Category: General (Page 4 of 6)

Life in this world is structurally unfair. And it starts even before a person is born. Many things are pre-decided for each created person without that person doing anything to deserve them. Anyone who doesn’t believe in reincarnation must agree that it is unfair that every person starts its life when everything in it (including factors that would have a critical effect on the rest of that person’s life) has nothing to do with anything that that person did. That is already a very unjust element of life. No one chooses where to be born, to whom, its personality, its body, its physical conditions, its genetic heritage. It is extremely unjust that even before a person is born it is often already the case that bad things happen to good people, or in this case to people who haven’t yet done anything wrong. It is never the fault of anyone that it was born into a dire situation. The structured injustice of life begins before the first breath. Obviously the fact that someone was created without giving consent is also a very severe structured injustice, but my focus in this text is not on the structured injustice bound and inherent in the decision to create a person without its knowledge let alone consent, but on how structurally unjust this decision is in the light of how structurally unjust life is.

From the moment a person is born, life imposes fear, pain, dangers, anxiety, limitedness, helplessness, physical discomfort, separation from the only familiar thing in the whole world and etc., to be later followed by more fear, pain, dangers, stress, as well as ailments, disappointments, deterioration, and eventually and inevitably death.

When people are creating new people, they know that their children will not only necessarily experience all of the above, but in addition would live in an unjust world where there is no causal relation between their actions and their experiences. They can be very reasonable, cautious, considerate and thoughtful yet miserable.
Yes, some will enjoy their lives, but only those who were arbitrarily blessed by blind luck.
There is no real sense or guarantee whatsoever in ‘do good things and good things will happen to you’.

It is not as if people start life in a neutral state, and due to their own decisions and actions they either have good lives or terrible ones. Instead, every person is born into an unjust and unfair world. This state disadvantages everyone from the beginning, making their entire life a struggle to overcome the curse of unfairness.

Life is inherently and structurally unfair and unjust without any option of repair. So to claim (as some pro-natalists do) that what we need to do about the world’s problems is to fix them, not stop procreating, is totally disconnected. However even if it wasn’t the case, obviously this claim is nothing but a lame excuse as people are creating new people all the time, without any of the world’s problems (even the ones which are not inherent and structural and so at least theoretically are solvable) even being close to any repair in the foreseeable future. In fact people are so careless, so indifferent, that they are not even thinking about the fact that they are throwing their own children into an unjust world, or about the world’s problems, or about the chances of their children to personally and directly be affected by some of the world’s problems.

Only those who are blessed with blind luck their entire lives, can be hopeful. And no one can guarantee blind luck in advance. So parents must face the fact that the world they force their children into is deeply broken and unjust.

The ethical thing to do, given this structurally unjust world, is to refrain from creating people.
Parents are active and contributive participants in perpetuating this unjust world by throwing into it more and more victims and victimizers.
The fact that the only way to create a new person is in a structurally unjust world, does not serve as an excuse for creating people in a structurally unjust world. That is especially so since there is nothing unjust in not creating people. No one is treated unjustly, unfairly, or harmfully by not being created.

Parents condemn their children to live in an unfair world where no matter what they do, bad things can always happen to them. No one chooses neither to be born, nor to be born in such an unjust world. The harm of living in a structurally unjust world is forced on everyone without their consent. Parents must take into account this dreadful imposition when considering whether to create new people.

But they don’t. Many people refuse to accept that this world is random, purposeless, unfair, and inherently unjust. They insist on sticking to the just world theory. That position is completely illogical and ignorant but it is also quite understandable. It is much more appealing to think that the world is just, that life has a purpose, that there is a guiding hand, or a transcendent supervisor than the other way around. As false as these notions are, obviously it is much more soothing, comforting and it gives a sense of control, to believe that if something bad happens to good people it must be the case that they are doing something wrong. Otherwise people would have to accept that there is no justice in this world, no fairness, no reason, no bigger picture, no purpose, and that quite often bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people.

It is important to internalize the appeal of this viewpoint. As false and ridiculous as it is, ignoring its power and its effect on procreation is also false and ridiculous. As long as antinatalists are trying to convince people not to breed using rational arguments they must acknowledge who they are dealing with. People believe in the just world theory because they are highly motivated to do so. Its appeal doesn’t stem from its logic but from its usefulness, not from its substantiation but because it makes it easier for people to keep doing what they want.

Since intuitively it seems that it would be much easier to convince people not to create people once they realize how structurally unjust this world is, there is an appeal to simply show people that they are mistaken. But it is this approach which is mistaken, as there is nothing simple in convincing people to reject a positon that their desires are depended upon.

There is no point in trying to convince people that this world is unjust. Their motivation not to see that is way stronger than our arguments will ever be. When the most obvious and self-evident things are not at all obvious, obviously what is needed is not convincing arguments but definitive actions.

 

Somewhat proximate to the rosy prophet pro-natalist type, mentioned in the former text, is the ‘enthusiastic art dealer’. These are pro-natalists who despite spending much more time using human technological innovations by playing Candy Crush on their smartphones than reading Chekov or visiting museums, they are concerned” about human works of art going to waste if humanity goes extinct.

Of course, for most of these claimers the only part art plays in their life is when they are artistically using it to make a pro-natalist claim. And even then it is not exactly Shakespeare. But I’ll ignore the blatant pretence and try to take this claim seriously.

No Actual Waste of Anything

Art has no meaning of its own. Insentient entities only have extrinsic value, and that includes each and every work of art that was ever created regardless of the great value it has for sentient entities which only they have intrinsic value. Once there is no one to value art, art instantly loses all its value. Works of art don’t get frustrated when visiting hours at museums are over, the Mona Lisa doesn’t wipe the famous smile off her face when the visitors leave, and classical books don’t have existential crisis when no one seems to be reading them anymore. Art works are not sentient creatures, they don’t experience anything, therefore they are not morally relevant by themselves. Their only moral importance is their effect on actual sentient creatures and when these are gone there is no harm or any deprivation in the fact that art won’t be viewed anymore. Without anyone reflecting on a masterpiece such as Catch-22 or Water Lilies it is just ink on paper, and The Seventh Seal is just a thin flexible stripe coated with light sensitive emulation.

It is simply irrelevant to consider wasteful a state where insentient entities are no longer experienced by anyone, when there is no longer anyone to value them. Not experiencing art is wasteful only if there is someone who can value it and is deprived of experiencing it. But no one is anxiously waiting to listen to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 or watch Café Terrace at Night before being created, and no one is harmed by not being able to do it if no one is ever created. There are no harms or deprivations in non-existence, there is literally nothing and no one. No one is missing anything or is harmed by anything. Just like no one had been deprived of a great life that no one had experienced, no one would be deprived of a great art work that no one had experienced.

I have argued in a text called Sacrifice that no one’s suffering should be justified by the pleasures of others, no matter how many others there are and how great the pleasures are, when the alternative is that no one would exist and so no one would seek pleasures and no one would ever suffer. But the argument in the center of this text is way worse since it is not even implying that at least some sentient creatures (practically numerous) must be sacrificed for the sake of the pleasures of others – obviously an utterly appalling argument in itself – but that some sentient creatures (again practically numerous) must be sacrificed for the sake of art works. Not for the sake of enjoying art works, but for the sake of art works themselves. That is the case because this argument is raised against human extinction despite that when humans are gone all the art works would lose all their meaning. It is implausible to raise the “artistic” argument against human extinction because obviously in the case of extinction humans couldn’t enjoy fine art, and fine art has meaning only if humans exist. And the same goes for any other human activity.
We can replace art with every human action and the (il)logic of this claim is supposed to work just as much. For example, if humanity goes extinct there would be no gum chewing anymore. We would obviously say that gum chewing has no meaning of its own and so there is no harm in that activity not taking place anymore, once humans are gone no one would be deprived of not chewing gum. The “artistic” pro-natalists would probably reply that gum chewing can’t be compared with art since the latter is way more meaningful and important than something trivial and insignificant as gum chewing. And that exactly proves that they are attributing intrinsic value to art works. The fact that this claim is raised specifically against human extinction goes to show that it at least implies that art is in itself more important than sentient creatures, a factor that makes this claim not only cruel and unethical but also fascist in a sense of placing objects before subjects.

An Actual Need to Waste Everything

The fact that there is nothing wrong, harmful or wasteful about works of art that no one would experience if no one exists and therefore no one is deprived of them (or anything else), is mostly a counter argument to the claim that human extinction is wrong due to all the alleged art waste, but it is not in itself an argument for human extinction. Clearly the motivation behind the argument against procreation is not that every positive thing humans ever did wouldn’t really be gone to waste had humanity gone extinct, but that everything negative that humans are doing and would ever do would be prevented.

Had humanity gone extinct before the 20^th century for example, art works such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Files, 1984, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Chaplin’s Modern Times, Matisse’s The Dance, Dali’s The Persistence of Memory and etc., wouldn’t have been created, and all the pre 20^th century art works wouldn’t be experienced anymore. However, besides that it wouldn’t matter to anyone because there would be no one to be deprived of any of that, there are many other things that wouldn’t have been experienced had humanity gone extinct before the 20^th century. Just a partial list: 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 animals 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 – humanity’s worst work ever, all would have been prevented.

The question shouldn’t be is the beauty that humans create worth the ugliness that they create, and that is not because there is no way that it is, but because this is a false equivalence.
It is true that as long as humanity exists, there would be great works of art and great works of pain. But as opposed to great works of art that there is no harm or deprivation in the absence of anyone enjoying them, if humanity’s great works of pain won’t be stopped there is certainly an immense harm to an immense number of sentient creatures. Therefore it is not even a case of incomparable balance between harms and pleasures, but a case of incomparable harm and no harm at all.

There is nothing wrong, harmful or wasteful about works of art that no one is deprived of experiencing. And there is everything wrong, harmful and wasteful about works of pain that trillions upon trillions of sentient creatures, humans and nonhumans, would be forced to experience if humanity won’t go extinct. Therefore, stopping humanity’s works of pain would be the greatest work of art ever created.

In the following text I wish to present what I call the imposition argument for antinatlism. But before I begin, a short clarification is required.
For some antinatalist the imposition argument is another name for the consent argument, which is one of the most common and important arguments for antinatlism, and which I address in another text. However, this is not what I mean when referring to the imposition argument for antinatalism. Although the two arguments have a lot in common and they coincide in some respects, I wish to make here a distinct and independent imposition argument for antinatlism.

While the consent argument mostly focuses on that creating people is subjecting them to harms without their consent – and is therefore an imposition of harms, the argument I am making here focuses on that creating people is subjecting them to a wide but very specific set of extremely crucial formative conditions that will constitute their very existence, yet none of them were chosen by the created people, and it is highly doubtful whether their constituting effect could ever be radically altered – and therefore an imposition of circumstances of existence.

