Category: Books (Page 1 of 2)

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.

Although Rivka Weinberg doesn’t discuss the ‘environmental’, the so called ‘misanthropic’, and the ‘harm to other people’ arguments for Antinatalism in her book The Risk of a Lifetime, which I have addressed in the former couple of texts, she did shortly address them during an interview in the Exploring Antinatalism podcast, and what she said about these three arguments can’t be ignored. So the following is not really a supplement to the critical review of her book, but more of a totally independent critical review and a direct reply to her comments about these three arguments.

Regarding the Environmental Argument (01:30:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked to comment about environmental antinatalism and said:
“Some people say that because the world is overpopulated and we have a climate crisis no one should have any children because that’s like using too many resources and contributing to the problem. I think that is a too high cost to apply to individuals and the benefit is too low. We need to solve the climate crisis but the way to solve that is with institutions and corporations. Not having children will not help at all. This is not the problem. This problem needs to be solved at a government and institutional level. Individuals can only work by getting their government to pass laws. We need different standards for cars, we need public transportation, we need all kinds of green technology, that’s what we need, that’s what is going to solve the problem. Changing our economic ways of life, our carbon dependence. Deciding not to have a child will deprive the individual of their meaningful life shaping relationships and for a benefit that will be very small in terms of the environmental problem.”

I don’t consider myself as environmental antinatalist, and as explained in the post about the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, I don’t share the same arguments or motive for human extinction as VHEMT. However, that is absolutely not because I think that the solution to environmental problems is different standards for cars, public transportation, all kinds of green technology, not to mention the most ridiculously absurd suggestion – institutions and corporations, which are obviously exactly the ones who are most responsible for most of the harm (with corporations having exactly zero motivation to solve problems which don’t affect their financial gain), but because I don’t consider the environment as a moral patient. The environment, ecological systems, species, and similar abstract terms often ascribed to the environmental argument, are not entities and therefore don’t hold any moral status. Their moral relevancy is only instrumental, not intrinsic, meaning they are important only because they are important to sentient creatures who are harmed when these are affected. I think that people must stop creating new people because each person severely harms numerous other sentient creatures, not because humanity affects the insentient environment.

But since numerous sentient creatures live in ecological systems, and therefore are hurt by what is referred to as environmental problems, indirectly, I highly sympathize with the ‘environmental argument’ for antinatalism, only that I consider it as part of the harm to others argument.

Anyway, I find Weinberg’s response to the environmental argument a case of lack of knowledge, and speciesism. Her claim demonstrates considerable ignorance regarding the harms caused by humanity overall, as well as on the individual level. She claims that the benefit of not having a child will be very small in terms of the climate crisis, however, researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that avoiding having a child can save an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. And according to a study by statisticians at Oregon State University, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child in the United States is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives such as driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

And according to another study called Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions, from more than a decade ago, meaning its conclusions are known for more than a decade now, reducing fertility rates so as to match the UN’s ‘low fertility’ projections rather than the ‘medium fertility’ projections, which corresponds to an average difference of 0.5 children per breeder, would likely result in a yearly reduction in GHG emissions of 5.1 billion tons of carbon by 2100. 5.1 billion tons per year is more than five times the annual emissions savings we would achieve in 50 years by doubling the fuel efficiency of the world auto fleet, or by halving the average kilometers traveled per car, or by tripling the number of nuclear reactors currently providing electricity around the world, or by increasing current wind energy capacity 50 times, or by halting all deforestation everywhere around the world. Reducing population growth could provide more emissions reductions than all five of these other measures put together.
The study’s authors estimate that following the low rather than the medium fertility projections would account for “between 16% and 29% of required emissions reductions by 2050.

Besides its severe carbon footprint, breeding is also an act of plundering, as each procreation further enhances robbing resources from others. One of these resources is water and people use a lot of it, even for things we rarely think of in that context. For example, it takes more than 33 liters of water to produce just one of the chips that typically power smart phones, laptops and iPads. A single smartphone requires 240 gallons of water to produce. And it even goes further than that as every bit and byte people consume over the internet has an indirect cost in terms of water waste due to the enormous cooling demand in data centers. In fact, even when people drink bottled water they are highly water wasteful, as it takes about 4 liters of water to produce one liter plastic bottle of water.

The harmfulness of bottled water is not only their wastefulness but mostly their pollution.
A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute. Less than half of the bottles are collected for recycling and less than 10% of those collected are turned into new bottles. Most plastic bottles end up in landfill or in the ocean.

And bottles are only part of the enormous plastic pollution. It is estimated that more than a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide annually. Only 1% of plastic bags are returned for recycling. Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags annually. That’s about 307 bags per person! The average person produces half a pound of plastic waste of all kinds every day.
Weinberg may suggest that plastic should be outlawed but this is extremely unlikely to ever happen. The current course is the opposite as plastic production is expected to double in the next 20 years and quadruple by 2050.

And of course it is not just plastic. An average American consumes about 45,000 pounds of metal (through the consumption of various products) during a lifetime. Each pound of metal must be mined, processed, transported and manufactured into consumable products, all stages are considerably polluting. For example, currently, about 25,500 tons of silver are consumed every year. There is some of it in every car, computer and phone, as well as many other products.
Humanity as a whole throws about 100 million aluminum and steel cans every day.
And in general, each person sends about 64 tons of waste to landfills over a lifetime.
Some of this waste can theoretically be reduced, but practically so far it has only been increased. And other forms of waste can’t be reduced. For example every day each person produces about 20 gallons of sewage. Over a lifetime, that is 567,575 gallons. Billions of creatures must live with all this human shit. Of course it would be better for them if there is less of it, and there would be less shit if there are less people.

If humanity is not only very far from ending the plastic age but its catastrophe is only getting worse and worse, despite that it is a very recent technology and despite that its immense and irreversible damage is well known for decades, how likely is it to ever end the rest of the polluting industries?

Since as opposed to the common way people present it, procreation is not having a baby but creating a person, I have focused here on harms people commonly cause throughout their lifetime, and not particularly when they are babies. However it is impossible not to specifically refer to the harm of disposable diapers, mainly in terms of non-degradable waste, and the pollution during the production phase.
The number of diapers babies are using depends on when they are starting to regularly use the toilet. On average, most children are potty trained by around 35 to 39 months of age. Considering that in the first year of life, babies are using about 3,000 diapers, and in the second year between 1,500 and 2,000, the estimations are that each baby adds about 6,000 diapers to landfills, where they will not compost or biodegrade.

People can choose to use cloth diapers instead of disposable ones, but they don’t. About 95 percent of American parents choose disposable diapers over reusable ones.
But even if more people would choose reusable diapers, that option also has a very high environmental impact due to cotton production, which is one of the highest in terms of pesticide use, as well as the energy and water costs of laundering cloth diapers. A life-cycle analysis, conducted by the Environment Agency in the UK, compared the manufacturing, disposal, and energy costs of both diaper types and found that based on average laundry habits and appliance efficiency, the overall carbon emissions created by cloth diapering were roughly the same as those of using disposables.

Another significant harm involved in laundry, and with every other way people are cleaning their things and themselves, is the use of cleansing agents. Detergents can have poisonous effects on all types of aquatic life when present in high quantities, and this includes the biodegradable detergents. All detergents destroy the external mucus layers that protect the fish from bacteria and parasites, plus they can cause severe damage to the gills. People are harming other sentient creatures even when they clean their dishes, their clothes, and themselves.

Again, there is no reason to focus on infancy when reviewing the harms of people, but again, it is hard to ignore the particular contribution of the harms of detergents during infancy, especially ones involved in laundry, as babies requires a lot of it. The few people who do choose to use reusable diapers need to wash them, and everyone need to wash their baby’s clothes, sheets, blankets, bibs, sleepers, socks, pants and etc., and many other things that babies tend to spit up on, drool on, or any other way make dirty. That adds up to a lot of detergents use, and since the severe harm that each use of each detergent doesn’t even cross the minds of the vast majority of people, they don’t even bother using at least the little bit less harmful options, not to mention using natural alternatives such baking soda, lemon, vinegar and etc. The vast majority of people are using conventional detergents which most are made of petroleum, are nonbiodegradable, contain various damaging chemicals including carcinogen ones, and phosphates which build up in rivers and lakes causing hypoxia (low oxygen) due to algal bloom.

Some call this very very partial list of examples – ‘harming the environment’, as if the environment is the one who gets hurt. But it is not the environment, it is the trillions upon trillions of creatures living in it who are severely harmed by everything that people are doing.
And so I agree with Weinberg that it is “a too high cost to apply to individuals and the benefit is too low”, only exactly from the opposite direction. The cost of procreation is way too high to apply to innumerous individual sentient creatures, and the benefit to people who want to procreate is way too low.
When considering humanity’s massive harm not to the sustainability of ecosystems which are not moral entities, but to trillions of their inhabitants, who most definitely are moral entities, I fail to see how it is not wrong for humans to procreate.

Not only that people have never considered changing their economic ways of life, and their carbon dependence, they have so far done the opposite. Even during major economic crises, wars, famines, natural disasters, extreme poverty and etc., people have never seriously considered changing their way of life, so why would they stop now?

The 2008 financial crisis has brought the Occupy Movement with the famous slogan “We are the 99%”, but unfortunately, quantitatively they were less than 1%. Most of the public, in the United States and outside of it, as always, remained silent, submissive, conformist and passive.
And if people are not changing the world for their own sake, what are the odds that they would do it allegedly for the world’s sake? If people are not doing it for themselves, considering that many climate change effects have already affected many of them in the past decades, what are the odds that they would do it for the ‘environment’, all the more so while they have systematically destroyed it all along history? Or for the sake of other animals, all the more so while they are still refusing to stop creating billions of them every year only to exploit while severely torturing them all their horrible lives in the food industry?

There is no way that people would ever change their ways even when they are the ones who directly pay the price, and it is definitely not going to happen when it is other people who will pay the price, and most definitely not when it is other animals.

Regarding The Misanthropic Argument (01:33:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked to comment about David Benater’s misanthropic argument which was presented as follows – every human being causes vast amounts of harm to other sentient beings including harm to nonhuman beings. Becoming fully aware of the extent of the harm we do, could possibly threaten the meaning in life.
And she replied that “most people are not terrible but if they are raised in a loving and stable environment are very unterrible. And so I think that there is no reason to not procreate because your child is going to be terrible. I think that if you are going to be nice to your child the likelihood of that child to be terrible is very low. So I don’t think that that aspect of the argument works at all. I think most people are not terrible and the people who are terrible are usually raised with a lot of cruelty, usually. So if you are going to have a child and you’ll raise it in a loving and a nice way I don’t think they are going to be a terrible person. I think that the likelihood of that are very low and I think that percentage of people that are awful is also small. Most people are regular, not heroic, not cruel, they are regular people. And they are not so bad that we have to make sure not to have them. In terms of our effect on other creatures of the world, I think we have other ways to respond to this than to say that we need to stop existing. We can have more respect for other animals, we can give them more of their habitat, we can do other reforms to be less damaging to other sentient species.”

Weinberg is absolutely totally wrong about people. They are absolutely totally terrible. It is very hard to accurately assess how terrible each person is since it depends on various factors such as location, socioeconomic status, consumption habits, life expectancy, livelihood, diet and etc., however, regardless of any circumstances, being terrible to 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. 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 cramped into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, that more calves would be separated from their mothers, and more cow mothers would be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, that more pigs would suffer from chronic pain, it is choosing more lame sheep, more beaten goats, more turkeys who can barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, more ducks who are forced to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, more rabbits imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, more geese being aggressively plucked, more male chicks being gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs nor meat, more snakes being skinned alive, and more crocodiles and alligators being hammered to death and often also skinned alive to be worn, and more mice, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, and monkeys being horrifically experimented on.

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 other consumed animals).
American meat eaters are ranked as one of the highest per person meat consumers in the world, and so these figures are higher than the world average. On the other hand, most of the people who consume relatively little animal based foods, would choose otherwise if they could. The only reason they don’t is because they can’t afford it. Time and again it is shown that as soon as people’s financial status improves, one of the first things they do is increase their animal based food consumption. Economic improvement is always accompanied by an increase in meat consumption. Per capita meat consumption has been growing persistently everywhere in the world. Among low-income societies it doubled in the last 20 years, and in what is referred to as “middle income” societies it tripled in the last couple of decades. So the consumption gaps are narrowing, and more and more animals are being harmed by more and more people.

Weinberg could have suggested that considering the vast amounts of harm to other sentient beings by consuming animal products, including the vast environmental harm of animal farming (a claim which could have also supported her reply to the former question), people must raise their children as vegans. But she is too speciesist and too ignorant regarding, first and foremost the torture, and also the environmental effect of factory farms to suggest that. And even if she did, obviously there is no way to insure that children would stay vegan for life, and veganism, as preferable as it is over animal based food, is still extremely harmful towards other sentient beings.

