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)

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

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

The Sacrificial Aspect of Pro-natalism

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

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

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

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

Perhaps using one of the most common antinatalist arguments – the risk argument, can make it clearer. Although I find it one of the strongest antinatalist arguments, I think there is something misleading in its common formulation. That is since on the global level procreation is not a gamble, it is not a risk, it is absolutely certain that some persons would be forced to live extremely miserable lives. The question is who. Since people tend to feel that bad things only happen to other people, they dismiss the chances that it would be them. Again, in this text I’ll not focus on disproving the factual base of the good life claim, so for the sake of the argument I’ll accept that the chances of each couple to create a person whose life is extremely miserable, are low. But this is not the case on a global scale. Somewhere in the world, miserable persons are being created. And that fact turns the argument from a risk that some of the people would have horrible lives, to a decision that some of the people would have horrible lives. People who decide to procreate are not only taking a risk on someone else’s suffering, they also approve and strengthen the claim that the suffering of some is justified because of the pleasures of others. The immorality of the ‘life is good’ claim stems not only from the decision to take risks on someone else’s life, but also from the decision that some would suffer so that others could enjoy.

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

Tyranny of the Majority

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

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

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

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

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

The Harm to Others

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

And since people don’t even take seriously the possibility that their own children might suffer extremely, there is no chance they would ever take seriously the certainty that sentient creatures would extremely suffer because of their procreation. That’s why we mustn’t wait until people would understand that it is ethically impossible to justify procreation, but do everything we can to make it impossible to procreate.

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 993-998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Confirmation Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Related Biases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if people would do everything in their power so that their children would have good lives, they can never guarantee it (and even more important, in my view, is that it is always guaranteed that their children would harm others). People can’t protect their children from every possible harm even if they’ll always do their best, since many bad things happen to many people independently of their parents’ actions. So obviously and as thoroughly explained in all the former texts in this blog, creating a person is always the wrong decision. In this post I’ll argue that the fact that breeding is always made by creatures who are hardly able to make right and rational decisions, makes it even worse.

Procreation involves creating an extremely vulnerable subject of harm, therefore the ones who decide to do so must be perfect decision makers. But people haven’t proven to be anything close. People are irrational creatures who usually don’t make the right decisions, and all their decisions are shaped and influenced by irrational forces. They tend to think that their decisions were made after they have rationally considered the best possible outcome of any given situation, and that they are in total control of their behavior and perceptions, but the truth is that much of it has very little, and often nothing, to do with the situation at hand and more with internal factors such as their personalities, habits, temperament, previous perceptions, willpower and hidden and explicit motives; and with contingent external factors such as how tired they are, how hungry they are, how thirsty they are, how sexually aroused they are, how comfortable their shoes are, the outside temperature, and etc.

While people like to believe that they are rational and logical, they are significantly influenced by many cognitive biases that constantly distort their assessments, positions, beliefs, judgments and decisions. Here are some common examples:

Status-Quo Bias: Generally, people prefer stability, the familiar, sticking to their routines. Therefore they tend to make decisions which guarantee that things remain more or less the same, even if they can be better, or are currently wrong. Though it makes sense not to fix something that is not broken, the problem is that many things are not even seen as broken because people don’t want to bother fixing them.

Egocentric Bias: People tend to recall the past in a self-serving manner, meaning they “remember” their performances as better than they actually were. One of the consequences is that they make decisions based on false self-perceptions.

Confirmation Bias: People tend to favor (and even remember) information that confirms their positions and actions, and disfavor and disregard (or forget) any information that contradicts or threatens their positions and actions. This bias is so common and so important that I address it separately.

Anchoring Bias: When making decisions, people tend to be overly influenced by the first piece of information they hear about the subject. The rest of the information is assimilated in relation to the first one simply because it was first and therefore was anchored, not because it is more accurate or more important.