Procreation is always an imposition since it is always throwing a person into specific life circumstances that weren’t chosen by that person.
No one chooses any of its existence circumstances. No one chooses the body they are placed in. No one chooses any of neither their initial physiological traits nor their physiological tendencies. No one chooses any of neither their initial psychological traits, nor their psychological tendencies. No one chooses their genetic makeup. No one chooses their biological sex or their sexual orientation. No one chooses their ethnicity or cultural heritage. No one chooses their linguistic community. No one chooses their religion. No one chooses their geographical location, the city, the street or the house they are born in. No one chooses the social or economic status they are born into. No one chooses their country’s, society’s, family’s historical heritage. No one chooses their country, society, and their family.

Procreation is an imposition because people are being created in a certain point in time, in a certain place, to a certain society, culture, and history, in a certain body, to a certain set of relationships, none of which they have chosen, yet it all deeply and directly affects them.

Since human infants are acutely helpless and therefore are profoundly dependent on other people to care for them physically and emotionally, procreation is an imposition of helplessness, as well as of dependency. People’s imposed helplessness as infants makes them extremely vulnerable to numerous harms such as injury, illnesses, frustration, internal impulses and external sensations which they can’t yet regulate, or any of their physical and psychological needs going unmet. And obviously their dependency on adult care makes them extremely vulnerable to any mistake, failure, inattention, indifference or incompetence of their care-givers.
And this imposition is not temporal as this deep helplessness and dependency has life-long ramifications, for example in the form of separation anxiety and attachment disorder, both may be imposed on people as a result of their imposed dependency on others due to their imposed helplessness as infants.

Because of their deep dependency, people strongly attach to their first care-givers, which are also people’s first relationships. Therefore, relationships with first care-givers have a formative effect on people’s later relationships. They function as the templates on which people enter into later relations throughout their lives. And not only that but, at least according to psychoanalytic thought, people’s early relationships with their first care-givers constitute a person’s basic sense of self and its personality structure. And in any case, because first relationships are chronologically first, because they begin when people are very undeveloped, and because people attach to these relationships so intensely, first relationships have a formative power that no later relationships can have. Subsequent relationships affect what is already established by first relationships. That means that people’s ability to relate is imposed on them by their first care-givers.

When being created people are imposed with particular social power relations in terms of economic status, social status, gender, ethnicity, age (hence ageism), disability and etc. Most people are, in one way or another, victims of, or at least are harmed by, social power relations. And all people are deeply embedded in them.
Since their imposed effect begins as soon as people begin, and since people begin totally unformed, people have absolutely no option to criticize or question any of the social power relations that practically form them. People inherit cultural and social norms that constitute their identity long before they can resist it, and by the time they supposedly can, it is already too embedded in their personality. Therefore, it is hard for people to think critically about them or even to develop the capacities to be critical of them, and when they do, it can only be established on the grounds of and be shaped by the very same social power relations.

In way more senses than they will be ready to admit, people’s initial life circumstances constitute their identity and existence, over which they have no choice.
Procreation is an imposition because people are always in certain circumstances that were caused through their past circumstances and these are always imposed. The circumstances of people’s creation are unchosen by them yet their effect on their lives is unalterable. People’s past always prolongs itself into their present be it in memory, perception, emotion, social status, relationships and various forms of psychological transference.
Procreation is an imposition because no one can ever choose to have or to have not been created in the circumstances that they were created in, and no one has an option to really evade their crucial effect, an effect that in one way or another will be part of every choice and every experience of that person.
Procreation is an imposition because the created person has not chosen anything involved with its creation nor most of the most crucial elements in determining who that person is.

No one is really the person they are because that is what they have chosen out of their own free will. Everybody is a product of genes they haven’t chosen, parents they haven’t chosen, other family members they haven’t chosen, environments they haven’t chosen, society they haven’t chosen, an era they haven’t chosen, shaping early experiences they haven’t chosen, a uterus environment they haven’t chosen and etc.

Most people accept this situation despite that there is something inconceivable about it. Generally speaking, liberal society supposedly highly emphasis individuals’ freedom of choice, but is totally silent about that despite that there is nothing more critical in a person’ life than its existence and the circumstances of its existence in the broader sense mentioned along this text, all of them are not chosen by the created person.
When it comes to each and every one of the factors which will have the most crucial influence on shaping the identity and the life of each person, the created person itself has no say.

And by the time people can supposedly have a say, they are already deeply designed by their non-chosen genetic makeup, their non-chosen uterine environment, their non-chosen living surroundings, their non-chosen earlier formative experiences, and of course by their non-chosen parents. Most of the critical things are determined for a person before becoming an autonomous entity, therefore s/he never really is one in a deeper sense. No one really has autonomy over its own life. No one really freely chooses its own projects, goals, meaning or even its own character. People choose practically nothing of almost each and every crucial factor that has made them who they are, so how can they ever be free to choose who they will be? who they can be? who they want to be? And who they really are?

People are not free to choose what they want in life, but can only make choices from within their pre-given life circumstances. It is the imposed life circumstances that constitute people’s choices. In other words, people’s set of choices in life, are actually a circumstantial pile with each one, in one way or another, being a result of a previous choice, and it all comes down to their initial creation circumstances.

People always make sense of things around them from a particular context. And this context is drawn from a set of factors which were imposed on them such as: their geographical location, their culture, their society, their family history, their class, their economic status, their gender, their personality, and even their physical traits. When people engage in some issue, they cannot set aside their particular creation circumstances and examine it objectively, but view everything from a perspective, one which was imposed by their particular creation circumstances.

So even people’s systems of beliefs, values, and goals, are necessarily imposed on them by their genetic makeup, their surroundings, their shaping early experiences, their cultural heritage, gender, sexual orientation, the country they were created in, the city they were created in, and of course, their parents. Everything the parents are doing affects their children somehow. Parents can’t avoid highly affecting their children, even only for the simple reason that they are deciding everything for them, including where they live, 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., during their early age, which is a very, if not the most, crucial stage in people’s development.
And it goes even deeper than that. During the pregnancy stage alone, everything people are doing highly affects their children. From what they are eating, what they are drinking, how they are sleeping, if they are exercising, their stress level, the air they breathe, the smells around them, and what they listen to.

Multitude examples can demonstrate this, but since the harm to others is a super central issue in this blog I’ll focus on an example in that context.
The fact that people are imposed to eat certain types of food, in certain times, since at least in their first few years they are totally depended, is, as earlier mentioned, a serious problem in itself. But the greater problem is that by imposing specific types of food, in specific times, in a specific manner, with a specific body language, with specific sounds and specific smells, in a specific posture and etc., much more than peoples’ taste in food is being determined. Taste in food (and it is important to mention that taste in food is not only determined by the above, but also by the conceiving person’s diet and the created person genetic makeup, however, since these are also not chosen by the created person but imposed, they are relevant to my point here just as much) is much more than merely culinary preferences, and eating is much more than feeding. Eating has much more dramatic effects than shaping one’s taste in food. And food itself has a very dramatic role in people’s lives, and an even more dramatic role in the lives of the ones people view as their food. People who were fed animal based products from day one, people whose mother fed herself animal based products, and people who are genetically inclined to prefer animal based products, would find it much harder to give it up when they are older, even after being exposed to how harmful this preference is for others. By the time these people are supposedly free to decide whether to keep participating in the systematic torture of others, they are already deeply shaped to prefer animal based products. And since humans are extremely biased and irrational creatures, their culinary preferences take a major part in shaping their ethical views as well, which makes it even harder if not impossible to ever change their eating habits.
In some cases, say among people whose cultural background and basic empathy to others make them more inclined towards veganism, but they were imposed by their genetic makeup and their personal nutritional history to prefer animal based products, it may result in a long frustrating struggle between opposite inclinations, a primal physical desire for animals based products against a rational realization that it is wrong. Obviously these people are the least important victims in this scenario, the real victims are clearly the tortured sentient creatures they consume, however, for our matter here, these people are imposed to struggle with preferences that were imposed on them.
Having said that, these kinds of cases are unfortunately rare and were brought here only to illustrate a point. Most people just carelessly consume animal products without a second thought about any of the consequences.

Some may argue that if people are the products of their specific life circumstances that includes their will. I agree, but that doesn’t mean that there is some special synchronization between a person’s will and a person’s range of possibilities. The fact is that there is a huge gap between most if not all of people’s wills and their range of realistic opportunities. Obviously, most people, by the time they are adults, drastically minimize their expectations so to meet their more realistic options. But expectations are not wills. The adjusted expectations may reflect people’s perceptions of their realistic options, which are products of their life circumstances, but they don’t reflect people’s wills. The wills are still there, and people are still frustrated by the huge gap between them and their adjusted expectations, not to mention the gap between them and their actual realities.

In other words, although indeed there is no gap between people’s “true will” and the will imposed on them as a result of their life circumstances, as they have no true will but only one that was imposed on them as a result of their life circumstances, it doesn’t make things better, but if anything, it makes it worse, since the cruel irony is that people don’t get to choose what to want, but do get to be frustrated by not getting it.

Numerous people are stuck in situations which were imposed on them. From abusive parents, abusive environment, innate medical conditions, effects of medical malpractice, undesired personality tendencies, negative mental and psychological conditions and etc., all have crucial impact on the created person and none were chosen by the created person. Not only haven’t we chosen to be created, we haven’t chosen to be created the person we are, in the life circumstances imposed on us. And by the time we can seemingly change that, it is already too late as most of the crucial things (if not the most crucial things) have already been long ago determined, and all that the people who are not satisfied with their share are left with, is constantly, but probably vainly, struggle to change things that so long ago and so deeply have designed their very selves.

Numerous people are miserable as a result of things they haven’t chosen and can’t change. And it makes them even more miserable because they suffer from the situation itself and from the frustration of being unable to fix it.

Probably in other scenarios people would think that it is really unfair that someone has to cope with something that it doesn’t like about oneself, for its entire life, despite not even choosing it. But when it comes to procreation the common answer is that ‘life isn’t fair’ or that ‘you should be thankful because others have it even worse’. But both replies obviously only strengthen antinatalism. The fact that the world isn’t fair doesn’t solve any problem involved in existence but intensifies and nourishs it, since throwing more people into an unfair world is unfair for them and it makes the world even more unfair by increasing unfairness.
And the claim that there are people who have it even worse doesn’t provide any comfort, and it’s also making things worse and more unfair.

No one chooses their initial life circumstances but everyone is obligated to live with their deep and continuous effect. No one chooses them despite that they all have an extremely crucial role in shaping the existence of everyone. In fact, they are in many senses the existence of everyone. No one has really chosen to be who they are. That’s why in many senses everyone is imposed to be the person they are. In that sense the specific existence of people was imposed on them. Some people may feel that they are satisfied with the person they are and with the life imposed on them, but many don’t.