Factory farming is the worst and cruelest way people feed themselves. But it is not that other options are harmless. It is impossible to eat without harming someone, somewhere along the line. And it takes a very long line to make food, any food. Much longer, and much more harmful than people tend to think.

Each agricultural area was once the living space of other creatures, who were killed, chased away, starved (as people have destroyed their food sources), dried (as people took control of their water sources), being exposed to predator (as people have destroyed their dens and other hiding places), restricted by fences, polluted by chemicals people constantly spray, and even burned alive during slash-and-burn.
And all this is not an historical description of how agriculture has started, it all still happens all the time. Billions of animals are constantly being poisoned, starved, dehydrated, chased away, polluted, trampled by tractors, combines, ploughs and harvesters, their homes are being destroyed and etc. All are common harms inherent to agriculture, and happening every single moment.

The most direct and immediate harm of plant based agriculture is the spread of poisons such as pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. More than 2.5 million tons of poisons are spread all over the world every year. Each gram is aimed to kill any creature in the area, and any potentially “competitive” plant in the area. Much of these poisons also harm creatures living far from the originally sprayed farms, as chemicals tend to drift by wind and are washed by rain. The estimation is that almost 100 million fish and birds are poisoned to death each year by pesticides, and about a billion are harmed by it.

Another type of chemicals intensively used in agriculture which are also harmful, are fertilizers. Most fertilizers are synthetic, but some, mainly in organic farms, are made of animals’ bones, blood, feathers and of course manure. Obviously none of which are originated from wild animals who died naturally, but from factory farmed animals who were tortured and murdered. So anyone who wants to avoid the harms of synthetic fertilizers, is bound to support the use of animal based ones, and so indirectly subsidize factory farming by making animals exploitation more profitable.

Although most of the trees in the rainforests are cut for cattle grazing, a very considerable amount is being cut for growing some of the most basic foods that vegans are consuming such as nuts, sugar, tea, coffee, several types of fruits and vegetables, and even the most common raw material for most of people’s clothes – cotton.

Meat is notoriously water wasteful, but the production of many vegetables also requires plenty of water. According to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers it takes 17,196 liters of water to produce 1kg of chocolate, 3,025 liters to produce 1kg of olives, 2, 497 liters to produce 1kg of rice, about the same amount for 1kg of cotton, 1,849 liters to produce 1kg of dry pasta, 1,608 liters to produce 1kg of bread, 822 liters to produce 1kg of apples, 790 liters to produce 1kg of bananas, and 287 liters to produce 1kg of potatoes. Humans’ excessive use of water leaves entire regions dried, and all the beings living there are left to dehydrate.

A lot of water is also being used after the cultivation stage. The production of food requires a lot of water for washing, cooking, boiling, cooling industrial machinery and etc. But probably the most harmful aspect of food processing is energy, which is obviously inherent to each and every part along the process of each and every food item. Almost each and every food item goes through several processing stages. Many require removal of unwanted parts, cleaning, grinding, liquefaction, drying, sorting, coating, supplementation of other ingredients, cooling, heating, baking, steaming, freezing and etc. All stages are energy-intensive, and the vast majority of it comes from fossil fuels.

Alternative energy sources other than fossil fuels are also harmful. For example, hydraulic dams dehydrate entire habitats, wind turbines are killing many birds, and solar panels are composed of heavy metals. But they are still less harmful than fossil fuels, yet humans, as usual, choose the most harmful option. And since there is little control over the chosen energy production method used for each food item, people are bound to take part in severe harms to other creatures. They can’t even really choose the least harmful method, and certainly can’t choose a harmless one, as there is no such thing. And even if it was possible to choose such an option, since most people care so little about harms to others they would probably simply choose the cheapest one.

Another stage in food production that is responsible for a lot of energy consumption (maybe even the most) is food transportation. Each and every country is highly depended on long-distance food, so everyone, everywhere, participates in a global food system.
Some foods travel thousands of miles during the process stage only, before they are sent all over the world as export. It is very difficult to accurately calculate the mileage of each food item since many foods are composed of several ingredients which each has travelled long distances as well. From the field to the first processing stage, then to the next processing stages, then to the packhouse, then to the storage warehouse, and only then to the airport or harbour. All that is for each ingredient, of each final food item.

All the harms involved in animal based food can theoretically be avoided if all humans would decide to go vegan. But that’s not going to happen. And anyway, not all the harms involved in plant based food can be avoided. Avoiding all food items that cause air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, climate alteration, land alteration, land clearing, land destruction, trampling, water waste, poisoning and etc., is simply impossible.

There are some people, a tiny minority unfortunately, that try to minimize their harm level by being vegan and environmentally aware, and take part in positive and meaningful activism, but even these few people are forced to do some terrible things to others simply by living in a world such as ours, where no one can avoid harming others even if they really try. And of course these are the least terrible people in the world, people who are trying not to be terrible but have no choice. The vast majority of people, the regular people, simply choose to be terrible.

So the likelihood of people being terrible is not very low but is actually guaranteed, and the percentage of people that are awful is not small but in fact close to 100%.
She is right that most people are regular, but only because the norm is cruelty and indifference. Our world is so terrible that regular people are cruel.

Weiberg had another thing to say about the misanthropic argument:

“The other thing I would say about this, is let’s say that it turns out that we killing off, just our very existence kills of a certain species of another species of fish, we excel things and they die. So now it is a question, who should go extinct me or the fish? Why should I pick the fish? Why can’ I pick me?  That is another problem with the misanthropic argument, that I don’t think I should sacrifice myself for another species.”

Weinberg presents the issue as if humanity and a certain species of fish are simply two species living in the world, and so there is no reason for her as a human to prefer the fish over herself. But as opposed to fish, humans live as masters of the universe, not as just another species. Their dominance and harmfulness is unprecedented. There is no other species that is even remotely as harmful as humans. Surly, many lifeforms eat other lifeforms, but no other lifeform is imprisoning other lifeforms for their entire lives. No other lifeform totally shatters other lifeforms’ social lives. No other lifeform prevents clean air, clean water, and natural environment. No other lifeform prevents access to natural food. No other lifeform is constantly genetically modifying other lifeforms to extract more meat, milk, eggs, skin, wool, feathers, fur and etc., from other lifeforms. No other lifeform castrates other lifeforms. No other lifeform burns numbers on other lifeforms. No other lifeform cuts the horns, tails and teeth of other lifeforms. No other lifeform rides, chains, and enslaves other lifeforms. No other lifeform forces other lifeforms to dance, do tricks, to dress up, to jump fences, to fight each other. No other lifeform experiments on other lifeforms.
To compare mankind with any other kind in terms of harm is absolutely ridiculous. And can be done only by an extremely ignorant and speciesist person.

Humans have an extremely high harm toll which makes supporting their right to exist a support in the violation of the rights of anyone who is hurt by them.

Weinberg presents the claim as if it is one human individual against one nonhuman individual and as if the misanthropic argument is choosing to favor the nonhuman, while practically it is one human individual against ten thousands of nonhuman individuals. As earlier mentioned, it is very hard to estimate the harm each human is causing to other creatures but in any case it is an enormous one under all circumstances (such as different lifestyles), as humans are making the lives of many animals very miserable in many ways.

I call to stop all human procreation not in the name of ecosystems, or since humans deserve to go extinct, or because I think it would solve all the problems in the world, but because of the harm to trillions of sentient victims per year.
Every day the human race provides us with more and more reasons why it must be stopped. And every day it provides us with less and less reasons to believe it would ever happen voluntarily. For it to finally happen, we must make it happen.

Regarding the Harms to Other People (01:36:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked: what about the harms we do to others using technology and exploitation of other people?
And she replied: “we need laws and regulations. Not having a child is not going to solve anything. You still going to have this exploitation, so if you wanna solve exploitation work to create laws that reduce that like minimum wages, and different kinds of trade agreements. It is our political institutions that will solve the problem, I don’t think that going extinct is necessary to solve this problem. It is also not practical, you are not going to have a child, but somebody else will and all the problems that you thought you are solving will go on.”

Human exploitation is way too beneficial to the exploiters for them to be deterred by laws and regulations. And in many cases human exploitation is also way too beneficial for the law makers and regulators for them to legislate such laws in the first place, and to later enforce them and to regulate exploitive industries. Even in cases where corporations don’t bribe law makers, they always have a strong lobby and other ways to influence relevant officials, while exploited people almost never have a voice. Corporations bringing in foreign currency to poor countries are way more beneficial for local politicians than their domestic population so they are always the last in line of priorities. That’s why despite that child labor and slavery are forbidden all over the world, both are still very prevalent all over the world.

Local governments don’t have a strong interest in fighting the exploitation of their own people since in many cases exploitative industries represent most of these countries’ export revenue and since their economies are highly depended on these industries. This is usually the economic and social background which corporations are seeking in the first place when they are looking for ‘sights’ to invest in. In the eyes of the corporations, the country is better for business, when the people are poorer, the lands are richer in terms of desirable resources, and the officials are easily bribed.
For example, it is well known for decades now that about three quarters of the chocolate industry relies on cacao from countries where child labor is extremely common. Laws and regulations didn’t and will not change that partly because people care much more about buying cheap chocolate than not supporting slavery and child labor. Many have seen the reports and documentary films about the miserable lives of poor kids, mainly from West Africa, in the cacao plantations – where they are forced to work extremely hard for extremely long hours, are beaten if they try to escape or even for working ‘too slowly’, have poor sanitation and no clean water – but are still consuming chocolate according to their taste or its price, and regardless of the living conditions of the people who have produced it for them (and have never in their life tasted it).

A very similar story occurs in the cobalt mining industry which also involves slavery and child labor, and often both. Yet many people buy a new phone every couple of years, so not to stay behind in terms of the cutting edge luxurious technology, while indifferently leaving the poorest people in the world way behind in terms of the most basic living conditions, including clean water, proper nutrition and sanitation and hygiene.

Unfortunately, prostitution is practically legal or limitedly legal in most of the countries in the world. But sex trafficking is formally forbidden in all of them. Yet human trafficking, which most of it involves the sex industry, is the largest international crime system after arms trade and drug traffic. Despite being illegal and extremely harmful, all three industries are thriving all around the world.
Like in any other example, laws and regulations will not solve the problem which is too systematical and ingrained in human culture, and social and economic structure. People don’t need a regulative reform but a radical social and cultural revolution in the way they view others, and in the economic system which actively encourages such extreme inequality and poverty that people can buy other people, rent other people, and many parents sell their own children to the sex industry in order to pay for their debts. Many of these children, along with other children who are kidnaped by traffickers, or end up in the sex industry after running away from home and it was the only available option for them to support themselves, would never escape this industry. That is millions of children all around the world.

The problem is way too systematical for laws and regulations to solve it. Child labor is illegal in most of the world yet it is estimated that 1 in 10 children across the globe are subjected to child labor, with almost half of them (about 75 million children), being in hazardous forms of work. The problem is way more systematical than that.

Corporations are interested in increasing profits only. That’s what they are about. They can do that by increasing the prices of their products, and by that risking that consumers would buy products from their competitors, or they can decrease the expenses, which obviously never means decreasing their own salaries but usually the salaries of the ones who already earn the least, and in the case of sweatshops, of the ones who are already extremely poor and have no other option but working in extremely exploitive, unsafe and unhealthy jobs.

Laws and regulations will not provide the so demandable change in the case of sweatshops as well. Partly it is because as long as people in the richer world are indifferent enough, people in the poorer world are desperate enough, politicians and officials are corruptible enough, and corporations are greedy enough, nothing will ever change.

Most sweatshop workers earn less than their daily living costs, and their only other option to support themselves and their families is another sweatshop with the same exploitive conditions. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are trapped in this system of exploitation, which is hardly likely to ever change by laws and regulations.

There is nothing new about any of this, not to you, not to the common consumer, not to the chocolate industry, not the technology industry, not the sex industry, not the fashion industry, and not to law makers and regulators.
Exploitation exists for thousands of years now. It wasn’t even reduced but has actually evolved in terms of the number of exploited people, the exploitation methods, the exploited age, their ethnical diversity, and their global spread. The fact that it evolved and is still evolving all the time is an indication that it is here to stay, and that laws and regulations are definitely not the answer.

