Should We Stop Having Babies? | Antinatalism Explored

Is it better never to have been? Some people believe it would indeed be better if no sentient life came into existence. Antinatalism is the philosophical viewpoint that procreation is morally wrong, and therefore, we should avoid it. Some antinatalists think only humans should stop having children; others believe that all sentient beings would be better off if they’d never existed.

But isn’t it wrong to oppose the birth of children? Why would anybody be against the creation of new life? One of today’s most well-known antinatalist philosophers is David Benatar. He wrote several books, including Better Not to Have Been, in which he explains his antinatalist ideas in detail. Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm, and thus it’s always wrong to bring new sentient life into existence. Therefore, preventing procreation is the best thing we can do for our potential children, as those who haven’t come into existence are free from the suffering of life.

So, his antinatalist position doesn’t come from a hatred of sentient beings. It comes from compassion because it seeks to prevent the inescapable suffering which results from being born. Antinatalism is a controversial topic that clashes with the worldviews of many. The masses probably oppose the idea of antinatalism, considering it misanthropic. After all, isn’t ending sentient life as a whole to eradicate suffering a tad extreme? This video explores the philosophical position of antinatalism.

Please note: this essay is a mere exploration, not an endorsement. If we look at life, we can conclude that we experience both good and bad; both pleasure and pain. And thus, we could argue that life is worth living when the good outweighs the bad. But when the bad outweighs the good, life is not worth living. However, from an antinatalist point of view, the bad always outweighs the good, no matter how you look at it. And thus, even when we consider our lives good and pleasant, not being born at all is always preferable to being alive.

According to David Benatar, coming into existence generates good and bad experiences, or pain and pleasure. If we experience pain, it hurts, and we suffer as a consequence of it. If we experience pleasure, we feel joy. As the Buddhists would say, life consists of Eight Worldly Winds: praise and blame, gain and loss, success and failure, and joy and sorrow. When we bring a child into the world, this individual will inevitably be exposed to these winds.

A positive, optimistic approach to this occurrence would be that the child now has an opportunity to undergo all the great things life offers. The individual may gain many pleasurable experiences and might even find sustainable meaning as a keystone of his existence. But do all these joys of life, like tasting good food and listening to beautiful music, make existence better than non-existence? Do these experiences outweigh life’s suffering?

And even when a child’s life turns out to be at least moderately pleasurable and even enjoyable, would it still be better off not being born at all? According to Benatar, a child would have been better off if it never came into existence. He explains an asymmetry between the amount of pain and pleasure we experience when we exist and the absence of pain and pleasure when we don’t exist. His book contains the following graph, showing us, due to this asymmetry, the advantage of non-existence over existence.

When we exist, we experience pain (which is bad) and pleasure (which is good). However, when we don’t exist, we don’t experience pain (which is good) and we don’t experience pleasure (which is not bad). So, being alive accompanies good and bad. Not being alive accompanies good and not bad. Therefore, non-existence has the advantage.

Benatar presents us with alternative ways of comparing existing with not existing, which show that the asymmetry holds up. For example, we could say that the absence of pleasure isn’t “not bad” but “bad.” A common argument against the antinatalist view is that we miss out on all the...