A quite common counter-argument to antinatalism is the objection to the idea that it is possible for currently existing people’s actions to violate the rights of currently non-existing people, as those who don’t exist can’t have rights and can’t be harmed. There are all kinds of ways to tackle this argument. I find the one made by the philosopher Joel Feinberg to be most apposite and elegant. Feinberg claims that hiding a bomb attached to a time clock set for seven years from now in a kindergarten would be clearly wrong despite that the ones who would be harmed by that action didn’t exist in the time it was performed. That action is wrong, partly because it violates the rights of the children not to be harmed, even though they did not yet exist and so did not yet possess the right not to be harmed, when the harmful action took place. That proves that it is possible for currently existing people’s actions to violate the rights of people who currently don’t exist but will exist in the future.
It is ridiculous to claim that it is ridiculous to claim that we need to consider whom who doesn’t exist yet, when clearly someone would exist as a consequence of the action in question.

Clearly someone didn’t exist when the decision to create that someone was made. By definition, that condition is given in cases of creating people. To claim that it is impossible for currently existing people actions to violate the rights of currently non-existing people as those who don’t exist can’t have rights and can’t be harmed, is to evade the moral issue and the responsibility for causing harms. Someone who is doing something that would harm someone somehow sometime, must be held accountable for that harm even if the harmed person doesn’t exist when the harmful action has taken place. For instance, the person from Joel Feinberg’s example.

The obvious fact that the created person didn’t exist before being created doesn’t mean that its creators are free of any moral obligations towards that person’s creation. But objecting the idea that it is possible for currently existing people actions to violate the rights of currently non-existing people means that it is not and can’t be morally impermissible for people to create new people no matter the circumstances. And I don’t think that pro-natalists can really stand behind a claim which basically permits anyone to create people under all circumstances, in any congenital condition no matter how harmful, to any parents no matter how abusive and dysfunctional they are expected to be, that there is no such thing as a Wrongful Life, that there is no wrong age to create a person, no inadequate living conditions and etc., everything is morally permissible when creating a person since non-existing people have no rights and it is impossible to harm someone who doesn’t exist. The price that comes with this counter-argument to antinatalism is very heavy and it is that everything goes, and surly few if any would support such a moral stand.
Clearly it is just an excuse. And obviously even the supporters of this claim agree that existing people have a moral duty to avoid causing any possible harm, even if that harm would be caused to someone who would only exist in the future.

I also don’t see how these pro-natalists can face Feinberg’s example in that relation.
I guess they will claim that hiding a bomb attached to a time clock set for seven years from now in a kindergarten, is nothing like creating a new person. But the example of setting a bomb in a kindergarten is not meant to be analogical to procreation, but to demonstrate that it is possible for currently existing people’s actions to violate the rights of currently non-existing people despite that the latter didn’t exist when the actions were made.

But actually a ticking bomb is analogical to procreation. That is because considering the massive harm to others that each created person would cause throughout its lifetime, each person is actually a living set of numerous bombs. And therefore procreation is nevertheless setting a time bomb. Not in a kindergarten, but definitely in the food industry, in the garment industry, in the energy industry, in the oceans, in rivers, in forests, in the atmosphere, in the soil, underground, and in every corner of the globe. And that bomb is not set to blow up 7 years from the time the action took place, but after 9 months, and for as long as the created person exists. And it is not one bomb but thousands of bombs, for the thousands of sentient creatures each created person would harm during its lifetime.

People set a bomb every time they eat, no matter what they eat, because everything has a price. They set a small bomb when they eat a seasonable organic vegetable, and a gigantic one when eating a cheeseburger or bacon and eggs. But they always set a bomb.
People set a bomb every time they dress, not matter what they wear, because every item of clothing has a price. They set a small bomb when they wear organic hemp clothes, and a huge one when wearing a wool sweater and leather shoes. But bombing is inevitable.
People set a bomb every time they use electricity, not matter how it is being generated. They set a small bomb when they use wind or solar power, and a huge one when using coal. But using electricity inevitably involves some bombing, and usually a lot because most people have no choice but to use power generated from fossil fuels.
People set a bomb every time they use transportation, not matter which one. They set a small bomb when they use public transportation, and a huge one when using an SUV or an airplane.
And the same goes for other human activities. They all inevitably involve harming others. The only difference is that in some cases people can choose to use smaller bombs, and less frequently. However, despite having only a bit of wiggle room in that relation, a fact that should have made people much more cautious and careful about every decision they make given that no matter what they do they will harm others, most don’t give a second thought about the size or the number of bombs they are setting.