Exploitation of people is not a result of lack of laws and regulations. It is way too easy to throw that as a solution. The problem is much deeper than that. The problem is global and systematic, not local and regulative. Human exploitation is mostly the result of a global economic system designed to favor the richer at the expense of the poorer. It is originated from the fact that more than half of the people in the world are poor and about a third are in deep poverty, not because there are no laws and regulations in some places around the world. The problem is global since the workforce had turned global a long time ago and so people are consuming products that are produced all over the world, and mostly in the poorest areas of the world, since in these places people are so poor that they will work for the lowest salary possible.
The only reason I am bothering you with such basic facts about globalization and capitalism,  which I am sure you are all very familiar with, is since Weinberg chose to avoid a very serious and relevant question by hiding behind the notorious ‘we need laws and regulations’. Of course we need better laws and regulations, but laws and regulations are not, never have, and never will be determined by what is right for the common people, and are always a product of the interests of the tiny most powerful minority. The issue of human exploitation is way too systematical, historical, common, established and complex to seriously suggest laws and regulations as the solution. And in this case, it is more than a tiny minority that benefits from this situation. Many people benefit from the current state of affairs, and these are the common consumers who can get more of the stuff they like, and cheaply. And if most people feel that they are benefiting from the global exploitation, they are not very likely to support more laws and regulations.

There are already laws and regulations against slavery yet it is still common all around the world in one form or another. It is not formal and explicit as it was when it was legal, but people still own other people. They may not buy people in auctions like they used to up until about 200 years ago in most of the world, but many people, in fact more than there were about 200 years ago, are trapped in all kinds of social and economic entanglements that have made them practically enslaved.

Many people around the world are engaged in forced labor (also called involuntary servitude) which is basically situations in which people are bound to work against their will, because of structural reasons such as poverty, wars, droughts, social discrimination, migration, corruption, high rates of unemployment, crime and etc., not because of legal and regulative reasons. And so laws and regulations will not solve most of the types of human exploitation even if humanity took that issue seriously, and currently we are not even there yet.

There is no reason to believe that things that have so far not been solved, and many of which have even gotten worse, will ever be solved.

It is beyond naïve to seriously suggest that political institutions will solve the problem, while they have so far all along history mostly been a huge part of the problem or were totally incompetent in solving it.

It seems that Weinberg chooses to believe that absence of laws and regulations is the source of the problem, and also the greed and cruelty of a tiny minority of people. But the truth is that the origin is corrupted, perverted, inequitable, unfair, discriminative and unjust social, cultural and mostly economic systems, and also the absence of care and the greed of the vast majority of the human population.

And even if she was right, why should people suffer until the values reverse? Until their welfare becomes prior to others’ profits? Even if the priorities could someday change for the better, how is it permissible to procreate before they do? How is it ethically permissible to contribute to such a dire situation instead of changing it first? How is it ethically permissible to create a person who will be bound to take part in the exploitation of others, on a daily basis, because theoretically the solution is laws and regulations?

And these questions also directly relate to the last part in her comment: “It is also not practical, you are not going to have a child, but somebody else will and all the problems that you thought you are solving will go on.”
That is a very strange argument from someone who explicitly bases her principles of procreative permissibility on a Kantian framework. An ethical prohibition is not supposed to be personally optional but universally obligatory, especially under a Kantian framework. If an argument is valid, it is supposed to apply to everyone, so somebody else is also not supposed to have a child. Ethics is not supposed to be determined by how plausible it is that other people would apply its valid conclusions. If avoiding harming others is a valid argument and if everyone is bound to harm others, then no one should be permitted to procreate.

Of course some people, probably most, would choose not to be ethical and to be selfish and indifferent towards harming others, but that is not a justified reason to permit them to be unethical.
Unfortunately I agree that people would never be ethical, not in general and definitely not in relation to procreation specifically, but that doesn’t mean that antinatalism isn’t right and so we should permit people to procreate, but that antinatalism isn’t applicable and so we must look for other ways to stop people from procreating.

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The following is the second part of the text about Rivka Weinberg’s book The Risk of a Lifetime, in which she explores How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible.
If you haven’t read the first part, it is highly essential to do so before reading this one.

In any case, here is a quick recap. Procreation according Weinberg is not a gift, but it’s also not a predicament; it is a risk, a risk of a lifetime that people choose to impose on other people, and necessarily for their own benefit since being created can never be in the interests of a person before being created. And since this is the setting of creating a person, meaning, basically a selfish action that imposes a lifetime risk on another person, it needs to have a very good reason.

Weinberg suggests that procreation is a risk that can be justified by two principles she calls the ‘Principles of Procreative Permissibility’:

Motivation Restriction: Procreation must be motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born.

Procreative Balance: Procreation is permissible only when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.

Weinberg uses a Kantian/Rawlsian framework for constructing these principles, explaining that the Kantian framework is suited to questions of procreative permissibility because it emphasizes the treatment of all persons as ends in themselves and stresses the importance of proper motivation. And the Rawlsian framework is particularly useful for questions of procreative permissibility because it is constructed to yield just principles in cases of distributive conflicts of interests and deliberated about under conditions constructed to reduce bias. She is aware that it is not common to think of procreation as a distributive conflict of interest, but argues that it is one:

“prospective parents have an interest in procreating whenever they please, and future children have an interest in excellent birth conditions. These interests are often in conflict. For example, if parents procreate while they are unemployed, their children will bear some of the costs of their parents’ procreative freedom. If we restrict procreative permissibility only to cases where the future children are likely to have extremely secure economic situations, people who cannot offer this to their children will bear the costs of the security of future children (a category that, in this case, will not include their own children).” (p.7)

In the previous part I have addressed her first principle, and in the following text I’ll address the second one.

Conflict of Interests?

Despite being absolutely aware of the fact that prospective parents may want to create children but their future children have no interest in being created, she addresses procreation as a conflict of interests regarding risk imposition.

“Risk imposers have an interest in doing the act that imposes a risk; those they place at risk have an interest in avoiding any harms resulting from the imposition of the risk. In the procreative case, parents have an interest in procreating, which imposes various risks on their children. To assess when the risk is permissible to impose, we consider the cost to the parents of restricting their risk-imposing activity and the costs children may bear if parental procreative risk imposition ripens into a harm. We are thus engaged in adjudicating a distributive conflict of interests.

Although parents and children have many interests in common, in fundamental ways, procreation involves a conflict of parent/child interests. Prospective parents have an interest in procreating; future people have an interest in optimal birth conditions. The procreative conflict consists in the conflict of interests between existing people with an interest in procreating and future people with an interest in optimal birth conditions.” (p. 155)

People may have an interest in optimal birth conditions when they are being created, but before being created no one has an interest in being created. There is no conflict of interests between prospective parents and their children before they are created. There is only people who are forcing their own interests on others when they are creating them. People have many interests regarding their own creation, but only once they have been created, not a moment before, and since the case in point regards ethical questions about creating people, not about treating existing people, there is no conflict of interests. A conflict of interests was relevant only had people had an interest in being created before it was forced on them. Presenting the issue as a genuine conflict of interests seems like an attempt to disguise the unavoidable coercion element, the intrinsically distinctive and unequal positions, as well as the fact that as explained in the first part it is unavoidably treating others as means to others’ ends.

Yet she suggests Contractualism to handle this seemingly conflict of interests:

 “Contractualism is designed to handle conflicts of interests, as it is fundamentally an account of how to interact with—how to make deals (contracts) with—others who are just as entitled to respect and autonomy as we are. How to balance what we want to pursue and how we wish to be treated with the rights and claims of others is a guiding point of all contractualist theories. The contractualist theory most directly aimed at adjudicating conflicts of interests is Rawlsian contractualism. That speaks in favor of it as a model for formulating our principles of procreative permissibility.” (p.157)

But you can’t sign a contract with someone who doesn’t exist. You can only impose a contract on someone who doesn’t exist and that’s exactly what happens in procreation. You can try to extract the most respectful, most carful contract you can possibly think of, but you can’t avoid it being coercive and it can never neutralize all the risks, which in the case of procreation, didn’t exist prior to the creation. As she herself admits, yet is ready to impose that risk anyway:

“No one can be absolutely sure that she will be able to fulfill her parental responsibilities since anyone can die anytime, or become incapacitated, homeless, and so on. So we will not set absolute standards of procreative care because that would impose too high a cost on parents. No one would be able to procreate if the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities had to be absolutely guaranteed. But we won’t set very low standards either, for example, allowing impoverished, mentally ill adolescents to procreate, because that would impose too high a cost on the children.” (p. 62)

If she rejects the claim that the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities has to be absolutely guaranteed because then no one would be able to procreate, it means that she wants to permit procreation and not that she had truly taken an ethical journey into the question of procreation. She rejects an absolutely valid conclusion because she finds it undesirable. That claim goes to show that her journey had an initial agenda. Why wouldn’t it be the case that no one should be able to procreate unless the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities is absolutely guaranteed? It makes total sense. The fact that it’s also totally impossible doesn’t mean that we need to forsake this absolutely logical conclusion, but that we need to absolutely forsake procreation.
It looks like she is led by her desirable outcome, because when examining How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible, the option that it may never be permissible can’t simply be ruled out. We mustn’t ignore such an important and self-evident condition as absolutely guaranteeing the ability to fulfill one’s parental responsibilities just because we don’t like what is inferred from that. What is the point of a philosophical inquiry if some conclusions are rejected simply because we don’t like them?

And of course, parents being unable to absolutely guarantee the fulfillment of their responsibilities, is only part of the risks imposed when creating people, there are many others, and she mentions some of them herself:

“Not only are there many ways for life to turn out really badly, there is also the matter of how wildly and incredibly uncertain life is. Adults who have been screened for all screenable genetic diseases may still give birth to a severely deformed, ill, disabled, suffering person; adults well placed to care for a child can drop dead anytime, lose their jobs, blow up their heretofore stable relationships; prosperous, productive societies can degenerate into civil war, anarchy, tyranny, and oppression; anyone can get what we might call a great start in life and come to a horrific end (and middle).” (p. 21)

But still argues that these risks can be justified as long as it fits the Procreative Balance Principle:

“Procreative Balance: Procreation is permissible when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.”

One of the fundamental problems involved in this principle is that people usually examine life according to their own lives and if when they are thinking about creating a new person their lives are fine in their view, then they falsely induce that life is fine in general. This observation is wrong not only because it is probably inaccurate and biased regarding their own lives, but also because it is wrong to make a personal life assessment when they are not even half way through (assuming that most people breed before their life is in its middle). But, of course, the worst thing about it is that people also tend to induce that since their life is fine then their children’s life will be fine too, and that is despite that they would be different people, who will live different lives. No one has any guarantee that their children’s lives would be even remotely similar to their own lives.

Furthermore, this procreative principle implies that existing people need to consider their own existence compared with non-existing people or with the option of their own non-existence, and both cases are impossible. A person can’t really remove oneself from its own existence and ignore its interest in continuing to exist (if one has such an interest), therefore, asking people to consider that the risk they are imposing on their own children would not be one that it is irrational for them to accept as a condition of their own birth, is for them, since they exist, like asking if they were willing to give up their own existence considering the risk involved with their creation. But that is obviously not the case and it is definitely not the case when it comes to creating new people. Had existing people never have existed they wouldn’t have to give up anything. And the same goes for people who don’t exist. Whom who never have existed don’t lose anything by not being created.
The person who is asked to reflect over its own creation while considering creating a new person exists and therefore probably balances its own existence with the option of never existing, and since the later seems to most people less desirable or even as a bad option, it seems that they are ready to take huge risks so not to “lose” their existence. That is despite that this is not what would have happened had they never existed. People are afraid of non-existence even though the issue is of them never existing in the first place, not stopping to exist. But people wrongfully imagine themselves giving up everything they have, even though it has no sense, since had they never existed they wouldn’t give up everything they have, nor would they experience giving up everything they have. And since they are making this fundamental mistake it seems rational to them to accept imposing risks, even huge ones, as a condition of their own birth and therefore also as a condition of the creation of their children.

So there is something inherently flawed about this principle as it makes people ask themselves the wrong question, while they actually need to be asking themselves a different one. Something like: I have experienced severe pain at least once during my lifetime, I was severely ill at least once during my lifetime, my heart was broken at least once during my lifetime, I have lost a loved one at least once during my lifetime, and I am working very hard all my life just to support myself; I don’t wish anyone to go through any of that, definitely not my own children. If I’ll create people they probably will experience all of this too, and if I don’t they won’t. They probably would also experience some great things but they will not be deprived of these things if I never create them. So I am actually causing my own children to experience severe pain at least once during their lifetime, severe illness at least once during their lifetime, broken-heartedness at least once during their lifetime, the loss of a loved one at least once during their lifetime, and to work very hard all of their lives, all for me to experience parenthood. What kind of a person wants to do that to others?

