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

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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.

References

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

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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

Feldman, F. Some puzzles about the evil of death in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. (2015) The worm at the core: on the role of death in life.

Luper, S. Annihilation in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

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)

Rosenbaum, S. How to be dead and not to care in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

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

Viorst, J. (1986) Necessary Losses. New York: Simon and Schuster

One of the most popular antinatalist arguments is that procreation is wrong since it is impossible to obtain the consent of the created person.
In addressing this argument I have decided to focus on Seana Shiffrin’s article Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm. That is despite that Shiffrin doesn’t even aim at making an antinatalist argument, but argues for a more equivocal stance toward procreation. Shiffrin is mostly concerned with the ease with which society refuses to impose liability on parents despite that they “subject their future children to harm and substantial risk by bringing them into existence” (p. 148). However, I think that in her course of challenging some of the false philosophical premises against ‘wrongful life’ liability, and the current juridical policy toward issues involving procreation and parent–child relations, she makes a very substantial antinatalist case.

Harms and Benefits

Like Benatar, Shiffrin also argues that there is an asymmetry between benefits and harms (which she thinks are not two ends of a scale, and are often absolutely independent states of a positive and a negative kind), but as opposed to Benatar’s version, hers doesn’t stem from advantageousness of non-existence over existence, but from consent.

Shiffrin’s argument relies on the ethical premise regarding benefits and harms with no consent – while it is morally permissible to inflict harm without consent to prevent a greater harm, it is impermissible to inflict harm without consent in order to bestow a benefit.
She exemplifies:

“Absent evidence that the person’s will is to the contrary, it is permissible, perhaps obligatory, to inflict the lesser harm of a broken arm in order to save a person from significant greater harm, such as drowning or brain damage from oxygen deprivation. But, it seems wrong to perform a procedure on an unconscious patient that will cause her harm but also redound to her greater, pure benefit. At the very least, it is much harder to justify. For example, it seems wrong to break an unconscious patient’s arm even if necessary to endow her with valuable, physical benefits, such as supernormal memory, a useful store of encyclopedic knowledge, twenty IQ points worth of extra intellectual ability, or the ability to consume immoderate amounts of alcohol or fat without side effects. At the least, it would be much harder to justify than inflicting similar harm to avert a greater harm, such as death or significant disability.” (p.127)

Therefore, despite that as opposed to Benatar Shiffrin thinks that being created can overall benefit a person, she argues that procreation is morally problematic since all existing persons suffer harms, and it is impossible to secure their consent before being created.
Even if the pleasures of life can be seen as advantages over non-existence, it is morally wrong to impose preventable harms on others without their consent. Harming others without their consent is permissible only to prevent greater harm. Since this is never the case when it comes to procreation, creating someone is an unmistakable violation of this ethical principle.

Shiffrin argues that even though people can benefit their offspring by creating them, they also impose serious harms upon them:

“By being caused to exist as persons, children are forced to assume moral agency, to face various demanding and sometimes wrenching moral questions, and to discharge taxing moral duties. They must endure the fairly substantial amount of pain, suffering, difficulty, significant disappointment, distress, and significant loss that occur within the typical life. They must face and undergo the fear and harm of death. Finally, they must bear the results of imposed risks that their lives may go terribly wrong in a variety of ways. All of these burdens are imposed without the future child’s consent. This, it seems, is in tension with the foundational liberal, anti-paternalist principle that forbids the imposition of significant burdens and risks upon a person without the person’s consent. Doing so violates this principle even if the imposition delivers an overall benefit to the affected person. Hence, procreation is a morally hazardous activity because in all cases it imposes significant risks and burdens upon the children who result. The imposition of significant burdens and risks is not a feature of exceptional or aberrant procreation, but of all procreation.” (p.137)

Common Objections to the Consent Argument

Some object the consent argument, claiming that consent can be hypothetically assumed. Shiffrin opposes this claim for four reasons:
(1) Great harm is not at stake if one is not being created
(2) If one is being created, the harms suffered may be very severe
(3) The imposed harms of life cannot be escaped without high costs
(4) The hypothetical consent procedure is not based on features of the individual who will bear the imposed condition but on a false attempt to universalize preferences of benefits

Others are objecting the idea that it is the parents who are imposing the serious harms.
Shiffrin replies:

