he decided to title the harm to others argument as the misanthropic argument, and by that in a way, continue the anthropocentric tradition of focusing on the human race. Surely this part of the text is very unflattering for humanity, but it still focuses on humanity, instead of on its victims, who are supposed to be, at least in the harm to others argument, the center of attention. He calls the first two arguments of his part of the book the philanthropic arguments since they focus on humans as victims of procreation, and he calls the third one the misanthropic argument since it focuses on how destructive and harmful the human race is and so it better not exist. So all three arguments focus on humanity, while it could have easily been framed as antinatalist arguments for the sake of the one who does not yet exit, and antinatalist arguments for the ones who already exist and would be harmed by the ones who will be created, without even mentioning any biological species.

Yet, leaving the title issue aside, the misanthropic argument is in my opinion by far Benatar’s best argument.

Basically it goes as follows:

“The strongest misanthropic argument for anti-natalism is, I said, a moral one. It can be presented in various ways, but here is one:

1. We have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
2. Humans cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death.
3. Therefore, we have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing new humans into existence.” (p.79)

Benatar devotes a considerable part of the misanthropic argument section to base the second premise of his argument. Based on some famous social psychology experiments, as well as other evidences from other fields, he details about humans’ violent tendencies, scary conformism and etc. This sub-section is called Human Nature—The Dark Side.
Then he mentions some notorious historical atrocities humans have inflicted on each other, writing: “Humans have killed many millions of other humans in war and in other mass atrocities, such as slavery, purges, and genocides.”

After specifying some of the violence humans inflict on other humans, he goes on specifying violence humans inflict on animals. In this sub-section he reviews the major animal exploitation industries, briefly describing the horrible life in each.

The last part of his foundation of the second premise is the harm that humans cause to other humans and to animals by the destructive effect they have on the environment.
He writes:

“For much of human history, the damage was local. Groups of humans fouled their immediate environment. In recent centuries the human impact has increased exponentially and the threat is now to the global environment. The increased threat is a product of two interacting factors—the exponential growth of the human population combined with significant increases in negative effects per capita. The latter is the result of industrialization and increased consumption.
The consequences include unprecedented levels of pollution. Filth is spewed in massive quantities into the air, the rivers, lakes, and seas, with obvious effects on those humans and animals who breath the air; live in or near the rivers, lakes and seas; or get their water from those sources.” (p.99)

Benatar is aware that most people would reply to his misanthropic argument saying that instead of preventing humans’ procreation we should reduce their destructiveness. But he disagrees:

“we cannot expect that human destructiveness will ever be reduced to such levels. Human nature is too frail and the circumstances that bring out the worst in humans are too pervasive and likely to remain so. Even where institutions can be built to curb the worst human excesses, these institutions are always vulnerable to moral entropy. It is naïve utopianism to think that a species as destructive as ours will cease, or all but cease, to be destructive.” (p.104)

And adds:

“Given the current size of the human population and the current levels of human consumption, each new human or cohort of humans adds incrementally to the amount of animal suffering and death and, via the environmental impact, to the amount of harm to humans (and animals).” (p.109)

And concludes:

Humans would never voluntarily cease to procreate, and would never cease to be destructive. That’s why we must aim at human extinction by forced sterilization.

Pro-Natalism

The second part of the book is written by David Wasserman who argues for the defense of procreation. He begins with a brief critique of Benatar’s asymmetry, mainly by mentioning the familiar aspects which were specified in the post dedicated to it, so there is no point repeating it here. He also criticizes Benatar’s quality-of-life argument, again mainly by mentioning the familiar aspects such as that Benatar offers unduly pessimistic assessments and inappropriately perfectionist standards.
A more interesting claim he makes is regarding the dynamics between Benatar’s asymmetry and his quality-of-life argument, a point which was mentioned in the post regarding extinction and pro-mortalism. Wasserman wonders why Benatar even needs the asymmetry argument (which he calls the comparative argument) and is not sufficed with the quality-of-life argument (which he calls the philanthropic argument), as Benatar:

“does not regard his comparative argument by itself as making the case that all procreation is wrongful. That case also requires his philanthropic argument, which is designed to show just how bad our lives really are. But if it is the magnitude of the harm that gives rise to a complaint, not the conclusion that life is always a harm, then it is not clear what role the comparative argument plays in reaching that conclusion. If careful scrutiny and critical assessment could show that life was very harmful overall for everyone, or almost everyone, then why would it matter for purposes of a moral complaint that it was also disadvantageous in comparison with nonexistence? The extremely high odds of a very bad existence would make procreation wrongful on any reasonable decision rule for risk or uncertainty.” (p.151)

So Wasserman thinks that Benatar should make do with his quality-of-life argument and doesn’t need the asymmetry, but he doesn’t agree with it for reasons which were mentioned above, and since he thinks that not only the risks must be considered but also their probability (which he claims are very low). To that he adds criticism of the attempt to use principles taken from Rawls’s Theory of Justice to constitute an antinatalist argument. Both arguments, the risk and Rawls’s Maximin, are worthy of a separate discussion. The one about risk can be found here, and the one about Rawls’s theory of justice can be found here. Therefore, I’ll not detail them here.

Intuitively, it would make sense to mainly focus here on Wasserman’s counter arguments to the misanthropic argument, given that this is Benatar’s novel argument in this book, and since I think that the harm to others is the most important antinatalist argument. However, Wasserman cowardly, poorly, and extremely speciesistly, evades the argument of the harm to others. His evasiveness is another proof that there is no way to seriously confront this claim. Wasserman’s response to the harm to others argument, as unbelievable as it is two decades into the third millennium, is almost Cartesian, meaning he simply denies the moral validity of animals’ suffering, this is what he wrote:
“I can only respond briefly, in part because I strongly disagree with Benatar’s weighing of the suffering of minimally-sentient animals, a disagreement we cannot resolve here.” (p.166)
Benatar details some of the common horrors done to animals on daily basis in factory farms, laboratories, the entertainment business, and the clothing industry, claiming that: “Humans inflict untold suffering and death on many billions of animals every year, and the overwhelming majority of humans are heavily complicit.” (p. 93) and Wasserman’s reply is that animals don’t really matter. That’s it. His “reply” is simply disgraceful.

Regarding the harms to other humans that Benatar details about as part of the misanthropic argument, Wasserman’s reply is that he disagrees most sharply with Benatar on the implications of human destructiveness and cruelty for individual procreative decisions. And surprisingly, the argument he uses to justify this claim, in my view, undermines moral philosophy:

“I do no think prospective parents must “universalize” about the likely consequences if everyone judged or acted as they do. I think the concerns about the consequences “if everyone did it” have far more relevance for policymakers than prospective parents. Although the latter must be cautious in their predictions about their children and may reasonably have concerns about the fairness and cumulative impact of similar decisions, I believe that they do not need to give this the same weight in their decisions as policymakers or other impartial third parties should in theirs.” (p.167)

Universalizing decisions and acting as policymakers is exactly how ethics should work. That doesn’t imply using Kant’s categorical imperative for any possible case, but Wasserman doesn’t even suggest exceptional cases or anything of this sort. He practically permits people to act as they wish as long as they are not official policymakers, as if only the actions of the latter have consequences. Obviously all actions have consequences, and all consequences must be considered ethically, especially when it comes to actions that everyone can do, like creating a new person.
What’s the point in morality if it is subjective? What exactly is the validation of ethics if every couple can be their own personal policymakers?

I wanted to seriously confront a serious opposition to the misanthropic argument, but Wasserman didn’t provide one. So I’ll focus in the rest of this text on three other points that he makes which I have found worth addressing.

The Good Of The Children

The first point is Wasserman’s claim, and the example allegedly proving that claim, that people can have a child for the child’s sake:

“Here is an example to give some flesh, and plausibility, to the idea that prospective parents can create children for reasons that concern the good of the children, or at least their shared good. Consider a couple who very much want children and decide to adopt. They are normally fertile, but are moved by the need to find homes for the many orphaned children in their country now housed in institutions. This, however, is not their primary reason for adopting; it merely tips the balance. Their reasons include wanting the fulfillment of raising a child from a young age, seeking the uniquely intimate relationship that a child develops with its parents, and giving the child a good home—among the reasons given in surveys of prospective parents. They regard these as reasons that could be served equally well by adoption or conception. Just as they are going to start visiting orphanages, their government prohibits adoption—orphans and abandoned children will be wards of the state, with temporary foster parents in special cases. The couple is very disappointed but quickly decides to go with “Plan B”—they conceive a child for the same reasons.
The point of this example is not just to illustrate that adoption and procreation may be done for similar reasons. As important for my purposes, it suggests the limited role that the actual vs. contingent existence of the child may play in the sorts of reasons prospective parents have. The couple in my example starts by seeking to find a child of their own who already exists, or whose existence is not contingent on their actions. Barred from doing so, they shift to creating a child. But their reasons for doing the latter are largely the same as their reasons for having sought the former. The desire to help existing needy children was just a tiebreaker.” (p.190)

I fail to see the reasoning behind this argument or the explanatory power of this example.
If anything this example proves the opposite. It goes to show that these people want a child of their own, not to help someone in need. If they find no difference in that sense between adopting a child and creating one, then clearly the interests of the child weren’t their motive, as in one option there is an existing child who is orphan and so in need, and in the other option there is no one who needs anything.
It is the parents who wanted the fulfillment of raising a child from a young age. Before they have procreated, that child didn’t exist and so didn’t share their want. It wasn’t in the interests of that child to be raised from a young age. Non-existing persons don’t have interests and no wants, so it can’t be for the good of the child. An existing child on the other hand, does have an interest to be raised from a young age. That’s a very important difference between the two cases.