Insisting on such a procreative balance implies that not procreating must be a serious harm to people who want to. But isn’t it an indication of how lacking existence is? Of how basically lacking people are? Of how even adults are nonautonomous but are rather dependent and deficient for needing to create others, let alone infant others, to complete them? Had procreation been unforceful, unharmful and risk free, then it could have been permissible. But when the price is so high it is absolutely wrong. In order to fill people’s basically lacking existence they are creating more basically lacking people who will create more basically lacking people to fill their own basically lacking existence and so on. What’s the idea? that without creating new basically lacking people, existing basically lacking people will be harmed by their basically lacking existence so there is no choice but to create more and more basically lacking people?
This is another aspect of procreation being a sort of a Ponzi Scheme, one which I have referred to in the text Autobiographies, Biographies and Ponzi Schemes. And this cruel cycle of unnecessary and totally unbalanced imposition must be ended.

Unbalanced Sacrifice

Even if for the sake of the argument I’ll accept the claim that there’s truly a conflict of interests between people who want to create a person and the person they will create, and that sometimes the harm of not procreating is worth the risk of harm to the person being created, this is not the only implication of these principles. Given that miserable lives are being created all the time – and many of which regardless of the parents treating their children as autonomous people worthy of love and respect – what these principles are actually saying is that some’s misery is justified by the interests of others to procreate.

Weinberg prefers to frame the argument this way: procreation is sometimes ethically justified since many people have a strong interest in procreating and their interest is motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, and for most created people life is not at all bad. But the very same idea can be framed differently: procreation is sometimes ethically justified despite that it is always the case that for some created people, life would be miserable. The second formulation implies that procreation is justifying the imposition of miserable lives upon at least some created people, for the sake of people who want to procreate. But ethically we must prioritize the ones who would be imposed with something that they really wouldn’t want – life of misery had they existed, over the ones who would not get something they want, even if they really want it.

On a global level procreation is not a gamble, it is not a risk, because it is absolutely certain that some persons would be forced to live extremely miserable lives. The question is who. Since people tend to feel that bad things only happen to other people, they dismiss the option of misery happening to their children. And even if for the sake of the argument I’ll accept that the chances of each couple to create a person whose life is extremely miserable are low, this is not the case on a global scale. Meaning, somewhere in the world, miserable persons will be created. And that fact turns the argument from a risk that some of the people would have horrible lives, to a decision that some of the people would have horrible lives if procreation is permissible, because cases of misery are certain, and there are no cases of procreation in which there is a certainty of no misery. So people who decide to procreate are not only taking a risk on someone else’s suffering, they also approve and strengthen the claim that the suffering of some is justified because of the interests of others – people who want to procreate. The immorality of these principles stems not only from the decision to take risks on someone else’s life, but also from the decision that some would be sacrificed so that others could have what they want.

Individuals are sacrificed for others’ desires. That is since even if individuals are being created by people who are motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, some would still be miserable. And so, on a global scale, procreation is sacrificing individuals for others’ desires.
Once there is an option for creating a miserable life, procreation is ethically undefendable. The way it is nevertheless being defended is actually by a sort of tyranny of the (existing) majority.

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 lead miserable lives, but that is a false equivalency. Especially since procreation is not only forcing needless and pointless suffering on the created person, but is also, and in fact first and foremost, forcing needless and pointless suffering on thousands of other sentient creatures, since each person created is harming thousands of sentient creatures during a lifetime.

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.
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 accepting the murder of thousands of creatures.
And all this is the harms involved with direct consumption of animal based food and clothing. Each human harms many more animals in plenty of other ways by consuming various other products, including vegan ones, and by participating in various other activities. Everything has a price, nothing comes for free, everything is somehow harmful to someone.

Procreation is not only creating a subject of harms, but also a small unit of exploitation and pollution. Therefore, the question is not is it justified that people would impose a risk of a lifetime 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 miserable lives on many others so that a truly tiny minority would experience parenthood. How can it be acceptable to force lives full of suffering on thousands of sentient creatures, 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 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. So the true balancing is even crueler considering that the harm to whom who will not get what they want, can be summed up with one generation only, compared with harm to infinite number of generations, theoretically until the sun burns. Eventually we are talking about sacrificing the interests of only the people who currently exist and want to procreate, and only for the “right” reasons, and only if they meet the criterion of the procreative balance. How can the deprivation of one desire, of only a part of only one generation, be seriously compared with the continuance and systematical deprivation of whomever would exist if that part of that one generation will procreate?

Wasn’t it worth it to sacrifice people’s desire to procreate 150 years ago was it possible, so to prevent the horrors of Auschwitz? Is the harm of preventing something desirable from someone, greater than the harms of the Second World War? Wasn’t it worth it to prevent all the people who lived 150 years ago from expressing their desire to procreate so all the horrors of the 20^th century could be avoided, not to mention all the horrors that occurred since then and will occur in the future?

Sentient creatures who would exist in the future are not less 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 and meet the criterion of the principles of procreative permissibility. So giving these people the same moral weight as all the creatures that would ever be forced to suffer is a serious case of myopia, speciesism and cruelty.

One needs to be extremely speciesist to ignore that there is more than one species, and be extremely biased to ignore that there is more than one timeframe. The harm to people from the present is extremely marginal compared with the harm to other species and to people who will exist in the future.

Once realizing that procreation is not good in itself but is only good for the ones who want it, and that it has a tremendous price, clearly it is better to prevent it as soon as possible, as stopping it will hurt only some of the existing people, and not stopping it will endlessly harm more and more sentient creatures. The harm to part of the existing people, by preventing them from procreating, can’t even come close to seriously countervail the harms to generations upon generations of sentient creatures.

Objecting to harm the current generation by preventing it from procreating is forcing endless harms on an endless number of individuals.

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 would understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate.

References

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

Weinberg, Rivka. Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

Weinberg Rivka The Moral Complexity Of Sperm Donation
Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 (print); 1467-8519 (online) doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2007.00624.x
Volume 22 Number 3 2008 pp 166–178

Weinberg Rivka. The Risk Of A Lifetime (Oxford University Press, 2006)

In her book The Risk of a Lifetime Rivka Weinberg explores How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible.
As the headline implies she thinks that procreation is a risk of a lifetime, and as the subheading suggests, it is a permissible risk but under certain conditions.
Since the road she takes to explain How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible goes through various issues which I have already addressed in previous texts, such as her Hazmat Theory Of Parental Responsibility, the Non-Identity Problem, David Benatar’s Quality Of Life Argument, Seana Shiffrin’s consent argument, and Rawls theory of justice, here I’ll focus on the core of her book – the ‘Principles of Procreative Permissibility’.
For a more complete critical observation of the rest of the ideas she addresses in the book, please read the texts I have just referred to.

The Principles of Procreative Permissibility

Despite that the very first sentence of the book is: “Everybody is somebody’s fault” and despite that shortly after she writes:

“It’s mind-blowing, really. Here we are, in our strange and vast universe, living with many unknowns, uncertainties, and difficulties, and what do we do? We decide to create a creature like ourselves, a sentient, conscious person, with full moral status and a future largely unknown except for the fact that the person will be helpless and dependent for a very long time. How odd of us. Who do we think we are, anyway? Where do we get off? When we procreate, what are we doing and why are we doing it? (p. 15)

Her book is not at all an antinatalist one and she doesn’t think life is a predicament. But she also undauntedly rejects the common notion that life is a gift. As opposed to gifts, which are given for free, can be enjoyed or ignored, but very unlikely to harm the recipient, Weinberg argues that life is not free, it can’t be ignored, and it can definitely harm the created. One has to work hard to enjoy life, and if one ignores life, one is likely to suffer, and of course for many created people life is extremely harmful. So life, even when considered good, is not a gift.
But more importantly, life according to her is not a gift, nor a benefit bestowed by parents on their children, because no one needed, wanted or had an interest in being created before it happened, and no one existed in any other form before being created so no one can be benefited by being created. In her own words: “the future person does not have a good or any state at all to improve, benefit, or better until after the procreative act is complete” (p. 20)
She agrees that procreation is not and can’t at all be an action for the sake of the created people, but is an action for the sake of the parents, as the children are not subjects of interests before they are being created, so how can their creation be for their own sake?

So procreation according Weinberg is not a gift, but it’s also not a predicament, it is a risk, a risk of a lifetime that people choose to impose on other people, and necessarily for their own benefit since being created is never in the interests of a person before it exists. And since this is the setting of creating a person, according to her, meaning, basically a selfish action that imposes a lifetime risk on another person, it needs to have a very good reason.

Weinberg suggests that procreation is a risk that can be justified by two principles she calls the ‘Principles of Procreative Permissibility’:

Motivation Restriction: Procreation must be motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born.

Procreative Balance: Procreation is permissible only when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.

Weinberg uses a Kantian/Rawlsian framework for constructing these principles, explaining that the Kantian framework is suited to questions of procreative permissibility because it emphasizes the treatment of all persons as ends in themselves and stresses the importance of proper motivation. And the Rawlsian framework is particularly useful for questions of procreative permissibility because it is constructed to yield just principles in cases of distributive conflicts of interests and deliberated about under conditions constructed to reduce bias. She is aware that it is not common to think of procreation as a distributive conflict of interest, but argues that it is one:

“prospective parents have an interest in procreating whenever they please, and future children have an interest in excellent birth conditions. These interests are often in conflict. For example, if parents procreate while they are unemployed, their children will bear some of the costs of their parents’ procreative freedom. If we restrict procreative permissibility only to cases where the future children are likely to have extremely secure economic situations, people who cannot offer this to their children will bear the costs of the security of future children (a category that, in this case, will not include their own children).” (p.7)

In the following text I’ll address her first principle, and in the second part I’ll address the second one.

An End To Others Being Means

With heavy reliance on a Kantian ethical framework Weinberg considers the motivation behind procreation and the treatment of all persons as ends in themselves, to be extremely crucial:

“Just as Kantian contractualism emphasizes the importance of being properly motivated, we have determined that proper procreative motivation is crucial to its permissibility. Proper procreative motivation is important because it helps to ensure that we are procreating in ways that are not disrespectful to children or inconsistent with our broadly liberal values of autonomy, respect, and equality. For example, procreating because one wants to engage in the parent-child relationship as a nurturing parent would be an acceptable procreative motive, but procreating to impress the neighbors would be a problematic procreative motive, regardless of outcome, because it does not treat the future child as a person deserving of respect and value in her own right.” (p. 154)

However, there seems to be a basic and fundamental oxymoron with forcing existence on other people and treating them as ends in themselves. While we should, and hopefully can, treat existing others as ends in themselves, creating others without them desiring, needing, wanting, or having any interests in being created, can’t be treating them as ends in themselves, as they didn’t exist before their existence was forced on them. Weinberg totally rejects people’s false statement that they are creating other people to benefit these people, so how is it that it is impossible and logically implausible to create someone for its own benefit but not that it is impossible and logically implausible to create someone as an end in itself?

The fact that these ends are to raise, love, and nurture their child once it is born, doesn’t make them means to the child’s end, or the child to be an end in itself. The desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, is still the parents’ desire and never the child’s, since before being created there is no child to have any desire.
Treating a child as an end in itself once it is born doesn’t retroactively make the creation of that child an end in itself. The child was still necessarily born for others’ ends.

In order for a person’s creation to truly be for its own end, it is insufficient for the parents to treat their child as an end in itself, nor for that person to find an end of its own to its own existence, but that the answer to the question ‘why was I created?’ be ‘since I had an end X’. Clearly there is no such option since no one has its own ends before existing. The answer is always ‘since my parents had an end X’. A person can absolutely say ‘now that I exist I have an end X’ and it can absolutely be a reason for its existence after being created, but it can’t be a reason for its creation. No matter how many ends a person would find along its existence, the end of its creation will always be its parents’.

Therefore I find it hard to see how procreation can be defended using a Kantian framework since people are never created as ends in themselves but always as means to their parents’ ends. Being created is never needed or desired by the person being created. It is forced on each and every person, always, and necessarily for motives of others. Or if to go back to the first sentence of the book – “Everybody is somebody’s fault”…

The case in point is about creating people, not about how to treat people after creating them was already decided.
It seems that as far as Weinberg goes the instrumentalization bound with creating people can be covered up if their parents intend to treat them as separate and valuable persons in their own right after they were created. Obviously, treating a person as worthy of respect of its own after being created is highly crucial, however it shouldn’t retroactively change the instrumental circumstances of its creation. It is impossible to create someone not as a mean to others’ ends. And no matter how that person would be treated after being created, nothing can retroactively change that fact.