“one might resist the claim that because existence may deliver harms, the creator who causes a person to exist causes her harm. One might object that placing someone in a condition where she will necessarily suffer harm is not the same as causing her harm. In some sense, the condition inflicts the harm, not the agent. But this observation seems tangential to assessments of responsibility. If an agent places a patient in the path of an evident, oncoming avalanche that will break her arm, it seems fair to say that the agent harms the patient; at the least (and sufficient for my purposes), the agent is accountable and responsible for the harm the patient suffers—even if the agent does not break the arm directly through his action, does not seek the harm and even tries to prevent it (as may happen in cases of deliberate action resulting in foreseen, but unintentional harm).” (p.125)

Another attempt to counter the consent argument is by claiming that it is impossible to receive consent from non-existing persons.
First of all, the impossibility to obtain consent to inflict harms isn’t a justification to impose them anyway, especially when there is no harm involved in not creating someone. In fact, procreation is exactly the case in which there shouldn’t be a doubt that we mustn’t act in ways that might harmfully affect someone without consent, since not procreating is the surest way not to harm someone without consent.

Secondly, it’s plausible to argue that an existing person acts wrongly towards someone who couldn’t give consent, if as a result of that action, there would be a person who is harmed with no consent. Shiffrin claims on that matter that: “If our actions now set into motion causal chains that will result in a right’s being violated in the future, this action is, at best, morally problematic.” (p.138)

More in this context, some try to refute the consent argument by attempting to turn it on its head, claiming that following the logic of antinatalists, if we need to obtain a person’s consent to be created we must also obtain a person’s consent not to be created. In other words, if consent is important, how come antinatalists are asking for one only in cases of creating a person but not in cases of not creating a person?
However, there is a fundamental difference between the case where there is no existing person yet but there is going to be, and the case where there will never be an existing person. In both cases it is impossible to obtain consent before making a decision, but in the case of procreation the consent of the person who will be affected by that decision is required, while in the case of not creating a person there is no person who will be affected by that decision. There is no and never will be a person who needs to consent to harms that would never be caused to that person.

There is no need to ask someone to consent to not being created, because there is no such someone and because there are no harms that need to be consented to.
When people decide to create a person, that person’s consent is needed because once created that person would necessarily and inevitably be harmed. But that is not the case when people decide not to create a person, because then there is no person at all, let alone one who would necessarily and inevitably be harmed. Creating a person is necessarily forcing something on someone. Not creating a person is necessarily not forcing anything on anyone.

The fact that someone didn’t exist before being created doesn’t change the fact that once created that someone exists without giving consent to its own existence. Consent is relevant because someone will exist and will be harmed during existence. Had that someone not been created, there would have been no existing person who is affected by not being created and therefore there would be no need to obtain consent.

This claim implies that if creating a person is to force existence on people, then not creating people is to force nonexistence on people. But it is impossible to force nonexistence because nonexistence is not a state anyone can be in. Only existence can be forced. And in fact, existence can only be forced since existing people never give consent to be created.
There are no persons whose nonexistence was forced on them for the simple reason that there is no such thing as persons who were never created and there is no such thing as nonexistence. However, existence does exist, and it was forced on everyone who was ever created, exactly because consent could never be obtained. Nonexistence can never be forced on anyone, and existence can only be forced, and it is forced on everyone.

And finally, pro-natalists object the consent argument by claiming that most people state that their life is worth living, and by that they are expressing their consent retroactively.
But for people to be able to give a retroactive consent for their creation, they must also be able to retroactively decline it, and they can’t. No one can undo its own existence. People can end their existence, but they can’t retroactively cancel it. As I broadly explained in the text about suicide, this option is extremely problematic in itself, and is irrelevant to the case of consent since killing oneself doesn’t retroactively cancel a person’s existence, it doesn’t retroactively offset all the suffering that that person experienced, and it would probably cause additional suffering to anyone who cares about that person. If created people can’t really retroactively reject their creation, then they also can’t retroactively give their consent. Creation was forced on all people, and once they exist none really has a choice in terms of consent, even the ones who state that they are happy that they were created.

