Although Rivka Weinberg doesn’t discuss the ‘environmental’, the so called ‘misanthropic’, and the ‘harm to other people’ arguments for Antinatalism in her book The Risk of a Lifetime, which I have addressed in the former couple of texts, she did shortly address them during an interview in the Exploring Antinatalism podcast, and what she said about these three arguments can’t be ignored. So the following is not really a supplement to the critical review of her book, but more of a totally independent critical review and a direct reply to her comments about these three arguments.

Regarding the Environmental Argument (01:30:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked to comment about environmental antinatalism and said:
“Some people say that because the world is overpopulated and we have a climate crisis no one should have any children because that’s like using too many resources and contributing to the problem. I think that is a too high cost to apply to individuals and the benefit is too low. We need to solve the climate crisis but the way to solve that is with institutions and corporations. Not having children will not help at all. This is not the problem. This problem needs to be solved at a government and institutional level. Individuals can only work by getting their government to pass laws. We need different standards for cars, we need public transportation, we need all kinds of green technology, that’s what we need, that’s what is going to solve the problem. Changing our economic ways of life, our carbon dependence. Deciding not to have a child will deprive the individual of their meaningful life shaping relationships and for a benefit that will be very small in terms of the environmental problem.”

I don’t consider myself as environmental antinatalist, and as explained in the post about the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, I don’t share the same arguments or motive for human extinction as VHEMT. However, that is absolutely not because I think that the solution to environmental problems is different standards for cars, public transportation, all kinds of green technology, not to mention the most ridiculously absurd suggestion – institutions and corporations, which are obviously exactly the ones who are most responsible for most of the harm (with corporations having exactly zero motivation to solve problems which don’t affect their financial gain), but because I don’t consider the environment as a moral patient. The environment, ecological systems, species, and similar abstract terms often ascribed to the environmental argument, are not entities and therefore don’t hold any moral status. Their moral relevancy is only instrumental, not intrinsic, meaning they are important only because they are important to sentient creatures who are harmed when these are affected. I think that people must stop creating new people because each person severely harms numerous other sentient creatures, not because humanity affects the insentient environment.

But since numerous sentient creatures live in ecological systems, and therefore are hurt by what is referred to as environmental problems, indirectly, I highly sympathize with the ‘environmental argument’ for antinatalism, only that I consider it as part of the harm to others argument.

Anyway, I find Weinberg’s response to the environmental argument a case of lack of knowledge, and speciesism. Her claim demonstrates considerable ignorance regarding the harms caused by humanity overall, as well as on the individual level. She claims that the benefit of not having a child will be very small in terms of the climate crisis, however, researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that avoiding having a child can save an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. And according to a study by statisticians at Oregon State University, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child in the United States is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives such as driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

And according to another study called Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions, from more than a decade ago, meaning its conclusions are known for more than a decade now, reducing fertility rates so as to match the UN’s ‘low fertility’ projections rather than the ‘medium fertility’ projections, which corresponds to an average difference of 0.5 children per breeder, would likely result in a yearly reduction in GHG emissions of 5.1 billion tons of carbon by 2100. 5.1 billion tons per year is more than five times the annual emissions savings we would achieve in 50 years by doubling the fuel efficiency of the world auto fleet, or by halving the average kilometers traveled per car, or by tripling the number of nuclear reactors currently providing electricity around the world, or by increasing current wind energy capacity 50 times, or by halting all deforestation everywhere around the world. Reducing population growth could provide more emissions reductions than all five of these other measures put together.
The study’s authors estimate that following the low rather than the medium fertility projections would account for “between 16% and 29% of required emissions reductions by 2050.

Besides its severe carbon footprint, breeding is also an act of plundering, as each procreation further enhances robbing resources from others. One of these resources is water and people use a lot of it, even for things we rarely think of in that context. For example, it takes more than 33 liters of water to produce just one of the chips that typically power smart phones, laptops and iPads. A single smartphone requires 240 gallons of water to produce. And it even goes further than that as every bit and byte people consume over the internet has an indirect cost in terms of water waste due to the enormous cooling demand in data centers. In fact, even when people drink bottled water they are highly water wasteful, as it takes about 4 liters of water to produce one liter plastic bottle of water.