Weinberg mentions along the book some awful motives for procreation, probably as a rhetoric exercise, hoping to put a positive spin on the motivation she claims can make it permissible. But arguing that – creating a person if there is no intention or ability to ensure that the child would feel self-respect, that she is entitled to love and consideration in her own right – is wrong, doesn’t make the opposite right. They both can be wrong, despite one of them being much worse than the other.
I agree that it will be hard for a child to develop basic self-respect if s/he is not treated as worthy of respect, but that is a good reason to treat people as worthy of respect, and not at all a reason to create people in the first place. Furthermore, the risk imposition, the selfishness, the paternalism, the pointlessness, the pain, the frustration, the stress, the boredom, the sickness, the death and the fear of death, are all still there. All that mentioning some horrible reasons to create a person can prove is that there are certainly even worse reasons to create a person than the ones she suggests, but it can’t prove that her reasons are permissible.

If I want to do something that involves someone else, let alone when that person has no interest in that something happening before it does, I must make sure that at least that person will not be harmed by my desirable action. There is no such option when people are creating people. In fact, it is the opposite, we can be sure that all created people will be harmed, and no motivation and intention to raise, love, and nurture them can ensure that they won’t.

In addition, good intentions do not guarantee good performances (wanting to be a respectful and loving parent does not guarantee succeeding in being one), even allegedly succeeding in treating people as separate persons in their own right, and as entitled to respect and being valued for their own sake, doesn’t ensure good outcomes. Awful and unrespectful relationships between parents and children don’t have exclusivity in misery. There are plenty of other causes and reasons for misery, and there are many miserable children of parents who sincerely tried to be as respectful and as loving as possible. It is simply not at all a guaranteed recipe as life throws plenty of shit at people, and parents are absolutely helpless in protecting their children from all of it.

Wrong Motivation

Besides being irrelevant and insufficient when it comes to questions of creating new people, and besides being selfish and instrumental as well, the mere desire for a relationship which is highly, inevitably, and prolongedly – unequal, paternalistic and controlling – is highly questionable.

Doesn’t the fact that most people don’t want to adopt but desire a biological child of their own, arouse suspicion that it might not be merely the desire to raise, love, and nurture a child? Isn’t it obvious that there is another motive here which involves hubris or narcissism, as people seem to insist on seeing their own genes being spread, on creating an extension of themselves, a mini-me, or something of this sort?
And shouldn’t the fact that the few who are willing to adopt, disproportionally prefer a baby and not a grown child (despite knowing that most of the other people who are willing to adopt prefer to adopt a baby as well, so if they will insist on adopting a baby, parentless grown children might never be adopted), set alarm bells ringing regarding people’s real motives as clearly they prefer that the person they supposedly want to raise, love, and nurture would be as little, as dependent and as cute as possible? Isn’t it because the younger and the more dependent their child is the easier the imprinting process would be? Doesn’t it at all involve ensuring that their child would be more likely to love them back and to fill them with a feeling of power and competent (as after all they are supposedly able to take care of all of someone else’s needs, a feeling that is not available for them with bigger and more independent children)? Doesn’t that preference have something to do with them wanting a cute gadget to love, all the more so one that is way more likely to be an extension of themselves than a grown child is expected to be?
Would people create new people if they were born independent, speaking, intellectually equal adults? No way. And that means that at least part of what they desire is an unequal, paternalistic and controlling relationship.
And of course this case is not even of participating in such a relationship but of creating one, all the more so exactly because that’s what it is (again, people would not create independent, speaking, intellectually equal adults).

So even if that was truly the motivation of parents, there is something awfully wrong about it. And unfortunately, usually, the motivation is even worse than the one Weinberg refers to.
I fail to comprehend how a desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born can justify the blunt and unambiguous elements of imposition, selfishness, and instrumentalization, bound with its creation. Elements which Weinberg is well aware of:

“even if the child’s life is good for the child once the child exists, it is still not a benefit to the child to have been procreated. That’s why we cannot easily claim to create a child to further the child’s interests. The child has interests only if the child exists; otherwise we have no real subject for interests at all. Therefore we do not further the child’s interests by bringing it into existence. We must face the fact that we don’t procreate for the sake of our children. We procreate because we want to. Hopefully, we want to because we want to engage in the parent-child relationship as a parent and participate in a family. Thus we come to an understanding of how we may procreate with a justifiable motive. The parental motive seems justifiable because acting on it may satisfy a unique and legitimate interest of existing people and, arguably, may do so in a way that can be respectful of the future child before the child is conceived and beneficial to the child once the child exists.” (p. 39)

If humans have such a strong motivation to express their desire to love and take care of others, why not directing it towards whom who are in real need instead of creating new unnecessary needy people? By that they are adding insult to injury, since they are devoting most of their time, energy and resources to needs that they have unnecessarily created, instead of to the various needs that were already there. So in that sense, creating new people is not only disrespectful towards the created people, as they are created to serve as mediums for the expression of their creators’ desire to love and take care of others, but it is also disrespectful towards existing people in need who are treated as if their need is less important than a created unnecessary need.
And it all comes with a very high price, imposing unnecessary lifetime risks on others, treating children as means to others’ ends, forsaking people in real need, and creating additional and unnecessary units of suffering, exploitation and pollution.

It is hard to call something a truly and authentically loving relationship when one side is totally depended on the other. The child being absolutely needy and helpless, develops attachment to its parents because they provide vital first aid, mainly through feed and a sense of protection. And that positive association is being formed regardless of any intrinsic quality of the parents. It is not a choice or a preference, but more like a conditioned reflex. This is more like a fixed attachment, an imprinting, than anything authentic.
It is such an unequal, paternalistic and commanding relationship that it needs to be condemned not perpetuated and justified. The fact that it is very common, natural and universal doesn’t make it right.
A structurally unequal and dominating relationship is not justified because these features are natural and inevitable. In fact, since this relationship is naturally and inevitably structurally unequal and dominating, creating it must be avoided.

Procreation involves a dubious motivation and it is wrong to describe it as if it can be a product of a pure desire to raise, love and nurture another person. It is mainly a biological impulse, that can be controlled, is unnecessary, and necessarily has tremendous prices.

Creating a person is creating a biological gadget, even if its creators don’t treat it as one. It is a biological gadget that is supposed to provide its creators love and satisfaction, a sense of power and competence, a purpose for their existence, to ease their existence’s pointlessness, to ease their boredom, to give them a reason to do staff, to recover and maintain their relationship, normalize them in the eyes of society and etc. These motives are rarely openly stated but they are some of the real reasons behind procreation and often behind the motivation to raise, love and nurture one’s child once it is born.

Disrespectful Unequal and Nonautonomous

Having a so called proper motive may be important to ensure that the parents are not disrespectful to their children or inconsistent with broadly liberal values of autonomy, respect, and equality, after the person was created, but it can’t retroactively change the fact that that person was created for its parents’ ends, without equally respecting that person’s autonomy. These values are some of the crucial factors for insuring a respectful treatment of an existing person, but practically they are hardly relevant even for existing children, as they are not really treated as equally respectful autonomous people, and they are not even theoretically relevant for non-existing people.

Unilaterally forcing someone into a relationship which that person can’t really get out of isn’t being respectful of that person. Once existing, a person can’t undo its own existence, undo or change the genetic makeup forced on that person, undo or change the environmental conditions forced on that person, or undo or change the relationships forced on that person.
And there is not even a clean, safe and respectful exit option from any of that, so how is it respectful of the person created?

Suicide, which is not by all means undoing existence, as explained in the text about suicide, is a horrible, harmful, scary and dangerous option. Disconnection from the forced relationship is only optional from a certain age and even then it is always complicated as people are not psychologically built to disassociate from their family, it always comes with a price, and even if it didn’t, it can’t retroactively cancel out the crucial and irreversible effects a family has on a person. Weinberg may wonder why would anyone even want to have these options if its parents really loved and nurtured that person? And maybe most wouldn’t, but some might, and anyway the point is not statistical but fundamental, forcing someone into a situation with no exit options is trapping, not respecting. If there is no respectful exit, how can there be a respectful entrance?

It sure sounds highly disrespectful to create someone to impress the neighbors (one of Weinberg’s examples, which was earlier mentioned), but is it really fundamentally different, in the instrumentalization sense, than the case of procreating because one wants to engage in a parent-child relationship as a nurturing parent? I am not saying it is the same, or that it is equally bad, it is not, but I am wondering how is creating someone as a love and nurture gadget for its parents, so fundamentally and even categorically different than many other selfish motives?
I understand that that person may feel more respected if its parents say that they wanted to raise, love, and nurture a child and not that they wanted to impress the neighbors if are asked why did they create him/her. However, if that person thinks a little bit more deeply about it, the parents wanted to raise, love, and nurture a child, they didn’t want to raise, love, and nurture him/her specifically, and it is them who wanted to raise, love, and nurture a child, not him/her specifically who wanted to be raised, loved and nurtured. So I understand why it feels more respectful than most other reasons, yet I fail to understand why this motive is categorically different.

Impressing the neighbors sounds awfully selfish and instrumental, but a desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born is also selfish and instrumental as in both cases it is not the created person’s need or desire but its parents’. In both cases a person was created unilaterally and according to the parents’ will. The fact that the created person didn’t have a will to consider before being created doesn’t mean that it was nevertheless respected because it will be respected after that person is created. The respect in case should be regarding its creation not its nurture. Respecting someone’s will in existence doesn’t retroactively respect someone’s will in being created, and since there is no will to be created, creating a person can’t be respectful but only forceful.

The desire for a relationship which in its essence is highly unequal and paternalistic, is wrong, and as opposed to her claim it is disrespectful to children and inconsistent with broadly liberal values such as equality, respect and autonomy. Weinberg argues that there are many cases of paternalism that we find justified, but that doesn’t mean that paternalism is unproblematic, only that it is sometimes necessary. It is still a problem and when it is justified it is probably because it is the lesser of two evils. It is justified since without it, someone is going to be harmed. Paternalism towards existing people who lost their ability for autonomy isn’t like creating people who have no ability for autonomy. The fact that we are bound to accept that there are some cases that paternalism is necessary isn’t by any means a justification to create more of it. We need to try and prevent paternalism as much as we can, not justify the creation of more and more of it because sometimes it is necessary. And it is never necessary to create an unnecessary situation which is known to be inherently and inevitably paternalistic.

Some argue that this paternalism is only temporary, but it is for a very long time, it is not at all necessary, and it is not a case of the lesser of two evils for these people. As opposed to the case of paternalism towards existing people, in the case of procreation the choice is not paternalism or harm, as no one is harmed by not being created.

And I disagree that the paternalism is temporary, since by the time the created people become supposedly autonomic they are already deeply designed by their genetic makeup, their surroundings, their so far life experiences (mainly earlier formative experiences), and of course by their parents who usually conduct it all. So how autonomic can a person exactly be when almost everything about that person was predesigned by various crucial factors that determine who that person is and who that person can be, from many aspects. People choose practically nothing of almost each and every crucial factor that has made them who they are, so how can they ever be who they really are? How can they really be autonomous?

There are various elements of coercion in parents-children relationships, there is no option for children to choose until a relatively late stage in their life, and even then these choices are made out of a very particular position which wasn’t chosen by them. The fact that people can’t choose, shape or even influence their own existence conditions including their genetics, their environment, their family, and their early formative experiences makes their creation even more wrong, disrespectful, and inconsistent with broadly liberal values of autonomy, respect, and equality.

Someone’s existence is always a result of an action that doesn’t respect the created person’s independence as a person because consent is never given by that person, the person never chooses anything about its own existence, including the very fact of having one, the person doesn’t have a safe and harmless way of ending its own existence, the person can’t choose its parents, the rest of the family, its neighborhood, its society and etc.
These things are always being selected for everyone. The most affected person never gets to choose anything, and that is always wrong and disrespectful.

Most of the critical things are determined for a person before it becomes an autonomous entity, therefore s/he never really is one in a deeper sense. And that is under the more liberal view, the more inclined you are towards nature in the famous nature vs. nurture debate, the less relevant the autonomy option is. However since no one really chooses one’s environment, it doesn’t really matter whether it is more nature or more nurture, as it is definitely not autonomy. No one really has autonomy over one’s life. No one really freely chooses its own projects, goals, meaning or even its own character.

This is inherent to human life and it is unavoidable. Of course there can be differences, clearly people raised by parents who highly emphasis their autonomy and choice are more likely to become more independent compared with people who were raised by controlling and strict parents. However no parents can avoid controlling their children and highly affecting their autonomy. They are deciding everything for their children, particularly at early ages. They decide for them where they live, they often unilaterally change where they live, they decide what they will wear, what they will eat, what they do, what they don’t do, who to be with, who not to be with and etc. And if parents really want to create autonomous people they must constantly and impartially expose them to an immense variety of options, which is obviously totally unrealistic, and it would only partially deal with only part of the problem which is the environmental effects. It won’t deal with many other environmental effects that parents have absolutely no control over, and it won’t deal with the genetic makeup that no one has chosen but everyone must endure.