And same goes for the second reason – no non-existing person is seeking the uniquely intimate relationship that a child develops with its parents. But existing persons – prospective parents, and even more so orphans – probably do. In the case of procreation, seeking the uniquely intimate relationship is the parents’ want imposed on the child they have created.
The last reason is no different. While orphans desperately need a good home, because they already exist but don’t have one, non-existing persons don’t need a home, or anything else for that matter. The need for a good home was created correspondingly with their creation.

There are many ways to really act for reasons that concern the good of the children, but none of them includes creating ones. There are many children who have parents but don’t have other things that would make their lives better, why not focus on them? Why not help children with their homework? Why not volunteer to babysit them every once in a while? Why not starting a children class for free? Why not choose professions that focus on care for the good of the children like being teachers, doctors, social workers, kindergartners, Clown Cares, and etc.?
If it was really benefiting children that was on their mind they would invest most of their time, energy and resources on existing children who are in need, instead of on someone who they have created its need by procreation. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyone who wants to provide a good home for someone in need, who feel they have so much love to give, who want to do good for others, can adopt a homeless dog from a shelter.

Wasserman argues that “For both adoptive and biological parents, the child’s “bare existence” is a necessary condition for fulfilling their primary end but is not, or need not be, a primary end in itself.” (p. 193) But that doesn’t explain choosing the most senseless option. And even if there wasn’t any other option for giving and the only option was truly to create a need, it is still treating someone as a means to an end. The child had neither interest nor any say in being created into existence. The child is a mean to the parents’ ends.

Unfortunately there is no shortage in philanthropist aims in this world, why choose to create a new one and focus on it? With so much misery in the world why create a new need? Doesn’t it make much more sense to focus on an existing need?

If this world lacks love and meaning, what is the point of increasing the number of creatures who need love and meaning? This is the stupidest form of giving.
Or, of course, that it is not really the reason why people procreate. The real reasons are that people feel powerful when someone is totally depended on them, they feel needed and important, it fills the empty and pointless lives of people with meaning, they believe it would save their relationships, it eases loneliness, it soothes their fear of getting old with no one to take care of them, biological impulse, genetical vanity, immortality illusion, continuity illusion, it makes them feel normal, it makes them look normal to others, conformism, stupidity, accident.

Tantrum in the Mall as a Sip of Lifelong Frustration

The second point I want to address is Wasserman’s argument regrading parents’ duty towards their children: “Even the most spoiled child should recognize that his parents do not have a duty to maximally satisfy his interests; that their own interests, as well as those of a myriad of others, appropriately limit their duty to satisfy his.” (p.154)

This claim might be true when that child would grow up but in real time that child suffers. As an adult that child might regret being so spoiled, but that doesn’t serve as compensation for the frustration at not getting maximum satisfaction. The fact that the child is wrong doesn’t make that child less wanting and less frustrated. Many children tend to keep crying and screaming when they don’t get what they want even after they are explained that what they want is exaggerated or that there is no option to provide them everything they want, any time they want it. And that, in my view, holds much more than might seem. Only because it is obvious that children don’t get everything they want, and also because the crying and screaming scene is so common, people don’t stop and think about the fact that they are creating someone who would want everything possible, and would have to compromise on very little of that. They don’t stop and think about the fact that they are creating someone who would be constantly frustrated.
And it doesn’t end at childhood, it continues throughout their whole life. It is only refined along the years, when children learn to suppress some of their desires (which might come out in different ways that are not necessarily more positive), or control their urges and desires (which again, doesn’t always turn out to be better), but this is forever. Frustration is forever.

The crying and screaming scene on the shopping mall floor because the child got a little bit smaller toy than wanted, which have become so familiar that it turned into a parenthood cliché, is much deeper than children being extremely spoiled. There are so many advices for how to deal with these scenes. Most blame the parents. And they are right, but not because they don’t know how to set boundaries for their children, but because they don’t know how to set boundaries for themselves. It is the parents who are too spoiled and selfish and careless about the effects on others. It is them who acted to promote their own interests and so created a toy for themselves. They don’t know how to postpone gratifications and therefore have created a new small unit of exploitation and pollution which doesn’t know how to postpone gratifications.

This scene, which is considered as parents’ initiation, and which some go through several times during a lifetime, has been so normalized, that rarely do people realize that this wanting being they have chosen to create, didn’t have to exist, and now that it does, it constantly wants things and is being constantly limited. Frustration, even when is the product of being spoiled, is still frustration. People must realize they are creating a wanting being which would be constantly unsatisfied. Quieter children who don’t cry and scream when not getting something, are viewed as more mature and better educated children, and less spoiled. That might be true, and they might internalize that being spoiled is not good, but looking at the screaming children getting their toys, makes them frustrated. Some of them want that toy just as much, but they have internalized the expectation of them to suppress their wants.

You can look at the mall scene as merely children being too spoiled, or as lack of parental authority, or the consequences of the snowflake attitude, or the effects of the consumerist society, or a little bit of each. But it is also a window of opportunity to comprehend that creating a child is creating a bottomless pit of wants which can’t be satisfied. Of course this example is totally marginal but it is not trivial just because it is so common. It is a window of opportunity because when children are in a state of tantrum there are almost no emotional impediments. Obviously, these scenes are in many cases very manipulative (children are not yet equipped with many tools to help them get what they want so they use what they have which is crying and screaming and kicking as hard as possible), however, they nevertheless express true helplessness. These incidents often occur when children feel they have no control over the circumstances. They want things but are helpless in getting them. Helplessness can often produce fear as the children are depended on other people’s wishes. These scenes are also much more raw than the customary desires of adults, as they are highly socialized to navigate their desires in more subtle ways.

In light of the horrors Benatar specified in the first part, obviously the mall scene doesn’t only pale but seems absolutely ridiculous. But I am not bringing it up as an example of human frustration, but as an example of the greatest trivialization of human’s most trivial frustration. What makes it interesting is the glimpse it offers for everybody to publicly see how much of a lump of wants a person is, and how much frustration even the most trivial scene contains, and how trivial frustration is in people’s lives. The scene is so trivial that everybody accepts it. The child would learn that we don’t get everything we want in life. Unfortunately the adults don’t learn that they shouldn’t create frustration, even if it is very very marginal.
Parents are forcing their children to give up the toy they want, because they have refused to give up the toys they wanted to create.

Russian Roulette

As mentioned earlier, I have addressed the risk argument in a separate text, so here I’ll make do with a quick note on Wasserman’s remark regarding Benatar’s risk imposition metaphor which according to him:

“gains spurious strength, I suspect, from the Russian roulette simile he employs, which has prospective parents pointing a gun at the head of their future child; a gun with a high proportion of chambers loaded. This simile is misleading. As the literature on the ethics of risk imposition and distribution points out, it matters a great deal if the threatened harm will be imposed intentionally. Shooting someone with a loaded gun is intentionally harming him, even if the discharge of a bullet had been far from certain.” (p.165)

One might argue that the parents are not always the ones who pull the trigger. However, they are definitely the ones who set the target, and they are the ones who load at least some of the bullets.
Parents who know that their children would experience suffering, and every parent knows that suffering is inevitable at least at some point in life, are setting the target. Had that child not been created by them, there would have been no one to shoot at.
They are loading some of the bullets by passing physical and mental traits which their children would suffer from. Other starting points might also affect the life of that child. If the environmental conditions are bad, then the gun is loaded with even more bullets. And if it is quite certain that the child is prone to a serious disease, or that the parents are prone to a serious disease, or have a violent history, for example, then the parents are also pulling the trigger, at least in some rounds, and the other rounds are being completed by other factors.
Since parents are creating persons out of their own will and for their own benefit, they are imposing an intended risk on someone else’s life. They don’t intend to harm their own children, but they intendedly ignore the fact that their children would surely be harmed.

When considering the harm to others, since the parents are the ones who provide their children food, clothes, energy and every other harmful aspect involved with supporting their life, they are definitely held responsible in every possible way. They have created this consuming being which wasn’t there and wasn’t deprived of anything before they have decided to create it, and now it exists, and it is hurting many sentient creatures in many different ways for no justified reason at all.
Considering the enormous harm every person inflicts on others, and the loaded weapon is not a gun, but an aircraft carrier.