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 not a case of imposition?
Suicide, which is by all means not undoing existence, as explained in the text about suicide, is a horrible, harmful, scary, dangerous and always complicated option.
Forcing someone into a situation with no good exit options is an imposition.

Creating people is not only forcing them with the very fact of existence, but also with everything involved in it. Most if not all of the most crucial aspects of people’s existence were imposed on them. People can’t consent to the very fact of their own existence, nor any of the initial circumstances of their own existence, nor can they radically offset the effect of the initial circumstances of their own existence. Given that existence is necessarily imposed on everyone being created, all the more so everything involved in it, no one should be created.

References

Stone A. Being born: Birth and Philosophy (2019)
Oxford University Press DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845782.001.0001

In the former text I have argued and elaborated as to why although ethical vegans are not by definition logically obliged to be antinatalists, ethically speaking they certainly should be antinatalists.

I don’t think there is a need to write a text about the opposite case, meaning elaborate as to why antinatalists by definition should be vegans, since obviously, non-vegan antinatalists are directly and personally supporting the creation of sentient creatures. But perhaps there is some need for some scenes that demonstrate this utter contradiction and more importantly the cruelty involved in consuming animal based products. Please feel free to use them when conversing with non-vegan antinatalists if you wish.

Procreation is always wrong no matter who is procreating, including considerate people such as ethical vegans who plan to raise their children to also be considerate people and ethical vegans. When these kind of people are procreating it is not necessarily as bad as when others are procreating since it is more likely that when the parents are considerate people such as ethical vegans, their children would be so too and therefore their toll on others in terms of harms would be smaller than when the parents are selfish, carnivore, consumerist assholes. However when ethical vegans are procreating it is much more disappointing, and more importantly it serves as proof for the known in advance failure of voluntary antinatalism.

Double Standard

Many ethical vegans are furious when antinatalists criticize them for procreating or for planning to procreate, claiming that it is their choice. That is a clear case of double standard since when non-vegans are telling vegans to stay out of their plate, the ethical vegans, absolutely rightly, reply that it is them the non-vegans who insist on imposing suffering on someone else in order to satisfy their own needless selfish desires, but when antinatalists tell ethical vegans who plan to procreate, that procreation is wrong, they usually tell the antinatalists to stay out of their ovaries. That is despite that procreation is also a case of imposing unnecessary suffering on someone else without consent. Non-vegans are not staying out of someone else’s life and therefore it is absolutely justified not to ‘stay out of their plate’. And since ethical vegans who are planning to procreate are not staying out of someone else’s life, it is absolutely justified to not ‘stay out of their ovaries’. Just as it is not a personal choice to harm others by eating them, it is not a personal choice to harm others by creating them.
And more importantly, since vegans also severely harm others in many ways, such as poisoning, trampling or chopping with agricultural equipment, trapping, shooting, destructing their habitat, polluting their air, polluting their water, stealing their water, stealing their food, dividing their homes, placing fences in their homes, illuminating their nights, making constant disturbing noises in what used to be their silent environment, and so on; creating a person, even if it was possible to absolutely guarantee would remain vegan for life, is not a personal choice too.

Vegans despise the claim that the meat industry actually benefits animals since it allegedly provides them with food, water and shelter from harsh weather, as well as protection from predators. Obviously there are some fundamental differences between the cases, yet vegan parents often sound exactly like the “argument” they hate so much, claiming that their children would have good lives despite that at least some pains and difficulties which none of the children have consented to endure are certain. Although vegan parents are not creating their children for profit and they will not murder them at a certain point, they do create them for their own personal benefit and not for the benefit of the children who didn’t need nor wanted anything before they were forced to exist. And all parents do condemn their children to die. Most children won’t be murdered, and definitely not by their parents, but they will die and will be aware of that for most of their lives. They wouldn’t have to die, or suffer from being aware that they have to die, had their parents not created them.
There are definitely differences between breeding animals and breeding people, but there are also some troubling similarities, which ethical vegans of all people should be the last ones to ignore them.

Ethical vegans absolutely rightly oppose breeding of “companion animals”, especially since there are so many homeless ones. I disagree with the adoption argument for antinatalism, mainly since it is antinatalism on condition while procreation is always wrong regardless of the number of children who are waiting for adoption. And the same goes for animal breeding, it is always wrong to breed an animal, regardless of the number of animals waiting for adoption. However, obviously in both cases, the fact that there are so many existing creatures who need a home makes procreation an even greater crime. Ethical vegans agree with this claim when it comes to animals but for some reason the ones who support procreation, don’t apply it to humans. There is no reason why breeding animals to be used as human companion while there are so many abandoned ones who are doomed to a lonely and miserable life in the pound, is morally wrong, while breeding humans to be used as human companion, to take care of them when they are old, to save their decaying relationships, to continue the family line, to fill their empty and pointless lives with a sense of meaning and purpose, to feel powerful because someone is totally depended on them, to feel needed and important, to hush their biological impulses, to boost their ego, to create an immortality illusion,  and etc., is not morally wrong just as much.

Most ethical vegans support spay and neuter for animals whose offspring might otherwise be left homeless, abandoned, run over in the streets, suffer from cold, heat, hunger, thirst, abuse, fear, loneliness, or if caught, to live in a cage inside a pound. When it comes to these animals, they don’t argue that it is natural for them to breed, or that we must stay out of their ovaries, or that it is their right and choice to breed and etc., well, human breeding is responsible for much much more harms than animals breeding. Although in the case of cats and dogs they should be spayed and neutered for the sake of cats and dogs (who would otherwise be born into a life of misery), and in the case of humans they must be spayed and neutered mostly for the sake of all the creatures who would be hurt by their offspring, that difference is not the reason for the different stands pro-natalist ethical vegans hold. They support spay and neuter in the case of animals but not in the case humans simply because they themselves want to procreate. Other vegans might oppose spay and neuter for humanity regardless of their desire (or lack of it) to procreate, and that might simply be because they are speciesist.

When pro-natalist ethical vegans are asked what if your children would choose to consume animals someday? many reply that they would do everything they can to prevent that, but ultimately, it would be their children’s choice. But they don’t think that it is the choice of non-vegan strangers whether to harm others or not. So, when it is non-vegan strangers they don’t think it is their choice but when it comes to their children it is not only their choice but the option to harm others was given by them. Had they not procreated at least the harm that their children are causing would have been avoided.

But it is more than the double standard issue, the expectations from ethical vegans are much higher, in general, and especially since they know all too well the opposite stand. They know best how frustrating it is that despite that they are advocating for such a rational, right, and morally self-evident decision such as veganism, they encounter again and again and again walls of ignorance and stupidity. Unfortunately many of them act similarly when it comes to their desire to procreate.

Double Risk

It is always wrong to procreate since it is taking a risk with someone else’s life. In the case of ethical vegans there is another risk which is that their children won’t stay vegans for the rest of their lives. Many ethical vegans are not deterred by that option, claiming that their children would surely be vegans for the rest of their lives, despite that there is absolutely no guarantee for that. Many children choose different paths despite their parents’ best efforts. In fact there are many vegan parents whose children stop being vegan when they grow up, and sometimes at a very early age. Many children are exposed to non-vegan food when they first go to kindergarten, pre-school, play dates, others’ birthdays and etc., and that is when many want to stop being vegan. There are some cases of separated parents where the children are vegans when they are with the vegan parent and non-vegan when they are not. So not only that it is wrong to put animals at risk by creating a new person with no guarantee that that person would be vegan for life, there are already many cases of vegan parents to non-vegan children. So it is not only wrong in principle, it is already factually based that children of vegan parents don’t necessarily stay vegan themselves. There is even a Facebook page devoted to such cases called Vegan Army Failures, where you can see posts made by vegan parents whose children stopped being vegan.

And it is not only the children who must be vegans for life to allegedly justify procreation, it is also the children’s children, and their children, and so forth. Can every vegan guarantee that all his future offspring would be vegan for life? Of course not. There is no way to control every future decision and action one’s children would ever make. Not to mention their children’s children. If only 2 of them decide not to stay vegan that’s already more harm than was reduced by the original parents being vegans. And in the worst case, vegans’ children might create a long line of meat eaters who breed more and more meat eaters.

Ethical vegans who procreate would never ever consider consuming animal based products. But it is possible that their children would someday have different values and perspective and so decide to consume animal based products. In such a case, in terms of net harm, the ethical vegans’ decision to procreate nullifies their veganism. As counter intuitive and crazy as it may sound, it is better that they themselves would stop being vegan than procreate. That is of course not a suggestion nor an implication that it is more important not to procreate than it is to go vegan, as there is no need to choose, obviously there is no contradiction between the two. In fact these are two of the most basic moral decisions anyone must make. The point is that procreation is so risky and harmful that it might end up being worse than not going vegan.

And even if that gamble would turn out successful and all the offspring would stay vegan for life, veganism is still causing an enormous harm to an enormous number of other creatures. 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 vegans tend to think or are ready to admit.

Vegan Harms

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 over their water sources), being exposed to predator (as people have destroyed their dens and other hiding places), restricted by fences, polluted by chemicals, and even burned alive during slash-and-burn. All this 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, immediate and familiar 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 washed by rain. The estimation is that almost 100 million fish and birds die each year from pesticide poisoning, and about a billion are harmed by it.

Other types of chemicals intensively used in agriculture are fertilizers, some of which are made out of animals. 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 use of synthetic fertilizers (because they evaporate or are washed and so pollute ecosystems outside the farms, mostly aquatic ones), is bound to indirectly subsidize factory farming, by making animals exploitation more profitable.

Although indeed most of the trees in the rainforests are cut for grazing, they are also cut for growing some of the most basic crops most vegans consume on a daily basis, for example nuts, sugar, tea, coffee, several types of fruits and vegetables, and even the most common raw material for most of peoples’ clothes – cotton.
It is theoretically possible to avoid supporting the destruction of rain forests specifically, if people are extremely careful with every detail regarding every food item they consume (including each and every ingredient and each and every phase their food has gone through before they consumed it), however it is absolutely impossible for people to avoid their share in land clearing in general.

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 of water to produce 1kg of olives, 2, 497 liters of water to produce 1kg of rice, and about the same amount for 1kg of cotton. It takes 1,849 liters of water to produce 1kg of dry pasta, 1,608 liters of water to produce 1kg of bread, 822 liters of water to produce 1kg of apples, 790 liters of water to produce 1kg of bananas, and 287 liters of water to produce 1kg of potatoes.
Humans’ excessive use of water leaves entire regions dried, and all the creatures living there are left to dehydrate.