Every aspect of children’s lives is controlled by their parents, but what I am mostly bothered with here is not the structured and inherent paternalism but that in many senses people are significantly designed by their parents, and by many other factors which they have not chosen or can retroactively affect. The more profound aspect of non-autonomy is that people don’t get to choose who they are, who they will be, who they can be, who they want to be, their boundaries and etc. This is not a temporary coercion but a lifetime one.

Procreation is creating a person. A person that not only has not chosen to be created, but also has not chosen anything involved with its creation nor most of the most crucial elements in determining who that person is. Procreation is creating a person who is forced to be the carrier of certain genetic makeup, environment, and formative experiences, without any option to really evade their crucial effect, an effect that in one way or another will be part of every choice that person would ever make. Way more than totally controlling their lives until a certain age (as important as it is in itself), that is the profound coercion and non-autonomy that is intrinsically involved in creating a person.

In conclusion, I disagree with Weinberg that this motivation ensures that people are procreating in ways that are respectful to children or consistent with broadly liberal values of autonomy, respect, and equality, or that this motivation is categorically different in the sense of treating children as means to others’ ends. I think that this motivation is nevertheless disrespectful, unequal, non-autonomous, and instrumental.
But even if I agreed with Weinberg, and even if such a motivation could have been genuine (and not extremely problematic, to say the least, and not disrespectful to children, and not inconsistent with broadly liberal values of autonomy, respect, and equality), what does it say about procreation if one of the two principles of procreative permissibility is what should have been the most self-evident reason for procreating? It is awfully sad that people need to be told that they must be motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, and not by any other motivation, when they are planning to create a person.
The fact that she seriously argues that such a motivation must be initial to procreation only strengthens antinatalism as it is supposed to be extremely clear. And the fact that not only is it rarely the motivation, but that usually there is not even a feeling or need to come up with explicit motivations for procreation, or any thought about such a profound and crucial decision whatsoever, makes antinatalism even stronger. It indicates on the ease with which people are imposing risks of a lifetime on other people. And that disrespectful ease means that people are far from being responsible enough in order to put the fate of others in their hands.
If humanity has reached the 21^st century and it needs a philosopher to dedicate a whole book to explain people under which circumstances procreation may be permissible, and these would be that they are motivated by the desire and intention to raise, love, and nurture one’s child once it is born, then clearly procreation mustn’t be permissible under any circumstances.
If it needs to be explained methodically and while eliminating unjustified and false motives it means that procreation mostly happens for unjustified and false motives. And if it mostly happens for unjustified and false motives there is a problem with the agents, since it is not that the “justified” and “right” motives are complicated, but rather that they should have been absolutely self-evident. But they are absolutely not. And that is extremely worrying.
If such an obvious factor must not only be mentioned but is one of the two formulated principles, then obviously there is something terribly wrong with the reasons people procreate and have been procreating so far. And if something is so wrong with the reasons people procreate and have been procreating so far, then maybe she doesn’t need to make the effort and formulate principles that can justify it, but conclude that people better never to have breed.

The second part of this text addresses Weinberg’s second principle of procreative permissibility: Procreative Balance

References

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

Shiffrin, S.V. Wrongful life, procreative responsibility, and the significance of harm. 1999
Legal Theory 5: 117–148

Weinberg, Rivka. Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

Weinberg Rivka The Moral Complexity Of Sperm Donation

Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 (print); 1467-8519 (online) doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2007.00624.x

Volume 22 Number 3 2008 pp 166–178

Weinberg Rivka. The Risk Of A Lifetime (Oxford University Press, 2006)

According to the book History of Antinatalism – How Philosophy Has Challenged the Question of Procreation, philosophy has started to challenge the question of procreation more or less since philosophy has started to challenge any question. The first mentioned and quoted philosophers in the book are the first philosophers mentioned and quoted in any book, meaning the pre-Socratics, including whom who is considered to be the first philosopher in history – Thales of Miletus who was born according to estimation between 624 to 620 BC, as well as Heraclitus (540-470 BC), Parmenides (515-450), and Anaxagoras (500-428 BC), and ancient Greek playwrights such as Sophocles (495-406 BC) and Euripides (480-406 BC). The book’s editor considers Thales to be not only the first philosopher to challenge the question of procreation but to be the first antinatalist, since when he was asked why he is childless, he replied ‘because I so love the children’.
The book is full of examples such as this, as well as many indirect but significant contributions to challenging the question of procreation, from several philosophers, in the course of almost 3,000 years. From the mentioned Thales, to Aristotle to whom an entire chapter is devoted, to Blaise Pascal, Leibniz, Montesquieu (“we should bewail people when being born and not after their death“), Schopenhauer obviously, Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, to explicit and unmistakable antinatalist philosophers such as Peter Wessel Zapffe and Emil Cioran, and until present day antinatalist philosophers.

However, as impressive as this detailing of the history of Antinatalism is, the fact that the philosophical challenges of the question of procreation are ancient, and were made by various thinkers, from various thought traditions, including plenty of religious ones, is actually very depressing since it means that many people, from various different cultures and thought traditions, including religious ones, had plenty of time to seriously challenge procreation, yet they haven’t.

I find the book very frustrating not because its content is too premature to be considered antinatalism, or because it turns out that philosophy has not seriously challenged the question of procreation, or since the ideas mentioned in it are merely proto-antinatalism and not more, or because the promise of an old and rich history doesn’t live up to expectation, but exactly because it does. The history of the philosophical challenges to procreation is indeed ancient and many of them are quite impressive, and the ones taken from the New Testament and from Christian theology are also very surprising. Notwithstanding, it is all very saddening, since none of it made a significant practical impact.
There is something very depressing about the fact that philosophical challenges to procreation go so way back and are so culturally extensive, yet they haven’t infiltrated the public.

In the chapter devoted to Christianity there are many quotes that I found surprisingly sympathetic to antinatalistic ideas. However, the fact that many ideas in Christianity are sympathetic to antinatalistic ideas and yet de facto Christianity is a very pro-natalistic ideology, is a very strong indication for people’s desires and limitations. That is especially the case with the concept of hell which should have been, and still must be, a very strong antinatalistic argument yet it absolutely isn’t. However, since I have already addressed this issue in the former text, and since the book focuses more on Christian Scriptures and Christian theology than the concept of hell, I’ll not get in to it here. And as for christian texts, it doesn’t matter that much what is written in the Scriptures, the Gospels and theological books but what people practically see in them, and they usually see what they want or what is in their interests. For example, Jesus advocated for simplicity, humbleness, and peacefulness, but allegedly in his name people engaged in countless wars, and accumulated inapprehensible wealth. No religion is more capitalistic than Protestantism, and no religion is more ostentatious than Catholicism. People, as usual, interpreted things as they desire.

Even if early Christianity, that of the Gospels, had truly contained many antinatalist tendencies, it clearly evolved into an extremely pro-natalist ideology, with the Catholic Church officially forbidding the use of contraception and abortion. And one must be highly conspiracist to believe that such a radical shift was possible despite that people’s natural dispositions were compatible with these ideas. It is much more plausible that if anything, it is the ideas of early Christianity which didn’t quite suit people’s natural tendencies which are not exactly celibacy and asceticism, and the later ones were way more fitting, evidently, they have been extensively endorsed and remain up to this day.

People don’t need a religious propaganda about family and fertility, they have a built-in biological one. Long before Christianity emerged, humans have lived in a familial structure and were highly inclined to procreate. And except for some marginal extraordinary examples, that is basically cross cultural and from time immemorial. It is not as if before Christianity most humans throughout history have lived solitarily and abstinently, but exactly the opposite. Unfortunately humans are naturally very social and sexual animals. Celibacy, continence, chastity and barrenness are completely unnatural for humans. Familialist and fertilist religious propaganda is needless, it is literally preaching to the quire.

Since people naturally desire to procreate they stress the pro-natalistic aspects and conceal or ignore the antinatalistic ideas. They always do that when they are facing demands they find undesirable. Especially when they are asked to stop doing things they want to keep doing. For example, one of the most common ways they justify the consumption of animal products is that humans are animals and animals eat each other, thus it is natural for humans to eat animals. Even if for the sake of the argument we’ll accept that it is natural – and ignore the fact that none of the ways humans consume animals is natural, that none of the animals that humans are consuming are natural, that there is nothing natural about adult humans consuming the milk of another species (it is unprecedented in the natural world), and of course that even if it was natural it wouldn’t make it ethical since naturalness has nothing to do with goodness or rightness as something can be natural yet terrible (and the fact is that most of the natural things are indeed terrible) – humans are contradicting themselves when at the same time, often literally in the same conversion, they are also claiming that they are not at all animals or at least a special kind of species, a superior one and therefore deserve a special treatment and a special place on earth, and shouldn’t be treated  equality to animals. How does it settle? It doesn’t. And it doesn’t need to, since as conceptually wrong as speciesist humans are, practically they are right that they are a superior species, and a superior species doesn’t have to be conceptually right, rational and consistent as long as its mastery and power is not threatened, as long as it makes all the decisions anyway. People don’t do what is right and consistent but what is worthwhile and desirable… for them.

Obviously we can’t expect masses of people to stop procreating, let alone all together and entirely, because they have heard or read some philosophical fragments. But we can expect that societies won’t become so pro-natalist because its members have heard and read some philosophical fragments. Yet all societies did become pro-natalist. It is not that people were convinced by these philosophical fragments but didn’t stop breeding as a result of the need for helping hands, because their sexual desire overpowered their perceptions, and because during some eras among some societies it was a civic duty to produce new citizens, it is that they weren’t convinced. Otherwise as soon as people had alternatives they would have stopped breeding, otherwise births wouldn’t have been celebrated but treated as something that happen since people have sex and because people need working hands and because nations need soldiers. But people didn’t stop and births were always celebrated. Had some of these ancient ideas had some presence in some of people’s minds, on the practical level procreation probably would have only very slightly decreased before the contraception age, but on the theoretical level it should have been viewed entirely different a long time ago, and for the last two hundred years it should have been decreasing. None of that had happened.

It is probably a good place to clarify that I am not suggesting that the book implied that if people would realize how ancient and extensive the history of antinatalist ideas is, they would be convinced by them, or anything like that. It is a history book, surely one that was written by people with a very clear agenda, but it’s still a history book, not a book-length pamphlet aiming at convincing the readers that antinatalism’s antiquity origin is somehow evidence of its trueness. I am discussing such a claim while addressing the book not because it was made along it, but because that is one of the more probable practical implications to take from it.
And we can often observe such a move in relation to animal rights. Many activists and writers are pointing out that compassion towards animals is actually ancient, mainly by quoting all kinds of prominent historical figures, as well as mentioning that some of them such as Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, da Vinci, Newton, Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Tolstoy, Kafka, Van Gogh, George Bernard Shaw, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein were vegetarians. But it seems that they don’t realize how depressing it is that such a basic idea wonders around for so long yet is still so far from becoming the norm. And vegetarianism (not even veganism) is way more basic and easy than antinatalism.

The question of procreation may be seriously challenged since ancient times, but it had only started to be significantly challenged by the public in the late 60’s, and that is mainly by environmentalists concerned about overpopulation (some may go earlier for that matter to Thomas Malthus though I don’t know how effective his warnings were on the practical level). And as important as the environmental concern is in itself, and as important as the fear of world hunger is in itself, and both most certainly are, these are not philosophical challenges to procreation. They are obviously extremely important ethical questions but since they are ethically circumstantial and not fundamental, it is not really the same category. But obviously you are the last people who need to be reminded that overpopulation is very far philosophically from antinatalism, and even if one anyway counts it in, at least as part of challenging the question of procreation, as aforementioned, concerns about overpopulation definitely don’t have a long history but started to engage parts of the public only in the mid-seventies. And by some parts of the public I unfortunately mean very few people. Even nowadays, in the climate change era, most of the environmentalist groups don’t dare to suggest that people should have fewer children.

The only philosophical challenge of procreation that truly had a serious effect on the actual number of people who decided not to procreate is Liberalism, and its effect is indirect. The philosophical tradition of Liberalism which put the individual in the center of attention as opposed to the nation, society, god and etc., made people realize they don’t have to procreate if they don’t want to, because it is their desires that count most. And many people indeed decide not to procreate because they don’t want to. Nowadays, people don’t feel the same level of social and religious pressure to procreate as people felt just until a few decades ago, and some of these people feel that they don’t want to procreate because it might collide with other life choices they find more attractive than becoming parents, or that they don’t want to become parents because they find becoming parents undesirable. People have various options to manage their lives and some don’t include or might collide with being parents.

Having said that, pro-natalists social pressures are still very powerful, and most people still want to procreate, and not because of external pressures, but because of internal ones.