References

Benatar David and Wasserman David, Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Benatar, D. Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

The philosopher John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness, is not an antinatalist. Furthermore, the theory he developed along these books, is according to him, not an ethical framework but a political one. Yet, some of the basic ideas in the theory are often used in ethical discussions. In my view, applying his theory of justice on procreation, if genuinely used impartially, must lead to the conclusion that procreation is not fair and is unjust – it must lead to antinatalism.

The Original Position

Rawls’s theory of justice is an evolvement of the social contract doctrine, and is mainly based on the idea that justice can only be obtained by free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The theory suggests that the principles of justice, which according to Rawls would regulate an ideal society, are ones which would be chosen by every individual if every individual were in what he calls The Original Position.
The original position is a thought experiment in which each real citizen has a representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of the real citizens. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that must be adopted when discussing the fundamental principles of justice in order to uncover the most reasonable principles of justice. The main tool for ensuring fairness and impartiality is The Veil of Ignorance – the parties in the original position are deprived of all knowledge regarding the personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances of the citizens they represent. This prevents arbitrary facts about citizens such as their gender, race, class, age, education, religion and etc., from influencing the representatives. They are also unaware of the political system of the society, its history, its class structure, economic system, or level of economic development, and even the time in which they are living (so they won’t overlook the expected interests of future generations).
The idea is that if the representatives know nothing about the people they represent, not only would they be unable to prioritize their personal interests, they would probably promote principles that are fair to all. If no one knows whose fate they are shaping, the rational choice would be to constitute principles that treat all fairly.

The original position, according to Rawls, sets fair and equal conditions for the parties to constitute a just social agreement. The fairness of the original agreement situation transfers to the principles everyone agree to. In other words, the agreement’s fairness is derived from the equal and fair conditions it was created under.

Maximin

Rawls argues that given that the parties are behind the veil of ignorance when setting the principles of justice, it is most rational for them to play it as safe as possible by choosing the alternative whose worst outcome leaves their citizens better off than the worst outcome of all other alternatives. Their aim should be to maximize the minimum regret or loss to well-being, therefore this rule is called maximin. In the original position context it means that the parties should maximize the minimum level of primary goods that the citizens they represent might find themselves with. And in a general context, it’s choosing the best possibility among the worst probabilities.
It is very likely that all parties would adopt the maximin rule since everyone understands that someone has to be in the worst position and since the representatives don’t know who they represent, for all they know it might be them. Therefore rational parties would choose the best possible worst case, by ensuring that the ones who are at the bottom of the social order, would be prioritized in terms of resources. In other words it would be rational of each to maximize the worse off case.

According to Rawls, given the unique character of the original position, being irrevocable and not renegotiable set of choices, a state where the parties decide the basic structure of their society, and the kind of social world they will live in, adopting the maximin rule is particularly rational and advisable. Because all one’s interests and future prospects are at stake in the original position, and there is no hope of renegotiating the outcome, a rational person would act upon the maximin rule. It is more rational under conditions of complete uncertainty, assuming an equal probability of occupying any position in society, always to choose according to the principle of maximin. Rawls’s logic is that if the worst case would be realized, at least it would be the best worst case possible.

Rawls claims that his theory is not being risk-averse, but rather entirely rational to refuse to gamble with basic liberties, equal opportunities, and essential resources, for the sake of the possibility of gaining more power, resources, and income.

A Theory of Antinatalism

Rawls’s theory of justice is a development of the social contract doctrine for an ideal of a well-ordered society. The original position and the veil of ignorance are hypothetical concepts of a thought experiment that aims at extracting and focusing on what really matters to people as social beings.
However, if we apply the basics of this theory to the issue of creating people, given that every possible life must be represented in the original position, including of course the possibility of people who feel that their lives are not worth living and that prefer that they had never existed, in terms of procreation, this would be the worse off case. Since in any case, even in a much better world than our horrible one, it is inevitable that some people would feel that their lives are not worth living, and that they rather never to have been, when it comes to creating people, being coerced to be born is the worst possible option, and so according to the maximin rule, we must never procreate.

The ‘worst case’ possibility is life not worth living. The probability of this option is morally irrelevant since it is the principle that counts, and according the Rawls’s theory of justice the principle is that the worse off are of primal consideration, even if the worse off option was relevant for a tiny minority only. Of course one can argue that if the principle leads us to an absurd conclusion, maybe we should reject it? But there is nothing absurd about this conclusion when it comes to creating people since no one would be harmed by not being created, and at least a tiny minority (which is actually probably hundreds of millions of people) would be forced to live a life not worth living if this conclusion won’t be applied. No matter what the quantitative proportions are, even if it is “only” few people against everyone else, since no one would be harmed had they never existed, and the “few” would be extremely harmed if existed, it is better that no one would exist.
Rejecting the maximin rule in the case of procreation, means imposing lives not worth living for the sake of the ones who might enjoy their lives. That is sacrificing some for the sake of others, and it is treating people, all the more so the less fortunate ones, as means to other people’ ends –  the more fortunate and already better off ones. If anything, that is absurd. How is it fair or just, that someone would suffer so others might enjoy themselves (and anyone with even the slightest familiarity with life knows how brief and fragile joy is), all the more so when none of them would be deprived of this joy had they not existed?

Prospective parents are in a veil of ignorance, they have no idea what kind of a life the person they are creating would be forced to endure. So the right thing to do is to play it as safe as possible by choosing the alternative whose worst outcome leaves their children better off than the worst outcome of all other alternatives. In procreation context the maximin rule means that the prospective parents should maximize the minimum level of harm that the persons they are creating might find themselves with. The way to maximize the minimum regret or loss to well-being, is not to procreate.

It is very likely that most prospective parents would not adopt antinatalism, despite that everyone understands that someone has to be in the worst position (since the prospective parents don’t know what kinds of lives their children would maintain, for all they know it might be them). The reason they won’t adopt antinatalism is that people are too careless, even when it comes to their own children. Therefore, prospective parents, who are definitely not rational parties, are not maximizing the worse off by not taking any risk that their children would lead miserable lives, but rather they are ignoring the worse off possibility, and for their own selfish sake.

It is quite obvious that since there is a possibility of life not worth living, and in fact there are many people who feel that way, then even if we ignore the inherent problems involved with people’s evaluations of their lives value, and for the sake of the argument totally accept their self-evaluation (despite it being totally biased and psychologically inclined), even the strongest pro-natalist claims – that people want to live – don’t hold against the possibility of a life not worth living in the eyes of the ones who live it.

Lives not worth living is not a theoretical possibility, it is a certainty. People whom their lives are not worth living would be born, and the chances for that happening are renewed with each procreation. Misery has no quota. The only way to avoid this worse off option is by not procreating.

Justice to Others

Finally and most importantly, Rawls’s original position consists of free and rational agents who represent humans only. When considering the interests of every sentient creature on earth (as we obviously must and Rawls totally omits), meaning that the original position would really include every morally relevant being, and the representatives have no idea the interests of whose species they represent, human procreation should not only be prohibited under the maximin rule, but as a fundamental violation of other sentient creatures’ most basic rights, such as the right to life, freedom from torture, the right for body integrity, freedom from discrimination, right to free movement, the right to be free from pain, the right not to be treated as means to others’ ends, and etc.

Rawls argues that maximin must be the prime guideline mostly in cases of uncertainty regarding the acceptable outcome, and if it is impossible to guarantee some crucial basic liberties. For nonhumans, humans’ procreation certainly brings about a very unacceptable outcome, and a guarantee that their most crucial and basic liberties would be violated.

I wrote earlier that prospective parents are in a veil of ignorance, but that is only regarding the lives their children would be forced to live. They are not in a veil of ignorance regarding the option that their children would be forced to live miserable lives, and that their children would definitely make the lives of others miserable. They know very well that the first scenario is highly possible, and that the second one is unavoidable. They are just careless enough to ignore these horrible outcomes. They are not ignorant, they are indifferent. Had they been ignorant, us radical antinatalists would ought to educate them. But since they are indifferent, educating them is irrelevant. So what we ought to do is educate ourselves, we must look for technological ways to make it impossible for them to procreate. That would not be a theory of justice, but the best practice of it.

References

Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press 1971)

Rawls, J. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press 2001)

The following text is the third and last part of my comments on some of Julio Cabrera’s replies to the questions he was asked in The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast #19 – Julio Cabrera ‘Questionaire on Antinatalism’. In this part I’ll address Cabrera’s reply to the question of involuntary sterilization.

For comments on his replies to questions regarding his general approach to Antinatalism please read part 1. And for comments on his replies to the questions regarding: The moral status of animals, Abortion, EFILism, and Veganism, please read part 2.

Question 16:

“If it were so that the only way to stop people from procreation was something akin to involuntary sterilization, you say that the end justifies the means? Do we have a moral obligation to prevent others from committing the ultimate moral transgression – procreation? If yes, then how? If no then why not?”

