Is Having Children Always Wrong?

There have perhaps always been misanthropic curmudgeons. But their unremitting pessimism has metastasized on the intellectual dark web, as they’ve availed themselves of the social media tools that are notorious for creating feedback loops that can nurture even the most outlandish of poisonous discourses.

David Benatar is perhaps the most prominent antinatalist, for example, believing that procreation is immoral since it causes untold harms in opening the next generation to the inevitable hardships in life. And Benatar debated Jordan Peterson on the matter.

Gary “Inmendham,” whom I debated onYouTube in 2014, has for years hammered away at conventional society for rejecting antinatalism and misanthropy. And a blogger who writes under the name “Existential Goof” follows much of Inmendham’s framing of the issues.

A Case for Antinatalism

Here’s the start of Existential Goof’s case for antinatalism, that is, for the ending of human procreation and thus for the indirect suicide of our species:

my thesis is that if one accepts an atheistic and materialistic conception of reality, then there can be no such thing as a good or a bad that is not defined exclusively by the feelings of sentient organisms. There is no basis for having a preference between two different outcomes outside on the impact that those outcomes are going to have on the feelings of yourself, or other sentient organisms. The gulf which exists between pleasure and pain is what drives preference; and if not guided by this, then all choices would be as arbitrary as the result of a meaningless coin toss.

He says also that nature punishes those who have no kids. Thus, he says, “Only when we allow ourselves to outsmart the unintelligent forces of natural selection will humanity realise that the only rational course for us to pursue is that of the extinction of ourselves, and of all life. We can then realise that, in a game in which nobody can win, the best option left to us is to cut our collective losses.”

Why should we “cut our losses” by collectively forgoing procreation? Because “It is only the feelings themselves which have intrinsic value, and thus ‘suffering’ is tautologous [i.e. synonymous] with ‘bad’” (my emphasis). And living is impossible without some suffering. Thus, life is at least largely bad. Therefore, those who perpetrate life by having children are indirectly bad for ensuring a continuation of those harms. Seemingly confused, Existential Goof also says that “pleasure has instrumental value, because living organisms have an innate desire for pleasure and aversion to suffering” (my emphases).

Is the idea that pleasure is instrumental because pleasure is a means of avoiding pain rather than an end in itself? Is pleasure supposed to be instrumentally good whereas pain is intrinsically bad? Moreover, isn’t it society rather than nature that punishes non-procreators, by holding up family as an ideal to make single people feel unhelpful? Nature rewards those who have sex by making that a pleasurable experience, but perhaps Existential Goof thinks that holding up those natural pleasures would cast some doubt on his antinatalist argument.

In any case, this crude reduction of morality to the existence of pleasure and pain won’t take us far. This is odd, too, because Existential Goof contrasts human morality with nature’s amorality as though he had some respect for the former’s sophistication:

Moral nihilism is how the animal kingdom operates, and how nature and evolution have always operated. There was no benevolent guiding force which created these beings, and they have very limited capacity for morality themselves, and for structuring cohesive societies based on mutual interests.

Indeed, human morality seems anomalous in the universal wilderness. So why leap from that admiration of a human accomplishment to identifying goodness and badness with mere pleasure and pain, especially when lots of other animals have those sensations and don’t have much morality? No, morality evidently takes into consideration much more than tallies of such base sensations.

Nevertheless, this antinatalist seems to think the existence of some unjust suffering in life warrants this villainous proclamation: “if the Benevolent World Exploder came tonight and instantaneously eradicated all sentient life on the planet, then it would not be possible for me to register any qualms about its decision to act without my consent. Consent is only important when the potential outcomes of one’s actions are going to cause harm, and a scenario in which life was eradicated painlessly at the push of a button would do nothing other than remove harm from existence.”

This implies that Existential Goof takes himself to be such a moral purist that he’d be appalled at the prospect of killing humanity if that extinction event would require harming the dying people in the process. But if that extinction could happen bloodlessly, as in this thought experiment of deciding whether to press a button to annihilate everyone in a nanosecond, he’d have no moral objection because that extinction would end the chances for pain by ending our capacity to produce a new generation of sufferers.

Of course, the end of procreation would also preclude the existence of future pleasures. So isn’t it a toss up?

Is Pain More Morally Important than Pleasure?

Antinatalists like to argue, on the contrary, that there’s an asymmetry here. It’s much more important, they say, that we avoid pain than that we obtain pleasure. So ending our capacity for pain is more morally significant than ending our capacity for pleasure. As Existential Goof says, “Under the normal ethical rules of civilisation, there is first an obligation to do no harm; and no obligation at all to give someone pleasure.”

Yet that looks like John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, so it’s a function of liberal society, not of civilization in general. The reason it’s part of liberalism is that the liberal emphasizes our freedom (autonomy) and need for privacy. Pleasuring someone without that person’s consent would amount to a harm, not a good, because pleasure is deemed a private matter.