The harmfulness of bottled water is not only their wastefulness but mostly their pollution.
A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute. Less than half of the bottles are collected for recycling and less than 10% of those collected are turned into new bottles. Most plastic bottles end up in landfill or in the ocean.

And bottles are only part of the enormous plastic pollution. It is estimated that more than a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide annually. Only 1% of plastic bags are returned for recycling. Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags annually. That’s about 307 bags per person! The average person produces half a pound of plastic waste of all kinds every day.
Weinberg may suggest that plastic should be outlawed but this is extremely unlikely to ever happen. The current course is the opposite as plastic production is expected to double in the next 20 years and quadruple by 2050.

And of course it is not just plastic. An average American consumes about 45,000 pounds of metal (through the consumption of various products) during a lifetime. Each pound of metal must be mined, processed, transported and manufactured into consumable products, all stages are considerably polluting. For example, currently, about 25,500 tons of silver are consumed every year. There is some of it in every car, computer and phone, as well as many other products.
Humanity as a whole throws about 100 million aluminum and steel cans every day.
And in general, each person sends about 64 tons of waste to landfills over a lifetime.
Some of this waste can theoretically be reduced, but practically so far it has only been increased. And other forms of waste can’t be reduced. For example every day each person produces about 20 gallons of sewage. Over a lifetime, that is 567,575 gallons. Billions of creatures must live with all this human shit. Of course it would be better for them if there is less of it, and there would be less shit if there are less people.

If humanity is not only very far from ending the plastic age but its catastrophe is only getting worse and worse, despite that it is a very recent technology and despite that its immense and irreversible damage is well known for decades, how likely is it to ever end the rest of the polluting industries?

Since as opposed to the common way people present it, procreation is not having a baby but creating a person, I have focused here on harms people commonly cause throughout their lifetime, and not particularly when they are babies. However it is impossible not to specifically refer to the harm of disposable diapers, mainly in terms of non-degradable waste, and the pollution during the production phase.
The number of diapers babies are using depends on when they are starting to regularly use the toilet. On average, most children are potty trained by around 35 to 39 months of age. Considering that in the first year of life, babies are using about 3,000 diapers, and in the second year between 1,500 and 2,000, the estimations are that each baby adds about 6,000 diapers to landfills, where they will not compost or biodegrade.

People can choose to use cloth diapers instead of disposable ones, but they don’t. About 95 percent of American parents choose disposable diapers over reusable ones.
But even if more people would choose reusable diapers, that option also has a very high environmental impact due to cotton production, which is one of the highest in terms of pesticide use, as well as the energy and water costs of laundering cloth diapers. A life-cycle analysis, conducted by the Environment Agency in the UK, compared the manufacturing, disposal, and energy costs of both diaper types and found that based on average laundry habits and appliance efficiency, the overall carbon emissions created by cloth diapering were roughly the same as those of using disposables.

Another significant harm involved in laundry, and with every other way people are cleaning their things and themselves, is the use of cleansing agents. Detergents can have poisonous effects on all types of aquatic life when present in high quantities, and this includes the biodegradable detergents. All detergents destroy the external mucus layers that protect the fish from bacteria and parasites, plus they can cause severe damage to the gills. People are harming other sentient creatures even when they clean their dishes, their clothes, and themselves.

Again, there is no reason to focus on infancy when reviewing the harms of people, but again, it is hard to ignore the particular contribution of the harms of detergents during infancy, especially ones involved in laundry, as babies requires a lot of it. The few people who do choose to use reusable diapers need to wash them, and everyone need to wash their baby’s clothes, sheets, blankets, bibs, sleepers, socks, pants and etc., and many other things that babies tend to spit up on, drool on, or any other way make dirty. That adds up to a lot of detergents use, and since the severe harm that each use of each detergent doesn’t even cross the minds of the vast majority of people, they don’t even bother using at least the little bit less harmful options, not to mention using natural alternatives such baking soda, lemon, vinegar and etc. The vast majority of people are using conventional detergents which most are made of petroleum, are nonbiodegradable, contain various damaging chemicals including carcinogen ones, and phosphates which build up in rivers and lakes causing hypoxia (low oxygen) due to algal bloom.