Cabrera:

“Involuntary sterilization would be something totally immoral within a negative ethics, in a certain line of argumentation, of course. I have one theoretical line and another practical.
(1). At least within a deontological and not utilitarian ethics such as negative ethics, in order to decide something ethically we have to take into account the autonomies of those involved. In this case we have two autonomies to consider: the real autonomy of the procreators and the conjectured autonomy of the procreated.”

First of all, it is hard to ignore that when Cabrera wants to counter-argue involuntary sterilization then there is a division between the real autonomy of the procreators and the conjectured autonomy of the procreated, but when he wants to counter-argue abortion, then not only the autonomy of the procreated, but the autonomy of the fetus is not conjectured but considered as real and equal to its parents’ autonomy, despite that it is not even conscious yet. If you are baffled by this claim, please listen to his stand regarding abortion in the questionnaire (question 21), or read about it in the second part where I am addressing his anti-abortion view.
But obviously the point is to try and deal with the core of the argument, so I’ll ignore the manipulation and focus on the point he is making here which is that we must consider the autonomy of the people who have a desire to procreate.

The reason this argument is false is first of all since a desire is not an ethical justification. The desire to do something is insufficient as a moral justification to do it even if the desirers are autonomies. Obviously people have an interest to procreate, that’s why they are procreating, but that is a description of our dire reality, not an ethical justification of it.
It is ethically false, if not absurd, to consider the interests in doing something which is basically wrong, as a counter argument for the action’s wrongness. It is balancing the harmfulness of a crime with the interests of the criminals to perform it.
A strong interest to do something wrong doesn’t make it right. Neither does the resulted frustration if the wrong action is prohibited. To claim otherwise is to nullify criminalness, as all that any offender should claim is that by stopping him from committing a crime we are violating his autonomy. The autonomy of every offender would be hurt if they couldn’t continue with their offences, is it a justified reason to let them go on with their crimes? Rapists might feel that their autonomy is hurt if they are not allowed to rape, or if they are caught, is that a reason not to do everything we can to stop them? Can the desire to rape be an argument in favor of raping?
Can people’s autonomy and desire to eat animals be a justification for the torture of the animals they consume? Arguing that all factory farms must be closed down today for the pain and misery they cause can’t be seriously counter argued by claiming that people have a desire to eat meat, eggs and milk, and preventing it from them is not considering their autonomy.

Cabrera argues that:

“Even though it is immoral to procreate from the antinatalist perspective that we assume, there are other perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments (in fact, Benatar is frequently answering objections because the question is highly controversial).”
Of course this question is highly controversial but not because there are other perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments, or because it is highly complicated in philosophical terms, but because people want to procreate. It is arguments against selfish desires, social conventions, biological urges, and many other motivations, but definitely not reasonable counter-arguments.
There are no perspectives that present reasonable counter-arguments to antinatalism, there are only excuses that present counter-motivations to antinatalism.

The desire of people to procreate is morally wrong and therefore their autonomy can’t be weighed, not to mention in an equal manner, against the harms forced on the procreated.

Cabrera is aware that the only way to justify the refusal to impose on procreators the prevention of their immoral desire to procreate is by arguing that it is not necessarily immoral. Since if it is immoral, then it is morally justified to ignore the autonomy of the criminals and impose a prevention of their crimes just as it is in other cases of immoral actions such as torture, rape and murder. Therefore he makes the following move:

“If we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the murderer when he is about to kill someone, why would we not have the right to not respect the autonomy of the procreator when he is about to generate someone? I reply that in the case of existing people, we can clearly see that the victim of a murderer wants to continue to exist (and if he does not want to – as in the case of assisted suicide – we can also know this). But in the case of non-existent people, antinatalists assume uncritically that the non-being wants certainly to continue not to exist.”

By claiming that in the case of procreation, as opposed to murder, there is room for speculation, Cabrera states that he is not really sure about his claims regarding the immorality of procreation.
It might be the case that he thinks that procreation is not a serious crime as murder, but that would go against many of his other claims, including ones he has made along the questionnaire, and definitely ones that he made in the book A Critique of Affirmative Morality. For someone whose antinatalism is so heavily based on the harm of mortality, I would expect him to argue that not only is procreation a crime as serious as murder but actually is a type of murder. And since when he talks about mortality he is not only arguing that it is a harm because everyone must die, but because everyone starts dying when they are born, procreation is supposed to be consider by him even worse than murder as it is a slow structural murder. It would have made sense for him to claim that since people are in a constant state of dying then procreators are in a constant state of murdering. But instead of making claims which are accordant and consistent with his other claims, he insists on abruptly claiming that antinatalism is speculative.

For anyone who is less familiar with Cabrera’s other stands, here is a representative sample taken from his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality:

“Even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build, etc.” (p.54)

And one taken from his article Negative Ethics:

“To come into being is to be ontologically impoverished, sensibly affected and ethically blocked: to be alive is a fight against everything and everybody, trying all the time to escape from suffering, failure and injustice. This strongly suggests that the true reason for making someone to come into being is never for the person’s own sake, but always for the interest of his/her progenitors, in a clear attitude of manipulation; radical manipulation indeed because, in contrast with usual manipulation of people already alive, manipulation in procreation affects the very being of the person, and not only some of his/her predicates.”

So Cabrera’s own antinatalist claims aren’t in line with his reply. Neverthelss a serious reply must be made to the argument that “antinatalists assume uncritically that the non-being wants certainly to continue not to exist”, an argument he further develops along his answer accusing antinatalists for easily going from the premise that the world is a bad place, to the conclusion that nobody wants to live in a bad place. And he finds this sequitur controversial:
“If our conjecture about the interests of the non-being is totally rational, it is certain that it would prefer to continue in the same state. But if the conjecture is made on the basis of humans we know, emotions will prevail over reason and the interests of the non-being could be, despite everything, to come into existence. After all, we are recreating the autonomy of the procreated in pure speculative terms, guided by certain philosophical ideas; but there are perspectives guided by other ideas according to which the non-being wants to exist and is asking for it. This, of course, is equality speculative. But how can one unite between two equally conjectural conceptions of the interests of the not being? Pure speculation about the desires of the not being, in the impossibility of deciding between speculations, is strong enough for me not to procreate, but it seems too weak to prevent others from procreating. What is a strong reason for making my own decision may not be strong enough to justify intervention.”

I will ignore, for the sake of the argument, that he seems to ascribe interests to non-beings, and even that like many pro-natalists, he of all people, the philosopher who criticized Benatar’s asymmetry and presented a different and quite unique approach to antinatalism, treats antinatalism as if it is a movement with one argument, let alone one that is ascribing interests to non-existing beings, despite that there are many other reasons why procreation is wrong, and I’ll focus on the speculation issue.
In order to oppose involuntary sterilization Cabrera takes the very long road of arguing first that the parents’ autonomy and desire must be considered despite that procreation is morally wrong (a claim which is addressed above), and that although he thinks that procreation is morally wrong, antinatalism is speculative. The fact that procreation is morally wrong is not speculative because it needs not to be based on conjectural conceptions of the interests of non-existing beings, but on the fact that at least the interests of some created people would be never to have been.
Given that lives which are found not worth living by the ones who are living them, not by antinatalist, are being created all the time, there is nothing speculative about the claim that the interests of at least some created people is that they had never been created. The fact that their creation severely harms them is not speculative but unquestionable. So letting procreation continue despite that it is guaranteed that at least some of the created people would rather never to have been, is actually claiming that forcing some people to endure miserable lives that they wish were never imposed on them, is justified by the desire of other people to procreate.

This argument must not be confused with the common antinatalist risk argument. Although I find it one of the strongest antinatalist arguments, I think there is something misleading in its common formulation. That is since on the global level procreation is not a gamble, it is not a risk, it is absolutely certain that some persons would be forced to live extremely miserable lives. Somewhere in the world, miserable persons are being created. And that fact turns the argument from a risk that some of the created people would be forced to endure horrible lives, to a decision that some of the created people would be forced to endure horrible lives. People who decide to procreate are not only taking a risk on someone else’s life, they also approve and strengthen the claim that the suffering of some is justified because of the desire of others to procreate. The procreators’ autonomy argument entails sacrificing people who would be miserable if procreation is allowed, for the sake of people’s autonomy if procreation isn’t allowed.

So the speculative argument is false, as even if I’ll accept for the sake of the argument that it is speculative whether everyone’s existence is a harm, it is not speculative that if procreation is allowed, miserable lives would inevitably occur.

One might suggest that what we ought to do is weigh the interests of the people who want to procreate against the suffering of the ones who would have miserable lives, but that is a false equivalency. That is since procreation is not only forcing needless and pointless suffering on the created person, but is in fact, first and foremost, forcing needless and pointless suffering on thousands of other sentient creatures, since each person created is hurting thousands of sentient creatures during a lifetime.
Even if we’ll accept for the sake of the argument that it is speculative whether the created person is going to be harmed as a result of its existence, there is nothing speculative about that thousands of sentient creatures would be harmed by the created person.

