Many years ago, I wrote a book in defence of a conclusion that most people instinctively dislike: birth is not a gift, but a harm. To bring a person into the world is not a neutral act, still less an obvious act of generosity. It means taking someone who would otherwise have suffered nothing and placing them within reach of illness, fear, disappointment, ageing, death and every accident that existence makes possible. This position is usually called anti-natalism.
After the book appeared, I received many kinds of responses. Some people wrote with gratitude, as if somebody had finally said what they had long felt but had not dared to express. Others were angry, convinced that the view was absurd, diseased or even wicked. Still others were simply bewildered. If life contains love, beauty, music, friendship and morning light, how can birth always be a bad thing?
But of all the responses I received, the one I remember most came from a young person who had suffered severely since adolescence. He wrote that he had been bullied so badly at school that the trauma forced him to abandon his education. He wrote that strangers mocked him for his appearance, called him ugly, and treated his face as if it were an offence against them. Then, shortly after reaching adulthood, he was diagnosed with a serious congenital heart condition, which later developed into heart failure and malignant arrhythmia. Death, for him, was not an abstraction but a hand always pressing on his chest. He lived each day with the fear that his heart might simply stop. If his parents had not wanted a child, he said, he could have remained peacefully nonexistent. He would never have known humiliation, terror, bodily failure or the anticipation of death. To send somebody into such a world, he concluded, was a grave moral violation.
One need not accept anti-natalism in full to be struck by such words. Some will say that a life like this is extreme, and therefore cannot support a general argument against procreation. But severe suffering is not a rare anomaly. It is merely hidden beneath the ordinary surface of life. Disease is not rare. Violence is not rare. Depression is not rare. Loneliness is not rare. Humiliation is not rare. We call the worst lives exceptional partly because doing so allows us to preserve the comforting belief that most lives are worth beginning.
Anti-natalism is not a new thought. Greek tragedy already contains the lament that not to be born is best. The Book of Ecclesiastes carries a similar shadow. In Eastern traditions, the burden of existence is recognised with great seriousness. Buddhism treats life as a cycle driven by craving and ignorance; Indian thought has often imagined liberation as release from the round of birth and death. In modern philosophy, Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Cioran and others all saw, in different ways, that existence is not a light matter and that life does not automatically deserve affirmation.
Of course anti-natalism will never become the natural conviction of the majority. Human beings possess a powerful reproductive drive, and culture clothes that drive in the language of maturity, fulfilment and love. A person who says that he does not want children is often expected to explain himself. A person who says that nobody should have children will almost certainly be treated as offensive. But the fact that a view runs against instinct is not a reason to dismiss it. Biological impulse can explain why we want children; it cannot prove that having them is morally right.
The dangerous idea may not be anti-natalism. It may be its opposite: the unexamined, airy, almost cruel ease with which people create new beings. We speak of “giving life a chance”, as if birth merely opens a door. But behind that door there are not only gardens. There are hospitals, battlefields, poverty, abuse, mental collapse and dying beds. To bring a child into existence is not simply to hand over an entrance ticket. It is to place that child inside a system of risks from which there is no prior consent and no clean exit.
Even if life is not pure suffering, it is still worse than most people are willing to admit. Human beings have a strong tendency to affirm life. We not only want to live; we want to believe that our living has value. So we reinterpret harm as growth, endurance as meaning, and mere failure to collapse as happiness. A person can live a life that was not worth starting while sincerely believing that, all things considered, it is good.
This claim often provokes indignation. How can anyone tell another person that his life is not as good as he thinks it is? Is not the person living the life the final authority on its quality? If someone feels that his pleasures outweigh his pains, what right has an outsider to say that he is mistaken?
Curiously, the same deference is rarely extended to the depressed. When a depressed person says that life has no value, many optimists immediately reply that his judgement is unreliable, that suffering has distorted his view. But if people can underestimate the quality of life, they can also overestimate it. Unless we collapse the distinction between how good a life actually is and how good it feels to the person living it, we must admit that self-assessment can err in both directions. Psychology has given us ample reason to think that optimism bias, adaptation and the tendency to justify what cannot be undone are powerful forces. We are not neutral auditors of existence. We are more like investors who, having already paid dearly, keep reassuring themselves that the purchase was wise.