Much 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.
But even if it didn’t, energy production methods other than fossil fuels are also harmful. Hydraulic dams for example dehydrate entire habitats, wind turbines are responsible for many bird killing, 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 participate in severely harming other creatures. They can’t really even choose the least harmful method, and most certainly can’t choose a harmless one, as there is no such thing.

Another stage in food production that is responsible for a lot of energy consumption (maybe even the most) is food transportation.
Each person in the world contributes in one way or another to what is referred to as the food superhighway. The food superhighway never stops moving. It is made possible by a vast network of ship lanes and flight paths. Without it vegans would run out of most of their food. On any given moment there are 6 million containers moving around the globe. Each and every country is highly depended on long-distance food, so everyone, everywhere participate 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, than to the next processing stages, then to the pack house, then to the storage warehouse, and only then to the airport or harbour. All that is for each ingredient of each final food item.

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.

And obviously it’s not just food. It takes more than 33 liters of water to produce just one of the ‘chips’ that typically powers laptops, smart phones 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.
Highly environmentally aware vegans might succeed in totally avoiding the use of plastics, but it is hard to avoid the use of metals. 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.

The extraction of raw materials which includes drilling, digging, cutting, refining, and smelting, releases chemical substances and carbon dioxide, and pollute the air, water and land. It also destroys habitat for innumerable animals.

Another unavoidable action for every human, including the most considerate and aware vegans, is sewage. Every day each person produces 20 gallons of sewage. Over a lifetime, that is 567,575 gallons.
Each person sends about 64 tons of waste to landfills over a lifetime. Highly aware and considerate vegans can try their best reducing their share, but it is unavoidable to produce some waste, and it is impossible to prevent much of it from being sent indirectly to landfills.

People harm others even when they clean themselves. Detergents can have poisonous effects on all types of aquatic life if they are present in sufficient quantities, and this includes the biodegradable detergents. All detergents destroy the external mucus layers that protect fish from bacteria and parasites, plus they can cause severe damage to the gills. Most fish will die when detergent concentrations approach 15 ppm (parts per million).

The fact that veganism is less harmful than other options doesn’t make it harmless. So although highly environmentally and socially aware plant based diet is the best option for reducing harms of an existing person, the fact that harms can only be reduced but never avoided serves as a very good reason to never create a new person. There is no way not to harm, even for highly environmentally and socially aware vegans, and therefore there is no way to morally justify creating new people even if they would always be highly environmentally and socially aware vegans themselves.

Maybe part of the problem is because vegans tend to classify harms which are not caused in factory farms, laboratories, or by the use of animals in the clothing industry, and in the entertainment industry, as environmental harms, or even worse, as harm to the environment. But obviously humans don’t harm the environment as there is no such option. The environment is not a moral entity. It is not sentient and it has no interests. The harm is inflicted on sentient creatures. Therefore, ethical vegans can’t overlook these harms claiming that they are not caused to individual sentient animals (who obviously they themselves believe have rights). They can’t exempt themselves from ‘harms to the environment’ because there is no such thing, it is always individual sentient animals who are harmed and so they must take these harms very seriously.
The harm humans inflict on other sentient creatures is so vast that practically there is no human action in modern society that doesn’t harm an individual, an animal person, somewhere in the world.

Ethical vegans claim that veganism is not about being perfectly harmless as it is impossible, but about reducing harms. They may justify causing harms to others by claiming that they can’t exist without harming others, but they can’t justify the creation of new people by claiming that they also can’t exist without harming others, since while their own existence was forced on them, the existence of their children is of their choice. It may be plausible to argue that the harm they are causing was forced on them, but it is absolutely implausible to argue the same for the harms that their children would cause.

But many vegans rationalize, idealize and sugarcoat their choice to create new people by claiming that they are procreating because they are helping to build a vegan army. As ridiculous as it sounds to every reasonable person with some common sense, this fallacy is seriously claimed by many.
This claim brings me to what I find most disappointing about ethical vegans who procreate.

Army of Excuses

What disappoints me the most, at least when it comes to activists, is not the self-deception regarding the real reasons behind their procreation, not the double standard, not the irresponsibility (as there is absolutely no guarantee that their children would stay vegan), and not even the ignorance regarding how much suffering every vegan causes, but the decision to invest so much time and so much energy and resources in just one person, all the more so in one who didn’t need any attention before being created, while there are so many other sentient creatures who already exist and are in an extremely urgent need of help. Why create another need and frustration center when there are already billions of them out there, some desperate for any help possible?

Every activist knows how desperate activists are for any help, and how important each activist is, so deciding to so dramatically divert one’s time, energy and resources to someone who needs it only because they have created that person, despite that it needed nothing before they have decided to create it, is adding problems to a world already full of problems. It is deciding to create another creature which would harm others merely by existing, and who would draw its activist parents’ time and resources from causes that existed before and regardless of its creation. Therefore procreation by ethical vegans is not only hypocrite, untruthful and disappointing, it is also cruel.

Every activist knows how desperate activists are for any help, and how important each activist is, so deciding to so dramatically divert one’s time, energy and resources to someone who needs it only because they have created that person, despite that it needed nothing before they have decided to create it, is adding problems to a world already full of problems. It is deciding to create another creature which would harm others merely by existing, and who would draw its activist parents’ time and resources from causes that existed before and regardless of its creation. Therefore procreation by ethical vegans is not only hypocrite, untruthful and disappointing, it is also cruel.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610. This does not include the cost of a college education, and not if the child stays with the parents after the age of 17, as often happens.
And it’s not the only huge financial cost which must be considered. If parents devote on average around 3 hours a day to their children, by the time they turn 18, it sums up to about 20,000 hours.
Other crucial considerations are hard to measure. It is hard to tell how much energy raising children costs but it is surly enormous.
If all that time, money and energy is invested in animal activism, it would surly have a much more positive effect than raising vegan children.
Even the least talented activists ever can turn two people to veganism if they put into it much of their energy, 40,000 hours, and $467,220.
Spending all that by breeding so there would be more vegans is probably the most inefficient way imaginable.

Activists are declaiming similar arguments in their sleep. They are using the same structure of arguments when they are deconstructing excuses not to go vegan, but not when it comes to procreation, since they want to procreate, not because there is any ethical way to justify it.

Not to procreate is to not harm the person created and to not harm others, while procreating is to cause harm to the person created as well as to others. The chances of the child to be happy are very low and the chances that it would be such an efficient activist that it would worth all the harms caused by it and for it, are very very low. It is much more probable that the person created by vegans would nevertheless cause more suffering than it would reduce (as many children would choose not to be activists at all, and so would only cause suffering and won’t reduce any), and would have more negative experiences than positive ones. Most people, even ones without exceptional problems, are frustrated, bored and dissatisfied most of the time. Most are not satisfied with their jobs, their social life, their intimate relationships, and there is a huge gap between their expectations of themselves and of the world, and what their actual lives are like. Even without exceptional problems and life of misery, it is easy to see that most people are dissatisfied. While all that is the case for every person, since some ethical vegans are claiming that they intend their child to be an activist, that means they are adding an enormous weight on the shoulders of their children, and expose them to the horrors of the world. Animal rights activists are suffering because of what they have been exposed to, why the fuck do they want to do that to their children?!
At some point the vegan parents would have to tell their children why they are vegans, they would have to tell them that most of the people in the world insist on torturing animals just so that they can enjoy the taste of their meat. If they want their children to stay vegan the truth can’t be whitewashed, and telling the truth about the horrible world they were forced into would definitely leave a mark.
Don’t get this the wrong way, I am not claiming that people who are exposed to the horrors of the world are the victims, as obviously the creatures that these horrors are inflicted upon are the victims, but why create someone to later burden that person with such a heavy duty as changing the world, and while exposing all its horrors, instead of focusing on existing people who probably already know much about it, and would otherwise continue being the victimizers?

Even if, for the sake of the argument, I will ignore the problems involved in turning your children into a means to an end (in this case it is not even using someone for something, it is creating someone for something), there is no guarantee that the assignment of the created children to changing the world would ever succeed. The persons created might be totally unfit for being the activists expected of them. And there is not even a guarantee that the person created would even stay vegan, not to mention not harm others, and surly not that it would be such an amazing and efficient activist that any harm caused by that person would be worth it. There is no guarantee for any of that, but there is one regarding the harms caused by that person, they are guaranteed.
On the other hand if people would devote the same time, energy and resources to turning themselves and other people who already exist (and so the harm caused by them is already given), into super-efficient activists, it would be much more sensible, efficient and morally justified than creating new people, who would cause a lot of harm, and maybe would also reduce some if they would become activists and really stay vegan for life.

The claim that if good people would procreate then there would be more good people, is not convincing. If good people would invest all the time, energy and resources that is needed to raise a child only in its first year, on making the world a better place, considering all the harms that their child would cause, it would probably make the world a better place even if their child would grow up to be an activist. And no one creates a child for it to be the vegan messiah. Not even very dedicated vegan activists. If a vegan messiah is needed activists should focus on making themselves one, not on biologically creating one. And if they feel that being a vegan messiah is beyond their ability, why would they think that it is in their power to biologically create one?

Obviously some of the created people would be caring and help others who are in need. But if people think that their children might help others it means they understand that there are others who need help, so it makes much more sense to help others directly than it is to create more people with needs who might help others someday, but also might not, and might even make the world worse, and would definitely harm others by existing, and by reducing the ability of the parents (who seemingly created that person to help others) to help others. That is a very strange and inefficient way to help others.

Procreation by ethical vegans is extremely disappointing because it diverts energy, time and resources from those 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.

Antinatalists must be vegans by definition (otherwise they are directly and personally supporting procreation of animals), and ethical vegans, although not by definition but certainly logically and morally, must be antinatalists. But we are not even there yet. The desire to procreate is so strong that even many ethical vegans do it. What is supposed to be absolutely obvious is absolutely not.

The fact that such lame excuses are being used by ethical people who devote most of their lives to reduce suffering, goes to show how strong the procreation urge is. If it is hard to convince even ethical vegans – people who care deeply about the suffering of others – not to procreate, what are the chances to ever convince people who still eat veal and shark soup? There is no chance, and therefore the solution mustn’t rely on people’s willingness to do the right thing, but on the endless commitment, ingeniousness and moral passion of few activists who care enough to try and end procreation for good.