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.
Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the ones with the highest price – animal based foods.
Each person directly consumes thousands of animals. More accurate average figures are varied according to each person location. An average American meat eater for example consumes more than 2,020 chickens, about 1,700 fish, more than 70 turkeys, more than 30 pigs and sheep, about 11 cows, and tens of thousands of aquatic animals, some directly and some indirectly (as many of which are fed to consumed animals).
Therefore in most cases procreating is choosing that more fish would suffocate to death by being violently sucked out of water, that more chickens would be crammed 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 for 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 most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision one must make – procreation is practically letting a mass murderer on the loose.

And it is not that vegan food is harmless. It is much less harmful, but still very harmful. It is impossible to eat without harming someone, somewhere along the way, even when sticking to a vegan, local, organic and seasonable diet. It is impossible to entirely avoid using fertilizers, packages, pesticides, transportation, water, energy, and to avoid producing waste.
For a broader explanation why harming is inevitable please read the text the harms to others, where there is a more detailed information regarding some of the inherent harms of humans, all humans, and regardless of what they eat.

And anyway, a vegan, local, organic and seasonable diet, is relevant for extremely tiny minority of people who care enough to choose the least harmful options at any given time. Even most vegans and environmentalists are not doing that. Most vegans simply consume plant based food, and most environmentalists still hardly connect food with environmentalism. In recent years there is a positive awaking in that area, but still it mostly regards dolphin safe tuna, food’s carbon footprint, bottled water, and avoiding six pack rings.
And of course the vast majority of people are extremely far from even being aware of all of that, not to mention considering it, or even thinking that they should. And that is a very strong reason for forced sterilization, since there is no way to avoid harming others even if everyone tried, and currently the vast majority of people not only don’t want to, but support the exact opposite.

Living on a planet with limited resources, no one can really avoid getting in conflict with others. No one should cause suffering to anyone, but no one can not cause suffering to others. Everything people do affects others, so it is even theoretically impossible to fulfil the most basic ethical requirement – do no harm. And practically, it is far from being the case that people are harming only since and when they cannot do otherwise. I wish people were harming others only for survival reasons. Reality is unfortunately much crueler. People harm, exploit, torture, humiliate, deprive, attack, ignore, abuse and whatnot, for much less essential reasons. People don’t harm others because they have things that they need, but mostly because they have things that they want.

It is interesting that Cabrera has made a rhetorical comparison between procreating and killing, since the two shouldn’t only be compared on the rhetorical level. As aforementioned, in some sense, especially under Cabrera’s notions of procreation and death, procreating is killing as it is creating someone who has to die. And while that maybe speculative and arguable, the fact that every person kills many others during its life is inarguable. People are killing others on a daily basis, mostly to feed themselves but also to cover themselves, to move from place to place, to heat their houses, to build their houses, and practically for most of the things they consume. So even if you disagree with the claim that procreation is murder because it is creating someone who would necessarily die, procreation is murder anyway because it is creating a mass murderer.

Procreation and murder are in fact intertwined. Since as Cabrera mentioned earlier, we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the murderer when he is about to kill someone, we have the right not to respect the autonomy of the procreator when he is about to generate someone, as that someone would necessarily be a murderer.

Cabrera argued that there are two different autonomies which must be considered, of the procreators and of the procreated, but he ‘forgot’ the thousands autonomies that are violated by each created person. Before discussing the autonomy of procreators and procreated, we must consider the autonomy of everyone who would be harmed by each procreation.

Even if we could know the interests of non-existing persons before creating them, we first must consider the interests of everyone who would be sacrificed and otherwise harmed by these persons. We must consider their interests not to be genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons. We must consider their interests not to be imprisoned for their entire lives. We must consider their interests not to live without their family for their entire lives. We must consider their interests not to suffer chronic pain and maladies. We must consider their interests not to be deprived of breathing clean air, walking on grass, bathing in water, and eating their natural food. We must consider their interests not to be violently murdered so the to-be born could consume their bodies. We must consider their interests that their habitats won’t be destroyed, and that their land, water, and air won’t be polluted.

Procreation is not only creating a subject of harms and pleasures, but a small unit of exploitation and pollution. Therefore, the question is not is it justified that people would impose harms on another person so they can fulfil their desire to procreate, but is it justified that people would impose immense harm on many others so that they would fulfil their desire to procreate.

The question in point is not is it ethical to take the risk of creating miserable lives, but is it ethical to impose immense suffering on many others so that a truly tiny minority would
experience parenthood. How can it possibly be acceptable to force lives full of suffering on thousands of sentient beings, just so that one unethical preference of would-be parents won’t be frustrated?

But it goes even further than that. What should be weighed against the interests of people who want to procreate is not only the people who would be born into miserable lives, and not only the nonhuman animals who would be harmed by the newborns of the current people who want to procreate, but all the harms, and all the misery, and all the suffering that would ever be caused by humans. The equation is between one generation of people who would sacrifice their desire to procreate, and all the victims of all the procreations that would ever occur.
Human procreation is not only risking “a tiny minority” who might be sacrificed for the sake of people’s desire to procreate, it is ensuring that numerous generations of sentient creatures would be sacrificed for one desire of an extremely tiny minority – one generation, of one species only.
And since people don’t even take seriously the possibility that their own children might suffer extremely, there is no chance they would ever take seriously the certainty that numerous generations of sentient creatures would suffer extremely because of their procreation. That’s why we mustn’t wait until people understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate, or in other words involuntary sterilization.

However Cabrera argues that:

“Within a negative ethics, the autonomy of procreators, their desire to procreate cannot be ethically justified, as procreation is immoral. But even so, we cannot prevent others from procreating, since at least in an intellectual democracy, people have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses.”

What Cabrera is saying is that despite that people’s desire to procreate cannot be ethically justified as procreation is immoral, and despite that preventing others from procreating would prevent tremendous misery and imposition from every human that would ever exist, and from every nonhuman that every human that would ever exist would force to endure, since in an intellectual democracy, people have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses, we cannot prevent others from procreating. That is simply cruel. How can the deprivation of one desire, of one generation only, be seriously compared with the continuance and systematical deprivation of whomever would exist if that one generation is not involuntary sterilized?
Sentient creatures who would exist in the future are not less morally important than sentient creatures who live right now. And sentient creatures who would live in the future infinitely outnumber the ones who are alive today, let alone merely the humans who want to procreate. So giving the current humans who want to procreate the same moral weight as all the creatures that would ever be forced to suffer is a serious case of myopia, speciesism and cruelty.

Cabrera confuses a right to disagree with a right to impose. People may have the right to disagree with the antinatalist theses when it comes to their lives, but they have no right to impose their stands on others, let alone trillions of others. People don’t have a right to impose. And that’s exactly what they are doing when they are procreating. So does involuntary sterilization of course, but that is in order to stop the infinite impositions bound with the infinite procreations that would occur otherwise, it is an imposition to stop the suffering bound with existence. And it is an imposition to prevent one desire, which is totally immoral, and of one generation only, so that all future impositions of who knows how many generations would stop for good.

Imposition is anyway bound to happen. It is either that people would continue to decide for other people that they would exist, generation after generation after generation, and for other creatures that they would have to be exploited, suffer and be sacrificed for the sake of the people they insist on creating, or that we decide for one generation only that they won’t procreate. There is no way around it, decisions are anyway being made for others, the question is will it be only the decision not to procreate and for one generation only, or the decision to feel pain, to fear, to be bored, to be disappointed, to be sad, to be lonely, to be purposeless, to die, to fear dying and many other sources of suffering, and for generation after generation after generation after generation…

Given that the only way to cease the inherent imposition of procreation is with the inherent imposition of forced sterilization, clearly for the long run that resolution holds much less imposition than letting procreation continue on its current horrendous course. The number of individuals who would have to endure imposition of all kinds in the future if it won’t happen, is practically infinite. In fact, even without considering everyone who would ever exist, the number of individuals who endure coercion of all kinds in the present, already defeats the number of people who need to be sterilized.
Objecting involuntary sterilization on the current generation is forcing endless suffering on an endless number of individuals. Imposition is unavoidable, the question is of extent. The imposition involved in involuntary sterilization is for one generation only. The imposition involved in the refusal for involuntary sterilization can last until the sun burns out.