Some call this very very partial list of examples – ‘harming the environment’, as if the environment is the one who gets hurt. But it is not the environment, it is the trillions upon trillions of creatures living in it who are severely harmed by everything that people are doing.
And so I agree with Weinberg that it is “a too high cost to apply to individuals and the benefit is too low”, only exactly from the opposite direction. The cost of procreation is way too high to apply to innumerous individual sentient creatures, and the benefit to people who want to procreate is way too low.
When considering humanity’s massive harm not to the sustainability of ecosystems which are not moral entities, but to trillions of their inhabitants, who most definitely are moral entities, I fail to see how it is not wrong for humans to procreate.

Not only that people have never considered changing their economic ways of life, and their carbon dependence, they have so far done the opposite. Even during major economic crises, wars, famines, natural disasters, extreme poverty and etc., people have never seriously considered changing their way of life, so why would they stop now?

The 2008 financial crisis has brought the Occupy Movement with the famous slogan “We are the 99%”, but unfortunately, quantitatively they were less than 1%. Most of the public, in the United States and outside of it, as always, remained silent, submissive, conformist and passive.
And if people are not changing the world for their own sake, what are the odds that they would do it allegedly for the world’s sake? If people are not doing it for themselves, considering that many climate change effects have already affected many of them in the past decades, what are the odds that they would do it for the ‘environment’, all the more so while they have systematically destroyed it all along history? Or for the sake of other animals, all the more so while they are still refusing to stop creating billions of them every year only to exploit while severely torturing them all their horrible lives in the food industry?

There is no way that people would ever change their ways even when they are the ones who directly pay the price, and it is definitely not going to happen when it is other people who will pay the price, and most definitely not when it is other animals.

Regarding The Misanthropic Argument (01:33:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked to comment about David Benater’s misanthropic argument which was presented as follows – every human being causes vast amounts of harm to other sentient beings including harm to nonhuman beings. Becoming fully aware of the extent of the harm we do, could possibly threaten the meaning in life.
And she replied that “most people are not terrible but if they are raised in a loving and stable environment are very unterrible. And so I think that there is no reason to not procreate because your child is going to be terrible. I think that if you are going to be nice to your child the likelihood of that child to be terrible is very low. So I don’t think that that aspect of the argument works at all. I think most people are not terrible and the people who are terrible are usually raised with a lot of cruelty, usually. So if you are going to have a child and you’ll raise it in a loving and a nice way I don’t think they are going to be a terrible person. I think that the likelihood of that are very low and I think that percentage of people that are awful is also small. Most people are regular, not heroic, not cruel, they are regular people. And they are not so bad that we have to make sure not to have them. In terms of our effect on other creatures of the world, I think we have other ways to respond to this than to say that we need to stop existing. We can have more respect for other animals, we can give them more of their habitat, we can do other reforms to be less damaging to other sentient species.”

Weinberg is absolutely totally wrong about people. They are absolutely totally terrible. It is very hard to accurately assess how terrible each person is since it depends on various factors such as location, socioeconomic status, consumption habits, life expectancy, livelihood, diet and etc., however, regardless of any circumstances, being terrible to numerous others is inevitable. And the most immediate and prominent harm is caused by what people eat.

Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the ones with the highest price – animal based foods. Therefore in most cases procreating is choosing that more fish would suffocate to death by being violently sucked out of water, that more chickens would be cramped into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, that more calves would be separated from their mothers, and more cow mothers would be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, that more pigs would suffer from chronic pain, it is choosing more lame sheep, more beaten goats, more turkeys who can barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, more ducks who are forced to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, more rabbits imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, more geese being aggressively plucked, more male chicks being gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs nor meat, more snakes being skinned alive, and more crocodiles and alligators being hammered to death and often also skinned alive to be worn, and more mice, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, and monkeys being horrifically experimented on.

Each person directly consumes thousands of animals. More accurate average figures are varied according to each person location. An average American meat eater for example consumes more than 2,020 chickens, about 1,700 fish, more than 70 turkeys, more than 30 pigs and sheep, about 11 cows, and tens of thousands of aquatic animals, some directly and some indirectly (as many of which are fed to other consumed animals).
American meat eaters are ranked as one of the highest per person meat consumers in the world, and so these figures are higher than the world average. On the other hand, most of the people who consume relatively little animal based foods, would choose otherwise if they could. The only reason they don’t is because they can’t afford it. Time and again it is shown that as soon as people’s financial status improves, one of the first things they do is increase their animal based food consumption. Economic improvement is always accompanied by an increase in meat consumption. Per capita meat consumption has been growing persistently everywhere in the world. Among low-income societies it doubled in the last 20 years, and in what is referred to as “middle income” societies it tripled in the last couple of decades. So the consumption gaps are narrowing, and more and more animals are being harmed by more and more people.