Halo Effect: People’s overall impression of someone influences how they view each of that person’s traits, even when there are no causal links or any relevancy between the traits. The most common expression of the bias (and its worst effect) is that people find whom who is more physically attractive to also be smarter and kinder, and even worse, that the less physically attractive are also dumb and evil.

Sunk Cost Fallacy: Also known as Escalation of Commitment, people tend to continue in activities even after realizing that these activities are no longer enjoyable or needed, and often despite that it would take more efforts to complete them than was invested in them in the first place. In other words, people’s decisions are influenced by their cumulative prior investments, and regardless of their need, desire, and often despite new evidence proving this decision wrong.

Ego Depletion: Studies show that willpower is an expendable resource which can be depleted after overuse. In times of overabundance of temptations and stimulations such as ours, it is much easier and very frequent for people’s willpower to be depleted. Therefore, in many cases they unconsciously make decisions which they would have never made hadn’t their willpower been depleted.

Belief Bias: People value the logic of an argument according to the plausibility of its conclusion.

This is one of the biases which most strongly prove how illogical people are, as the logic of an argument, by definition, must be objective and independent of how plausible or desirable the conclusion which is rationally inferred from it is. Otherwise what is the point of logic in argumentation?

Existence Bias: People tend to treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness, and to evaluate an existing state more favorably than its alternatives.

The Optimism Bias: The optimism bias, also referred to as “the illusion of invulnerability”, is people’s built-in cognitive tendency to underestimate their likelihood of experiencing bad things, and overestimate their likelihood of experiencing good things. For example, people underestimate their chances of suffering from diseases or car accidents, no matter how prone they are specifically to be involved in such, or how prevalent diseases and car accidents are in general; and they overestimate their happiness potential no matter their specific living conditions.

Availability Heuristic: When evaluating a specific issue, idea, method or decision, people tend to place greater value on information that comes to their mind more quickly. People give greater credence to immediate examples and tend to overestimate the probability of similar things happening in the future.

Priming: Not only that people’s decisions and judgments are unconsciously affected by stimuli, which in many cases are absolutely irrelevant, such as smells, colors and looks, usually these factors will also affect people’s following decisions and judgments – since primal decisions and judgments affect future ones. In other words, when people are exposed to one stimulus, not only that it affects their current decisions and judgments, but it might also affect their future ones. That is despite that usually the primal stimulus had nothing to do with neither of the cases at hand.

The Consistency Effect – Is a similar and even stronger effect than priming, which basically means that people tend to defend and preserve their positions and behaviors, even if these were decided randomly or without serious observation by the agent. This effect can be an even stronger case of priming since it usually lasts longer, and since it doesn’t necessarily relate to sensual perceptions but to statements and actions performed by a person. Hence, once a person said or did something, it is often much harder to convince that person that s/he is wrong because of their drive to remain consistent (even with random and arbitrary statements and actions), which is usually further fortified by another kind of psychological bias – Self-Justification which is the infamous tendency of people to justify their behavior no matter how incoherent, reasonless and even untypical it is.

Substitution Bias: When people are confronted with a complex decision, they often automatically and unconsciously substitute it with a less complex one. They seek an easier, more familiar, related problem and apply its easier more familiar solution, to the more complex problem.

Bandwagon Effect: People tend to believe and do things merely since others believe and do them (they jump on the bandwagon).

Default Effect: Studies show that an option is more likely to be chosen by people, regardless of its content, or whether it has advantages over other alternatives, or if it is expected to benefit its choosers, once it is simply (and arbitrarily) set as the default option.

Groupthink: People’s opinions and decisions are shaped, if not suppressed, by other group members who collectively and unconsciously try to reach an agreement, often at the expense of evaluating alternative positions. This tendency results in an irrational and dysfunctional but common decision-making process.

Fluency Bias: People tend to take more seriously ideas which are processed more fluently, and more smoothly, often merely because they were presented more masterfully, not because they are more trustworthy or logical.