The impossibility to obtain a unanimous consent, beforehand, from everyone who would ever live, and from everyone who would ever be harmed by everyone who would ever live, is sufficient to construct a valid antinatalist argument in my view. But even under much less radical criterions, even if you disagree that it is wrong to cause someone harm without that person’s consent, even if you disagree that pleasures are not really good as claimed in the post about Benatar’s asymmetry,  and even if you disagree that the reason most people feel that their lives are worth living is not because their lives are really good but mostly because of various psychological mechanisms, still, if consent is derived from the claim that life is worth living, then the ones who feel that their lives are not worth living, don’t give consent retroactively. And since no one can tell whether the lives of the persons they are creating would be found worth living by the persons created, what this claim actually implies is that the majority’s supposed retroactive consent should trample the minority who don’t retroactively give consent to their harms.

This claim is even more atrocious given that non-existing persons are not being harmed by not experiencing the good parts of life had they never existed, while existing persons are harmed by experiencing the bad things in lives. The fact that there are people who feel that their lives are not worth living, despite the allegedly good parts of life, is sufficient for all procreations to be morally unjustified. There are many people who feel that their lives are not worth living, but even if there were few, it doesn’t matter how many people feel this way, the proportions between the ones who feel that their lives are not worth living and the ones who feel they are worth living, are morally irrelevant since no one is harmed by not being created, and the ones who feel that their lives are not worth living are definitely harmed by being created. Had none of them existed, none of them would have been harmed.

Abstaining from procreation won’t cause any harm to anyone who wasn’t created. But a person who doesn’t consent to the miserable life forced upon it, is being severely harmed with no justification, no compensation, and the ‘way out’ option – suicide, although can stop future suffering, it can’t retroactively justify it, and has additional tremendous costs.

Every new person created is a new chance for a person who won’t retroactively give consent to be created, therefore every procreation is morally wrong.

The Harm to Others

In my view, the most important aspect of the consent argument, is one which I have yet to come across in this context – the harm to others.
Not only the person who is about to be created, is going to be harmed as a result of its existence, but also thousands of others who would be harmed as part of providing the living support for that person. A “support” none of them has ever given consent for. In this case I think it is safe to say that hypothetical consent won’t be given. No sentient creature would give consent to be harmed so a person who doesn’t even exist yet, would benefit.
Considering the harms to others, counterarguments such as hypothetical consent or that it is illogical to ascribe consent to non-existing persons, is irrelevant. Existing sentient creatures who will be harmed by a person who will be created, will most certainly not give their consent to be harmed by that person and for that person’s sake.

Before discussing the relevancy and feasibility of obtaining consent to be harmed from a person who doesn’t yet exist, we must obtain consent from everyone who would be harmed by that person’s existence. Even if we could have obtained consent from non-existing persons before creating them, we first must ask everyone who would be sacrificed and otherwise harmed by these persons. We must get their consent to be genetically modified so they would provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons. We must get their consent to be imprisoned for their entire lives. We must get their consent to live without their family for their entire lives. We must get their consent to suffer chronic pain and maladies. We must get their consent to never breathe clean air, walk on grass, bath in water, and eat their natural food. We must get their consent to be violently murdered so the to-be born could consume their bodies. We must get their consent to destroy their habitats, pollute their land, water, and air.
But no one is asking them. And it is not even because everyone knows they would never give their consent, but because others’ harms matter so little to people, that no one even thinks they must be asked.

And one last point. Since this blog is actually a call for an operative antinatalist resolution, it is important to indicate that behind the consent argument there is a firm objection to the inherent coercion of procreation. This is an important note since some might oppose the forced sterilization call as an operative antinatalist resolution, due to its coercive aspect. But given that the only way to cease the inherent coercion of procreation is with the inherent coercion of forced sterilization, clearly for the long run that resolution holds much less coercion than letting procreation continue on its horrendous course. The number of individuals who would have to endure coercion of all kinds in the future if it won’t happen, is practically infinite. In fact, even without considering everyone who would ever exist, the number of individuals who endure coercion of all kinds in the present, already defeats the number of people who need to be sterilized.
Coercion is unavoidable, the question is of extent. It is either that people would continue to decide for other people that they would exist, generation after generation after generation, and for other creatures that they would have to be exploited, suffer and be sacrificed for the sake of the people they insist on creating, or that we decide for one generation only that they won’t procreate. There is no way around it, decisions are anyway being made for others, the question is will it be only the decision not to procreate and for one generation only, or the decision to feel pain, to fear, to be bored, to be disappointed, to be sad, to be lonely, to be purposeless, to die, to fear of dying and many other sources of suffering, and for generation after generation after generation after generation…
Refusing force sterilization on the current generation is forcing endless suffering on an endless number of individuals. The coercion involved in forced sterilization is for one generation only. The coercion involved in the refusal to forced sterilization can last until the sun burns out.