References

Ash, M.; Livezey, J. and Dohlman, E. (2006). Soybean backgrounder. USDA: Economic Research Service. Retrieved from United States Department of Agriculture

audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds

bbc.com/news/science-environment-36492596

Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems. PNAS, 110, 52

carbonpositivelife.com

ChartsBin statistics collector team (2013). Current worldwide annual meat consumption per capita. Viewed 29 February 2016 from ChartsBin

ciwf.org.uk/media/5235306/The-life-of-Broiler-chickens.pdf

cleancult.com/blog/pollutants-in-laundry-detergent

Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, And The Empirical Dimensions Of Food Choices 2015 by Mark Bryant Budolfson

container-recycling.org/index.php

countinganimals.com/a-child-raised-to-weigh-five-hundred-pounds-by-age-ten

countinganimals.com/the-fish-we-kill-to-feed-the-fish-we-eat

countinganimals.com/the-forgotten-mothers-of-chickens-we-eat

countries and production systems. Water Resources and Industry, 1-2, 25-36.

darksky.org

detergentsandsoaps.com

ecowatch.com/u/ecowatch

encyclopedie-environnement.org/app/pdf?idpost=6884&idauthor=A-38&urlimg=%2Fapp%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F10%2Fpollution-lumineuse_couverture.jpg

epa.nsw.gov.au/wastegrants/organics-infrastructure.htm

Ercin A.E., Aldaya M.M. and Hoekstra A.Y. (2012). The water footprint of soy milk and soy burger and equivalent animal products. Ecological equivalent animal products. Ecological Indicators, 18, 392-402

Eshel G., Shepon A., Makow T. and Milo R. (2014). Land, irrigation water, greenhouse gas, and reactive nitrogen burdens of meat, eggs, and dairy production in the United States. PNAS, 111, 33, 11996-12001

FAO Save Food Global Food Waste and Loss Initiative

fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en

fao.org/zhc/detail-events/en/c/889172

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations Statistics Division 2014. Retrieved 23 February 2016 from FAO Stat

Food, the Environment, and Global Justice 2017 by Mark Bryant Budolfson

FoodBank Hunger Report 2018

foodmiles.com

forbes.com/sites/jimhenry/2016/11/26/millions-more-cars-on-the-road-and-not-just-for-thanksgiving

globalissues.org/article/214/stress-on-the-environment-society-and-resources

Good K. (2014). The surprising way your diet can fix the soy and deforestation problem. One Green Planet. Retrieved from One Green Planet

growveg.com/guides/the-high-cost-of-the-food-superhighway

Herrero M., Havlíkb P., Valinc H., Notenbaertb A., Rufinob M.C., Thorntond P.K., Blümmelb M., Weissc F., Graceb D. and Obersteinerc, M. (2013)

Hoekstra A.Y. (2012). The hidden water resource use behind meat and dairy. Animal Frontiers, 2, 2

Hoekstra and Chapagain, 2008, cited in Ercin A.E., Aldaya M.M. and Hoekstra A.Y. (2012). The water footprint of soy milk and soy burger and equivalent animal products. Ecological Indicators, 18, 392-402

independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/veganism-environment-veganuary-friendly-food-diet-damage-hodmedods-protein-crops-jack-monroe-a8177541.html

independent.co.uk/news/science/environment-extinction-elephant-giraffe-rhino-hippo-biodiversity-animal-history-a8859746.html

International Dark-Sky Association. “International Dark Sky Places.” Accessed November 19, 2013. darksky.org/night-sky-conservation/34-ida/about-ida/142-idsplaces

Mekonnen M.M. and Hoekstra A.Y. (2012). A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products. Ecosystems, 15, 401-415. DOI:10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8

modernslaveryhelpline.org

National Soybean Research Laboratory NSRL. Benefits of soy. Retrieved from: NSRL.

nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/plastic-planet-waste-pollution-trash-crisis

One Green Planet (2012). Facts on animal farming and the environment. Retrieved from One Green Planet.

ozharvest.org

peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming

Piazza J., Ruby M.B., Loughnan S., Luong M., Kulik J., Watkins H.M. and Seigerman M. (2015). Rationalizing meat consumption. The 4Ns. Appetite, 91, 114-128

Pimentel D., Berger B., Filiberto D., Newton M., Wolfe B., Karabinakis E., Clark S., Poon E., Abbett E. and Nandagopal S. (2004). Water resources: Agriculture, the environment, and society. BioScience, 47, 2, 97-106

Pimentel D., Houser J., Preiss E., White O., Fang H., Mesnick L., Barsky T., Tariche S., Schreck J. and Alpert S. (1997). Water resources:Agriculture, the environment, and society. BioScience, 47, 2, 97-106

plasticpollutioncoalition.org

shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-miles

Smil V. (2014). Eating meat: Constants and changes. Global Food Security, 3, 2, 67-71 dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2014.06.001

smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-wind-turbines-really-kill-180948154

Steinfeld H., Gerber P., Wassenaar T., Castel V., Rosales M. and de Haan, C. (2006). Livestock’s long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Rome, Italy. Retrieved from FAO

studyfinds.org/children-climate-change-save-planet

Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment by David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/12/vegetarians-food-animal-origin-fertiliser-vegetarian

theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/30/stephen-emmott-ten-billion

theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children

theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change

treehugger.com/green-food/homemade-bone-meal-a-partial-solution-to-peak-phosphate.html

treehugger.com/green-food/vegan-organic-agriculture-is-your-carrot-really-vegan.html

treehugger.com/lawn-garden/finally-a-practical-guide-to-dealing-withmanure-book-review.html

treehugger.com/renewable-energy/north-america-wind-turbines-kill-around-300000-birds-annually-house-cats-around-3000000000.html

Watch magazine. Retrieved from Worldwatch Institute

Water Foorptint Netweork

What’s Wrong with Industrial Agriculture Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 110, Number 5, May 2002

World Watch Institute (2004). Meat. Now, it’s not personal! But like it or not, meant-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet

World Watch Magazine, 17, 4. Retrieved from World Watch

Worldwatch Institute (2004). Meat. Now, it’s not personal! But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet. World

WWF (2014). The growth of soy: Impacts and solutions. WWF International. Gland, Switzerland

WWF (n.d). Soy – Facts and Data. Retrieved from WWF

Ziegler L. (2015). Keep showering, California. Just lay off the burgers & nuts. Medium. Retrieved from : Medium

Zonderland-Thomassen M.A. and Ledgard S.F. (2012). Water footprinting – A comparison of methods using New Zealand dairy farming as a case study. Agricultural Systems, 110, 30-40

In a post called Sacrifice I have referred to one of the most common pro-natalist claims which is that the vast majority of people find their life good and only a tiny minority find their life miserable, and so, since the chance for miserable life is very low, it is not justified to prevent procreation.
In this text I want to address a similar pro-natalist claim which is that given that the chance for miserable life is very low, it is not justified to prevent procreation since people’s desire to procreate outweigh the misery of the tiny minority that find their life miserable.

Since I have addressed the issue of the chances of imposing a miserable life in the post Sacrifice mentioned earlier, as well as in the one regarding Benatar’s Quality of Life Argument, and more thoroughly in the post about Suicide, I’ll not repeat here the counter arguments and the explanations to why the basis for this pro-natalist claim is false. Here, for the sake of the argument, I’ll ignore the fallacy of its basis, and focus on the wrongness of the argument itself.

The wrongness of this argument also involves sacrificing, but different than the one claiming that since most people are satisfied with their lives creating new people is morally justified, a claim based, even if unconsciously, on the false assumption that the case is of two groups of unborn persons, one who would be miserable and one who would be satisfied, and since the one who would be satisfied is bigger, then procreation is morally justified. But it is not a question of volume. We don’t need a majority to decide in the case of procreation since there is no one who is harmed by not being created, not the satisfied group and not the miserable group. There are no victims in non-existence. And there are victims in existence, especially in the case of miserable life. So what this claim is suggesting is to defend procreation using the tyranny of the majority. Justifying procreation despite that some would live miserable lives, for the sake of the ones who would live happy lives, is sacrificing individuals for others’ pleasures, pleasures which in no way would be missed had no one existed.

However, the pro-natalist argument I wish to address in this post, doesn’t entail sacrificing people who would be miserable for people who would be happy if forced into existence. It entails sacrificing people who would be miserable if procreation is allowed for people who would be miserable if procreation isn’t allowed (those who want to be parents). So as opposed to the former argument, in this case we can’t counter argue that if no one is created no one is harmed.

The reason this argument is false is first of all since an interest is not an ethical justification. The interest to do something is insufficient as a moral reason to do it. 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.

The antinatalist argument is that people mustn’t procreate because procreation is wrong, for example because it is forcing harms on someone else without consent, so the answer can’t be that procreation is not wrong because people want to procreate and would be frustrated if they couldn’t.

Can people’s desire to eat animals be a justification for the torture which is factory farming? 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. Some might argue that eating meat is not like creating new people, but I fail to see the fundamental difference in this context as in both cases people do as they please at the expense of others without their consent.

The desire of people to procreate is morally wrong and therefore can’t be weighed against, not to mention weighed in an equal manner against, reasons not to procreate which are morally valid. The reply to an ethical argument can’t be that it is false since moral agents prefer not to act accordingly. The interests of the victimizers, or at least the ones who are responsible for the harm, can’t be weighed against the interests of the victims, and definitely not in an equal manner.
The parents, who are the ones responsible for the harms, can’t argue that the harms must be weighed against their interests to cause it. That’s a distorted morality.

But even if for the sake of the argument I’ll agree that the interests of people who want to procreate should be considered despite that procreation is morally wrong, weighting their interests against the suffering of the ones who would lead miserable lives, is a false equivalency. First of all 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 subjects vulnerable to harms, since each person created is hurting thousands of sentient creatures during a lifetime.
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 by the current people who want to procreate, 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. The equation is between one generation of people who would sacrifice its 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 would understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate.

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 wanted to procreate in the beginning of 19th century only, is it even conceivable to consider if it was worth it? Is it even conceivable to consider if it is worth doing now?

References

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

Shiffrin, Seana. Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm
Legal Theory 5, no. 2 (1999): 117–48

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

One of the most common pro-natalist claims is that most people find their life good, and the ones who don’t, are only a tiny unfortunate minority, which we may be morally obligated to try and help, but not let these exceptional cases ruin it for everybody else.

One of the common bases for stating that it is “only” a tiny minority who feels this way, is the number of suicides. But that basis is false since, firstly, the number of people who think life is horrible is not equivalent to the number of suicides or suicide attempts. Secondly, even if it was, that number is quite high, especially considering how difficult it is for someone to decide to carry out suicide, let alone actualize it. The fact that the number of suicide attempts is so high despite the difficulty involved in this decision, should actually be very alarming and indicative of the counter argument. And thirdly, the common pro-natalist claim that the option of suicide is always available for anyone who has ‘a problem with life’, is false and merciless in itself regardless of statistics. However, this important issue deserves a separate reference which is addressed here.
In this text I will not focus on disproving the factual base of the ‘life is good’ claim, but on its morality.