Weinberg could have suggested that considering the vast amounts of harm to other sentient beings by consuming animal products, including the vast environmental harm of animal farming (a claim which could have also supported her reply to the former question), people must raise their children as vegans. But she is too speciesist and too ignorant regarding, first and foremost the torture, and also the environmental effect of factory farms to suggest that. And even if she did, obviously there is no way to insure that children would stay vegan for life, and veganism, as preferable as it is over animal based food, is still extremely harmful towards other sentient beings.

Factory farming is the worst and cruelest way people feed themselves. But it is not that other options are harmless. It is impossible to eat without harming someone, somewhere along the line. And it takes a very long line to make food, any food. Much longer, and much more harmful than people tend to think.

Each agricultural area was once the living space of other creatures, who were killed, chased away, starved (as people have destroyed their food sources), dried (as people took control of their water sources), being exposed to predator (as people have destroyed their dens and other hiding places), restricted by fences, polluted by chemicals people constantly spray, and even burned alive during slash-and-burn.
And all this is not an historical description of how agriculture has started, it all still happens all the time. Billions of animals are constantly being poisoned, starved, dehydrated, chased away, polluted, trampled by tractors, combines, ploughs and harvesters, their homes are being destroyed and etc. All are common harms inherent to agriculture, and happening every single moment.

The most direct and immediate harm of plant based agriculture is the spread of poisons such as pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. More than 2.5 million tons of poisons are spread all over the world every year. Each gram is aimed to kill any creature in the area, and any potentially “competitive” plant in the area. Much of these poisons also harm creatures living far from the originally sprayed farms, as chemicals tend to drift by wind and are washed by rain. The estimation is that almost 100 million fish and birds are poisoned to death each year by pesticides, and about a billion are harmed by it.

Another type of chemicals intensively used in agriculture which are also harmful, are fertilizers. Most fertilizers are synthetic, but some, mainly in organic farms, are made of animals’ bones, blood, feathers and of course manure. Obviously none of which are originated from wild animals who died naturally, but from factory farmed animals who were tortured and murdered. So anyone who wants to avoid the harms of synthetic fertilizers, is bound to support the use of animal based ones, and so indirectly subsidize factory farming by making animals exploitation more profitable.

Although most of the trees in the rainforests are cut for cattle grazing, a very considerable amount is being cut for growing some of the most basic foods that vegans are consuming such as nuts, sugar, tea, coffee, several types of fruits and vegetables, and even the most common raw material for most of people’s clothes – cotton.

Meat is notoriously water wasteful, but the production of many vegetables also requires plenty of water. According to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers it takes 17,196 liters of water to produce 1kg of chocolate, 3,025 liters to produce 1kg of olives, 2, 497 liters to produce 1kg of rice, about the same amount for 1kg of cotton, 1,849 liters to produce 1kg of dry pasta, 1,608 liters to produce 1kg of bread, 822 liters to produce 1kg of apples, 790 liters to produce 1kg of bananas, and 287 liters to produce 1kg of potatoes. Humans’ excessive use of water leaves entire regions dried, and all the beings living there are left to dehydrate.

A lot of water is also being used after the cultivation stage. The production of food requires a lot of water for washing, cooking, boiling, cooling industrial machinery and etc. But probably the most harmful aspect of food processing is energy, which is obviously inherent to each and every part along the process of each and every food item. Almost each and every food item goes through several processing stages. Many require removal of unwanted parts, cleaning, grinding, liquefaction, drying, sorting, coating, supplementation of other ingredients, cooling, heating, baking, steaming, freezing and etc. All stages are energy-intensive, and the vast majority of it comes from fossil fuels.

Alternative energy sources other than fossil fuels are also harmful. For example, hydraulic dams dehydrate entire habitats, wind turbines are killing many birds, and solar panels are composed of heavy metals. But they are still less harmful than fossil fuels, yet humans, as usual, choose the most harmful option. And since there is little control over the chosen energy production method used for each food item, people are bound to take part in severe harms to other creatures. They can’t even really choose the least harmful method, and certainly can’t choose a harmless one, as there is no such thing. And even if it was possible to choose such an option, since most people care so little about harms to others they would probably simply choose the cheapest one.