Think about it this way, if one generation of humans had decided that it is wrong to procreate and therefore agreed to sacrifice its desire to do so, that decision would have prevented all the suffering caused by humans from the moment the last person of that generation died. If for example that generation lived in the beginning of 19th century, that decision would have prevented all the suffering that occurred during the 20th century. Two world wars, hundreds of other wars, all the war crimes, all the reeducation camps, the famine in China, the famine in Ukraine, the famine in Japan, the famine in Russia, the famine in India, the famine in Somalia, the famine in Ethiopia, the famine in Mozambique, the famine in Yemen, the famine in Sudan, all the rapes, all the murders, all the tortures, all the concentration camps in Poland, Germany, Cambodia and North Korea, all the diseases, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Armenia, the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, all the animal experimentations, all the fishing, all the hunting, all the beating, all the humiliations, all the accidents, all the disappointments, all the frustrations, all the pains, and every second in every factory farm. Can the frustration of one generation, of one species only, seriously be compared with all these atrocities? Of course not. But the human race is far from being moral enough to decide not to procreate, no matter how obvious, essential, unequivocal and urgent it is. The human race is not moral enough to realize that if one of the former generations had made that call then all the atrocities of the 20th century and the ones happening now in 21st century wouldn’t have happened, and that if they would make that call now, all the atrocities of the 22nd century won’t happen. But the human race would never make that call.
Now if it was possible to sterilize that generation in the beginning of 19th century, an action which would have prevented the horrors of the 20th century, for the price of the frustration of the people who existed in the beginning of 19th century only and wanted to procreate, is it even conceivable to consider if it was worth it? Is it even conceivable to consider if it is worth doing now?

Cabrera argues that:

“We would have to come up with a very powerful justification for intervening in the lives all of these people, to prevent them from doing something that we consider to be immoral, but which they consider to be moral or morally neutral. I am not saying that we cannot intervene; I say that in order to prevent others from procreating, we should have a reason much stronger than the reason that leads us to not have children ourselves. Intervention is a very strong action that must be very well justified.”

And I agree. Indeed intervention is a very strong action that must be very well justified, and it is very well justified by the fact that procreation is a very serious crime.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing on someone else the most important decision in that person’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is harming someone else without that person’s consent.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is gambling with someone else’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after meaning in a meaningless, needless, pointless, and absurd world.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after pleasures despite that pleasures are not really intrinsically good but addictive falsehood smoke screen illusions, which trap sentient beings in an endless, pointless and vain seek for more of them. Pleasures are preceded by wants which are the absence of objects desired by subjects. People want because they are missing something. They seek pleasures to release the tension of craving. Craving or wants, are at least bad experiences if not a sort of pain. Pleasures are short and temporary, and compel a preceding deprivation, a want or a need, which is not always being fulfilled, rarely to the desired measure, and almost never exactly when wanted. And even when desires are fulfilled, the cycle starts again.

Procreation is a very serious crime because it is forcing someone into a needless, pointless, absurd, constant chase after happiness despite that according to the “set point” theory of happiness, which many psychologists find convincing nowadays, mood is homeostatic and we all have a fixed average level of happiness. That means that even desirable things which people do manage to obtain, are satisfying at first, but eventually people adapt to them and return to their “set points”. Therefore people usually end up more or less on the same level of wellbeing they were before. That’s why some argue that people actually run on hedonic treadmills.
Procreation is a very serious crime because there is a very realistic probability that a person forced into existence would be miserable. There is not even a theoretical possibility that a person forced into existence won’t be harmed at all. Creating someone who would definitely be harmed and the only variable is to what extent (with the potential of extreme misery), must be morally prohibited. Given that the motives are never the interests of the to-be born person, it is not only morally flawed, it is selfish, egocentric, arrogant, and careless.
Procreation is a very serious crime because the ample evidences that bad experiences are more important than good ones, not only serve as a proof that good experiences are at least not as good as bad experiences are bad (if not proving that bad experiences almost always outweigh the good ones), but how horrible life actually and inherently is. Basically, pain and other negative experiences, increase the fitness of individuals by enhancing their respondence ability to threats to their survival and reproduction. It has a crucial adaptive function. Existing sentient beings are tortured by evolutionary mechanisms which their only point is that additional sentient beings would exist, regardless of any of those beings’ personal wellbeing. It is a pointless, frustrating and painful trap.

Procreation is a very serious crime because it diverts energy, time and resources from persons who already exist and are in need, to those who needed nothing, were deprived of nothing, and harmed by nothing before they were forced into existence.
Procreation is a very serious crime because life is a constant Sisyphean struggle just to survive a life no one chose. Everyone is bound to overcome needless frustrations, disappointments, pains and discomforts.
Procreation is a very serious crime because each bad moment happening in life 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.

Procreation is a very serious crime because lives not worth living is not a theoretical possibility, it is a certainty. People whose lives are not worth living would be born, and the chances for that happening are renewed with each procreation. Misery has no quota. The only way to avoid this worse off option is by not procreating.
Procreation is a very serious crime because there is no way to retroactively revoke it, and there is not even an easy and harmless option for someone to end its own existence. Many people are trapped in horrible lives without a truly viable option to end it because they are too afraid to kill themselves, or because they don’t want to hurt the ones who care about them if they do, or are too afraid that if they won’t succeed in killing themselves they would be socially stigmatized in the better case, or coercively hospitalized in a worse one, or harm themselves so severely while trying to kill themselves that they would end up even worse than they were. Trapping people in the impossible situation of not wanting to live but not wanting to kill themselves so not to hurt others or because they are afraid to kill themselves for any of the mentioned reasons, is a very serious crime.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it forces someone to die, and to fear of death for most of one’s life.
Procreation is a very serious crime because it forces someone into an unfair world where the most crucial factor in having a relatively tolerable life is luck. In a split of a second, even relatively happy lives can turn utterly miserable, often by one wrong decision, or even regardless of one’s actions. One can be very responsible, reasonable and diligent, yet utterly miserable as a result of a mistake made by someone irresponsible, unreasonable and lazy. Life is not only pointless but also unfair, arbitrary and fickle.

And finally, more than anything, what makes procreation such a serious crime, is that it is forcing enormous needless and pointless suffering on thousands of vulnerable individuals. While the person created is one morally relevant creature which would be harmed by being created, each person created is hurting thousands of more morally relevant creatures during a lifetime.

Procreation is so harmful, so wrong, so immoral, and such a serious crime, that it is not enough to oppose it theoretically, we must stop it practically.

Humans’ carelessness, even for their own children, and their cruelty in general, are of the strongest reasons why trying to convince people not to procreate is useless, and why we must find ways to stop humans from procreating regardless of their opinion about it. Just as they disregard the opinion of their children, and all of their children’s victims. That is not to teach them a lesson of course, but because it is the only way to stop this never-ending crime.

The billions of sentient creatures who are imprisoned for their entire lives, the billions of sentient creatures who are being genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons, the billions of sentient creatures who are being forced to live without their family for their entire lives, the billions of sentient creatures who suffer from chronic pain and maladies, the billions of sentient creatures that can never breathe clean air, walk on grass, bath in water, and eat their natural food, the billions of sentient creatures being violently murdered so the to-be born could consume their bodies, the billions of sentient creatures whose habitats are being destroyed and polluted, the billions of sentient creatures being skinned alive, castrated, burned, poisoned, kicked, dehorned, mounted, chained, experimented on, enslaved, are all a very powerful justification for intervening in humans’ ability to procreate.

We mustn’t count on human morality. It is speciesist and immoral to allow people to decide and to wait until each one of them would understand and act accordingly, while the victims pile up. We must make a decision for the victims’ sake even without the permission of the victimizers.

Procreation is a crime so serious that it shouldn’t be left for humanity to decide upon. It must be stopped and by involuntary means if necessary. And unfortunately it is necessary.

The problems humans are causing are only getting bigger and bigger, and so the solution must be radical and thorough. People are not going to stop procreating out of their own good will.

Preventing suffering from innumerable generations is a moral imperative. Arguing that something is better, surly in this unequivocal case, ethically compels an intervention to make it happen. After all, to stand idle while generation after generation spawns an unimaginable amount of suffering, is complicity. It is very cruel to let the madness continue without doing anything about it.

People will never stop breeding until we make them. We must stop looking for the best antinatalist argument, and start looking for the best way to somehow sterilize them all.

Cabrera’s practical argument against involuntary sterilization goes as follow:

“If this highly theoretical line of argumentation does not satisfy, there is another more pragmatic: in order to implement a systematic policy of non-procreation with powers to practice involuntary sterilization, we will need an enormous centralized power that compels people not to procreate. In the domain of real politics, a totally unconscious sterilization resource is unthinkable; many people would realize that, in this New Antinatalist Order, they are forbidden to reproduce and that could generate a genuine state of antinatalist terror. Here everything happens as with socialism: it is a good cause – based on equality and solidarity – that may have to resort to some type of violence to be implemented.

The instinctive force to procreate is so high that no weak police could contain it. For this, thousands of other immoral actions would have to be committed just to prevent the immorality of procreation. Even if the procedures were soft, they are intrusive and violent, in one way or another.”

Unfortunately I agree that the instinctive force to procreate is so high that no weak police could contain it. And unfortunately it is also so high that no strong ethical argument could ever contain it. That’s exactly why involuntary sterilization is so needed. Because there is no other way that procreation would ever stop.