The Sacrificial Aspect of Pro-natalism

Most pro-natalists don’t disagree that every life involves some level of pain, only that according to them, for the vast majority of people, these pains are outweighed by the pleasures of life. As argued in the text regarding Benatar’s asymmetry and his quality of life argument, I totally disagree with this chttp://nonvoluntary-antinatalism.org/critical-review-of-better-never-to-have-been-part-4-the-quality-of-life-argument/laim, but here I wish to focus on a different unethical projection implied by it.

Even if for the sake of the argument I’ll accept the claim that someone’s pains are justified by that someone’s pleasures, it is not the only thing pro-natalists are actually saying here. Given that lives not worth living are being created all the time, what they are actually saying is that some’s suffering is justified by the pleasures of others. And that’s a whole different level of moral wrongfulness.

Pro-natalists prefer to frame their argument this way: procreation is ethically justified since for most, the pleasures outweigh the pains. But the very same idea can be framed differently and imply that: procreation is ethically justified despite that for some, the pains of life outweigh the pleasures.
We can’t justify imposing existence on ones who prefer never to have exited, by claiming that there are many others who enjoy the life imposed on them. Ethically, we must prioritize the ones who would be imposed with something that they don’t want had they existed, over the ones who would not get something they would have wanted had they existed.

No one wanted to exist before they existed. Existence was forced on everyone. Some are satisfied with it, but they wouldn’t be unsatisfied had they never existed. However, the ones who are not satisfied, would rather that they had never existed. They can’t be compensated for the harm caused to them by forcing them into existence, and the ones who are satisfied wouldn’t need to be compensated for the absence of pleasures as they would not be deprived of them had they never existed.
Given that it would be impossible to compensate existing creatures in case their suffering is not justified in their eyes, and given that it is impossible to harm non-existing, the conclusion is not that it is always better never to have been (since the ones who are satisfied allegedly prove differently), but that it is always better not to procreate since the satisfied won’t be deprived of any pleasures, and the unsatisfied won’t be sacrificed for any others’ pleasures.

Perhaps using one of the most common antinatalist arguments – the risk argument, can make it clearer. 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. The question is who. Since people tend to feel that bad things only happen to other people, they dismiss the chances that it would be them. Again, in this text I’ll not focus on disproving the factual base of the good life claim, so 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. But this is not the case on a global scale. Somewhere in the world, miserable persons are being 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. 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 pleasures of others. The immorality of the ‘life is good’ claim stems not only from the decision to take risks on someone else’s life, but also from the decision that some would suffer so that others could enjoy.

Of course, there is a simpler and more intuitive aspect of sacrifice in procreation. Regardless of the quality of life, how happy or miserable a person is, or was expected to be before being created, no one is ever really created for their own sake. Everyone is created as means to other people’s ends, such as to take care of their parents when they are old, to heal their parents’ relationships, to continue the family line, to please the parents’ parents, to ease their parents boredom, to fill their parents’ life with meaning and purpose, to be soldiers, to push the economy by being consumers and workers, to treat society’s elderly, to continue the human race, and etc. Extremely emotional and physical vulnerable persons, which are mortal, and are aware at a very young age of their mortality, are being created for others’ interests. This is a very cruel sacrifice.

Tyranny of the Majority

This issue is not a question of volume. We don’t need a majority to decide in the case of procreation since there is no one who is harmed by not being created. There are no victims in non-existence. And there are victims in existence. So if anything, it is a binary issue, not one of majority rule.
And all it takes is one individual whose life is not worth living to make procreation unjustified. If life is not justified for one individual, life is not justified at all.
Imagine that you can create a world in which everyone is happy, except for a single individual who suffers. Would it be moral to create that world? I think not. That is since no one would be harmed by the absence of pleasures if that world won’t be created, but one individual would be harmed if it would. Creating that world despite the suffering of that individual is sacrificing that person for the pleasures of all the others, pleasures which they in no way would be missing. The same is implied by this specific pro-natalist argument. Individuals are forced into horrible lives so others can enjoy their lives.

In that sense procreation is treating some as means to others’ ends. Individuals are turned into vessels for others’ pleasures. That is since although individuals are being created by people who are hoping that all of them would enjoy their lives, they know that some won’t. That is sacrificing individuals for others’ pleasures. Some might argue that sacrificing individuals might be morally justified in some extreme cases, but all of them involve preventing greater suffering, not bestowing pleasures.

Individuals can theoretically be compensated for their suffering by pleasures, but if that doesn’t happen, there is no way to compensate them for their suffering, certainly not by others’ pleasures. Existence forces a situation in which one might be miserable and there is no way to compensate that person for that misery. It is an unjustified suffering, with no good reason to take place, and with no good reason not to prevent.
Once there is an option for creating a life not worth living, procreation is ethically undefendable. The way it is nevertheless being defend by is the tyranny of the majority.

Balancing pain and pleasure might successfully counter the pinprick argument, but it can’t successfully counter the consent argument, or a threshold argument (everyone must feel that their lives are at least worth living) or the worse off argument.

No one’s suffering should be justified by the pleasures of others, no matter how many others there are, and how great the pleasures are, when the alternative is that no one would exist to seek pleasures and no one would ever feel pain.

The Harm to Others

But of course, this discussion is substantially partial. Procreation is not only creating a subject of harms and pleasures, but a small unit of exploitation and pollution, so the question is not is it justified that someone would impose harms on another person so that that other person would experience pleasure, but is it justified that someone would impose immense harm on many others so that the person created would experience pleasures.
When considering the harm to others, as we obviously must, the ratios are reversed. Human procreation is not risking “a tiny minority” who might be sacrificed for the sake of a vast majority, it is ensuring that a vast majority would be sacrificed for a tiny minority.
The question people must ask is not only is it ethical to impose harms on someone (hoping that the pleasures that someone would experience outweigh the harms), but is it ethical to impose immense suffering on many others so that the person they decide to create would experience pleasures. Since it is never ethical, procreation is never ethical.

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 sentient creatures would extremely suffer 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

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

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

Shiffrin, Seana. Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm
Legal Theory 5, no. 2 (1999): 117–48

Out of all the various antinatalist arguments, the claim that parents are also victims of their own procreation, for example because pregnancy is very limitative and troublesome, because labor and childbirth is extremely painful, because breastfeeding is often also painful and usually exhausting, because of the sleepless nights, because children cost a fortune, because they demand constant attention, because they give rise to constant anxiety and etc., or even in relation to specific cases such as that something terrible happens to their children, is probably the least popular. That is since it is the parents who have decided to take the risk of creating a new person in such a dangerous world, where happiness is never guaranteed but pain always is, without getting any form of consent, and despite that the death of the person they have created is predetermined, and of course, despite that the person they have created will harm numerous others merely to support its own existence.
Obviously the parents are not the main victims of their decision to breed, and it is their responsibility and their fault, however, they are victims too. The fact that they have brought it on themselves doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from it as well. They are responsible for the harm but they are also among its victims.
I totally understand why some antinatalists resent such a claim, as it is the parents who have created the harm. The reason I nevertheless agree that parents are victims too, is only in the context of how programmed to procreate people are.

Despite how intuitive it is, we shouldn’t regard humans as if they absolutely freely and rationally choose to procreate. Humans are biological and social creatures who are physically and emotionally built to procreate, and they are living in natal societies in which the image of the family portrait is incomplete without children. Calling procreation a free rational choice is too simplistic. It is not exactly a choice, but more of a default, mostly in a biological sense, but also socially and psychologically.

In a way, everyone is a victim of circumstances, even the parents. We regard them as if they absolutely freely and rationally choose to procreate but that is not exactly accurate. They are just pawns in a game way way bigger than they are able to handle. We are misled to think they have rational justifications for their actions because they are using words that can construct coherent sentences, but actually it is mostly rationalization of their DNA programing.

People are acting, justifying, and rationalizing their decisions and behavior under the tremendous influence of various cognitive biases, among them is the existence bias – the psychological tendency to treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness, and to evaluate an existing state more favorably than its alternatives.
Psychological studies that affirmed these tendencies have also found that imagining an event such as one of the possible outcomes increases the estimation of its likelihood, which in turn leads to favorable evaluation of that outcome. In other words, the better people can imagine something, the greater their estimation that it is likely to happen, and the more likely something is to happen, the more positively it is evaluated.
When it comes to existence itself, the effect of the existence bias is immeasurably stronger since not only that obviously by definition non-existence doesn’t exist, but also since the alternative option to existence is almost impossible to imagine. People can’t imagine what it is like to never exist (most mistakenly confuse never existing with ending their existence and therefore even more strongly oppose the claim that it is better never to have existed). Most people refer to questions regarding existence as if they are asked to give up their current existence (which as aforesaid they are inclined to value as good) for something they falsely imagine as eternal nothing.
For these reasons and more, the option of existence is the ultimate case of lacking any other alternative. Therefore it is not at all surprising that there is a causal relationship between existence and positive evaluation. People are biased to view existing things (and definitely existence as a whole) as good, and to view non-existence as bad.

Rational persuasion not to procreate won’t help because people don’t rationally choose to procreate.
Humans are creatures who are biologically built to breed, and psychologically built to favor existence. We need to sober people up from their existence bias and their life addiction and that is almost impossible since once someone exists s/he is already addicted. And as opposed to other addictions, it is even harder in this case to identify it as an addiction since by definition, existence is the only thing that exists, it’s all there is. When someone gets addicted to a substance or even a behavioral pattern, it can be distinguished from the person itself, we can refer to that person separately from the addiction. But when the addiction is to existence there is nothing external, there is no alternative reality to observe existence from, there is no way for someone to really examine it separately from its existence.
Not only that life’s grasp is so firm, and not only that it has some very strong psychological mechanisms on its side such as: The Pollyanna Principle, Adaptation, and Comparison with Others, all mentioned in the post regarding Benatar’s Quality of Life Argument, it is hard to imagine anything else. That is despite that it is not even required by antinatalism as people are not necessarily asked to question their own existence, but are asked not to impose on others the same harmful addiction that was imposed on them.

One example which I find quite unequivocal for that matter is that many people know that life has no meaning, but in spite of that assertion, not only are they living their lives as if they are meaningful, most people who have come to this conclusion nevertheless create new persons. The self-evident revelation that life has no point, purpose, reason, meaning, end goal, and etc., appears as insufficient to stop most people from throwing new people into this pointless, purposeless, reasonless, and meaningless mechanism. That I believe is a strong indication of just how addictive life is.

The rest of the people who breed mostly demonstrate the addictive element of life by putting their own children at such tremendous risks and convincing themselves that there is no way that something bad would ever happen to them, despite that at least one very bad thing would necessarily happen to all of them – they all would necessarily die. Maybe at the end of happy lives, maybe at the end of miserable lives, maybe at a very young age as result of an accident or a disease from which they have suffered all their lives. People know that no matter how hard they would try, how many efforts they would make, lives are shattered in seconds. It happens to so many people, and no parent can ever guarantee that it won’t happen to their children, and yet…
Facts and statistics play a very marginal role in these matters. No matter how unequivocal the data regarding the likelihood of a catastrophe is, most people won’t believe it, not to mention do something to prevent it. People tend to ignore, disfavor and discount any data that contradicts or threatens their positions, desires and behavior.