Another stage in food production that is responsible for a lot of energy consumption (maybe even the most) is food transportation. Each and every country is highly depended on long-distance food, so everyone, everywhere, participates in a global food system.
Some foods travel thousands of miles during the process stage only, before they are sent all over the world as export. It is very difficult to accurately calculate the mileage of each food item since many foods are composed of several ingredients which each has travelled long distances as well. From the field to the first processing stage, then to the next processing stages, then to the packhouse, then to the storage warehouse, and only then to the airport or harbour. All that is for each ingredient, of each final food item.

All the harms involved in animal based food can theoretically be avoided if all humans would decide to go vegan. But that’s not going to happen. And anyway, not all the harms involved in plant based food can be avoided. Avoiding all food items that cause air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, climate alteration, land alteration, land clearing, land destruction, trampling, water waste, poisoning and etc., is simply impossible.

There are some people, a tiny minority unfortunately, that try to minimize their harm level by being vegan and environmentally aware, and take part in positive and meaningful activism, but even these few people are forced to do some terrible things to others simply by living in a world such as ours, where no one can avoid harming others even if they really try. And of course these are the least terrible people in the world, people who are trying not to be terrible but have no choice. The vast majority of people, the regular people, simply choose to be terrible.

So the likelihood of people being terrible is not very low but is actually guaranteed, and the percentage of people that are awful is not small but in fact close to 100%.
She is right that most people are regular, but only because the norm is cruelty and indifference. Our world is so terrible that regular people are cruel.

Weiberg had another thing to say about the misanthropic argument:

“The other thing I would say about this, is let’s say that it turns out that we killing off, just our very existence kills of a certain species of another species of fish, we excel things and they die. So now it is a question, who should go extinct me or the fish? Why should I pick the fish? Why can’ I pick me?  That is another problem with the misanthropic argument, that I don’t think I should sacrifice myself for another species.”

Weinberg presents the issue as if humanity and a certain species of fish are simply two species living in the world, and so there is no reason for her as a human to prefer the fish over herself. But as opposed to fish, humans live as masters of the universe, not as just another species. Their dominance and harmfulness is unprecedented. There is no other species that is even remotely as harmful as humans. Surly, many lifeforms eat other lifeforms, but no other lifeform is imprisoning other lifeforms for their entire lives. No other lifeform totally shatters other lifeforms’ social lives. No other lifeform prevents clean air, clean water, and natural environment. No other lifeform prevents access to natural food. No other lifeform is constantly genetically modifying other lifeforms to extract more meat, milk, eggs, skin, wool, feathers, fur and etc., from other lifeforms. No other lifeform castrates other lifeforms. No other lifeform burns numbers on other lifeforms. No other lifeform cuts the horns, tails and teeth of other lifeforms. No other lifeform rides, chains, and enslaves other lifeforms. No other lifeform forces other lifeforms to dance, do tricks, to dress up, to jump fences, to fight each other. No other lifeform experiments on other lifeforms.
To compare mankind with any other kind in terms of harm is absolutely ridiculous. And can be done only by an extremely ignorant and speciesist person.

Humans have an extremely high harm toll which makes supporting their right to exist a support in the violation of the rights of anyone who is hurt by them.

Weinberg presents the claim as if it is one human individual against one nonhuman individual and as if the misanthropic argument is choosing to favor the nonhuman, while practically it is one human individual against ten thousands of nonhuman individuals. As earlier mentioned, it is very hard to estimate the harm each human is causing to other creatures but in any case it is an enormous one under all circumstances (such as different lifestyles), as humans are making the lives of many animals very miserable in many ways.

I call to stop all human procreation not in the name of ecosystems, or since humans deserve to go extinct, or because I think it would solve all the problems in the world, but because of the harm to trillions of sentient victims per year.
Every day the human race provides us with more and more reasons why it must be stopped. And every day it provides us with less and less reasons to believe it would ever happen voluntarily. For it to finally happen, we must make it happen.