I also agree that “in order to implement a systematic policy of non-procreation with powers to practice involuntary sterilization, we will need an enormous centralized power that compels people not to procreate”, and that’s exactly why it is the last thing I imagine when I advocate for involuntary sterilization. My vision is of a chemical or biological agent that compels people not to procreate, not a political one.

Hopefully the method for involuntary sterilization would be the least intrusive and least violent as possible, however nothing is more intrusive and violent than procreation. So even if “thousands of immoral actions would have to be committed just to prevent the immorality of procreation”, they are nothing compared with the trillions of immoral actions that would continue to be committed if involuntary sterilization isn’t committed.

The human race is with no proportion the greatest wrongdoer in history. And things are not getting better. And even if they were, they are currently so horrible that the harm of involuntary sterilization is marginal compared with the harms to existing nonhumans, which quantitatively speaking already by far exceed the number of existing humans, not to mention when considering the harms to every nonhuman who would ever be born. There are more nonhuman animals in factory farms at any given moment than there are humans on this planet. For their sake alone involuntary sterilization is utterly justified. The harm to existing people by preventing them from procreating, can’t seriously be compared to the harms to generations upon generations of sentient creatures whose suffering would be prevented in the case of involuntary sterilization.

The answer to the question do we have a moral obligation to prevent others from procreation, depends on who we ask. If we keep asking humans only, then the answer of most would be that we have a moral obligation not to prevent others from procreating, and only a tiny minority would argue differently. But if we ask anyone who would be affected by involuntary sterilization, anyone whom this question is relevant for but is never asked, an absolute majority would unhesitatingly say that there is a moral obligation to prevent humans from procreating by all means necessary.

Cabrera askes:
“What would an antinatalist say if a natalist society – like ours today – decided to apply fertilizing substances to everyone without their consent?”
Probably that inflicting suffering, let alone without consent, is morally wrong, and that preventing the infliction of suffering, even without consent, is morally right.

That question holds a major false equivalence, since forcing people to create suffering is not the same as forcing people to stop creating suffering. And forcing all people to create more and more people, who would cause more and more suffering, to more and more sentient creatures, is not equivalent to forcing much less people not to procreate, so trillions of victims would be spared.

In the following texts I will comment on some of Julio Cabrera’s replies to questions he was asked in The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast #19 – Julio Cabrera ‘Questionaire on Antinatalism’.

I find this episode very interesting and highly important with many issues worth addressing. Therefore I decided to divide my review into three parts:
Cabrera’s general approach to Antinatalism, His approach to animals (and also to EFILism, Veganism and Abortion), and the last part is dedicated to the question of .
Another very important issue which was brought up in question number 10, but mostly in question number 15, regards his perspectivist stands elaborated in his book “Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation”. But since I have addressed this issue as part of a critical review of the book, and especially in the appendix of that review which was specifically dedicated to the issue of perspectivism, I’ll not address it here as well.

In this first part I’ll address questions regarding his general approach to Antinatalism.

I would like to use this opportunity of mentioning The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast to highly recommend everyone to listen to each and every episode of it. I think it is an ethical and an intellectual treasure, and that the people involved in it are doing an outstanding job. We highly differ on the practical level, meaning on what we think must be done regarding antinatalism, but we highly agree on the theoretical level, meaning that we all must be sentinetcentered EFILists.

Question 2:

“Can you explain to me your general position on the subject of antinatalism?”

Cabrera:

“I accept the central idea: better not to be born, better not procreate. But I have three reservations. First, antinatalism is, in my case, just a part of a negative ethics, which is based on a negative ontology. The problem of procreation is a special problem, not the central one; and it does not appear out of nowhere, but within a complex system of ideas. Secondly, my antinatalism is not centered on the issue of suffering, but on manipulation. Thirdly, antinatalists are ethical pessimists, but they remain logical optimists. All of these questions will be clarified throughout the questionnaire. But these ethical and logical reservations are not enough to undermine the central antinatalist idea.”

Since I’ve already broadly addressed negative ethics in the text dedicated to text dedicated to Cabrera’s book A Critique Of Affirmative Morality, I’ll only briefly argue here that antinatalism shouldn’t be just a part of a negative ethics but its main derived conclusion especially since Cabrera’s negative ethics is based on a negative ontology, meaning (based on his article from History of Antinatalism, Pages 168-169) life as imposed at birth constitutes a situation that causes a sensible and moral discomfort, which is not merely empirical but structural, based on the phenomenon of terminality of being, on the crude fact that all things are terminal, in the sense of things that begin to end at their very starting point, and not calmly but painfully, affected by all kinds of frictions and hardships. And in trying to escape from terminality, humans harm others; they become terminal to each other. The main impact of terminality in humans is the phenomenon of moral impediment – the impossibility of being ethical in the sense of not manipulating and not harming others.
In an article called Summary of The Ethical Question in Julio Cabrera’s Philosophy, Cabrera writes that:

“a negative life shall emerge, basically, on four ideas: (a) Full conscience about the structural disvalue of human life, assuming all the consequences of it; (b) Structural refuse to procreation (a negative philosopher with children is even more absurd than an affirmative one without them); (c) Structural refuse to heterocide (not killing anybody in spite of the frequent temptation to violence); (d) Permanent and relaxed disposition for suicide as a possibility.”

Now, since the only way to avoid the structural disvalue of human life, to avoid violence of all kinds, to all creatures, at all times, and to avoid the complexity and hardships of suicide as a possibility, is not to procreate, I think that antinatalism should nevertheless play the central role in negative ethics.
According to negative ethics life is structurally unethical. What then can be more central than the derived conclusion that procreation is morally unethical?

Regarding his claim that his antinatalism is not centered on the issue of suffering but on manipulation, in the article which I’ve just quoted from, he writes that procreation is in any case morally problematic because “it consists in providing to others the terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium and moral disqualification”, so if indeed it is the manipulation which is in the center of his antinatalism then procreation is morally problematic because the created persons were manipulated into a terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium and moral disqualification, and not because the created persons are in a terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium and moral disqualification. In other words, it seems that according to Cabrera the act of manipulation by the parents is morally more important than the actual state of their children – the created persons. That is despite that the created persons might not be aware of or view their creation as a manipulation, while they all feel pain, tedium and are structurally morally disqualified (even if they may not be aware of or care much about the last defect). In my view, structural manipulation can never be morally more important than how the manipulated creatures actually feel. Or put it even more simply, the central problem with “providing to others the terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium and moral disqualification”, is not that the providing is manipulative but that the pain, tedium and moral disqualification are harmful.
If it is the manipulation and not the suffering which makes procreation wrong, would procreation be wrong even if there was nothing wrong with pain, tedium and moral disqualification, as long as the created persons were manipulated into a terminal structure of them? And would procreation not be wrong, if the created persons weren’t manipulated but still in a terminal structure of being and its consequent pain, tedium and moral disqualification?

Even if only few people suffered during their lives and all people were manipulated, suffering should still be the center of antinatalism because experiences of actual people are more ethically important than abstract notions, no matter how unethical they abstractly are. If no one is hurt by an abstract notion then it is morally meaningless.
It is morally meaningless to manipulate water in itself, as water are not subjects, they don’t feel anything. They don’t experience their manipulation on any level. Manipulating water is morally meaningful only if it affects the experience of sentient creatures who live in or rely on it. The basic unit of ethics is experience, not abstract notions such as manipulation.

In his answer to a different question (Number 12), he said:

“In favor of antinatalism, I think that the manipulation argument is more striking than the suffering argument. The thesis “we should not have children because they will suffer”, face many counter-arguments; for example: there are also many good things in a human life, we are well equipped to endure suffering, suffering is relative to peoples and so on.
On the contrary, the thesis: “we should not have children because we manipulate them when we make them be born” it is something impossible to deny. There may be people who suffer little during their lives, but they were certainly manipulated at birth. Anyway, I use both arguments.
I show that life is full of suffering and that therefore, the “value of life” cannot justify manipulation.”

But suffering is also something impossible to deny, especially if like me, you think that many “good” things in a human’s life are not really intrinsically good but addictive falsehood smoke screen illusions, which trap sentient beings in an endless, pointless and vain seek for more of them. Pleasures are preceded by wants which are the absence of objects desired by subjects. People want because they are missing something. They seek pleasures to release the tension of the craving. Craving or wants, are at least bad experiences if not a sort of pain (I elaborate about this in the text about Benatar’s Asymmetry argument and its supplemental text about how bad is stronger than good).

And regardless of that the “good” things are actually not good, just as people can counter-argue that there are also many good things in a human’s life and so the suffering during it is worth it, they can just the same claim that the good things in life outweigh the manipulation. The manipulation argument is exposed to the same counter-argument that Cabrera claims that the suffering argument is exposed to. Anyone can say that the manipulation is not that bad and they are happy to be alive even if they were manipulated. Of course there is a lot to say about why many people state they are happy to be alive, and about how happy they really are, and for how long, and etc., but the point here is that it is not the argument of manipulation that would convince them otherwise but if anything, other arguments from other areas, most probably (but highly improbably) ones that involve theirs or their children’s suffering.