Mere Exposure Effect: People tend to favor options merely because they are more familiar with them.

Choice-Supportive Bias: Once a decision is made, people tend to over-focus on its benefits and minimize its flaws.

Gambler’s Fallacy: People tend to think that the likelihood of events which their probability is statistically independent (such as dice rolling or coin flipping), is nevertheless affected by past outcomes. For example, people believe that after two successive heads in coin tossing, it is more likely that the next one would be tails.

Restraint Bias: People tend to overestimate their ability to resist temptations.

Expectation Bias: People are biased by their expectations of a situation, which causes them to believe, confirm, and spread information which correspond with their expectations, and overlook, discard, or downgrade information which is in conflict with their expectations.

Framing Effect: People’s decisions are likely to differ depending on whether the exact same information is presented in one way or in another.

Authority Bias: People tend to ascribe more credibility and are more influenced by authority figures, regardless of the content of their statements.

False Uniqueness Bias: People tend to view themselves as more unique and special than they actually are.

Hyperbolic Discounting: Also known as present-bias, as it regards to people’s tendency to strongly prefer immediate benefits over future ones, despite that their future selves would highly prefer that they wouldn’t make those decisions in the present.

And it’s probably most fitting to end this partial list of cognitive biases with – Bias Blind Spot: People’s tendency not to recognize the effect of biases on their own judgment. Almost all people are sure that they are less biased than others, absolutely convinced that their beliefs, judgments and decisions are all rational, accurate, and bias free. Research has shown that people are still unable to control the effect of biases on their beliefs, judgments and decisions, even after made aware of them, and that further strengthen the fact that they are biased by the Bias Blind Spot.

Every decision people make is never after an independent standalone truly rational examination of the given situation. Every decision is somehow biased, usually by more than one cognitive bias.

It may be worth noting that cognitive biases are not the same as logical fallacies. While it may seem to some that at least theoretically, logical fallacies, which are basically error in logical argumentation, can be fixed by talented, articulate and patient activists, cognitive biases on the other hand, being deeply rooted genuine deficiencies or limitations in people’s thought processing, judgments, memory, attention, valuation, and other mental activities, are here to stay and they constantly distort people’s rational thinking, logic, emotions, believes, positions, perceptions, decisions, and actions.

The fact that people are so unaware of these tremendous forces influencing their decisions makes it even harder to convince them to change their decisions since they are sure that their decisions were made rationally and independently of any external or internal pressure.
If people were rational then in each case they would logically compare all the options and decide upon the expected best outcome in terms of benefit, and not according to the various factors that actually determine their behavior.

People’s thinking and decisions are highly affected by their emotional state. Multiple studies have shown how stress and excitement affect people’s reason and actions. One famous example is lottery sales which sky rocket after events which are considered good, especially unexpected ones. People generally tend to overestimate the chances of something good happening to them, and underestimate the chances of something bad happening to them (the Optimism Bias) and it has an even stronger effect when they have a better mood (which obviously doesn’t really affect the chances of something good happening to them, or that something bad won’t).

Not only that the emotions experienced by people while making a decision sometimes have nothing to do with the issue itself, it is often the case that the effects of the emotions experienced while making a decision can last longer than the emotions themselves. In other words, not only that emotions sometimes have a strong irrelevant effect on an immediate decision, they often affect future decisions as well, and again regardless of the relevancy to the issue itself. That is because in many cases an emotion creates a long-lasting pattern of responses to similar scenarios which correspondingly affects decision making regarding these situations. Or to put it even more bluntly, one initial mistake can start a chain reaction of misguided decisions.

People are sure that they are always in the driver’s seat, at least when it comes to their decisions, and with what happens in their lives. But they are always not, even when it comes to “their” decisions and with what happens in their lives, and to an even greater degree, what happens in others’ lives.
People are merely pawns who are constantly influenced by many forces which they can’t comprehend or are even aware of, not to mention are able to control.