All humans are mass scale bombs planters, and at some point they are also becoming ticking bombs in a sense of potentially creating more bombs planters, which in their turn would also turn into ticking bombs, and etc. Therefore, the sooner we antinatalists realize that what we ought to do is establish bomb squads, the better.

Pro-natalists tend to confuse the claim that ‘procreation is always wrong’ with the claim that ‘life is always not worth living’. These claims utterly differ, and the differences between the two are quite important. I’m not referring here to Benatar’s differentiation between life worth starting and life worth continuing, a distinction many of his critics have chosen to ignore, usually by referring to both cases as life worth living. Although this is an important point by itself, this is not the one I want to make here. I am referring to the false inferring that since there are people who feel that their lives are worth living, maybe even most, then the claim that procreation is always wrong is false. That is a conceptual confusion in the best case and a manipulation in the worst.

It is a manipulation when it is ascribed to Benatar, who actually argues that all life is not worth starting, not that all life is not worth living, and it is a conceptual confusion since the argument that procreation is always wrong isn’t necessarily derived from the claim that every life is not worth living. There are many antinatalist arguments and most aren’t founded on the premise that all life is not worth living. One of which is the argument that it is morally wrong to impose a decision, let alone the most important one in someone’s life, without consent, and since it is always impossible to get consent in the case of procreation, procreation is always wrong, regardless of the quality of life of that person. According to the consent argument, procreation is wrong even in cases of life worth living because they were imposed on the person without consent.

Another argument which unties the stilted connection between antinatalism and life worth living, is the risk argument.
There is no need for all lives to be not worth living to constitute a valid antinatalist argument, it is sufficient that lives not worth living are a very realistic probability, since no matter how many people would live lives worth living, nothing would be lost if they are not created, however there would be a very serious loss if the created person is miserable. Since every procreation is a new chance to create a miserable person whose life is not worth living, every procreation is morally wrong, regardless of the quality of life of other persons.

And the most important antinatalist argument in my view is that every procreation is wrong even if we could theoretically be assured that each one would result in a life worth living, since we are always practically assured that each procreation would result in a life of misery for other sentient creatures. There are absolutely no lives who are not at the expense of others, and most lives are absolutely cruel, causing misery, abuse, confinement, loneliness, sickness, chronic pain, fear and despair. There are no good lives that can ever justify all this misery, certainly not when it can be easily avoided by simply choosing not to procreate.

The constrained false linkage between the claim that ‘procreation is always wrong’ and the claim that ‘life is always not worth living’ is very convenient for pro-natalists since they know the common perception among the general public is that procreation is not only utterly acceptable but is also considered a blessing. This is how even philosophers can get away with such an invalid move. Procreation is always wrong and for various reasons, some of which were detailed earlier in this text. But pro-natalists prefer to present antinatalism as if it is necessarily founded on the premise that all life is not worth living, since it is the easiest way out.
The ease in which pro-natalist choose the easy way out is extremely worrying. We are not in a debate. We don’t get points for good arguments, and pro-natalists are not disqualified for utterly false ones, or for completely distorting ours.
Antinatalists surly easily defeat pro-natalists in the theoretical debate, but pro-natalists are winning in real life. And their win is billions of sentient creatures’ loss. Arguments will not convince pro-natalists, so to stop procreation what we need is not good theoretical claims but efficient practical methods.

References

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

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

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

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

Autobiographies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Ponzi Scheme

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

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

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

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

Biographies

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

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

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

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

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

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.