The fact that he admits that when he is challenged with his manipulation centered argument, he uses the suffering argument, all the more so claiming that life is full of suffering, goes to show that it’s the suffering and not the manipulation which tips the scales even according to his view.

He knows that not many would be convinced by the fact that people manipulate their children when they make them ‘be born’, but at least some may be convinced by the option that their children would suffer during their lives. He realizes that it is hard to be convinced by the argument that the “value of life” cannot justify manipulation in itself, so he must add the ‘full of suffering’ part, otherwise people might be rather indifferent to the fact that all people manipulate their children by making them ‘be born’ as long as their lives are good. Most people are not bothered with the fact their parents manipulated them when they made them ‘be born’. Most people are rather satisfied with this manipulation. It seems that most people are happy that they were created (or at least they state that they are) despite that it was a manipulation at their expanse. The ones who admit that they are not happy that they were created, usually feel this way because they are suffering during their lives, not because they were manipulated to be born.

But much more important than which argument can do a better job convincing people and dealing with counter-arguments, is which argument better describes the wrongness of procreation. The fact that there are not many people who feel that they are harmed by the fact that they were manipulated to be born, but there are many people who feel that they are harmed because of the suffering they endure during their lives, indicates that it is the suffering which should be in the center of antinatalism.
Contrary to the manipulation argument, one which centers suffering can base itself on the fact that there are people who can’t bare their own suffering in life and would rather never to have been, and that some of them kill themselves. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that there are people who feel that their lives are not worth living and that some of them decide to kill themselves because their parents manipulated them to be born. People who kill themselves and people who seriously consider killing themselves, do it because they can’t bare their suffering in life, not because they can’t bare the fact that their life started as a manipulation. So it is the suffering argument which is more striking than the manipulation argumecnt, and that is the argument which is less exposed to counter-arguments by people who most would probably severely underrate the chances of their children to suffer during their lives because of the optimism bias, but wouldn’t even understand how “giving” life to someone and loving them supposedly unconditionally is a manipulation. Obviously that is not to say that manipulation is not the case, of course it most definitely is, but few people can acknowledge this, while many can accept that suffering children is an option.

Question 6:

“Can you envisage a plausible mode of living that avoids (or diminishes to a trivial level) the “moral impediment” or is this an intrinsic feature of life that is inescapable?”

Cabrera:

“The thesis of moral impediment is very important in my philosophy and it helps to understand why my pessimism is, above all, an ethical pessimism, not a hedonistic or sensible pessimism. I am not primarily pessimistic because of suffering, but because it is impossible to be moral with others and because others cannot be moral with me. My antinatalism is also primarily moral: not to procreate not only to save someone from suffering, but because it creates another morally disabled being, beings who will be structurally incapable of morality.”

It seems as if Cabrera treats morality as the thing that subjects of life should defend instead of the other way around. It is morality that should defend moral subjects. It is individual sentient beings who are morally important, and morality is the conceptual idea that is supposed to defend them. Morality is so important because and only because of the existence of moral subjects, not in itself. As aforesaid, the basic unit of ethics is experience, had no one experienced anything negative, the fact that it is impossible for anyone to be moral with others and that others cannot be moral with anyone, would have been ethically meaningless. Had all the beings in the world been structurally incapable of morality but were also insentient, there would have been no need for morality and there would have been nothing wrong with them being incapable of it. The structural incapability of morality wouldn’t hurt anybody because nobody could get hurt.
The central problem with structural incapability of morality is not ontological one, it is its practical consequences and its implications on the experience level, which are the only things that matter morally. The problem with beings who will be structurally incapable of morality is that they are bound to hurt each other, not that they will hurt morality.

Cabrera’s relation to morality sometimes sounds almost religious, in terms of it having a first cause argument, as if it must exist for its own reasons. But morality is supposed to be a tool for moral subjects to use in order to protect them. It sounds like Kant’s ethics which is so focused on reason as if reason is its own reason. But reason is a tool, a mean, not an end. And so is morality.

Just like ‘humanity’, ‘species’, and ‘nature’, morality is a concept, a notion, a term, not a moral entity in itself. Morality doesn’t care that its implication is impossible. Moral subjects care, because they are the ones who are hurt by the fact that its implication is impossible. And that is a very good reason to never procreate. In my view the most important one. The fact that procreating is necessarily and inevitably creating beings who will be structurally incapable of morality, means that all beings will necessarily and inevitably harm each other.

Cabrera writes that: “in principle, it is not possible to escape moral impediment. As long as you want to continue living, the chances of you falling into moral impediment multiply (including the possibility of procreation).”
Therefore the only way to avoid moral impediment is antinatalism. The impossibility to escape moral impediment is a sufficient reason. If by definition people cannot be moral, and by ‘cannot be moral’ I mean that it is impossible for them not to harm others, then their existence cannot be morally justified.

Question 13:

“if it was possible to completely abolish involuntary suffering in the future, would you still say that procreation is unethical in such a hypothetical future? What hypothetical scenario would convince you to (pro)natalism?”

Cabrera:

“Certainly, I would continue to claim that procreation is immoral in this future world; and here it is clear again why it is convenient to center the argument of the immorality of procreation on manipulation and not on suffering. For even having children in a hypothetical world without suffering, this act would continue to be inevitably manipulative, and therefore immoral. Furthermore, there would still be conflicts between beings without suffering, and boredom and restless desire would be inevitable.”

I fail to see why conflicts between beings without suffering is morally problematic. Problematic to whom? Who is harmed by these conflicts? Is it that the very existence of conflicts is immoral despite that no one is harmed by them? If so, isn’t it to attribute moral status to the conflicts themselves despite that obviously they are not moral entities? Is the conflict between water and rocks immoral?

And given that boredom and restless desire are a sort of suffering, they are not supposed to be included in the hypothetical world described in the question. The whole point is that there would be no suffering in order to isolate the manipulation component in Cabrera’s antinatalsim (if I understand the purpose of the question correctly).

The fact that he would continue to claim that procreation is immoral in this future hypothetical world, despite that no one is harmed in it, goes to show how strange centering the argument of the immorality of procreation on manipulation and not on suffering is. Surly, even in the hypothetical world described in the question, procreation would remain manipulative, but by definition no one is going to be harmed by this manipulation. There would be no victims to this manipulation, and to state that a situation is immoral despite it having no victims is senseless to me.

Nevertheless, this position that I have just expressed is relevant only to a hypothetical world in which suffering was somehow completely abolished, but not to the extremely implausible option of trying to somehow turn our real actual world into a supposedly suffering free world by some advanced technological invention. In that case, I would still argue that procreation is immoral, not because it would remain manipulative as Cabrera argues, but because even if it was plausible, there is no guarantee that someday things wouldn’t change in this world and suffering would come back, and mostly and most importantly because of all the suffering of thousands of trillions of sentient creatures that would be caused while waiting for this extremely implausible option. So to prevent all that I would continue to claim that procreation is immoral. The only thing better than a world that suffering was completely abolished from, is a world that suffering can never come back to.

Cabrera further explains the reasoning of his claim:

“I sustain a structural pessimism about human life, not a mere empirical pessimism of balance between “good things” and “bad things”, with a predominance of “bad things”. This is not my line. In “discomfort and moral impediment” (p.23 onwards), I present a long argumentation about the lack of sensible and moral value of human life based on what I call “terminality of being”, the decaying and frictional being received at birth. As long as this structure is maintained procreation will be immoral.”

I understand that balancing between “good things” and “bad things” is not his line. But it also wasn’t the line of the question. He wasn’t asked whether he would continue to claim that procreation is immoral even if the balancing between “good things” and “bad things” would be in favor of the “good things”, but will he continue to claim that procreation is immoral even if there would be no “bad things” at all. And he gave his answer in the first paragraph. Practically, the scenario given in the question is beyond hypothetical to the point of being absolutely delusional, so obviously it should be taken as a thought experiment only, not a practical suggestion. And under this hypothetical scenario, the whole point is that the structure he describes will not be maintained, “the decaying and frictional being received at birth” is somehow supposed not to negatively affect whom who would live in this future hypothetical world, and so, this can’t be the problem with procreation in this hypothetical world.

Cabrera ends his answer with the following:

“From the pessimistic and antinatalist point of view, we can state that there is no responsible scenario where it is better to be than not to be, no type of being that can compete with the sublime perfection of nothingness.”

Nothingness is not sublime perfection, but literally the absence of all things. There is nothing in nothing by definition, so it can’t be perfect sublime. There are no experiences in nothingness. Non-existence is not worse or better than existence because there is no one there for whom it would be better or worse compared with existence. So it is not better not to be, as no one can not to be, it is just bad to be. Being is harmful and not being is not harmful for the obvious and simple reason that only existing beings can harm others and be harmed, and no one can harm others and be harmed had not existed.