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

Singh, A. Assessing anti-natalism: A philosophical examination of the morality of procreation (University of Johannesburg 2011)

Suicide is often used by pro-natalists to counter antinatalism. The issue is usually brought up in three different ways. The most common mention of suicide is one of various verbal vomits such as ‘if you think life is so bad why don’t you kill yourself’. I will not discuss this specific use of suicide in the following text, not only because it’s ignorant and idiotic, but mainly since this “argument” is so detached from any antinatalist argument that it is not even relevant to refute it. It simply has nothing to do with antinatalism. Therefore as common as this stupid evasion is, I’ll skip it and focus on the other two.
The second one is an attempt to refute the antinatalist claim that procreation is morally wrong since life is a harm, by stating that only a tiny minority of people carry out suicide, therefore procreation is not a harm and life is not as horrible as antinatalists claim it is.
The third one is an attempt to suggest a solution – if life is so horrible for a person, suicide is always an option. Although this claim is often used in a cynical manner, it can also be seriously used as a counter argument for antinatalism and so despite that it is giving it more credit than it actually deserves, this is how I’ll address it here.

A Wrong Use of the Wrong Statistics

Pro-natalists claim that antinatalism is wrong since only a tiny minority of people feel that their lives are not worth living, evidently very few people carry out suicide. This claim is false from several aspects, first of all factually.
Officially, more than one million people worldwide kill themselves every year. That means that statistically, for every 130 people born each year, one will carry out suicide. Globally, suicide ranks among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15–44 years, and the 2nd leading cause of death in the world for those aged 15-24 years. In most countries the incidence of suicides is higher than the incidence of intentional homicides. In the United States there are more than twice as many suicides as there are homicides. A report by the World Health Organization states that more people take their own lives every year, than those murdered or killed in war.
According to recent findings from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over the past 20 years, suicide rates have been on the rise in every state in the US except Nevada. The research found that the suicide rate increased by more than 30% in half of the states from 1999 to 2016. In some states, that increase was as high as 58%.
The World Health Organization states that a person carries out suicide somewhere in the world every 40 seconds.
And all these are official statistics, unofficially the numbers are even higher as many deaths are not considered suicides but as accidents or unsolved mystery and etc., to avoid the associated public shame, or family guilt.

However, the more important point is not what the real scale of suicide is, but is it the real scale for life evaluation. It is not. Suicide statistics don’t reflect the number of people who feel that their lives are not worth living. If anything, it is suicide attempts which are much more indicative, and the statistics are that there is one death by suicide for every 25 attempts. So all the former statistics, as alarming as they must be to anyone who thinks this pro-natalist claim is reasonable in the first place, must be multiplied by 25.

But even that extent is very partial and misleading since trying to carry out suicide is extremely difficult, and from many different aspects. The first and most primal one is that it is biologically difficult. Many people don’t carry out suicide because they are built to survive. As horrible as life is for someone, to intentionally end it by oneself, one must overpower the very strong biological instinct of self-preservation. Almost every biological mechanism in our body is built to survive, including the innate fear of pain, height, being under water, blood, suffocation and etc. and suicide often involves at least one of them.
People are biologically wired to survive, and that doesn’t change even when they are living in complete misery. We have evolved to survive, not to kill ourselves, so to try it anyway, one must overpower strong primal forces, and this is only the beginning of the suicide ordeal.

Another obstacle to overcome is a social one. The social status of suicide is that it is wrong, cowardly and even a sin. People are indoctrinated from age zero to believe that life is precious, a sacred gift one must cherish. Of course, one can wonder, if life was really a gift then why almost each and every society and religion feel the need to condemn suicide as sin, as a sign of weakness and ingratitude? Why do they all fight the suicide option and insist on forcing life on people instead of letting them decide if they want to use this “gift” or not? Why not making suicide legal and legitimate? Isn’t it suspicious that life is constantly praised and death constantly condemned? When so many people are making so much effort to prove something which is supposed to be so obvious, it means that it is not so obvious that it is so obvious.
However, having said that, it is not easy to overcome this intensive indoctrination. In addition to the inner constraints, the fact that a suicide attempt usually carries a social stigma deters many from trying. If the veil of social shame is removed, and if no religion institute considered it a sin (which is a very important factor to many people), clearly many more people would have carried out suicide.