Destruction can take only a moment; repair can consume a lifetime
If we compare good and bad things with even moderate honesty, we find that they are not symmetrical. The worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. Few people would accept one minute of extreme torture in exchange for one minute of extreme delight. Pleasure is often brief; pain can be enduring. The pleasure of food fades quickly, sexual pleasure passes, praise and achievement lose their shine. Chronic pain can last for years. Shame can return again and again. Trauma can govern the body decades after the event that caused it.
Harm is also quicker than recovery. A car crash can destroy a body in seconds; rehabilitation can take years, and may never be complete. A cruel sentence can lodge itself in memory and remain there long after the speaker has forgotten it. A career built over ten years can be ruined by an economic collapse, an illness, a false accusation or a single mistake. Learning requires accumulation; damage can arrive suddenly. Order is fragile. Breakdown is convenient.
Desire also counts against us. Many desires are never satisfied. Even when they are satisfied, it is usually only after a period of dissatisfaction. Hunger gives way to the desire for security; security to the desire for respect; respect to the desire for love; love to the desire for stability; stability to the desire for novelty; novelty to the desire for meaning. Desire is not a road leading to a final destination. It is a machine that keeps accelerating. One desire settles down, and another lifts its head.
Life is therefore a condition of continual defence. We must eat in order not to be hungry. We must sleep in order not to collapse. We must earn money in order not to become destitute. We must maintain relationships in order not to be lonely. We must care for the body in order to delay its decline. Good states rarely occur automatically; bad states often approach the moment we cease resisting them. Life is not a neutral plain on which pleasures occasionally appear. It is a slope on which we are always braking.
Even a very fortunate life falls far below the ideal. Knowledge is good, but the most learned person knows only a tiny fraction of what there is to know. Healthy longevity is good, but a healthy life of ninety years is still pitifully short compared with ten thousand years. Intimacy is good, but no two people fully understand one another. Achievement is good, but every achievement is constrained by time, capacity, luck and death. The good that life contains is nearly always partial. The bad often arrives whole.
Optimists reply that bad things are the condition of good things. Without hunger, food would not satisfy; without pain, we would not protect ourselves; without difficulty, achievement would have no value. Sometimes this is true. But it is not true often enough. Are congenital illnesses necessary? Is child abuse necessary? Are famine, war, cancer, psychosis, torture, rape and dementia required in order to make the world richer? Even if some suffering helps us appreciate pleasure, it remains true that things would be better if we could have the pleasure without first being educated by pain.
Another objection is that this uses an impossible standard. Human life cannot be perfect, the objection runs; therefore it must be judged by human standards. But this confuses two questions. One question is: how good a life can a human being reasonably expect under actual human conditions? Another is: how good is human life? Human standards may answer the first question. They cannot answer the second simply by saying that human life is as good as human life can be. A mouse that lives three years in the wild may be doing very well for a mouse, but that does not mean mice are well off with respect to longevity. Human beings may be more fortunate than mice and still far less fortunate than some longer-lived animals. Measured against ideal life, we are almost absurdly brief.
A show may not be bad enough to walk out of, yet bad enough that, had you known, you would never have bought a ticket
When people ask whether they would have been better never to exist, they often slide into a different question: whether they should go on living now. These are not the same. A person who already exists has an interest in continued existence. He has relationships, memories, projects, fears and attachments. Death deprives him of things he already has or hopes to have. Thus to say that a life was not worth starting is not to say that it is not now worth continuing.
A theatre performance illustrates the difference. You are halfway through a bad show. Perhaps it is not bad enough to justify standing up and leaving. You have already bought the ticket, come to the theatre, and perhaps arrived with someone else. Leaving would itself be awkward. Yet if you had known in advance how dull the performance would be, you would not have come. Life can be like this. It may not have been worth starting, while still being worth continuing once started.
