Written by Dr Matti Häyry, PhD, Professor of Philosophy of Management, Aalto University School of Business (Academic Visitor at the Oxford Uehiro Centre, University of Oxford, 2007–2008)
Antinatalism is being against reproduction, typically on altruistic grounds. Applied to humans, this means not having children in the trepidation that their lives could be miserable.
A prominent criticism against antinatalism targets the assumption that lives could be miserable. Surely, only a clinically depressed person or a gloomy pessimist can think that. Others understand that human lives have their ups and downs yet remain liveable to mentally healthy individuals with a positive outlook on life. Antinatalists must either be ill or have an excessively negative outlook on human existence. Either way, their views can be dismissed.
Sam Woolfe has addressed the first concern head on by making two points. Medical conditions as such are irrelevant to the validity of an argument. And even if antinatalists were prone to a modicum of doom and gloom, this might strengthen their case instead of weakening it. As he writes:
Depressive realism is a hypothesis developed by the psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson in 1988; it essentially states that depression may afford an individual with a more accurate view of the world than the non-depressed.
The argument from illness would seem to require that all antinatalists are somehow debilitatingly depressed – a claim that has no support.
Which leaves us with the more philosophical questions. Must antinatalists be pessimists? And if they must, does this mean that their views can be deemed invalid? My answer to both is, “Not necessarily.”
Metaphysical, psychological, and temporal dimensions
Pessimism can be a metaphysical view stating that life is cosmically futile and evil. Arthur Schopenhauer thought that human existence is full of suffering and void of redeeming meaning. Philipp Mainländer held that our existence is just a form of death-in-progress, a disastrous error. Peter Wessel Zapffe believed that life is tragic because we have an inherent need for meaning but the universe provides none. Émile Cioran lamented life’s lack of purpose and the ensuing despair. The connection between this kind of thinking and human reproduction is, however, far from clear. Mainländer, Zapffe, and Cioran advocated the end of humankind but did not specify the methods. Schopenhauer explicitly condoned having children.
David Benatar, a modern pessimist and antinatalist, while recognizing the lack of meaning, has put the matter more psychologically by stating that “even the best lives are very bad”. His analysis has it that human existence is but a string of discomforts, annoyances, and aches in the expectation of more serious setbacks in the forms of disease, disability, and, eventually, death. He is an antinatalist due to his pessimism. But must every antinatalist buy into this? I do not think so.
In everyday language and thinking, optimism and pessimism are forward-looking attitudes. An optimist expects good things to happen, a pessimist expects bad things to happen. Applied to human reproduction, optimists assume that their future children’s lives will be good, pessimists anticipate that their possible children’s lives would be bad. Procreative optimism encourages childbearing, procreative pessimism discourages it.
Attitudes towards the possibility of future harm
When antinatalists are against reproduction on altruistic grounds, they think about the harm, or possible harm, inflicted on their children if they are born. They do not need to align with the judgement that all human existence is evil, tragic, or bad. It is sufficient that they recognize the risk in reproduction. Some lives can be good, but parents cannot guarantee that this is the case with their offspring. Why take the risk, then?
Attitudes towards risk, or the probability of harm, vary. Everybody takes some risks because normal daily chores cannot be conducted without it. Some, however, embrace them, live on the edge, while others avoid them whenever they reasonably can. When people are making decisions only for themselves, they are perfectly entitled to choose their strategies as they wish. Also, if they have others in their care, they may have to take the responsibility for comparing different risks. But choosing possible harms to beings who do not exist yet is in a different category altogether.
Parents do not only expose their children to adversity. They also open up a new reproductive line in which their offspring has offspring and, as far as they are concerned, so on ad infinitum. By making the choice to procreate they commit themselves to imposing the same choice upon their children, to acculturate them into parenthood. The risk of a bad life, as experienced by the one living it, may be small to begin with but the iteration means that it will, in time, approach 100 %.
Cautious procreative realism
In view of these considerations, must antinatalists be pessimists, and if so, does it overshadow their judgement? No, not really. It is a fact that parents cannot guarantee the wellbeing or happiness of their children. It is a fact that making dangerous decisions for others is questionable. And it is a fact that if reproduction in your line goes on for long enough, someone will, eventually, have a horrible life, the kind of life depicted by Ursula Le Guin in her fable The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
You can be a risk taker, think that all goes well in your line forever, and you may be right, in a limited perspective of “forever”. If humankind makes itself extinct by climate change, environmental degradation, or nuclear holocaust in time, you may indeed not become the progenitor of the Omelas child of Le Guin, carrying humankind’s sins. Calling this outlook realistic optimism, however, does not strike me as right.
Or, alternatively, you can be a risk avoider, think that it is better not to put non-existing individuals in harm’s way when they are not benefited by it. There is no need to become existent. Calling this view cautious procreative realism, instead of pessimism, does strike me as right. And since excessive optimism and excessive pessimism are thereby ruled out, antinatalists need not be pessimists to any unreasonable degree.