Another obstacle is jurisdictional. It may sound relatively minor, however, in many places in the world, people are afraid that in the case of failing, they would be coercively hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital.
Another jurisdictionally important factor is that it is illegal to assist suicide. Many find it hard to kill themselves by themselves but would do it easily if they were assisted. It is not accidental that assisting another person to carry out suicide is a crime. If it wasn’t, probably many more people would use the assistance of others and do it.

Another serious obstacle to overcome is the fear of death. It may sound counterintuitive but it is not that people who consider suicide want to die, it’s that they don’t want to live. They can fantasize daily about ending their life and at the same time fear death and the unknown. The fear of death, even among the ones who wish for the ending of their lives, is instinctive, everyone is biologically built to fear death. And since not everyone view death as the end of all experiences, many are also conceptually afraid of it. Afraid of the unknown. In my view, death is not a state of unknown experiences, but of no experiences whatsoever, however the point here is not about how death feels like for the one who died (which is a morally irrelevant question as the dead don’t experience anything anymore including their own death), but how death feels like for the one who lives (which is a morally relevant question, since the living do have experiences regarding death as long as they are alive), and for many this experience is fear. And it is this fear of death, not the love of life, which prevents many people from killing themselves.

So, many people don’t carry out suicide because they are scared to die, and many don’t carry out suicide because they are scared not to die (if they fail). To fear a failed suicide attempt is also a very serious obstacle. Some people have survived jumping off high buildings, ending up in an even more horrible situation. Same goes for jumping off bridges, as in many cases their bodies have triggered survival instincts which made them try and swim up for air, until they were found by the coast guards. Some people survive overdoses if they haven’t swallowed the right pills or the right amount of them. Same goes for self-poisoning.
The fear of a severe disability or any other medical damage as a result of a suicide attempt, detains many who fear that they might end up even worse than they were.

Some people are halted by a personal obstacle in the form of obligations to others such as their children or other family members who are dependent on them. Many people reach the conclusion that their lives are not worth living after having children and so are trapped in life. This is, at least partly, why young people who don’t have children yet, and old people whom their children are old enough to take care of themselves, carry out suicide in much higher rates than people in the ages of 29 to 50.

Another major obstacle is guilt. Many people really want to end their life, but don’t want to hurt the people who care about them. People tend to blame themselves for the suicide of close ones, and people who contemplate suicide know that. They also know that people who carried out suicide are blamed for being selfish. And they don’t want that either.
Many are concerned that their close ones might find their body or that if they would make sure it would be hard to find their body, it would make people who care about them extremely worried until it would be found.

And finally, seemingly merely a technical obstacle but actually of the most important ones, is the lack of easy access to fast, safe and painless methods of suicide.
One of the reasons that men successfully carry out suicide about four times more often than women is gun ownership. Where methods which women usually prefer are available, for example ingestible lethal poisons in China and India, female suicide rates are similar and sometimes exceed that of men. That means that when people have access to a reliably lethal method, they are far more likely to kill themselves. Or in other words, if reliably lethal methods were more available, suicide rates were much higher.

In her book Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Jamison lists some horrible suicide methods performed by people who didn’t have access to more convenient options:

“To kill themselves, the suicidal have jumped into volcanoes; starved themselves to death; thrust rumps of turkeys down their throats; swallowed dynamite, hot coals, underwear, or bed clothing; strangled themselves with their own hair; used electric drills to bore holes into their brains; walked off into the snow with no provisions and little clothing; placed their necks in vices; arranged for their own decapitation; and injected into themselves every substance known to man, including air, peanut butter, poison, mercury, and mayonnaise. They have flown bombers into mountains, applied black widow spiders to their skin, drowned in vats of beer or vinegar, and suffocated themselves in their refrigerators or hope chests. One of Karl Menninger’s patients tried repeatedly to kill himself by drinking raw hydrochloric acid; he survived those attempts and died only after swallowing lighted firecrackers.” (p.133)

This list goes to show that for many people their existence is so horrible that they preferred to go through these horrible ways of dying and not through life. And who knows how many people had to suffer horrible lives because they couldn’t put themselves through any of these horrible methods and didn’t have alternatives. Had they had any, the suicide rates were much higher. And that is the case today just as much. If the most convenient suicide methods, for example a drug overdose of soporifics, were highly available, many more would have killed themselves.