This is why anti-natalism does not entail suicide or murder. A life that should not have been initiated does not thereby become a life that should now be ended. Death is usually a harm, even if in extreme cases it may become the lesser evil. Anti-natalism opposes creating a being who must face death; it does not license the destruction of beings who already exist. The interests of existing persons must be taken seriously. Nonexistent persons, by contrast, have no interest in being brought into the world.
For the same reason, nobody has the right to decide for another competent person that his life is no longer worth continuing. Questions about ending life involve an existing subject, with fear, attachment, dignity and uncertainty. Because these matters are so grave, they cannot be seized lightly by outsiders. Anti-natalism is not hostility to existing life. It is suspicion toward the creation of new life.
That suspicion is difficult to accept because procreation is invested with enormous cultural value. Children are seen as the fruit of love, the continuation of family, the completion of adulthood and the hope of the future. People work, sacrifice and endure for their children, and many find in parenting a profound source of satisfaction. All of this is true. But the satisfaction parents receive from procreation does not prove that the child has not been made to bear serious risks. An act may make the actor happy without being fair to the person who must live with its consequences.
Nor does the case against procreation require proof that every life is so bad that it is not worth starting. It is enough to show that procreation necessarily imposes serious risk on a person who cannot consent. If death is a serious harm, then the risk of death for every person born is one hundred per cent. Birth is not merely the beginning of life. It is the beginning of a countdown to death. Many parents, especially in modern societies, will not live to see their children die. This order of events protects the parents psychologically, but it does not alter the fact: every birth creates a death in waiting.
Even if one denies that death itself is bad, birth still brings with it an immense range of terrible possibilities. A child may suffer serious illness, mental collapse, bullying, poverty, war, sexual violence, accident, betrayal, disability, chronic pain, addiction, loneliness or the loss of those he loves. Parents cannot guarantee that these things will not happen. They can only hope that probability favours their child. But that is precisely the moral problem: they are rolling dice for someone else.
When all the probabilities of disaster are added together, no child begins life in safety
A single risk may seem manageable, but life does not expose us to only one risk. Cancer, depression, accidental injury, violent crime, financial failure, broken relationships, neurodegenerative disease, chronic pain and lonely old age accumulate across a lifetime. Some risks are difficult to measure because many injuries are underreported or unrecorded. Sexual violence is often covered by silence. Lifetime rates of mental illness are often underestimated because some subjects have not yet reached the stage of life at which they will suffer. Even using conservative estimates, the list of risks awaiting any new life is already heavy enough.
In non-procreative contexts, we would usually condemn someone who imposed such risks on an innocent person. If an action exposed another person to a substantial chance of grave illness, trauma or eventual death, we would not excuse it merely because the actor found the act fulfilling. Yet procreation often escapes this kind of scrutiny because it is ancient, widespread and surrounded by emotion. But commonness is not justification. Many practices once common in human history were also wrong.
So far, the argument has concerned the harms suffered by the person brought into existence. This may be called the philanthropic case for anti-natalism: it arises from concern for future children, not from hatred of them. There is also a colder argument. The person created will not only suffer harm; he will very likely cause harm. To create a new person is to create a new source of injury.
Human beings are among the most destructive creatures on Earth. We kill one another, oppress one another, deceive one another and humiliate one another. History is filled with war, massacre, slavery, torture, colonialism, camps, purges and prisons. Optimists reply that most children will not become perpetrators of the worst atrocities. That is true. Most will not become butchers, dictators or war criminals. But great evil rarely operates through a few villains alone. It requires obedient functionaries, bystanders, informers, supporters, the silent and those who benefit from the system. Ordinary people are not always innocent scenery. They are often the social material through which harm is made possible.
Even outside extreme atrocity, ordinary life is filled with smaller harms. People lie, betray, neglect, exploit, break confidence, invade privacy, lash out at the weak under pressure and abandon principle when interest demands it. A person need not commit spectacular evil to cause real suffering. We have all hurt others, though in different degrees, with different memories and different excuses.