The idea is that the individual’s space shouldn’t be violated either by harming him or even by forcing some pleasure on him. We’re supposed to be free to pursue happiness as we deem fit. Of course, that principle was meant originally for wealthy landowners who did indeed have the means to provide for themselves. They had no need for charity, and the slaves or rabble who did were barely considered persons, so moral considerations weren’t supposed to apply to them.

In any case, this alleged asymmetry is superficial at best. Liberalism in turn is part of what we can call “modern civilization,” which means it runs on science-centered progress. Thus, the reason individuals aren’t supposed to be obliged to provide pleasure to others is that that obligation is deferred to progressive modernity in general.

For example, we’re obliged to pay taxes not to a king who exploits the peasants, but to a democratically elected government that’s supposed to support the middle class and to help the sick and the poor by setting up homeless shelters or by providing free healthcare and education. The pleasures in these “developed,” modern societies are provided collectively rather than individually, by all the aspects of modernity, including capitalism, democracy, consumerism, science, technology, freedom of thought, church-state separation, and so on.

Moreover, there is a civilized obligation to help others in need, to give to charity, and to treat others with respect by being civil and displaying good manners in public. We might not take much pleasure in mere civility, but that’s because we’re spoiled since our societies are relatively advanced and luxurious.

The way this positive obligation comes about is that children in secular liberal societies are trained to be conscientious humanists. Thus, we learn to feel bad when someone’s in need. That conscience is limited, of course, and we violate it in all sorts of ways, such as when we ignore the plight of those who live far away. But there are also charities, animal shelters, and websites like Patreon and Kickstarter where we can give directly to causes we care about.

Again, this obligation is deferred and collective. Our societies inculcate us with a liberal sense of the worth and the rights of every single individual, so when we grow up, we’re inclined to help others when we can or when the mood strikes. And we often do so collectively, such as by voting in governments that systematically provide aid to poor nations.

The upshot is that we evidently do care as much about the potential loss of future pleasures and of other benefits in life as we would about the freedom from future pains. The antinatalist’s asymmetry is bogus.

Happiness and the Flexible Mind

Does pain so outweigh pleasure in human affairs that we’re obliged to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to terminate our species to end all forms of human pain? Of course, if moral badness were the existence of mere pain in general, the same conclusion should apply to all species that can feel pain. Ideally, for the antinatalist, we should be thinking of a way to painlessly end all terrestrial life.

And the antinatalist’s shock at the suggestion of extinguishing life if doing so would result in some pain seems superficial. After all, while we’re busying weighing the pleasures and pains to see whether life is worth living, we can weigh the pains caused in killing all life on Earth against the pains that would result from allowing life to continue to exist perhaps millions or billions of years into the future. Clearly, the end would justify the means, on the antinatalist’s crude utilitarian grounds. So what antinatalism entails is indeed the murder of humanity and of all life, period, regardless of whether that extinction event would be painful or painless.

If we’re going to stoop to judging whether there’s more pain than pleasure in life, we should observe that there aren’t likely many lives that are so tortured, they’re bereft of enjoyment. The reason is that we adjust our expectations for happiness to suit our circumstances. Thus, although poor people may say they’re less happy than rich people, the poor don’t say they’re miserable or nowhere close to being happy. 

And beyond a certain level of wealth, the rich don’t report being that much happier than the less rich. The richer always want to make more money than they have because they're competing with other rich people, so wealth has some diminishing returns.

Happiness is relative to expectations, as the ancient Stoics saw. Happiness depends on brain functioning, and the brain is highly adaptable. Consequently, happiness was possible even in barbaric and medieval periods, and in prehistory when life was nasty, brutish, and short. Otherwise, our species would have been terminated long ago by mass suicide.

To be sure, significant numbers of people kill themselves. Not all suicides, though, are committed as fully rational, sane, or sober acts. Many occur in old age after most of the person’s life has been lived. Others occur in the heat of a personal tragedy or due to untreated mental illness such as depression.

It’s possible there are some lives that are so gruesome or awful that the individuals might have been better off if they’d never been born, even with the brain’s ability to adjust to its circumstances. This might include the severely disabled or perhaps those born to abusive parents who make their children’s life a living hell. But those are relatively rare circumstances, and they’re fixable by societal improvements.

The Incoherence of Moralistic Antinatalism

Regardless, as I showed in my debate with Inmendham, there’s no such thing as an antinatalist “morality,” since this outlook comes apart at the seams. The antinatalist’s worldview is deeply incoherent.

Consider, for example, what it means to imply that parents are the metaphysical originators of all the harm experienced by their offspring, such that the parents are ethically to blame for it. For one thing, it means that the parents have freewill. On the contrary, antinatalists like Inmendham tend to be determinists for the important reason that once you posit freewill, you posit the potential for the improvement of human life, for social progress, and for moral modifications of nature. That hope could justify procreation as a rational, reality-based strategy for making improvements from one generation to the next.