And anyway, Liberalism is not a philosophical challenge to the question of procreation, but a philosophical challenge to the question of choice, so in relation to procreation, it may challenge social pressure on people to procreate despite that they don’t want to, as well as challenging social pressure on people not to procreate despite they do want to (LGBT people, or ethnic minorities which are prevented from fertility treatments, ova donations, sperm donations and surrogacy, for example). So liberalism per se is most certainly not a philosophical challenge to the question of procreation, and in liberal societies, it is often the case that liberal notions are in fact a challenge to antinatalism.

More people in more areas of the world having more choices regarding procreation is obviously a very welcome social change as otherwise there would have been many more people in the world, and correspondingly many more victims. But that is not an evidence of the success of antinatalists ideas. The reproduction decrease in many areas of the world in the last couple of decades is not an evidence for antinatalists ideas finally starting to be implemented after a long history of them being merely theoretical, it is not due to late blooming of ancient antinatalists ideas, but mostly due to contemporary social, cultural and economic processes, and if philosophy had anything to do with it, it is the indirect effect of liberalism, not the direct effect of moralism.

The fact that most of the people who abstain from procreation are doing it because they don’t want to, and not because they think that ethically no one is allowed to, doesn’t really leave that much room for optimism. And the fact that both ideas: that one doesn’t have to procreate, and that one must not procreate; have a very very long history, yet both, even the child-free notion, are still relatively marginal; actually creates even more room for pessimism.
A long history of a philosophical idea doesn’t guarantee its implementation in the future.

Of course I am not suggesting that books about the history of ideas shouldn’t be written, they have a purpose and a benefit, however we must also consider their depressing aspect.
We must consider that the longer the history of very logical and basic ideas, the smaller their chances to become the norm. The fact that some ideas are out there for such a long time but were never picked up by the masses, can be an indication that as logical and basic as they may be, they are undesirable by the majority. Environmental ideas for example also have a very long history. And as opposed to antinatalism and antispeciesism, which I can understand why they are viewed as conceptually threatening to some people as both are anti-anthropocentric (on the face of it, it seems as if it is mostly antispeciesism but since antinatalism practically necessarily results in human extinction it is also an anti-anthropocentric view), protecting the environment is not necessarily anti-anthropocentric, it can be quite the opposite if it is presented as protecting the human race’s home (despite that it is only one species out of about 8.7 million other species). So environmentalism is not necessarily contradictive to anthropocentrism, and it is hard to think of other reasons why despite it being so basic and logical and historical, it is still such a marginal viewpoint.
And if you think that it is not really that marginal, as many people would agree that protecting the environment is important, surly much more than people who agree with antinatalism and antispeciesism, then consider that many people may also say that people have a right not to procreate and that animals have a right not to be tortured, but both are empty statements since to really agree with antinatalism is to not breed and to agree with antispeciesism is to not consume animal products, and in the same line of thought, considering how important and urgent environmental issues are, agreeing that protecting the environment is important is also an empty statement, as clearly the planet is under severe climate change and people know this for decades now, yet they still consume animal products despite their immense carbon footprint, they still use private cars on a daily basis, and many use airplanes occasionally, most don’t recycle, and of course, keep creating more people despite that it is the worst thing that a person can privately do in terms of climate change.
And that is because people are egocentric and most are also egoistic and very small minded. They are extremely concentrated on their small little lives here and now, therefore it is highly unlikely that the history of ideas would wake them up. But it should wake us up. It should wake the few people who do care, and who are not concentrated on their small little lives here and now, but on everyone’s lives, everywhere, at all times.

History books must make us realize that caring for others always has been and always will be a marginal position. Ethical ideas such as antinatalism would never prevail.

For me, the main practical function of a book such as History of Antinatalism, is as an alarm clock. We need to read this history book with an eye to the future. We must think that the worst thing that can happen is that the chapters about current antinatalism would become in the future additional chapters about the history of antinatalism, instead of being the last ones. We must think that this book should be the first and last history of antinatalism book, because another history of antinatalism book in the future means that antinatalism has failed, as for it to succeed there must be no future.

References

Kateřina Lochmanová et al. History of Antinatalism: How Philosophy Has Challenged the Question of Procreation (2020) ISBN 9798645624255

The following text is a sort of appendix to the critical review of Julio Cabrera’s book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate. If you somehow got here before reading the main text , please read it first, otherwise it would be counterproductive.

In this text I focus on the ‘negative approach to argumentation’ potential implication of being so tolerant towards others’ views to the point of Ethical Subjectivism and Moral Perspectivism.

Cabrera understands that his approach may be interpreted as a form of, or at least as an intensification or indirect support of Moral Skepticism, Ethical Subjectivism, Moral Relativism and even Moral Nihilism, so he tries to explain why it is none of the above.

Regarding Moral Skepticism he writes:

“the negative approach is neither dogmatic nor skeptical; its attitude is eminently pluralistic. Contrary to dogmatism, the negative approach does not accept any unique or absolute truth about any matter whatsoever. But, contrary to skepticism, it does not think that this is a reason to suspend judgment or abandon philosophy. The negative approach is pluralistic in the sense of considering–against skepticism–that every philosophy succeeds in achieving truth in some aspect of it; but–against dogmatism–this does not mean that all other philosophies are false and must be discarded. In the negative approach, dogmatist philosophies do not fail, they all succeed; but, against dogmatism, such success does not eliminate other philosophies, also successful in their own terms. The negative approach adopts pluralism against dogmatic and sceptic monism.” (Page 167)

Regarding claims that his negative approach is a form of Nihilism he argues:

“Different from nihilism and frivolity, the negativist position firmly and seriously (and tragically) believes in the value and interest of the line of argumentation being sustained, connected to some specific Gestalten, even though–unlike the affirmative approach–it no longer believes that this is the unique true line, and that the alternatives are simply wrong and must be defeated. No line of argument can refute another by the mere fact of being sound, because many lines of arguments about the same matter are sound, even when opposed to each other.” (Page 183)

I agree that his stances are not skeptic or nihilistic as he doesn’t claim that it is impossible to validate moral stands nor that moral stands are all wrong or irrelevant or meaningless as it is according to moral theories such as Moral Skepticism, Moral Nihilism, Emotivism and Error Theory. If anything it is to the contrary, it seems that according to him, not none but every moral stand is valid as the next one, as long as it is honest, and can be rationally explained from the position and perspective (Gestalten) of its holder. Therefore it would be wrong to infer that all moral stands are wrong such as in Error theory and Moral Skepticism, or that moral stands are meaningless as in Moral Nihilism. However it can be inferred that arguing about different moral stands is meaningless since they are all right from the perspective of their different arguers. So, if anything, his approach is more a form of Moral Relativism and Ethical Subjectivism, but not in a sense that moral statements can’t be true or false, but rather that they are always relative to a certain perspective. In fact, he explicitly claims that his negative ethics is perspectivistic.

And indeed it is hard not to consider statements such as ‘philosophies do not fail, they all succeed in their own terms’, as a form of Moral Relativism, Ethical Subjectivism and Moral Perspectivism.
And even more so claims such as these:

“The pluralism of the negative approach is mostly based on the Gestalt theory–traditionally a theory of perception–applied into the field of concepts, as was explained in previous chapters (particularly in Chapter 4).  The negative approach states that the parties in a discussion are never speaking of strictly the same thing; it is highly unlikely that two arguers have exactly the same premises and the same Gestalten about everything. This also means that there is no “contradiction” between them in a strictly formal sense: if two parties come to the results A and non-A, it is not difficult to show that the premises, the argumentative process and the forms of sequitur employed by A are not the same as the premises and forms of argument of non-A. But because of this, there is no full communication between them either but, at most, some sort of interaction, where each party pays attention to and selects particular pieces of sectors of the other party’s statements. Both partially overlap generating a fragmentary and self-centered understanding of the subject being discussed.” (Page 167)

And:

“The philosophical ideas that appear on our horizon are never direct records of reality; rather, they are inevitability organized in a particular way; they allow some things to be seen and produce complete blindness for others.”  (Page 167)

And:

“Philosophical ideas are formulated in a particular way and shape, in relation to proximity, similarity and combination just like in the field of perception. When we try to persuade another person of our point of view, we try to change their organization of objects, but these attempts deal frequently with insuperable limitations; so that, after all, each of the parties firmly keeps their own Gestalt rather than accepting the other’s.” (Page 168)

It is hard to see how that doesn’t result in Moral Relativism and/or Ethical Subjectivism.
Obviously we can disagree with Cabrera’s premises in the above paragraph, but if we accept them, then it is not clear why this approach, in the most far reaching case, is excessively tolerant towards alternative views, and not simply absolutely tolerant towards any other view, as according to him, each point of view is actually an expression of a particular way and shape that objects are organized by people. So, if there is no right or wrong Gestalt how can there be a right and wrong philosophical idea that is derived from each person’s unique Gestalt?
And if “the philosophical ideas that appear on our horizon are never direct records of reality; rather, they are inevitably organized in a particular way; they allow some things to be seen and produce complete blindness for others”, how can anyone judge any philosophical idea? If no one has access to reality as it is, and everyone has blind spots, no one can judge anyone’s philosophical ideas. Where is the room for criticism under this formulation? How can anyone negate any standpoint? How can anything be wrong and right? How can anything be defined as cruel or harmful as it all depends on each agent’s Gestalt? And once a person follows the rules mentioned in the main text , basically everything goes, no matter how harmful and cruel it may be.

Cabrera’s approach is not Moral Nihilism or Moral Skepticism as he acknowledges the existence of moral values and their meaning, only that according to him they are relative. And not relative to particular social norms as Moral Relativism suggests, but relative to the particular perspective of each arguer, and so it is hard not to view it as Ethical Subjectivism or Moral Perspectivism. What ground does ethics have if anyone can do anything one wants as long as it can be explained according to that person’s Gestalt?

Cabrera tries to explain why nevertheless it isn’t:

“Gestalten, as conceptual organizations and perspectives, are neither “objective”–in the sense of completely external and independent from all human organization–nor “subjective”, in the sense of purely psychological, internal, personal, or private constructions. When looking at the famous images of gestalt theory (the duck and the rabbit, the old and the young ladies, the two jars and the two faces), we can see that all of them are perfectly objective, no matter which side is being selected for observation. Anyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort. The two figures are over there, they are real and not illusory, but they heavily depend on some perspective in order to be seen; these objective things can only be seen from a particular perspective, but this does not turn them “subjective”.
Therefore, there is a midpoint between objectivity and subjectivity to be explored, a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives, an objectivity that is only possible through some kind of look on reality that everybody can, in principle, assume. Figures do not appear without some effort–perceptive or conceptual–but once the figure appears, it is perfectly objective. ” (Page 168)

This explanation is rather ambiguous in my view. And it doesn’t seem to be consistent with his former claims. If the midpoint between objectivity and subjectivity is where everyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort, then it is not accurate that there are blind spots. How is this claim compatible with his claims regarding blind spots? If there is something that I can’t see, how can I assume it? and if I can, why can’t I treat it as objective given that his criteria for objectivity is if there is ‘a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives based on the possibility of everybody, in principle, to assume other perspectives’? If there is a kind of objectivity mediated by perspectives, an objectivity that is only possible through some kind of look on reality that in principle, everybody can assume, regarding philosophical positions; why can’t we assume it regarding philosophical discussions? Why can’t we try to show our opponent our look on reality given that everybody can, in principle, assume it, and therefore expect that person to be convinced by our arguments? If what can turn a seemingly subjective perspective into an objective one is that everyone can visualize the other figure by making a perceptual effort, then why can’t we treat it as objective during a debate? If objectivism is possible, we must make efforts and reach it. If it isn’t, then we have subjectivism. If after being exposed to my opponent’s thought process, I am not convinced by the arguments, then either they are wrong, or the premises are wrong, or my way of thinking is wrong; but it can’t be that they are all right. And if they are, then how is it not Ethical Subjectivism?
At most, Cabrera offers a psychological explanation for why so many discussions end in an impasse. But I fail to see the philosophical explanation for that claim.
I may understand why someone is sure that s/he has a right to eat another animal, but I fail to understand how any psychological explanation for that position can somehow provide a valid philosophical justification for that position.
Had Cabrera only argued that it is impossible to convince someone with a different Gestalten, I would have unfortunately mostly agree, but his argument is way more subjectivist and ethically dangerous, as he argues that someone with a certain Gestalten is right just as anyone else with a different Gestalten. It may be true that it is hard to convince a psychopath that harming others is wrong, but it is a whole different story to argue that a psychopath is right from its own Gestalten.
In any case, his reference to the point is too minimal in my view, as obviously it is an extremely important issue.