People often say that gun ownership increases the risk of suicide as firearms account for about half of all suicides in the United States. But clearly this data is presented falsely. Gun ownership doesn’t incite a will to die, but an easy way to actualize it. The will to die is incited by life.
This data shows that if everyone had a gun many people would have chosen to use it to end their own misery. And that is despite that killing oneself with a shot to the head is not a very inviting option. If there was a pill which anyone could purchase at any drugstore with no prescription, which painlessly and surely kills during sleep, the suicide rates would skyrocket.

This is a very partial list of the suicide ordeal. There are many more factors and there is definitely much more to say about each of the mentioned ones. But I guess it is sufficient for claiming that suicide is very difficult physically, mentally and emotionally. And yet, every year, tens of millions of people are trying to do it anyway. This fact, especially considering all these obstacles and many more, is a proof of how horrible life is, not the other way around.

But the even more important point for that matter is that all these obstacles, by preventing millions of people from trying to kill themselves, conceal the true number of people who feel that their lives are not worth living. Since trying to kill oneself is so difficult, it would be much more accurate to consider how many have thought about it. The question in point is not how many people have killed themselves, or how many have tried to, but how many wanted to.

Based on data from the 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the prevalence of serious suicidal thoughts among adults aged 18-25 is 10.5%.
The CDC estimates that about 10 million American adults seriously contemplated ending their life, nearly 3 million made a suicide plan, and 1.3 million attempted suicide.

A comprehensive study of suicidal thinking among college students in the United States found that more than half of the 26,000 surveyed had suicidal thoughts at some point during their lifetime.
The web-based survey conducted in spring 2006 used separate samples of undergraduate and graduate students from 70 colleges and universities across the country. Of the 15,010 undergraduates, average age 22, 55 percent had ever thought of suicide; 18 percent seriously considered it; and 8 percent made an attempt. Among 11,441 graduate students, average age 30: Exactly half had such thoughts; 15 percent seriously considered it and 6 percent made an attempt.

A more recent and extensive study that surveyed more than 67,000 students in the United States, found that over 20 percent of the students had suicidal thoughts or attempts just in the passing year. Furthermore, 9 percent had attempted suicide, and nearly 20 percent have deliberately injured themselves.

A study among students in grades 9-12, also in United States, has found that 17% of students seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous year. 13.6% of students made a plan about how they would attempt suicide in the previous year. 8% of students attempted suicide one or more times in the previous year. And 2.7% of students made a suicide attempt that resulted in an injury, poisoning, or an overdose that required medical attention.

Other researches, conducted in Europe and Africa as well as in the United States, have shown that mild to severe thoughts of suicide are common, occurring in 20 to 65 percent of college students.

In the earlier mentioned book Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide various surveys regarding suicide are detailed. All of them are a bit dated (the book was published in 1999) but since the figures have only gone up since then, many are still relevant and insightful. Here are several of them:

“Twenty-five years ago, in an early community-based study of suicidal thinking and behaviors, University of Cambridge psychiatrist Gene Paykel and his colleagues interviewed more than 700 people in New Haven, Connecticut. The results gave a public face to what had been very private thoughts. More than 10 percent of those interviewed said that, at some point in their lives, they had felt that “life was not worth living,” and a comparable number said that they had, at one time or another, “wished they were dead.” One person in twenty had thought about actually taking his or her own life, and most of those who had thought about suicide had thought about it seriously. One person in a hundred said he or she had attempted suicide. Approximately twenty years ago, the National Institute of Mental Health began the largest study ever undertaken of the nature and extent of psychiatric disorders in the U.S. population. It involved extensive interviews of a total of 20,000 people living in the five American catchment areas of Baltimore, Maryland; Piedmont County, North Carolina; Los Angeles, California; New Haven, Connecticut; and St. Louis, Missouri. The study included four questions about suicide, similar to those asked by Paykel and his colleagues, but was more specific in that it required a minimal duration for suicidal thoughts of two weeks. Of the 18,500 individuals who responded to the questions about suicide, 11 percent said they had at some point during their lives felt so low they had thought of committing suicide; 3 percent of the total said they had made one or more suicide attempts. Other investigations conducted in general communities have found that, consistent with these two studies, between 5 and 15 percent of the general adult population acknowledge having had suicidal thoughts at some point in their lives.