Moreover, if there’s freewill, there’s an anomaly to be treasured and perhaps even to be deemed sacred, existentially crucial, precious, or awe-inspiring. Together with consciousness, this would be the basis of valuing all people. The continuing existence of free beings might therefore trump all the harms they experience, and the greater tragedy might be snuffing out personhood altogether via antinatalism.

If, however, there’s no freewill, the moral condemnation of parents vanishes, and the antinatalist’s indignation at the hardships we experience turns out to be a bluff.

In other words, the more respect you have for people, the more you should appreciate our potential for transcending monstrous nature with social progress. Yet the antinatalist’s conceit is that he or she can claim to be a moral purist who reveres human and animal life (by not wanting them to come to any harm), while declaring that all humanity is condemnable and worthy only of being extinguished. That’s quite contradictory.

If you’re so squeamish that you’re appalled by the least suffering in life, you must think highly of the being that suffers. The unpleasant mental state doesn’t exist in the abstract. It’s a person who suffers, and people happen to be anomalous in nature in part because of our rational autonomy and potential for social progress, which are what give us moral rights in the first place. So if you acknowledge that we shouldn’t be harmed because we’re special creatures, you shouldn’t be going behind our back and casting such morbid aspersions by saying we should all wish to be killed.

Indeed, this kind of self-contradiction is what you’d expect from a mentally ill, wannabe supervillain. Rather than being philosophically rigorous, the antinatalist’s unhinged misanthropy is likely sustained by depression or by some other mental illness.

And the antinatalist is a misanthropist, not a lover of humanity, regardless of how she attempts to spin her denunciations. You can tell Inmendham hates humanity, for example, by the insanity and the condescension of his frequent rages. But supervillainy is off-putting, to say the least, so the antinatalist prefers to assume the pose of a humble, sensitive moralist, of a saint who just wants to end all our suffering.

With saints like these, who needs enemies?

The Continuity Between Generations

There’s also something grossly legalistic in speaking of parents as being liable for the harms their offspring likely undergo. Although the law recognizes the individuality of parents and of their children, and neurologically and perhaps culturally people who belong to different generations are, of course, at some level different entities, there are genetic and social continuities between parents and their children. And at this level of discourse, when we’re pondering whether humanity or even all animal life deserves to continue, we should reflect on those continuities.

When parents have kids, they’re not just creating new people; they’re extending themselves. Children are physical and social extensions of their parents since parents raise their children and pass their mindsets and habits onto them. Therefore, parents tend to empathize with their children so that when the children suffer or feel joy, the parents share in those feelings. When the child suffers, the suffering happens indirectly (by the mechanism of empathy) to the parents. And the suffering happens directly to this genetic and enculturated extension of the parents.

All of humanity, therefore, is genetically and historically related in that there are real continuities in the transmission of biological and cultural information. The relevance of this is that when we consider whether we should have kids, we’re implicitly wondering whether our life has been worthwhile—because we’d be extending that life in our offspring.

And that judgment about our life’s worth isn’t governed by Mill’s harm principle. Again, by having children and thus by helping to propagate human life, we’re not creating new life in the abstract, a set of strangers or aliens whose individuality and foreignness would be absolute. Instead, we’re extending our bodies and minds into the future to live on after we die.

Moreover, we know that in the final analysis most people think their life is worthwhile, despite all the setbacks and hardships, and that’s so even for those who don’t have children. We know this because most people don’t choose to kill themselves, and as I said, we’re adept at adjusting our expectations because the human brain and mind are supremely flexible. Even imprisoned criminals who are locked up in a hellhole for years may feel content enough with how their life panned out, because they focus on the little pleasures. If a watched pot never boils, a little pleasure can be magnified in the spotlight of consciousness.

Sure, the grass is always greener on the other side, to resort to yet another cliché, and we can also exacerbate our situation by overanalyzing and focusing on the worst-case scenarios. This is a question of temperament. Some people are optimists while others are pessimists, but even most pessimists are happy enough with life; indeed, pessimists may even derive some satisfaction from their negativity, from being able to say, “I told you so,” to someone who underestimates the dangers.

But just because someone feels misanthropic doesn’t mean antinatalism is philosophically sound. Far from it. And that’s coming from a card-carrying cosmicist who thinks happiness is for sheep anyway. Far from being obliged to terminate humanity to end our suffering, we should suffer on existential grounds to show that we understand the full implications of reality’s godlessness.

Full contentment with life is for deluded people and for animals that don’t know any better. Philosophy awakens us to the deepest, most absurd roots of suffering, but this means only that the most authentic kind of person would likely be honour-bound to suffer on behalf of an absurd world that reflects its monstrousness back onto itself most clearly through that purified vessel. Ending intelligent life would mean shattering the mirror and enabling nature to get away with its mindless absurdities with no reporter to bear the bad news. That’s not a worthy existential purpose.