Given how irrational people are, it is irrational to keep using rational arguments expecting to convince them to stop breeding. What is needed is not rational arguments but actions.

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The inevitableness of mortality, meaning the fact that everyone necessarily has to die, is a very common antinatalist argument.

Basically the argument is that it is wrong to create an unnecessary life that would necessarily end, but it has some variations and accentuations.
Versions of the mortality argument such as the one of Julio Cabrera, or the one of David Benatar, were already addressed here and here.

Other antinatalists argue that imposing existence which obviously necessarily ends with the death of the created creatures, is imposing death on those created creatures. And knowingly creating creatures who would necessarily die is at least a form of infliction of death, if not murder.

Some mention the harm of dying, pointing at the fact that rarely people, and all the more so other animals, die without suffering. Obviously I agree that unfortunately this is true, but in my view that is part of the argument that suffering is inevitable in existence, not that death is a harm in itself regardless of how it is experienced. The problem with the fact that most creatures are suffering while dying, is the suffering. And that suffering is a reason not to procreate even if it wasn’t part of dying. And on the other hand, according to the mortality argument, even if death didn’t usually involve suffering it would have still been a harm and a reason not to procreate, so I think we should separate the two arguments.

Some claim that death is bad for the person who died because it frustrates the wishes of the dead. This position is often referred to as the deprivation account, and I disagree with it. The dead can’t be frustrated. There is no one who experiences the loss of the goals which were not accomplished. No one is there anymore to be a victim of this “frustration”, or to be deprived of anything. The dead can’t experience any of the effects of their death. In fact they can’t experience anything hence can’t be deprived of anything. A state can’t be bad for someone if it doesn’t have bad consequences for that someone (or any consequences whatsoever in the case of death). A person who no longer exists is not harmed by the fact that things that that person wanted to happen didn’t happen as a result of its death.
Death can’t be harmful for the dead because it is the end of their existence, and harms are relevant only in existence. Death can be bad only for the living because it threatens to end their existence (that is of course except for the ones who wish for their existence to end).

According to the deprivation account, the essence of what is bad in death is that by dying people don’t get what they desire and plan for had they not died, and they are deprived of a better possibility. But if what is bad about death is that people’s desires would remain unfulfilled, then it is not death which is bad but life, since the dead no longer desire anything or are frustrated by anything, however the living are always frustrated by numerous unfulfilled desires. In death no one experiences anything, it is in life that no one ever gets exactly what they desire and plan for, let alone exactly when they want it. The dead indeed don’t get what they would have desired had they not died, but they don’t experience the situation of not getting what they would have desired had they not died since once dead there are no longer any experiences, desires, and frustrations. Experiences can only take place in the domain of an existing subject, they don’t remain after death, floating above the place where the subject died.

For a possibility of a better option to be harmful, it needs to be experienced by a subject, not merely be a possibility. Possibilities are not moral entities, only subjects are. And since death is precisely the termination of a subject, there is no longer a morally irrelevant entity to be harmed, or be deprived of any possibility. In other words, only if the dead could have experienced the deprivation of a good possibility, its absence could have been harmful.

Ironically, the deprivation account, probably the most common argument for why death is bad for the person who died, is a serious indictment against life, as it is only in life that the deprivation account is relevant, and in fact extremely prevalent since no one’s desires are ever fully and immediately satisfied, and so everyone is always deprived of something, at least to some extent, and also since it seems that according to the deprivation account, people need not to experience a deprivation of a better possibility to be harmed, but merely the hypothetical option of a better possibility is sufficient to harm them. That claim makes life actually even much worse than most antinatalists think, since there is always a better possible option for any given situation, so if people are harmed merely by the possibility of better options, they are most definitely numerously harmed in each and every single moment of their lives.