Two other studies of American high school students confirmed that thinking about suicide is far from a rare concern: more than 50 percent of New York high school students reported that they had “thought about killing themselves,” and 20 percent of Oregon high school students described a history of suicidal thinking of varying degrees of severity.” (p.35)

Suicide statistics are much higher than pro-natalists want to believe, and they increase along the years. They are also only partial. We don’t need to examine the number of suicides or suicide attempts, but the number of people who seriously wanted to die, of people who contemplate suicide. And that is a very high percentage.
And even more important than how many people are currently contemplating suicide, is how many would have, had all the obstacles mentioned before been removed. Obviously it is impossible to estimate this figure, but if suicidal figures are at all necessary to constitute an antinatalist argument (a claim which I disagree with but go with it for the sake of the argument), this is the figure to work with.

Pro-natalists find it much easier to consider “only” suicides (and reduce even their true scope), and to ignore suicide attempts, and suicide thoughts. But the question is how many would rather not live, not how many can overcome every obstacle in the suicide ordeal. It is easier for them since they know that the answer to that question, the answer to the right one, doesn’t reinforce pro-natalism but exactly the opposite.

Many people don’t carry out suicide not because life is a gift, but because ending it is a serious burden and from many different aspects. If all the preventable obstacles were omitted, the relatively high rate of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal thoughts, would have been much much higher.
Not that it is necessary in order to constitute an antinatalist argument, as even if it was truly a tiny minority it would have been sufficient, but it is currently not a tiny minority, and there would be many more people who would carry out suicide hadn’t there been so many obstacles. This is the real figure. Not how many did, or how many tried, and not even how many thought about it, but how many would have thought about ending their lives had all the obstacles been removed. Then we would have had a more accurate reflection of how horrible life is. Not a precious gift but a monstrous burden which is very difficult to get rid of.

Cruel Trap

The third pro-natalist use of suicide – that the option to kill oneself is always available for anyone who has ‘a problem with life’– was actually already proven false in the former part of this text. Every obstacle mentioned, and others that weren’t, don’t only prove that the current suicide scale is not at all indicative of the number of people whom their lives are not worth living, it also proves that suicide is not really an option for people who feel that way.

Even people who really suffer in life are usually afraid of death, of pain, of permanently disabling themselves if they don’t succeed, of committing a sin, of their family, of the unknown, of breaking the law, of being socially shamed, of being blamed for selfishness, of the isolation ward in a psychiatric hospital. So the suicide option is not very tempting in the better case, and nonviable in the worst.

For suicide to really be an option societies must adopt a right to die, with no committees, no investigations, and no forms to fill besides a formal application, and with assistance to anyone who wishes to die. Not only that suicide must be legal, it should be easy, highly accessible, painless, cheap and risk free. And even all that, which is currently exactly the opposite of the way society view suicide, is far from being enough to argue that anyone who thinks life is not worth living can simply carry out suicide.

It is false from every perspective to present suicide as a legitimate option available to anyone at any time. Biologically, suicide is the last option. And the fact that people are biologically built to survive, doesn’t soothe individuals whose lives are not worth living in their eyes, but exactly the opposite. They are prisoners of their own biological mechanisms. They are life’s captives, not free spirits who can choose to end their lives whenever and however they wish. People are trapped in horrible lives without a truly viable option to end it. They are built to stay even though their lives are bad.
People have no serious exit option that can justify their forced entry. Not that if there was any, procreation was morally justifiable, but at least this argument was decent and coherent. But there isn’t so it is not. People must overcome too many obstacles with each being too difficult, for suicide to really be an option.

It is very easy for pro-natalists to “solve” the issue by suggesting the suicide option, but it is not as if suicide is really perceived socially as a legitimate option. In fact it is exactly the opposite.
Suicide is perceived as an irrational choice, if not as a psychological indication of insanity (under harsher medical regulations), and never as a rational option anyone can choose, as it is falsely presented in this argument.

The fact that assisting suicide is illegal, and that the most convenient suicide methods are illegal and very inaccessible, also testify as to how far suicide is from being a legitimate option for people who want to end their lives.

If the ‘suicide is always an option’ justification for forcing life without consent was genuine, its advocators would also be advocators of making suicide more accessible, acceptable and easier. But they don’t, since obviously it is not genuine but merely a lame and lazy excuse for their selfish desire to procreate.