People have an existence bias and it makes them automatically approve existence and examine everything from this distorted perception. This is a very important point in relation to the idea of human extinction since it is a reason why people must never procreate as they are absolutely disqualified to examine life rationally and unbiasedly, but at the same time, it is a reason why they would never stop, as people are so biased that it is hard to see them viewing reality for what it really is.

Whether they are careless, totally irresponsible, addicted to life, or extremely existence biased, for any of these reasons, people must never breed. And for these reasons people would never stop. Most can’t do any different. I don’t think it exempts them from taking responsibility, but that it puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders. We who care about the dire consequences of every procreation, must internalize that this madness won’t stop by logical means but by technological ones. And we must find these means.

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)

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

Eidelman, S., Crandall, C. S., & Pattershall, J. (2009) The existence bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 765-775

Eidelman, S., Pattershall, J., & Crandall, C. S. (2010) Longer is better.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 993-998

Fisk JE (2004). “Conjunction fallacy”. In Pohl RF (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. pp. 23–42. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4. OCLC 55124398

Hardman D (2009). Judgment and decision making: psychological perspectives. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-2398-3

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

Many activists are misled by the intuition that if people are faced with a rational, logically valid and factually based argument, they would be convinced. However, this is unfortunately not at all the case.

One of the reasons people are not convinced by rational arguments is that people are not rational creatures. I have addressed people’s irrationality in a former text, where I argued that since creating a new person is imposing such a huge risk on someone else, people must be perfect decision makers. However, people are highly influenced by various cognitive biases which affect their perceptions, judgments, reasoning, emotions, believes and decision making, therefore they most definitely must never create new people. In this post I’ll argue that not only that various cognitive biases shape, or at least highly affect, people’s perceptions, judgments, reasoning, emotions, believes and decision making; other cognitive biases make it very hard to change people’s perceptions, judgments, reasoning, emotions, believes and decision making after they have been settled.

The intuition is that when we want to convince someone we must articulately present our logical arguments and support them with facts. But the fact is that it rarely works. It is very rare that the other side of the debate patiently and carefully listens to each of our well thought out factually based arguments.

People are not receiving information objectively and rationally. Every piece of information is filtered by their immediate emotional state (which affects the way this information would be processed in the long term as well), previous perceptions, hidden and explicit motives, will power, interests, how this information is delivered, and by whom this information is delivered (neuroscientists found that the brain encodes information much better when it comes from an agreeing partner). Information is never an independent standalone true reflection of reality, but always a filtered representation of it. By that I don’t mean that every case of information communication is somehow biased (although indeed it is almost always the case) but that every case of information receiving is somehow biased. And the strongest and most common bias for that matter is the Confirmation Bias, and therefore is the central issue of the following text.

The Confirmation Bias

People tend to favor, seek out, interpret, and even remember, information in a way that confirms and/or reinforces their positions and behavior, and disfavor and discount (or forget) any information that contradicts or threatens their positions and behavior.
Some scholars call it The Disconfirmation Bias and distinguish it from The Confirmation Bias which according to them is when people simply avoid information which counters their positions. For simplification, I’ll refer to both biases in an integrated manner under The Confirmation Bias, since ultimately, both apply to people’s tendency to maintain their positions, either by avoiding or resisting information that might lead them to reevaluate their beliefs, and/or by seeking information that supports their beliefs, which is uncritically valuated as accurate and reliable.

The confirmation bias doesn’t suggest that people aren’t easily influenced in general. Obviously people are quite pliable, influenced by social norms, trends, peer pressure, groupthink, as well as several other cognitive biases. The confirmation bias suggests that once a person has found desirable and comfortable decisions and beliefs, it is hard for another person to convince that person otherwise, let alone using rational arguments, logic and facts.

Leon Festinger, the psychologist behind the Cognitive Dissonance theory, said that: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

Evolutionary psychology suggests that the reason people have such a difficulty with being convinced by others, is that in evolutionary sense each individual aspires to increase its own fitness, not to seek the truth. In other words, the important thing is not what is true but what helps individuals to survive and multiply. Evolution is not about truth, it is about fitness.

Some relate this bias to less logical people, to ignorance, or even to stupidity, but in fact people with stronger analytic abilities are more likely to be able to twist any given information in ways that confirm their preexisting positions.
Studies have shown that when people are given two different scenarios in which they must determine the most efficient policy in each, when one scenario is emotionally neutral and the other is emotionally charged, it appears that the people with the best analytic abilities performed best in the emotionally neutral scenario, meaning they used their abilities to carefully and rationally analyze the data, however they performed worst in the emotionally charged scenario, since their preexisting position on the subject interfered with their ability to objectively analyze the data and accurately assess the most efficient policy stemming from it.
That goes to show that motivated reasoning is a universal trait, and not one of the less intelligent people. If anything, as just argued, it is the other way around, better cognitive capacities are more likely to strengthen the confirmation bias, as people with greater abilities for rationalizing and creatively twisting data, are more likely to strengthen their preexisting positions.
Unfortunately people tend to use their intelligence to maintain and support the positions they are more comfortable with, not to draw the most accurate conclusion from any given situation.
That is one of the reasons why we don’t necessarily see a strong correlation between intelligent people and right positions. And why it is not necessarily easier to convince the more intelligent people to embrace the right positions.

Not only that people tend to devalue information which contradicts their prior positions, they often distance themselves from such information. They don’t want “the truth” but “their truth”.
They don’t seek out the information which is most likely to be accurate, but the information which is most likely not to impact their habits, beliefs and behavior.

And that’s exactly what us antinatalists are trying to do. We are not only trying to fight against people’s desires, we are fighting against how their brain works. As mentioned in the text about The Optimism Bias, bad news and good news are not encoded in the same areas of the brain, and good news are encoded better than bad news. The brain treat bad news like a shock and good news like a reward, so it is no surprise that people seek for, focus on and remember good news, and that they always try to avoid, disregard and forget bad news.
When we are telling people that bad thing will happen to them, or to their children, unconsciously, their brain vigorously distort that information until it gets a satisfying picture.
People tend to seek out positive information that brings them hope and to avoid negative information such as the chances that their children would be harmed, not to mention information which compels them to do things they don’t want to such as not creating children.

People tend to avoid and/or distort gloomy messages. That doesn’t mean we should avoid presenting gloomy facts, but that it is not very likely to succeed. We can spend weeks formulating the best arguments, refer to the best articles and books, and assemble the most unequivocal data to support it, but eventually it doesn’t matter how good our work is if people don’t want to listen, not to mention are not even slightly open to be convinced.

So us presenting our case in the best way possible is insufficient to change other’s minds. That is because convincing is not only about the message or the messenger, but it is largely about the receiver, and about the receiver’s current mood, and mental state. The receiver’s emotional state is highly crucial since it highly affects perception, reasoning, and decision making.
That means that a person can be convinced or not convinced, by the very same argument and data, depending on the particular emotional state that person was in at the time of encountering it.
Making things even worse is the idea of ‘arbitrary coherence’ which is mostly attributed to economics but it is also relevant to beliefs and decision making. The basic idea in economics is that although the initial price of a product is often arbitrary, once it is established in one’s mind, it will affect the way not only the price of this product is assessed, but also future prices of related products, supposedly to make these prices “coherent”. But this imprinting process is relevant in other areas as well. Not only that many of people’s initial decisions are arbitrary, and are highly influenced by people’s emotional state during these initial decisions, people tend to stick to their initial decisions, which also affect future decisions of related issues. People’s first impressions and decisions become imprinted, and this arbitrary primacy has a tremendous effect on other decisions in the long-run.

That means that if an antinatalist talks to a person about procreation when that person is irritated, impatient, or particularly joyful in that day, that person might develop baseless arbitrary negativity to the subject and in later encounters that person would not only be biased by its preexisting positions but also by its desire to be consistent (as well as by pride and ego which tackle that person ability to admit s/he is wrong), and all these forces cause even the more open, caring and rational people to close their minds.
It is very rare that people say ‘maybe I was wrong about that’, or ‘now that I see the whole picture I surly must change my mind’. As the confirmation bias suggests (and surly your experience with trying to convince others supports), people usually tend to organize the facts according to their stands, not the other way around.

So the very scary conclusion of the arbitrary coherence is that trying to convince people not to procreate when they are in a “wrong” mood, might negatively affect their position on the matter in the long run as well. It is extremely depressing that decisions regarding critical ethical issues can often be influenced by whether the moral agent had just caught the bus in the last second, or stepped in a puddle while chasing it.
Decisions regarding critical ethical issues shouldn’t be influenced by the particular mood of the moral agent when first encountering them. But they often are. And since most people are not even aware of these processes and of the numerous cognitive biases distorting their perceptions, beliefs and decisions, they are sure they have reached them rationally and clearheadedly, and therefore have no need to reexamine them.

Other Related Biases

Other cognitive biases which make it extremely hard to change people’s beliefs, ideas, decisions and behavior are:

The Bandwagon Effect which refers to people’s tendency to believe and do things regardless of any supportive evidence but merely since others believe and do them.
While this psychological phenomenon is seemingly mostly about why people adopt beliefs, ideas and behavior, and not why they don’t change them, given that people have a strong tendency to conform, they find it hard to resist or hold positions which are counter to the norm, and in relation to this text, it is hard to convince them to change their beliefs, ideas and behavior, no matter how false, ridiculous, and refutable they may be, as long as they are synched with most of the others.
Conformity and social pressure don’t only cause people to adopt normative beliefs, ideas and behavior, but also to resist non-normative ones. Conformity is not only causing more and more people to “get on the bandwagon” when something’s popularity increases, but also to less and less people to get off of it once they are on it.

Conformity is an extremely powerful phenomenon. Solomon Asch’s experiments conducted in the 50’s, and many more conformity experiments which have been replicated more than 130 times in many different countries, all have the same overall outcome and with no significant differences across nations – people are confirming obvious errors about one-third of the time. And that is the pattern when the task is very simple, and the error is extremely obvious (when people were asked the same questions when they were by themselves they almost never erred). It is frightening to think what would be the confirmation rate had the task been a bit more challenging than identifying which line is longer, and had the people who deliberately gave an incorrect answer weren’t strangers whom the tested would probably never see again, but people they know and trust.

