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.

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.

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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)