Having said all that, I totally agree that death is a serious harm and a very good reason to never procreate but not because death is in itself a harm for the person who died, but because a person’s death is a harm for other people who cared about that person, and because that person, like most people, was aware of the fact that s/he would someday die, and that awareness had many harmful implications on that person while s/he was alive. Although a person can’t be harmed by its own death as the dead don’t experience anything anymore, a person is definitely harmed by being aware of its inevitable death, more or less all along its life. And that is the version of the death argument which is in the center of this text.

Death Anxiety

Death is a very serious harm because of the feeling of loss, but not the loss felt by the one who died as the one who no longer exists doesn’t experience any loss (or anything at all), but the feeling of loss by the ones who didn’t die and cared about the one that did.
Death is a very serious harm not because the dead experience something negative in death (or anything at all), but because the living experience something negative while being aware of their own inevitable death.
Death is a very serious harm not because it ended the existence of the one who died as the one who died doesn’t experience the end of its existence (or anything at all), but because it affected the existence of the person who died for almost its entire life.

The harm of death to the person who dies is a bit tricky, it is relevant only as long as death doesn’t come. For the person who dies, death is a harm as a threat, and as long as that person is alive. The harm of death is mainly manifested as death anxiety.

People are forced to live with the awareness that they would die. People are also forced to live with the awareness that other people they care about would die. Not only that, people are also forced to live with the awareness that they and other people they care about can die at any given moment, and often for reasons that they can’t anticipate or control.
Children are forced to live with the awareness that their parents might die, and from a very very young age (from the age of three and usually before they are six). And eventually they realize that their own death is also unavoidable.

The fact that anyone can die anytime, anywhere, by anything, along with the fact that in many cases there is no causal link between death and a person’s behavior – meaning, someone can be very responsible in terms of safety, security, avoiding risks, diet, fitness, sleeping time, health checkups, stress level and etc., yet get killed by an accident which was absolutely not by that person’s fault or lack of caution (drunk driver who ran a red light or mass shooting or whatever scenario that comes to mind in which the person who died couldn’t avoid or anticipate its death) – leads to much of the death anxiety.

Death is a harm not only because every created person has to endure its own mortality but because every created person has to endure others’ mortality. Many people who lose those whom they love find it too hard to overcome the loss, and some remain “stuck” in the mourning process, being immersed in a state of intense continuous grief, sorrow, anger, guilt, self-hatred or depression.
The death of loved ones may have long-term harmful effects on the mental and physical health of people, putting them at a greater risk of depression, illness, accidents, addictiveness to smoking, drinking, drugs, and to suffer from depression and various other psychological disturbances.
And the harm of losing people is not just when and after it actually happens, but it also results from the constant anxiety of losing loved ones. And the fact that it can happen anytime, anywhere, and by anything, is a significant factor of the death anxiety.

People don’t make peace with the fact that death is inevitable and is often very unpredictable. This cognitive problem creates a lot of anxiety and it has various effects in many aspects of human life, most of it is unconscious. In the following text I’ll elaborate about the most famous and substantial theory for that matter, Ernest Becker’s denial of death.
In its more tangible effect death anxiety is associated with: phobias, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, eating disorders, somatic symptom disorder and etc.
Some people become depressed, rigid, cynical or hateful toward self and others.
Many embrace religious or other dogmas that promise afterlife.
Others seek salvation in the form of a guru, a political figure, or a relationship with a partner.
And many seek to accumulate power and wealth unconsciously motivated by the false belief that it would provide them with invincibility.
Probably the least harmful impact, at least potentially, is people seeking symbolic immortality in creative productions and investment in positive causes. Unsurprisingly that path is not very popular. And unfortunately the most common path is also the worst one. Most people seek symbolic immortality by creating biological copies of themselves.

Ironically and tragically, death anxiety causes people to create more people. That is despite that people can’t produce people who are not aware of their own mortality, and despite that they can’t prevent their death anxiety. Procreation is an inevitable passing of unavoidable anxiety.
Procreating is creating a person who would be negatively affected by being aware that its existence is bound to end with death, which can happen at any given moment.