Regarding Moral Relativism he writes:

“Philosophical communities in general are more afraid of relativism, of the possibility of different and opposite positions all being true (the frightening “anything goes”), than of the opposite idea–absolutism–according to which just one position is true (our own, of course) and all the others are wrong (“only one goes”). As we saw before, changing perspectives is seen as irresponsible and dangerous by many. But this is controversial because the connections between dogmatism, fanaticism and tyranny have been blatantly evident through all human history. Totalitarianisms have historically been based on absolute certainties rather than on sceptical doubt. Totalitarianisms were never sceptical; on the contrary, fanatic people believe without restrictions in some absolute and unchangeable truth. Meanwhile, the negative approach does not assume any kind of “subjective relativism”; it could be better defined as an objective or Gestaltic relativism. Argumentation relies on Gestalten, but Gestalten are objective. It could also be said that the negative approach adopts a sort of Gestaltic or perspecitivstic realism.” (Page 168)

I don’t see the difference between “subjective relativism” and “objective or Gestaltic relativism” on the practical level. Under both formulations I am bound to accept the position of the other as being as valid as mine, no mater how cruel and harmful it is.
Secondly, though it is true that absolutism brought and brings horrors with it, so does relativism, only that its pluralistic coating makes it seem as a much better option than absolutism. But actually what is the difference between doing what I want no matter how cruel it is because I am absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong, and doing what I want no matter how cruel it is because I am right from my perspective and you may be right from yours? Consuming animals who are forced to live the worst lives imaginable because speciesism is absolutely right, or because consuming animals is absolutely right for me, doesn’t matter much to the suffering animals. Obviously under totalitarianisms the one in power holds the absolute truth and that’s obviously worse, but under totalitarianisms there is no room for argumentation anyway so it is an irrelevant example. When argumentation is possible, I don’t see the fundamental difference between absolutism and “anything goes” in relation to the option of me convincing my opponents.
It seems as if it is better to believe that everything is true than that there is only one truth, however in relation to argumentation, both lead to a total impasse. In both cases arguing is pointless. If a counter-argument can be found against my argument by someone who believes there is only one truth then the absolute approach leads to an impasse, and alternatively, if by definition a counter-argument is as good and as right as mine then the negative approach also leads to an impasse.

It is not that Cabrera argues that as long as I can’t see things from the other’s perspective and the other can’t see things from mine, I’ll never convince that person (a valid claim which could be categorized as Moral Pessimism), he argues that since I can’t see things from the other’s perspective and the other can’t see things from mine, we are both right. It is not even that we’ll never know who is right, but that we both are. How is that not a form of Moral Relativism or Moral Perspectivism?

But Cabrera rejects the idea that the negative approach is relativist, as well as rejecting moral relativism itself. He makes the common claim that moral relativism is self-refuting for the obvious reason that if all standpoints are relative, then by definition moral relativism can’t be objectively right but only relatively right, and so can’t make the case that everything is relative (if everything is relative then the claim that everything is relative is also relative and not objectively right).
In addition, according to moral relativism, standpoints claiming to be objectively right can’t be refuted by moral relativism as each stand can be right in relation to its own context. So paradoxically, moral relativism confirms stands that contradict it.

But in his view the same does not apply to his negative approach to argumentation theory:

“the more developed answer to the accusation of self-contradiction runs like this: all what was here said about the negative approach to argumentation is also applied to the discussion around affirmative and negative approaches. The negative approach is only a position among others. If this were not the case, the negative approach would really be self-refuting. The discussion between the affirmative and negative approaches to argumentation is inserted within the web of arguments, and it also depends on presuppositions and admits endless counter-argumentation. The fact that the negative approach will always have to face relevant counter-arguments from the affirmative side is exactly what makes the negative approach self-confirming instead of self-refuting. The negative approach accepts self-reference and self-inclusion as a serious commitment, not as a form of literary frivolity. Not only does the negative approach accept self-inclusion but it actually needs to do so; because if it did not include itself in the endless process of argumentation, the negative approach would be indeed self-contradicting and a curious and unjustifiable exception of the negative approach itself.” (Page 175)

If the negative approach is immune to self-refuting it is because it is so general and tolerant that it actually says very little. It is so inclusive that it doesn’t really leave anything out so there is no wonder that it is hard to find it self-refuting as what does it actually argue for that can be refuted? On the face of it, a theory that claims that the other theories are right just as much, and that counterarguments can always be found against any argument, is hard to be refuted because it leaves so much room for every other possible claim, including ones that seemingly contradict it.
It can’t be that a claim that practically claims that other claims might be right just as much, is true, because some of the claims that it confirms refute it. So one of them must be true. He claims that this is not the case because his approach is ready to accept any valid counter-argument. But the fact that an approach is ready for counter-arguments by stating that it is, doesn’t make it resistant to self-refuting, especially since if some counter-arguments that contradict it are true, then it is wrong. To claim that such attempts to contradict the negative approach actually confirm it because that is exactly what it claims – that there would always be counter-arguments, so counter-arguments approve not disprove it – is no more than sophistry.

To avoid self-refuting Cabrera should have claimed that it is not a meta-philosophy but just another claim, but obviously the negative approach can only be understood as a meta-philosophy. If it is just another claim about all the other claims being refutable and therefore so is it, then it can’t be a claim about all the other claims. It is just a mind game, merely a logical performance devoid of meaning.
It can’t be that the claim that there is one truth and the claim that there is no one truth, are both right. If the claim that there is only one truth is right then the one that there is not only one truth is wrong, and if the claim that there is not only one truth is right but all of them are right then the claim that there is only one truth is wrong and also the claim that all the claims are right because as just said, the one that there is only one truth is wrong. The negative approach states that there are no wrong claims but some are claiming that they are the only ones who are right so they must be wrong at least for claiming that, but obviously that would make the negative approach wrong for claiming that there are no wrong claims. In other words, Cabrera’s claim that the claim that everything can be right confirms the negative approach, is paradoxical since ‘everything’, by definition, includes opposite claims that contradict the negative approach.

I can’t see how the negative approach doesn’t repeat the same mistake that moral relativism makes.
The fact that as opposed to relativism the negative approach doesn’t aspire to be universal doesn’t mean it is not refuted when it is refuted.

Cabrera however argues that the very fact that people would argue with him confirms his view:

“It is always possible to counter-argue against the negative approach from the prevailing affirmative perspective. Many readers of this book will certainly have taken abundant notes in order to reply to a great number of my declarations, claims and statements about diverse issues during their reading. They may not have been convinced by my arguments and will also be able to produce many counter-arguments supporting the affirmative approach, to which I can also reply (if I am still alive, if nobody prevents me from doing so, if I am not arbitrarily excluded from the discussion, and so on). But such an endless confrontation between the affirmative and the negative approaches precisely illustrates the negative theses about argumentation. The fact that the affirmative approach will always have many objections to the negative approach makes the point of the negative approach: any debated matter is subjected to endless argumentation, including, of course, the confrontation between the affirmative and the negative approaches to argumentation.
But–somebody could still argue–if this is so, the negative approach was proved to be absolutely true, against its anti-absolutist conviction. Because if the negative approach proves that even dogmatic affirmative philosophies are also Gestalt-dependent, then the negative approach is absolutely true. But this is again an affirmative way to evaluate the situation. In the negative approach, the main thesis of the Gestalt-dependent nature of all philosophies is not an absolute thesis either, because it also depends on presuppositions that other lines of argument could reject or deny. Even the perspectivistic view is perspectivistic. There is not any neutral space where the negative approach could be proven as absolute; but this is the situation of any other theory of argumentation (and possibly of any philosophical theory in general). This shows that both the affirmative and the negative approaches can be endlessly defended and that none of them can eliminate the other. The negative approach is not defended as a universal truth, but as a result of a particular argumentative line which can be proved tenable. But the same happens with the other positions, in spite of their own anxiety for uniqueness.” (Page 175)

To me at least, it is a form of Ethical Subjectivism. It can be formulated more or less as follows:
1. Different people have different perspectives
2. The moral perspectives of people determine what is right according to them, meaning if the moral perspective of a person says that a certain action is right, then that action is right, at least from that person’s perspective
3. There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one moral perspective as better and righter than another. There are no moral truths that apply to all people at all times
4. Any person’s moral perspective has no special status but is merely one among various moral perspectives
5. It is wrong of us to judge other moral perspectives. We should always be tolerant of them

Or in other words, different people have different moral perspectives. Therefore, there is no objective truth in morality. Right and wrong are only matters of perspective, and perspectives vary from person to person.
And if to give a practical example, Pro-natalists believe it is right to procreate, whereas antinatalists believe it is wrong to procreate. Therefore, procreation is neither objectively right nor objectively wrong. It is merely a matter of perspective, which varies from person to person.

But Cabrera insists that the negative approach isn’t a form of Moral Subjectivism:

“Traditionally, subjectivity was conceived as multiple and objectivity as unique. The negative approach subverts this: objectivity is as diversified and multiple as subjectivity. We can reach objectivity in many different ways. The negative approach does not accept a unique objectiveness imposed on everybody in all contexts and lines of thought, independently from presuppositions and perspectives. In the negative approach, each philosophy sees some aspects of the world and they are perfectly objective within their own perspectives. We cannot capture the world from all sides (like God, supposedly), but always from a particular angle. But our perspectives are not “subjective”, in the sense of private and not valid for others. Everybody can see the duck if they are disposed to make the perceptive effort to stop seeing the rabbit; and everybody can see, for example, the death penalty as a revenge if they make the conceptual effort to stop understanding it as an act of justice. But stopping does not mean eliminating; each organization unveils some aspects of the world, but it does not refute the others; it simply offers an invitation to see things in other ways.” (Page 169)

According to this there are no real blind spots but spots who may be intentionally or unintentionally covered, and it is possible to uncover them. In that case why not act so to remove the cover and then go back to the affirmative approach? Why go all the way to Moral Perspectivism?

It feels like Cabrera is trying to have it both ways so to speak. You can’t argue against the affirmative approach claiming that there are different perspectives which are a result of different gestalts and that there are blind spots and that it is impossible to see others’ viewpoints; but when facing subjectivism, argue that it is possible to see others’ viewpoints. If it is possible to see others’ viewpoints if one wants to, then it is a question of will and that makes the case a psychological one and not philosophical. The question of will is a very important question, probably more important than the one raised here, but that is not the issue. The question is can people view things like others do or not. If they can’t then the negative approach is a form of Ethical Subjectivism, and if they can, besides emphasizing what every activist already knows very well – that it is tremendously hard to convince other people, especially when it comes to ethical issues, what is the point and added value of the negative approach?

It seems that all in all, the negative approach to argumentation is a form of ethical subjectivism because it supports the claim that there is no unique viewpoint from which moral norms are rationally compelling and universally binding. The truth of a particular moral stand cannot be evaluated according to an absolute truth, but according to each person’s perspective. There is no point beyond a personal perspective from which we can judge others in a way that is not relative to our own position. Moral statements are made true or false by the perspective of the arguers. They are actually personal statements about the perspective of arguers regarding a particular issue.

Ethical Subjectivism is sometimes defined as – people’s moral stances are based on their feelings and preferences but nothing more. Under this definition Cabrera is not an ethical subjectivist, since he thinks that there are things that are good and that there are things that are bad, only that we can’t determine what is good and what is bad because it is relative to the arguer perspective. But that is not the only definition of Ethical Subjectivism. It can also be defined as an ethical position that claims there is no such thing as “objective” right or wrong, and people are always right or wrong according to their own perspectives on the matter as long as they are honest and their views are not solely based on their emotions or their biased preferences but are also rationally grounded. According to that definition, when people are making ethical claims they are not just saying something about their feelings, but are making a rational claim about their ethical stands according to their Gestalt, which according to Cabrera therefore cannot be refuted by the other side. The negative approach to argumentation may be a more advanced and sophisticated version of Ethical Subjectivism, but I find it hard not to view it as a version of it at all.

Along this text I have argued against Cabrera for ambiguity, self-refuting claims, and for providing, at most, a psychological explanation for argumentation impasse but not at all a philosophical explanation for it. However, the most crucial criticism over Cabrera’s book Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate is that it doesn’t at all provide any new ethics for philosophical debate, but rather voids any content of philosophical debates about ethics. An ethical thesis which seriously suggests that everything can be right, implies that nothing can be wrong. In the better case it is simply contentless and useless, and in the worst case it is just a more sophisticated version of Ethical Subjectivism.
And if more or less everything can be right in its own way, there is no justification to change others’ positions, as they may be right; and if there is no justification to change others’ positions, then there is no justification to change many things that currently exist in the world; and that means that the world can stay more or less as it is and I can’t think of anything more unethical than that.

References

Cabrera Julio, A Critique of Affirmative Morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of life
(Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions 2014)

Cabrera Julio, Introduction to a Negative Approach to Argumentation – Towards a New Ethic for Philosophical Debate
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019)