According to the System Justification Theory, people are not only motivated to conform, but also to defend, bolster, and justify (often unconsciously) the social, economic, political, and ethical systems they currently live in, even if they don’t personally benefit from them, because justifying the status quo serves as psychological sooth for epistemic, existential, and relational needs. Viewing the status quo as justified, natural and desirable, even if it enhances inequality, injustice, favoritism and etc., originate in people’s need of order and stability, and in their need to hold positive attitudes about themselves, about the groups they belong to, and according to the theory, also about the social structure they are a part of.
Favoring the status quo reduces uncertainty, threat, and social discord. It also functions as a coping mechanism for dealing with inevitable negative situations, since being biased to favor an existing reality which is beyond people’s control, makes people feel better about it. This manifestation relates to people’s tendency of valuating events as more desirable, not according to their intrinsic value, but according to their likelihood to occur.
And thus, resistance to the status que, and alternatives to the current system, are disapproved and disliked.

Another related effect, which is similar but not the same as the Confirmation Bias, is the Continued Influence Effect. This effect, which is also known as the Continued Influence of Misinformation, refers to the fact that false claims and misinformation, once heard, often continue to influence people’s thinking and feelings long after they have been proven false. Internalized claims and pieces of information are not easily forgotten, even if they are ridiculously untrue and were utterly refuted. So not only that we must fight against false claims and misinformation derived from biological urges, cultural norms and conformity, we must also try to refute false claims and misinformation simply because they are there.

And not only that, these beliefs, ideas and behaviors can often be strengthened when others try to refute them. That is called the Backfire Effect or the Boomerang Effect. Ironically and irrationally, but not surprisingly, when people’s beliefs are challenged by contradictory evidence, they often get stronger. The researchers who named the Boomerang Effect (Hovland, Janis and Kelly) in 1953, argued that it is more likely under certain conditions, for example when the persuader’s position is so far from the recipient’s position that it would enhance the recipient’s original position. Unfortunately that is surly the case when it comes to antinatalism, which as obvious and self-evident as it is to us, it is unobvious and considered nuts by most people.

Another reason why it is so hard to convince people is that they tend to value the validity of arguments according to their personal relation to their conclusion, instead of whether they validly support that conclusion. So people can reject an argument despite that it is valid because they dislike its conclusion. It might seem intuitive and rather reasonable, but thinking about it, what’s the point of logic if a logical argument can be rejected merely because people don’t want to accept its logical and valid inference?

In conclusion, people have very limited ability to change other’s positions and all the more so behaviors. And that is not necessarily because people always fail to articulately present their logical arguments and support them with facts, but probably has more to do with the fact that they are focusing on rational arguments, facts and logic, while ignoring the core of what makes people tick, and that’s their motives, fears, hopes and desires. And these are almost impossible to change, let alone using rational arguments.

Rational arguments rarely work, and even that is relevant for a relatively small minority of people. For the rest, rationality is irrelevant and useless. So we must focus on other, more useful ideas to tackle the problem.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company

Dardenne B, Leyens JP (1995). “Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 21 (11): 1229–1239. doi:10.1177/01461672952111011

de Meza D, Dawson C (January 24, 2018). “Wishful Thinking, Prudent Behavior: The Evolutionary Origin of Optimism, Loss Aversion and Disappointment Aversion”. SSRN 3108432

Donna Rose Addis, Alana T. Wong, and Daniel L. Schacter, “Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future: Common and Distinct Neural Substrates During Event Construction and Elaboration,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 7 (2007): 1363–77, doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.10.016

Enzle, Michael E.; Michael J. A. Wohl (March 2009). “Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one’s fate in the hands of another”. British Journal of Social Psychology. 48 (1): 183–200
doi:10.1348/014466607×258696. PMID 18034916

False Uniqueness Bias (SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY) – IResearchNet”. 2016-01-13

Gilovich T (1993). How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-911706-4

Gino, Francesca; Sharek, Zachariah; Moore, Don A. (2011). “Keeping the illusion of control under control: Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration”. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 114 (2): 104–114. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2010.10.002

Jonathon D. Brown and Margaret A. Marshall, “Great Expectations: Optimism and Pessimism in Achievement Settings,” in Optimism and Pessimism: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Edward C. Chang (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000), pp. 239–56

Kokkoris, Michail (2020-01-16). “The Dark Side of Self-Control”. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 17 January 2020

Kruger J, Dunning D (December 1999). “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–34. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.64.2655. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367

Kruger J (August 1999). “Lake Wobegon be gone! The “below-average effect” and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77(2): 221–32. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.2.221. PMID 10474208

McKenna, F. P. (1993). “It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control?”. British Journal of Psychology. 84 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1993.tb02461.x

Michael F. Scheier, Charles S. Carver, and Michael W. Bridges, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Psychological Well-being,” in Chang, ed., Optimism and Pessimism, pp. 189–216

Nickerson RS (1998). “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises” (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 2 (2): 175–220 [198]. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Oswald ME, Grosjean S (2004). “Confirmation Bias”. In Pohl RF (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. pp. 79–96. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4. OCLC 55124398

Pacini, Rosemary; Muir, Francisco; Epstein, Seymour (1998). “Depressive realism from the perspective of cognitive-experiential self-theory”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 74 (4): 1056–1068. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.1056. PMID 9569659

Thompson, Suzanne C.; Armstrong, Wade; Thomas, Craig (1998). “Illusions of Control, Underestimations, and Accuracy: A Control Heuristic Explanation”. Psychological Bulletin. 123 (2): 143–161. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.143. PMID 9522682

Of all the cognitive biases mentioned in the former text, the Optimism Bias is probably the one that many antinatalists consider as playing the most crucial role in procreation. Although I don’t entirely share this thought, the optimism bias sure has some role in procreation, and therefore is surely worth addressing.

The optimism bias, also referred to as “the Illusion of Invulnerability”, is people’s built-in cognitive tendency to underestimate the likelihood of them experiencing bad things, and to overestimate the likelihood of them experiencing good things. For example, people underestimate their chances of suffering from diseases or car accidents, no matter how they are specifically prone to them, or how prevalent diseases and car accidents are in general, and they overestimate their happiness potential no matter what their specific living conditions are.
The rational thing to do when trying to assess which events are more likely to happen, is using statistics and comparative data, but being irrational, people tend to think that events are more likely to happen, if they want them to happen, and are less likely to happen if they don’t want them to happen.

One example illustrating the optimism bias and its effect on children is the rates of divorce. Despite that people know that the chances of them splitting up are almost 50%, they are creating people together anyway. That is because they are sure that it would never happen to them (almost all people are certain that there is a zero chance that their marriage will end in a divorce, and amazingly that includes the ones who have already been divorced), as all the bad things always happen to someone else, and because they are too careless about the dire consequences divorce has on children.

An indication of the optimism bias taken from the field of Neuropsychology is that bad news and good news are not encoded in the same areas of the brain, and good news are encoded better than bad news. The brain treats bad news like a shock and good news like a reward, so it is no surprise that people seek for, focus on, and remember good news, and that they always try to avoid, disregard and forget bad news.
When we are telling people that bad things will happen to them, or to their children, unconsciously, their brain vigorously distorts that information until it gets a satisfying picture.

Having said all that, I wish it was the case that people create new people because they are sure that they would have good lives. Unfortunately people are creating new people because they are sure it would make their own lives good.
The optimism bias is not the factor that enables people to breed. People are too careless for such a cognitive mechanism to be required for them to put others at risk. They would have (and many of them do) created new people even if they weren’t naturally biased for optimism.
The optimism bias doesn’t play such a crucial role in people’s decision to breed, as most are not even thinking about the lives of their children, but it does help them to so easily reject antinatalism.

Unfortunately making people aware of their optimism bias is pointless, since becoming aware of it does not cancel its effect, it doesn’t shatter the illusion. Researchers who have attempted to reduce the optimism bias, mainly in order to decrease risky behaviors, found that it is incredibly difficult. In studies that involved attempts to reduce the optimism bias through actions such as educating participants about risk factors and to carefully consider high-risk options, researchers have found that these attempts led to little change and in some instances actually increased the optimism bias.

So the optimism bias is here to stay. People are naturally biased for optimism, therefore there is no much point in trying to informatively influence them towards realism. They are not cognitively built nor want to handle reality. Therefore, in a way, antinatalists who keep trying to inform people are optimistically biased as well. They keep hoping that someday people would change, despite the absence of any evidence to support such an option, and despite multiple evidences supporting the conclusion that we must change them ourselves.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company

Dardenne B, Leyens JP (1995). “Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 21 (11): 1229–1239. doi:10.1177/01461672952111011

de Meza D, Dawson C (January 24, 2018). “Wishful Thinking, Prudent Behavior: The Evolutionary Origin of Optimism, Loss Aversion and Disappointment Aversion”. SSRN 3108432

Donna Rose Addis, Alana T. Wong, and Daniel L. Schacter, “Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future: Common and Distinct Neural Substrates During Event Construction and Elaboration,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 7 (2007): 1363–77, doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.10.016

Enzle, Michael E.; Michael J. A. Wohl (March 2009). “Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one’s fate in the hands of another”. British Journal of Social Psychology. 48 (1): 183–200
doi:10.1348/014466607×258696. PMID 18034916

False Uniqueness Bias (SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY) – IResearchNet”. 2016-01-13

Gilovich T (1993). How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-911706-4

Gino, Francesca; Sharek, Zachariah; Moore, Don A. (2011). “Keeping the illusion of control under control: Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration”. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 114 (2): 104–114. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2010.10.002

Jonathon D. Brown and Margaret A. Marshall, “Great Expectations: Optimism and Pessimism in Achievement Settings,” in Optimism and Pessimism: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Edward C. Chang (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000), pp. 239–56

Kokkoris, Michail (2020-01-16). “The Dark Side of Self-Control”. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 17 January 2020

Kruger J, Dunning D (December 1999). “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–34. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.64.2655. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367

Kruger J (August 1999). “Lake Wobegon be gone! The “below-average effect” and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77(2): 221–32. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.2.221. PMID 10474208

McKenna, F. P. (1993). “It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control?”. British Journal of Psychology. 84 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1993.tb02461.x

Michael F. Scheier, Charles S. Carver, and Michael W. Bridges, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Psychological Well-being,” in Chang, ed., Optimism and Pessimism, pp. 189–216

Nickerson RS (1998). “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises” (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 2 (2): 175–220 [198]. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Oswald ME, Grosjean S (2004). “Confirmation Bias”. In Pohl RF (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. pp. 79–96. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4. OCLC 55124398

Pacini, Rosemary; Muir, Francisco; Epstein, Seymour (1998). “Depressive realism from the perspective of cognitive-experiential self-theory”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 74 (4): 1056–1068. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.1056. PMID 9569659

Thompson, Suzanne C.; Armstrong, Wade; Thomas, Craig (1998). “Illusions of Control, Underestimations, and Accuracy: A Control Heuristic Explanation”. Psychological Bulletin. 123 (2): 143–161. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.143. PMID 9522682