Regarding the Harms to Other People (01:36:00)

Rivka Weinberg was asked: what about the harms we do to others using technology and exploitation of other people?
And she replied: “we need laws and regulations. Not having a child is not going to solve anything. You still going to have this exploitation, so if you wanna solve exploitation work to create laws that reduce that like minimum wages, and different kinds of trade agreements. It is our political institutions that will solve the problem, I don’t think that going extinct is necessary to solve this problem. It is also not practical, you are not going to have a child, but somebody else will and all the problems that you thought you are solving will go on.”

Human exploitation is way too beneficial to the exploiters for them to be deterred by laws and regulations. And in many cases human exploitation is also way too beneficial for the law makers and regulators for them to legislate such laws in the first place, and to later enforce them and to regulate exploitive industries. Even in cases where corporations don’t bribe law makers, they always have a strong lobby and other ways to influence relevant officials, while exploited people almost never have a voice. Corporations bringing in foreign currency to poor countries are way more beneficial for local politicians than their domestic population so they are always the last in line of priorities. That’s why despite that child labor and slavery are forbidden all over the world, both are still very prevalent all over the world.

Local governments don’t have a strong interest in fighting the exploitation of their own people since in many cases exploitative industries represent most of these countries’ export revenue and since their economies are highly depended on these industries. This is usually the economic and social background which corporations are seeking in the first place when they are looking for ‘sights’ to invest in. In the eyes of the corporations, the country is better for business, when the people are poorer, the lands are richer in terms of desirable resources, and the officials are easily bribed.
For example, it is well known for decades now that about three quarters of the chocolate industry relies on cacao from countries where child labor is extremely common. Laws and regulations didn’t and will not change that partly because people care much more about buying cheap chocolate than not supporting slavery and child labor. Many have seen the reports and documentary films about the miserable lives of poor kids, mainly from West Africa, in the cacao plantations – where they are forced to work extremely hard for extremely long hours, are beaten if they try to escape or even for working ‘too slowly’, have poor sanitation and no clean water – but are still consuming chocolate according to their taste or its price, and regardless of the living conditions of the people who have produced it for them (and have never in their life tasted it).

A very similar story occurs in the cobalt mining industry which also involves slavery and child labor, and often both. Yet many people buy a new phone every couple of years, so not to stay behind in terms of the cutting edge luxurious technology, while indifferently leaving the poorest people in the world way behind in terms of the most basic living conditions, including clean water, proper nutrition and sanitation and hygiene.

Unfortunately, prostitution is practically legal or limitedly legal in most of the countries in the world. But sex trafficking is formally forbidden in all of them. Yet human trafficking, which most of it involves the sex industry, is the largest international crime system after arms trade and drug traffic. Despite being illegal and extremely harmful, all three industries are thriving all around the world.
Like in any other example, laws and regulations will not solve the problem which is too systematical and ingrained in human culture, and social and economic structure. People don’t need a regulative reform but a radical social and cultural revolution in the way they view others, and in the economic system which actively encourages such extreme inequality and poverty that people can buy other people, rent other people, and many parents sell their own children to the sex industry in order to pay for their debts. Many of these children, along with other children who are kidnaped by traffickers, or end up in the sex industry after running away from home and it was the only available option for them to support themselves, would never escape this industry. That is millions of children all around the world.

The problem is way too systematical for laws and regulations to solve it. Child labor is illegal in most of the world yet it is estimated that 1 in 10 children across the globe are subjected to child labor, with almost half of them (about 75 million children), being in hazardous forms of work. The problem is way more systematical than that.

Corporations are interested in increasing profits only. That’s what they are about. They can do that by increasing the prices of their products, and by that risking that consumers would buy products from their competitors, or they can decrease the expenses, which obviously never means decreasing their own salaries but usually the salaries of the ones who already earn the least, and in the case of sweatshops, of the ones who are already extremely poor and have no other option but working in extremely exploitive, unsafe and unhealthy jobs.

Laws and regulations will not provide the so demandable change in the case of sweatshops as well. Partly it is because as long as people in the richer world are indifferent enough, people in the poorer world are desperate enough, politicians and officials are corruptible enough, and corporations are greedy enough, nothing will ever change.

Most sweatshop workers earn less than their daily living costs, and their only other option to support themselves and their families is another sweatshop with the same exploitive conditions. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are trapped in this system of exploitation, which is hardly likely to ever change by laws and regulations.