And then there is the harm humans do to animals. Every year, tens of billions of land animals and far greater numbers of aquatic animals are killed for human consumption. They suffer fear and pain in farms, transport vehicles, slaughterhouses and nets. This is not a catastrophe produced by a few sadists. It is the ordinary slaughter produced by ordinary appetites. Most people merely buy, cook, eat, and continue to believe that they are decent.
Some may say that they can raise a vegan child, a gentle child, an environmentally responsible child. Even so, every new person consumes resources, produces waste, occupies space, participates in social systems and leaves an ecological footprint. In wealthy societies, the per-capita environmental burden is especially large. In poorer societies, the per-capita burden is lower, but higher birthrates can offset that advantage. No new person arrives weightlessly. He must eat, live, travel, consume, emit and take up room on a planet already under strain.
If any other species harmed the world as humans do, we would oppose breeding more of it
If another species killed, polluted, expanded, destroyed habitats, tormented other animals and generated internal violence on the scale that humans do, we would probably think it wrong to increase its numbers. But when the species is our own, we change the standard. We say that humans also create art, science, friendship and morality. This is true. But the fact that a species can do good does not automatically offset the enormous harm it causes. This is especially so when the question is not whether to kill existing humans, but whether to create more of them.
This does not imply that humanity should be exterminated. A violent attempt to end the species would create new horrors and violate basic prohibitions against murder. Too many violent utopians have claimed that they were reducing future suffering while only enlarging present suffering. Anti-natalism neither requires nor permits that path. It does not ask us to kill those who exist. It asks us to stop pushing new people into the chain of harm.
The misanthropic argument also does not deny that human beings can do good. Some people save lives, protect the vulnerable, create beauty and reduce suffering. But prospective parents have little reason to assume that their child will be one of the rare net benefactors. Every parent wants to imagine a child who is kind, gifted and valuable. That imagination is deeply biased. The more likely outcome is that a child will be like most people: both harmed and harmful, capable of tenderness while also participating in systems of cruelty.
If a person longs to care for a child, adoption is easier to defend morally than procreation. Children who already exist and lack care have real needs. Caring for them responds to harm that has already occurred, rather than creating a new subject of risk. Just as those who want companion animals should adopt unwanted dogs or cats rather than breed more animals, those who want to parent should look first to children who already exist and already need care.
Of course, the number of adoptable children is limited, adoption systems are complex, and not everyone who wants to raise a child can do so through adoption. If one day every unwanted child were cared for, anti-natalists would indeed be deprived of one possible source of parental satisfaction. But the deprivation of an adult experience does not justify creating a child who must bear death and suffering. The loss of an opportunity for adults cannot cancel the imposition of a risky life on someone else.
The question of procreation finally forces us to face an uncomfortable fact: the issue is not whether humanity will become extinct, but when. No species lasts forever. The sun will change, the Earth will change, and the universe has not reserved a permanent seat for human beings. If anti-natalism is correct, then, other things equal, an earlier, peaceful and voluntary end to human continuation would be better than a longer future filled with more suffering, death and destruction.
This is not a conclusion people are eager to like. It runs against instinct, against family narratives, against the human sense of our own importance. But philosophy is not obliged to comfort our instincts. It asks whether an act is right because it is common, whether a desire is innocent because it is strong, and whether a child is spared imposition merely because the child is loved.
Perhaps the most difficult thing to understand is that anti-natalism need not begin in hatred of life. It can begin in taking the pain of life seriously. Because suffering is real, death is real, and harm is real, we should not lightly say: let us create another person. A nonexistent person is not deprived of pleasure and does not long to be born. Once born, however, that person will need many things, fear many things, lose many things and eventually die. That difference is enough to turn procreation from a triumph of natural selection into an object of moral scrutiny.
We are accustomed to calling birth a miracle. Perhaps it is. But not every miracle should be repeated. Some miracles are too expensive. Some gifts injure their recipients. Some doors, once opened on behalf of another person, cannot be passed back through into the peace of never having existed. On the question of children, perhaps the most merciful, lucid and least instinct-deceived answer remains simply this: no.