Most parents deceive and excuse themselves by saying that it won’t happen to their children. But it does. This claim implies that all the parents of all the people who have carried out suicide did a bad job as parents, which of course is not necessarily true. Many things are not under the control of parents (for example, there is not a lot that parents can do about mental diseases, or deep depression, which in many cases lead to suicide). The parents of people who have carried out suicide or a suicide attempt, are not necessarily worse than any other parent and they haven’t necessarily done something wrong as parents. They have definitely done something very wrong as people, which is creating persons who want to kill themselves, but this is not necessarily a result of them being worse parents than any other parent, since it can happen to anyone, and therefore no one should procreate.
No one should take the risk that their children would suffer so much that they would not only want to die, but that they would overcome all the obstacles and try to do something about it, or won’t because they are too afraid, or because they care too much about the people who care about them.
No one should put anyone in such a horrible position where they don’t want to live but are trapped in life.

Tens of millions of people are forced to live day after day after day, feeling that they don’t want to live, but are afraid of carrying out suicide, or that they are even in a deeper trap, can’t stand living but can’t stand the thought of hurting others by killing themselves. This is the cruel trap many people are forced to endure because they were brought to life. The option of suicide is not a legitimate solution for the problem of procreation, but in fact another of its many evils. Suicide is not a viable solution, and even if it was, it cannot compensate anyone for the suffering of existence, but can only stop the continuance of the suffering of existence. It can’t retroactively justify the existence of someone who doesn’t want to live, or wishes s/he had never existed. The suffering of these people can never be compensated nor justified, even if suicide was fast, fearless, absolutely sure, plain, painless and harmless to others. And it is definitely not the case when it is none of the above. Suicide is always difficult and rarely unharmful to people who knew the person carrying it out.

To seriously suggest the suicide option as if it is plain, harmless and viable for anyone, is not naïve, but stupid, ignorant and cruel.

Since so many people are so deterred by the thought of hurting so severely people who care about them, and so are trapped in life, if it was possible to carry out suicide by pressing a button that immediately totally erases the existence of these people, so that no one who ever knew them even remember their existence, then suicide could have been suggested more seriously as an option. But if this option was viable the number of suicides was enormous.
The reasons why not many more people are carrying out suicides is not that life is a gift but because of biological, psychological, emotional and even juridical difficulties.

Not only that hundreds of millions of people were forced to live lives they don’t want, and without their consent, they are forced to keep living them because they don’t want or are afraid to kill themselves for any of the mentioned reasons.

Trapping people in the impossible situation of not wanting to live but not wanting to kill themselves, for example, so not to hurt others, is not a solution, but an additional problem of procreation. It is a very cruel trap which the only way to avoid it is by not creating more persons.
However, people are ready to take the risk that their own children would end up in this cruel trap rather than giving up procreation. This is how cruel most people are. And that’s why it is pointless to show them the cruel trap they are creating for their own children, hoping they would choose to avoid it, and why it is so essential to try and break these cruel traps ourselves.

References

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention www.afsp.org

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

Cabrera Julio, Negative-Ethics 2011
https://philosopherjuliocabrera.blogspot.com/2011/05/negative-ethics.html

Cavan Shonle Ruth The Wish Never To Have Been Born (American Journal of Sociology Volume 37, 1932)

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

Jamison, Kay R, Night Falls Fast, Understanding Suicide (Vintage 2000)

Kann L, Kinchen S, Shanklin SL, et al. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance — United States, 2013. MMWR 2014; 63(ss04): 1-168. Available from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6304a1.htm

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Sarah Perry Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide
(Nine-Banded Books 2014)

Silverman, M., Meyer, P., Sloane, F., Raffel, M., & Pratt, D. (1997). The Big Ten student suicide study. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior, 27, 285–303
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Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings, NSDUH Series H-49, HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4887. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, 2014. Available at http://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHmhfr2013/NSDUHmhfr2013.pdf

Sullivan EM, Annest JL, Luo F, Simon TR, Dahlberg LL. Suicide Among Adults Aged 35-36 Years – United States, 1999-2010. MMWR 2013; 62(17): 321-325. Available from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6217a1.htm

Suicide Prevention Resource Center www.sprc.org

https://www.sprc.org/sites/default/files/Handout-DataAboutSuicidalBehaviorAmongCollegeandUniversityStudents.pdf

https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20180910/1-in-5-college-students-stressed-consider-suicide

http://www.vhemt.org/suicide.htm

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