The never to have been, never has to deal with death anxiety. However, every created (human) person has to die and to fear its own death. And also the death of others. Anyone who ever deeply cared about someone, especially if they were ill, knows how terrible death anxiety is. The never to have been, never has to deal with the anxiety about the death of others, and others don’t have to deal with anxiety about that person’s death.

Pro-Natalisn as Pro-Mortalism

Death anxiety is inevitable. Ironically many pro-natalists are trying to counter the mortality argument by claiming that death is part of life, totally missing that that is exactly the point. Had no one been forced into life no one would have to die. The fact that death is part of life is not a reason to accept it but the other way around.
And by that I don’t imply that life is good otherwise why would death be such a bad thing?
One can think that life is bad and that death is bad as well despite that death ends life. The reason there is no contradiction is because life can be bad for someone who might even want to end it but not by death. That may sound ridiculous because death is the end of life, but that is part of the horror of life, it can only end by death. There is no way to simply disappear without feeling a thing, and more importantly as if a person never existed. Had that been an option, many more people would have ended their lives. Most don’t do that because despite that they really don’t want to live, they are biologically built to fear death, many are afraid of not dying while trying to die and therefore ending up in an even worse situation than they were before trying to die, and many are afraid to hurt people who care about them. That’s why if there was a button that can immediately painlessly totally erase the existence of a person so that anyone who knew that person would magically forget that that person ever existed, many would unhesitatingly press that button.
Death anxiety is not the only reason why many people don’t bring their own death but it is a significant part of the reason. And these people who don’t want to live but are afraid to die are doubly victimized. Life that they want to end was imposed on them, as well as the fear to end it.

Unfortunately, this question is not very likely to receive a serious reply. It is more likely that more or less the following dead-end dialog would take place:
Antinatalist: Why would you want your own child to die?
Pro-natalist: I don’t want my child to die, I want my child to live
Antinatalist: But before your child was created it didn’t exist, you have created your child. There was no one and then you have decided to create someone. And that someone has to die. Your child wouldn’t have to die had you never created it. Your child didn’t have to live, there was no one there who had to live or die before you decided to create it, and now that you did, it has to die. So again, why do you want your children to die?
Pro-natalist: Again, I don’t want my children to die, I want my children to live.
Antinatalist: But before a person exists it doesn’t need nor wants to exist since there is no one there to need or want anything. However once that person was created by you, it feels a need and a want to continue to exist and that person, your child, eventually has to die. And so by creating a person you simultaneously created its feeling of need and want to continue to exist, as well as its inevitable death, which that person is going to fear from its entire life.
Your children didn’t want to live before you forced them to live. It was your want that created their life. They didn’t ask to be born, life were forced on them. Everyone is forced into a purposeless existence which inevitably ends with their death. So what is the point?
Pro-natalist: The point is that before anyone die they live.
Antinatalist: But there is no reason for them to live besides your desire of having children. And there is no way to avoid their death. Do you think that your desire to have children should overpower your own children’s desire not to die, as well as the death anxiety that would affect them their entire lives?
Me: I know I am supposed to provide some answer to the last question, but I honestly can’t think of even a very lame one.

People don’t have to create people, however people have to die. And since people know that they don’t have to create people but that if they will, the people they are creating have to die, how is it not forcing them to die?

If you find this brief predicted dialog more or less familiar, and if you find yourself relating to the frustration, maybe it is time to rethink this approach.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press

Becker, E. (1971). The birth and death of meaning (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press

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McGregor, R. and Sullivan-Bissett, E. 2012: “Better No Longer To Be: The Harm of Continued Existence” The South African Journal of Philosophy

Nagel, T. (1970) Death Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1 pp. 73-80

Pitcher, G. The misfortunate of the dead in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

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Suits, D. B. Why death is not bad for the ones died in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

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