There is nothing new about any of this, not to you, not to the common consumer, not to the chocolate industry, not the technology industry, not the sex industry, not the fashion industry, and not to law makers and regulators.
Exploitation exists for thousands of years now. It wasn’t even reduced but has actually evolved in terms of the number of exploited people, the exploitation methods, the exploited age, their ethnical diversity, and their global spread. The fact that it evolved and is still evolving all the time is an indication that it is here to stay, and that laws and regulations are definitely not the answer.

Exploitation of people is not a result of lack of laws and regulations. It is way too easy to throw that as a solution. The problem is much deeper than that. The problem is global and systematic, not local and regulative. Human exploitation is mostly the result of a global economic system designed to favor the richer at the expense of the poorer. It is originated from the fact that more than half of the people in the world are poor and about a third are in deep poverty, not because there are no laws and regulations in some places around the world. The problem is global since the workforce had turned global a long time ago and so people are consuming products that are produced all over the world, and mostly in the poorest areas of the world, since in these places people are so poor that they will work for the lowest salary possible.
The only reason I am bothering you with such basic facts about globalization and capitalism,  which I am sure you are all very familiar with, is since Weinberg chose to avoid a very serious and relevant question by hiding behind the notorious ‘we need laws and regulations’. Of course we need better laws and regulations, but laws and regulations are not, never have, and never will be determined by what is right for the common people, and are always a product of the interests of the tiny most powerful minority. The issue of human exploitation is way too systematical, historical, common, established and complex to seriously suggest laws and regulations as the solution. And in this case, it is more than a tiny minority that benefits from this situation. Many people benefit from the current state of affairs, and these are the common consumers who can get more of the stuff they like, and cheaply. And if most people feel that they are benefiting from the global exploitation, they are not very likely to support more laws and regulations.

There are already laws and regulations against slavery yet it is still common all around the world in one form or another. It is not formal and explicit as it was when it was legal, but people still own other people. They may not buy people in auctions like they used to up until about 200 years ago in most of the world, but many people, in fact more than there were about 200 years ago, are trapped in all kinds of social and economic entanglements that have made them practically enslaved.

Many people around the world are engaged in forced labor (also called involuntary servitude) which is basically situations in which people are bound to work against their will, because of structural reasons such as poverty, wars, droughts, social discrimination, migration, corruption, high rates of unemployment, crime and etc., not because of legal and regulative reasons. And so laws and regulations will not solve most of the types of human exploitation even if humanity took that issue seriously, and currently we are not even there yet.

There is no reason to believe that things that have so far not been solved, and many of which have even gotten worse, will ever be solved.

It is beyond naïve to seriously suggest that political institutions will solve the problem, while they have so far all along history mostly been a huge part of the problem or were totally incompetent in solving it.

It seems that Weinberg chooses to believe that absence of laws and regulations is the source of the problem, and also the greed and cruelty of a tiny minority of people. But the truth is that the origin is corrupted, perverted, inequitable, unfair, discriminative and unjust social, cultural and mostly economic systems, and also the absence of care and the greed of the vast majority of the human population.

And even if she was right, why should people suffer until the values reverse? Until their welfare becomes prior to others’ profits? Even if the priorities could someday change for the better, how is it permissible to procreate before they do? How is it ethically permissible to contribute to such a dire situation instead of changing it first? How is it ethically permissible to create a person who will be bound to take part in the exploitation of others, on a daily basis, because theoretically the solution is laws and regulations?

And these questions also directly relate to the last part in her comment: “It is also not practical, you are not going to have a child, but somebody else will and all the problems that you thought you are solving will go on.”
That is a very strange argument from someone who explicitly bases her principles of procreative permissibility on a Kantian framework. An ethical prohibition is not supposed to be personally optional but universally obligatory, especially under a Kantian framework. If an argument is valid, it is supposed to apply to everyone, so somebody else is also not supposed to have a child. Ethics is not supposed to be determined by how plausible it is that other people would apply its valid conclusions. If avoiding harming others is a valid argument and if everyone is bound to harm others, then no one should be permitted to procreate.

Of course some people, probably most, would choose not to be ethical and to be selfish and indifferent towards harming others, but that is not a justified reason to permit them to be unethical.
Unfortunately I agree that people would never be ethical, not in general and definitely not in relation to procreation specifically, but that doesn’t mean that antinatalism isn’t right and so we should permit people to procreate, but that antinatalism isn’t applicable and so we must look for other ways to stop people from procreating.

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